A day that lives in infamy

Never did I think I'd witness anything like the events of September 11, 2001. In fact, even two and a half weeks later I'm still trying to convince myself of the reality of what happened.

That morning I woke up, showered, dressed, and went to work as I normally do. I noted to myself how beautiful and clear the weather. I sat down at my desk and booted up my email, just like usual. The first message I read that day, on a low-traffic list called Void, was this:

Subject: Fuck...
Date: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 9:41 AM

For all those people who were too young to remember Challenger, the WTC center is basically gone.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck...

CZ
I think I might throw up.

Not having seen or heard any news yet that morning, this simply didn't parse. Then I opened up the mailbox of my main mailing list, Elbows, to see this:

Subject: WTC
Date: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 9:11 AM

I'm told a small plane just hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center.

Anyone have any details, I am nowhere near a news outlet.

Andy

At this point I felt a knot in my stomach. I kept reading, finding such subject lines as:

• WTC update
• NEWS FLASH: Two planes hit NY World Trade Center towers
• Fire at Pentagon!
• Pentagon and White House evacuating

I tried to bring up a news site on the web, but of course all the major US sites were getting completely hammered by traffic, so I went to see if someone in the office had a radio. Pete did, and soon four or five of us had huddled around his cube to listen. I remember pondering the minor irony of our dependence on a radio in an office working on cutting-edge technology, but hey, you take what you can get.

The radio news station had a live feed from New York City. Something that stood out to me at the time was the announcer's constant use of the word "extraordinary," as if he simply couldn't access any other word to describe what he was seeing. "Extraordinary... extraordinary... extraordinary." I couldn't blame him, though, because pretty much all I could say was, "Oh my god," and "I feel like throwing up."

Geo walked over about ten minutes later, oblivious to the mounting horror, and asked us what was going on. We told him, and he said, "No way." "It's true," I replied. He stood and listened for a few minutes, then declared that he was going back to his apartment to watch the news and anyone who wanted was welcome to join him.

So seven of us grabbed our stuff and left the office. First we went into a nearby bar to watch their TV for a few moments, then walked over to Geo's place so we could sit. We sat there for over an hour watching 3 television sets stacked on top of each other, each tuned to a different channel in an attempt to glean the latest tidbit of information -- something, anything that would explain the horror we were witnessing.

Several of us took turns using Geo's landline phone to try to contact family and friends. Jude managed to reach me on my cell phone and said that everyone at State Street was going home. I desperately wanted to try calling Chris or my Dad, but was sure that I wouldn't be able to reach them at their offices in Washington, D.C. yet. I was reasonably sure that no one I knew in either city was likely to be in immediate danger, but not knowing for certain was awful.

We watched, transfixed, seeing the planes crash into the World Trade Center over and over, explosions billowing, people falling. The towers crumbled before our eyes again and again, and it still just seemed so unreal. It couldn't possibly be happening. This just had to be some kind of Hollywood production with a gigantic special effects budget, right? The towers were there. We saw them. Buildings that large don't just go away.

Except when they do.

Around noon we decided that we weren't likely to learn anything new for the time being, so some of us headed back to the office. Others went to the grocery store, just in case there was a panic rush for supplies. I returned to my desk and joined IRC to find the largest crowd I've ever found on channel. Of course, all we could do was talk about the morning's events. I don't know about everyone else, but I was certainly useless for the remainder of the day. Everything seemed so trivial, so pointless. What could anything about my job possibly matter after thousands of people had just died such horrific deaths? How important could any of it be when war seemed virtually inevitable?

Instead, I spent the rest of the afternoon talking, surfing the web for news, and feeling sad and afraid. I did manage to contact my mom, who assured me that my dad was fine and had made it home, and Alex, who told me she'd heard from Chris and would be picking him up from Greenbelt later on. The rumors of a car bomb at the State Department had me freaked out for my friend Kate, but I later figured that she and my friend Megan, who works at the National Holocaust Museum, were likely fine. None of my family would have been around the WTC, either, so the rational part of me felt assured of their safety; however, my emotional side was going nuts with worry for all my family and friends in both cities.

I left work about 6:00 pm, as usual. The weather was still lovely, but the usual throng of people milling about the courtyard outside the building was absent. The bars and restaurants were empty. The roads and sidewalks, usually full of people driving and biking and walking home, were nearly deserted...rush hour without the rush. And all I could think about as I walked toward the T station was how many of those people who went to work in NYC and DC that day probably thought something like, "Wow, it's so nice out today. I wish I didn't have to spend all day indoors in the office," not knowing that they'd never see another day.

The Kendall Square T station was also nearly deserted, despite (or maybe because of) the extra trains they'd announced were running that afternoon. It struck me as morbidly funny at the time that it took a terrorist attack on our soil to get better train service. A train pulled up, nearly empty, and I boarded, sat down, and glanced at my fellow passengers. Most of them had the same hollow, stricken expression I'm sure I wore. There was no conversation, no laughter, no noise save the rumbling of the train. It was eerie.

As I sat there, the full gravity of the day's events finally hit me. I was on my way home, but I couldn't stop thinking about the thousands of people who would never go home again, and the tears just started flowing silently down my cheeks. I wept all the way home.

We had invited people to come over to our house that night, just to huddle together and keep from feeling alone. Quite a few came. Most spent a fair amount of time playing games, but I spent most of the night in the hack room watching the news, surfing the web, and talking on IRC because I couldn't tear myself away. I joined the ACLU online that night, predicting an imminent war (well, DUH) and that we would soon see massive attempts, both blatant and crafty, to curtail civil liberties in the aftermath (I so did not want to be right about that, but, sadly, I was).

I saw a lot of heartbreaking footage that night. I must have watched the planes crash and the towers fall at least fifty times.

