How it felt in the middle distance

I was sitting on my terrace in downtown Manhattan on the morning of September 11th and trying to work. Disturbing sounds entered my consciousness — sounds I could not recognize except as murmurs from a crowd that was clearly gathering on La Guardia Place, one block North of Houston, in the street and not, as would normally be the case, on the sidewalk. Construction workers at a building down the block stopped work and gathered at the edge of the building’s shell; periodic shouts erupted that sounded half like cursing, half like prayer. Sirens started up. Lots of sirens.

I thought: whatever it was (a car accident? a fight?) was being taken care of. There were dozens and even hundreds of people in the street and police and ambulances were, clearly, on the way. No one needed me to spread the news or to help. I wanted to work — on this book in fact — which then had the title “World War II and the Modern Imagination.” Disturbed, but still wanting to write, I went inside and received almost immediately a phone call from my younger daughter in Durham, North Carolina, asking in a breathless way: “MOM, are you all right.” When I said that I was but that something strange seemed to be happening outside, she said what millions of people said that day: “Turn on the television.” When I asked which channel, she dismissed my question saying, “any channel” — and, indeed, any channel would do. For there, on the screen — less than two miles to the south of my northward-facing terrace — were the facts: two planes, for reasons as yet unexplained at that early hour, had flown into the World Trade Center and the Towers were burning.

Like people everywhere, my daughter and I felt in the presence of history but thought first of family and friends: my younger daughter called me; I asked her to call my husband (who was teaching a yoga class) and called my older daughter, who lived in uptown Manhattan and was, I knew, likely still to be asleep. In our own small, instinctive and, on this occasion, lucky ways, we enacted a concern for a few beloved individuals that forms an archetype within our oldest narratives of war and civil disaster — The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid — where characters show concern for loved ones (Achilles for Patroclus, Aeneas for Creusa and Anchises) that history can overwhelm and even trash at will. The pattern repeats in many Holocaust narratives and showed up almost immediately for 9/11 in the missing persons posters that plastered my neighborhood and in the well-known New York Times series, “Portraits of Grief.” In New York and across America, people turned instinctively to family and friends or, in their absence, to random strangers in an overflow of emotions.

But, as one sign that we live in a thoroughly media age, television served as the communal hearth around which we gathered. It became both a companion and a participant, shaping the events of 9/11 even as we lived them. Throughout the day, as at the beginning, I turned on the television, much as people during World War II turned on the radio. I checked in, the world checked in, with CNN.

Wondering, “how could this have happened?” and “had it really happened?” I got dressed immediately. I put on jeans and sneakers in case I would be needed to help with rescue. With the kind of consummate illogic and disbelief that marked the day, I also took a bag of laundry I had packed the night before, just in case the crashes were some fantastic hoax and had not happened after all. As I joined the crowd in the street, I had a direct view down West Broadway of the burning Towers and suddenly understood the murmurs I had heard, because I was uttering them too. Some people were saying, “Oh, shit”; some people were saying, “Oh, my God.” As the flames glowed and the smoke billowed, as people fleeing from the offices began arriving among us, as one Tower collapsed or immediately after, I became part of the murmurs involuntarily.

The confusion in that last sentence — as one Tower collapsed, or immediately after — reflects some of what I learned about history and cultural memory on 9/11. I was close to the site of the emergency: Houston Street, one block down from my building, was totally sealed off and would be for weeks. My own neighborhood, Greenwich Village, was similarly sealed after the attack — no subways, no buses, no taxis, no entry without passing armed soldiers. I was not in or directly around the World Trade Center, not in the mazelike streets of the financial district, where the smoke and the confusion must have been terrible. I did not have children at school nearby nor a relative in the Towers. I did not know anyone on the NYPD or in the fire department. I was an eyewitness. But I had limited access to facts and relied, like people everywhere, on other people and the media for certain kinds of knowledge (which Tower was hit first; the exact time it collapsed and so forth). In no clear or immediate danger, I even had time to consider various analogies: Germans watching the Reichstag burn was the one that came to mind, though it quickly became taboo once an analogy with Pearl Harbor had surfaced.

My position, then, was in what I will call the middle distance — a feeling of spatial, temporal, or emotional connection, in this case all three, but with my only stakes the stakes available to many others. And yet I went, I must have gone, into a mild form of shock — not “trauma,” an overused word that would exaggerate what I felt and its effects — but the jolt of being in the middle distance, which I believe exists alongside trauma and not, as is generally assumed, just within it. Like most New Yorkers, I continued to function calmly, even stoically and at a reasonably high level throughout the day and over the next, though I was very much aware that things were not “normal” and that the conditions we call “normal” might change. Even though I cannot remember, even now, precisely what I saw in person and what I saw on tv.

I do know certain things. I know that, when I got downstairs, the police were already stationed around my building and that, when I asked if I should head downtown to help, they told me that the area was sealed and that I should stay nearby or go back inside. [A policeman was the first to say the words “terrorists” and “attacks”; until then I had been trying to understand how two planes could have flown into the WTC on a clear day.] I know that, as the rumors on the street became more and more fantastic (an assault on D.C., the Pentagon in flames, other hijacked planes en route to California), I went upstairs several times to check on television and the internet — and that almost all the rumors, on that surreal day, turned out to be true. I know that, on one of my trips downstairs, I brought my laundry — which for some reason I was still holding — to the shop at the corner, wordlessly making the exchange with the owner and later that day losing the receipt in the way that New Yorkers just plain lost things for days and weeks to come. I know that I gave my cell phone to an agitated, thin young man with red hair and freckles who had dashed into the laundry offering the owner extra money to use his phone. I know that he gave it back without getting through, murmuring that New York prayer, “Oh shit. Oh, shit,” as he dashed back into the street. I know I spoke to people flowing from downtown who were crying and telling stories of escape. I know I heard upstairs, in my apartment, that once one Tower had collapsed, the other, structurally paired, was also doomed. I know that I stopped looking on the street at that point, because I could not bear to see it happen.

