Nobody ever believes how long we didn’t believe it. We can’t even believe it ourselves.
Nobody believes how long it took us, from finding out that a plane had crashed into a big building, to figuring out that something Really Bad had happened.
Maybe it was easier for us than for the ones who just saw it all on TV.
* * *
I was at school. I’m not sure anymore what the real distance between my dorm at NYU and the World Trade Center was, because I’ve told the story so many times, and it’s gotten shorter and shorter for effect. After learning that I Was There, four out of every five people who picked me up when I was hitch-hiking, half a year later, wanted to know, in detail, what it was like.
Most of the stories I told when I was traveling were lies - how I just wanted to “see the country,” how I was in love - but I always tried my best with this one, because the listeners really wanted to know.
The truth is that we just didn’t get it. None of us did. Not me, rolling out of my hard little dorm bed and dragging myself toward the shower before my first class. Not my suitemate, who intercepted me on my way to the bathroom and told me about this freak accident that was on TV. Not anybody.
I just took my shower.
Even when I was interrupted again, putting on my make-up, and told about the second plane.. even when I turned on my own TV.. even when I walked outside and looked up in the sky and saw the same thing that was on all those TV’s all over the country..
I just walked on to class.
It was a really nice day out. People were walking backwards down the street, so they could see the cloud of smoke coming from the towers. People were talking on their cell phones.
My chemistry professor had been teaching since six AM. He had no idea anything was happening. No one told him. Class was the same as always, except the room was a little (not a lot) emptier. I heard later that in other classes, people had rushed in, told them to turn on their TVs. Not in mine.
I just took my notes.
Afterwards, when I was walking back to my dorm, people were still standing in the sidewalk, talking on their cell phones. The day wasn’t quite as pretty, the smoke had spread out, and I had somehow gotten disoriented. I’d been out there only an hour ago, staring straight at them, but I’d only lived in New York a month, and in the midst of all this drama, I’d completely forgotten where the Twin Towers were.
I honestly thought it was me.
When I got back to my dorm, everyone was standing in the lobby watching the TV. They shooed us away until we filed into the second floor lounge, in front of the big screen. We were, at most, three miles away from the “accident,” and when the they showed the footage, we didn’t even know it wasn’t live. We, just like everyone else, saw the towers collapse on television. We thought it was happening right then. Individually, we cried, we gasped, and we screamed. Collectively, we entered into some sort of cult. From then on, when we passed each other in the halls, when we passed someone else on the street, when we looked into someone else’s teary eyes, we felt a strange common bond with that person, we thought we knew what they were feeling. Slowly, we got a little dazed, a little wobbly, a little drunk on the drama of this great story we’d now have forever.
I left the room. That was the last time I let myself watch it on TV.
When I returned to my own room, my computer screen was covered with messages. Everyone I’d ever met wanted to know if I was okay. I said I was. I told people to call my mother for me. I was starting to understand, a little.
While everyone else watched it on TV, I walked down Broadway with a few of my friends. Empty, carless, closed-off, below-14th-Street Broadway. My friends snapped photos of the surreal scene, of the massive dust cloud. I didn’t. I never took a single shot. I never went down to Ground Zero, though I sniffed burnt WTC stationary and other artifacts acquaintances brought back.
When I woke up the next morning, my room smelled like ashes. Everyone who could get out of the City did. Soon there were only a handful of students left in my dorm. There was the constant threat of evacuation, and I was very lonely.
The Village was dead. The most alive place I’d ever been in my entire life was absolutely dead. Everything smelled like smoke. Everything was hazy gray. For lack of one of the surgical masks which were suddenly all the rage in the NY fashion scene, I went out with a scarf around my face. I tried to give blood, but even though type-O’s were given preference, they had too many. They said they’d contact me when I could come back. They did, and I went, two months later.
All around the country, people were glued to their TVs. In Georgia, my mother didn’t turn hers off, didn’t sleep, watched it day and night. I spared myself that, but I saw the people with the signs. The signs with the pictures. The signs that said MISSING instead of DEAD.
I heard the stories of the people who had stories that were better than mine. The people who’d actually seen them fall. The people who knew people who had died.
Instead of watching it on TV, or engaging in the act of Not Watching It On TV, or walking around in some sort of stupor, a good friend of mine actually went to try to help. He’d volunteered at a nearby hospital over the summer, and thought they’d need all the extras they could get. So he went, and he sat in a big room full of all these doctors and nurses and good people like him from all over the City and nearby and not-so-nearby places, all ready and waiting for the injured to start pouring in. They waited all night long. They waited until they realized that they weren’t needed afterall, because there weren’t going to be any injured pouring in. Because the injured were all dead.
No other story I’d heard had ever made me feel so much sadness and so much love at the same time. It was then, days later, that I really got it. I finally got it. I understood what had happened, not because I Was There, but because someone was kind enough to tell me.
After that, things didn’t seem so surreal anymore. I started noticing all the other people who had already woken up, the ones who were out there doing something. Whether they were helping out all the people with the signs, or they were just tearing holes in the hearts of their “I love NY” tee-shirts and safety-pinning them back together to wear in Union Square, they were out there.
I still wouldn’t turn my TV back on, but a friend of my mother’s swears she saw me on CNN, at one of the candlelight vigils.