12:15 AM: OPN: oh my god. oh my god.
12:16 AM: lise^: opn: ???
12:16 AM: OPN: I just saw footage of the second plane...from behind. I just watched the plane fly right through the building.

1:21 AM: Sorsha: aieee....more 1st-person footage. the guy filming is watching the blast debris come toward him, saying, "I hope I'm gonna live...I hope I'm gonna live..."

One of the creepiest things was seeing immediately-post-collapse footage of the rubble. It was so preternaturally still, except for lots of beeping. I couldn't figure out what it was, but it was clearly coming from multiple sources. A volunteer fire brigade member in Australia (from the Whitlams mailing list) wrote that the beeping was the sound of sensors worn by firefighters in case of becoming trapped -- the sound of hundreds of firefighters running out of oxygen and dying. That thought filled me anew with such horror.

The subject lines in my inbox told the story in bites:

• Plane crash in the World Trade Center
• Southern WTC tower collapses completely
• Both towers down
• Unaccounted for aircraft
• Apparently 2 of the planes were from Boston
• NYC suspects check in please?
• Can I pick another species? This human thing just isn't working out...

Several people on my usual mailing list set up online check-in points for members to write in to assure us that they were okay. Thankfully, it turned out that I didn't know anyone who died that day -- though it was incredibly freaky to learn that the president and VP of sales of my own company had been on the plane parked just next to one of those ill-fated flights -- but I did know people who knew people who died. In fact, Danny Lewin, the CTO of Akamai, just across the street from Permabit, where a lot of my friends are employed, was on one of the planes that hit the WTC. Another friend knew a neighbor from down his street who was on one of those planes as well; that man's son plays with my friend's son. My parents have good friends whose son and daughter-in-law live in NYC; she worked for Marsh & McClellan in the WTC, but she didn't have to be at work until late morning that day. Almost everyone in her office perished. And so on and so forth...it's like playing a morbid game of six degrees.

As it turned out, I'd had plans with friends to see a show downtown the very next day. I almost couldn't believe that I was contemplating attending, but I figured that I'd long since paid for the ticket and that a distraction might not be such a bad idea after all. The show was Cookin', a Korean blend of dance, percussion, and food (think Stomp meets Iron Chef meets the Marx Brothers and you'll get the idea).

Predictably, there wasn't a whole lot of working going on the day after. I'm sure I made several half-hearted attempts at accomplishing some tasks, but the phones were pretty quiet and no one could concentrate on anything anyway. Things got weird when there were news reports/rumors of something scary going down at one of the major hotels on Boylston St., not far from where I was planning to get off the T to walk to the theatre district. When it came time for me to leave work, I seriously considered, for about five minutes, avoiding the T and sticking to surface transportation. I know that I was not the only one to whom occurred thoughts of followup attacks...say, poison gas attacks in the subways of major cities. But then I figured that it wasn't likely, and took the T as planned. When I got out at the far corner of the Boston Common, I actually did see that there was some kind of police roadblock further up Tremont St, but I resisted the urge to get closer and walked toward my destination instead. I never did find out what was going on there.

The theatre had a noticeable number of empty seats, though I'd say that at least two-thirds of the seats were filled. Clearly, some people had felt that they couldn't go out to enjoy a show after an event of such magnitude (I'd certainly felt some of that myself), but more had felt that they might as well go on doing what they'd planned. Just before the show started, the house announcer requested a moment of silence to remember the victims of the day before. You could have heard a pin drop in there.

At first I had a hard time letting myself enjoy the production, because horrific images of destruction kept racing through my head unbidden. Eventually, though, I was able to let myself relax enough to pay attention and let it distract me from the world for a couple of hours. I reasoned that the real world would flood back in soon enough, anyway...might as well enjoy what I could.

The next several days are a bit of a blur now. I started writing this a couple of weeks after 9/11, added more to it about three months afterward, and I'm putting final touches on it at nearly the six-month mark. What stands out still: Not being able to eat for days afterward; looking into the sky and seeing no planes, no contrails, and realizing how much we take such things for granted; finding myself awake in the wee hours before dawn, hearing the scrambling of military jets overhead, and feeling a chill at the sound of them screaming in the sky; the fear that we might actually find ourselves on the cusp of World War III (the only time I've ever truly felt that fear); the subsequent depression and feeling for weeks like nothing really mattered; feeling the need to archive for myself hundreds of emails, photos, and editorial cartoons in the month or so afterward; insisting to people on various mailing lists that targeting Arab and Muslim Americans and committing indiscriminate revenge bombing were wrong and stupid ideas; just trying to convince myself that it really happened and wasn't simply some awful nightmare; the occasional high alert from the government; the feeling that nothing would ever be the same.

Mainly what stays with me now, above all, is a persistent sadness that mostly lives in the back of my head, but which leaps to the foreground when I see pictures of that day, read accounts of the victims or survivors, or see the NYC skyline, either pre- or post-disaster. These things still make me weep six months later, and I didn't even suffer any personal losses that day. It's just that seeing those things reminds me of how terrible it was that day and of how much we've all lost as a result of it. Six months later it's still a national wound that's only slightly scabbed over and resumes bleeding if picked at even slightly.

I still haven't visited NYC to see Ground Zero, though I've wanted to go. My budget has been somewhat limited since my layoff just before Thanksgiving. I feel the need to see it for myself, because I don't know that it will feel truly real until I do. I want to pay my respects. A number of people have characterized the hordes of people who have visited Ground Zero as the national equivalent of rubbernecking at an auto accident, but I respectfully disagree. To me, it's an open casket funeral writ large. It's the final resting place of not only thousands of people, but of the American sense of security and naivete. How can I let that pass unacknowledged?

Begun late September 2002, completed March 8, 2002