I turned east onto the cobbled part of Greenwich Street and then north again, back up toward my apartment building. By the time I got to the massive UPS warehouse on the border of Tribeca and the West Village, the throng had stopped and turned to look at the burning north tower. A brown UPS truck, its doors and windows wide open, had parked in the middle of the street and cranked up the radio in its cab to full volume. A hot dog seller, who had presumably wheeled his rusty cart all the way up from the financial district, was offering snacks. There were curses of disbelief as the K-Rock DJ, who had stopped playing back-to-back Led Zeppelin for probably the first time in his career, declared that the Pentagon had also been hit by an airliner, and that another aircraft had come down in Pennsylvania. “This is fuckin’ World War III,” shouted a teenager on a skateboard. At that moment the north tower fell—all 1,350 feet of it sucked into the bedrock of southern Manhattan.
Each tower, I later learned, created 900,000 tons of rubble when it fell. And each Boeing 767 released one kiloton of raw energy—the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT, or a twentieth of the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima—when it hit the World Trade Center. The scale of the destruction, it seemed, could be described using only the metrics of nuclear Armageddon.
So there I stood on Greenwich Street—watching a 110-story skyscraper being razed for the second time in one morning. It was then I realized that this was a deliberate act of cruelty, not a freak double accident. Perhaps, I thought, this is the beginning of the end for the war virgins. Perhaps our adrenal glands weren’t malfunctioning: They were trying to tell us something all along. But who would want to vandalize the world’s most famous skyline? What could they hope to achieve? I felt my first flash of anger. Only one name seemed obvious: Saddam Hussein. I thought of President George W. Bush, and I thought of his father, President George H. W. Bush. And I thought of the inevitable revenge ahead. There is a war coming, I told myself—and this time, it won’t be over in five days. My only comfort, out there in the ash and the smoke, was that wherever the war was declared, I wouldn’t be there to cover it.
Little, of course, did I know.
I got back to 666 Greenwich Street sometime before noon: Deadlines seemed like an abstract concept after what had just happened. Even now, I can’t remember the final steps into my apartment. Did I say anything to Walter and Carlos at the door? Was there anyone in the elevator with me? My memory resumes its narrative with me trying to call the foreign desk, then Alana, with no success. The mobile phone masts had jammed with 21 million New Yorkers calling their mothers. Instead, I e-mailed. Luckily, my Internet service was still working; it was hooked up via cable, not through the dead phone line.
This is what I sent to Barrow:
Subject: Hell
Must say the whole thing has been traumatic. Not only do I have a friend who works there (can’t contact her), but I also sat and watched at least 20 people jump out of the W.T.C. from the top floors because they were being burned alive. I stayed as long as I dared, but when the first tower collapsed and a huge mushroom cloud engulfed the financial center, I’m afraid to say that I legged it as fast as I could. I’m not going anywhere near the financial district again, too dangerous.
In hindsight, those final two sentences were probably not the best way to begin a career as a war correspondent. Legging it, after all, is not what war correspondents do: They hold fast; stand firm; head back into the action. The e-mail did, however, establish a theme for my later work. I also e-mailed Alana and Glen. I told Glen to call my mother. She would have assumed the worst.
Finally, I e-mailed Karen:
Subject: OK
Are you okay?
I imagined the message pinging into the inbox of her computer, buried beneath 1,800,000 tons of melted steel and plastic. Perhaps she would be able to access her work e-mail account remotely, I thought. I remembered that she used to carry a Palm Pilot around with her. After clicking on “send,” I noticed I had a new message. It was highlighted with a cheerful yellow envelope icon.
The e-mail was from the foreign desk:
Subject: [Blank]
Thousand wds please on “I saw people fall to death,”
etc…
I felt a twist of anger at the almost comic insensitivity of the e-mail. “Fuck you,” I mouthed at the screen of my laptop. Part of me, however, felt pleased with the request. To the foreign desk, I was a dull, egghead business reporter—and a young and inexperienced one at that—not a trusted “color” writer. The rest of me, however, felt disgusted at the thought of using the trade center’s destruction as a career opportunity. Nevertheless, I could only imagine the agony of Wapshott, having to watch or listen to reports of the destruction in New York and elsewhere from the QE2. I wondered if the cruise liner was even within range of satellite television.
My most pressing concern, however, was that I was in shock and unable to summon a single emotion, never mind a pleasing turn of phrase. The final deadline for the first edition was in about two hours, meaning I would have to file my thousand-word piece within an hour to guarantee it a place in the newspaper. I got up, washed my face, and spat dust and phlegm into the kitchen sink.
Then, somewhat belatedly, I threw up.
Next to my laptop was the red, leather-bound diary I had grabbed before running toward the World Trade Center. I opened it up. On the first page I had unimaginatively scrawled “Independence Day!”—a reference to the Hollywood film. I felt a shudder of incompetence, not the first of the day. My notes ended with a quote from a random bystander: “Dude, there’s no way that tower will collapse.” I sat on my cheap, pretend-leather chair and stared at my laptop’s postage stamp screen. Behind me was the only window in my apartment. I stared harder at the LCD and felt lightheaded with anxiety, as though the morning’s terror had dissolved the sugar in my blood. I jiggled my feet in an effort to revive myself.
Then I typed:
At first, we thought it was burning debris falling from the upper floors of the World Trade Center. Then we noticed the debris had arms and legs.
By 1:00 P.M., it was done. Twenty years ago the deadline would have come and gone; I would probably have been frantically jogging uptown in search of a working telephone, into which I could cough a few lines from my notebook. Perhaps my story would have made it into the following week’s newspaper.
I tried to watch television but kept being distracted by an unusual noise. It sounded like distant cheering—not constant, but in irregular bursts. I heard air horns and applause, like in a ticker-tape parade. For the second time in a few hours, I thought I was hallucinating. There it was again. I stood on my windowsill, cupped my hands against the filthy glass, and tried to see what was going on. Nothing: just an empty street, trees, and that awful smoke. I grabbed my keys and headed for the elevator. Outside, as I reached the corner of Christopher and Greenwich Streets, the noise came again, louder. Then I saw where it was coming from: On either bank of the West Side Highway was a crowd of perhaps two hundred people, waving American flags and holding placards with OUR HEROES and GOD BLESS AMERICA painted on them. As the ambulances and fire engines hurtled south down the highway, toward the mouth of hell, the crowd cheered, hooted, and wiggled the signs. I felt a sudden and unexpected swell of patriotism for a foreign country. There was no traffic going in the opposite direction. The vehicles blasted their horns. Their occupants, I noticed, looked more like soldiers than emergency workers. Some of them raised their fists and shook them in defiance. Others just waved. The rest, sootfaced and sipping sticky energy drinks, stared blankly at the missing Manhattan skyline. Perhaps, like me, they felt angry.