Months later, I developed some film that I had taken on 9/11 but had inexplicably delayed processing. As I write these words (it is November 2001 when I first wrote them), I have before me a photograph I took of a cloud of extremely dense dust and smoke and half of one Tower, burning. I do not know exactly why I grabbed my camera that day nor do I know whether I took the picture immediately after I saw the first Tower collapse as I stood in the street or whether I saw the collapse on tv and then went downstairs to take the picture. [I suspect the first, but I am not sure.] I do know that I did not feel exultant or excited at getting the shot. I also know that my feelings had no touch of the voyeuristic or macabre — emotions almost completely absent in New York on 9/11 — no desire, even, to show that I was there. As best I can recall, I felt numb except for knowing that I needed to take a picture — to freeze the moment? to establish a connection? A photograph was somehow required, somehow a necessary gesture if one had a camera on hand that day. That’s one reason it became so easy to mount a show of photographs so soon after the event, a show that opened two blocks away from where I lived but that I was not, for many weeks, able to bring myself to see.

Over the next six fragile and volatile weeks, the city danced rapidly to an extraordinary rhythm of expression and repression. One week was a “carpe diem” week, with playgoers drinking and swaggering in the streets. Another was a week of grim jokes or anecdotes about travel. I had read and taught Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year; now I got to see a real-time enactment. I’d go to see Norma at the Met or The Guys at a little theatre downtown and find myself plunged in thought and part of group reactions. At Norma, an opera about war, occupation, love, clashing religions, revenge, and forgiveness, I found myself incredibly moved, even transported, by the heroine’s avowal of forgiveness; then as I left the opera, the smell of Ground Zero hit my nostrils and the talkative crowd fell silent. At The Guys, a play about a fire-chief and a writer helping him draft eulogies, I was surrounded by random sobs that erupted at different times from different viewers and surprised us all. “A wounded city”: the play’s first words hit me in the chest. No one outside the city, those inside agreed, could really understand how the city felt. But we did, like some vast collective animal with many limbs. For months, no conversation could begin without a personal account of the disaster and a confused canvassing of politics and opinions. But the city had decided, collectively, to soldier onwards. And soldier on it did until, around Thanksgiving, things felt almost normal.

New Yorkers believe that their experience of Fall 2001 was more intense than others — and I believe that too. The smell of death and fear in the air; seeing soldiers on the street with machine guns; the sound of refrigerated cars rumbling through the street; the taste of repression and denial; the weird and complicated feeling of release when rumors swirled of new threats, this time 3000 miles away, in California. Yet I also recognize and accept how intense feelings were elsewhere. My husband, in North Carolina on the 11th and unable to join me in New York the next weekend as planned, briefly felt uncharacteristic support for the President, though he had opposed George W. Bush vehemently in 2000 and would again quite soon. I recognized his emotion as, at least in part, displaced concern for me and for our older daughter, who was also in New York that Fall. A friend who teaches in the South but has lived in Manhattan felt torn by being away when something so terrible was happening to “her city.” Such feelings could be multiplied into the millions.

New Yorkers knew they had to take care of each other — and did, at least for a while, when virtually everyone suspended the usual profanity and hurry on the streets. But right from the beginning, New Yorkers disagreed, quite widely and quite loudly, about the meaning of events. Taxi drivers told me, upfront and clearly, that the U.S. shared the blame because it had backed Osama bin Laden in the past, and armed him. They identified, long before the newspapers did, massive unemployment and a recession in the city. “It took ten years getting the city where it was” [a reference to the Giuliani miracle, although most cabbies retained a deep dislike of the Mayor], one taxi driver said as we sailed up Sixth Avenue on a weekday night, without stopping once for traffic, “now it’s come apart in just an hour.” I heard fears of war and lots of backlash against Attorney General Ashcroft’s actions. I saw peace signs pop up within a day alongside flags and the many impromptu shrines to the WTC dead, including large ones I passed daily in Washington Square Park and at Union Square. I also saw and heard, in many places and from many people, on the Left as well as the Right, full support for the War on Terrorism and a sense that any demurrals were less than patriotic.

Eventually, a certain rawness in the initial reactions passed into cant and sentimentality. “Go for it Snoopy. You always did fly high,” scrawled one man on a poster of his brother that appeared within two days of the collapse. The poster confessed what was already suspected but, during the first week after 9/11, never said: that the rescue operations would produce few survivors. And the words — celebratory of a jump or death in high places — did not seem shocking then, though they do now, when a certain piety has settled in.

I thought at the time that only some of the sentiments I heard, observed, and felt — the unusual cooperation among New Yorkers, the magnificent behavior of the firemen and police, full support for the war in Afghanistan — would make their way into the public record for future historians who relied on the copious information available in newspapers or on tv. And that has, in fact, proved to be the case. Within Congress and the press, a surprising degree of consensus emerged for the administration’s version of preventing terrorism, bypassing debate, a combination that may prove more damaging to democracy than the terrorist attack itself. But on the 11th, I wasn’t thinking of the official record or of future political consequences. Like almost everyone in New York that day, I was fearful of the present.

I watched a cloud of dust move from downtown and stop just in front of and to the left of my building. I did not know what was in the dust but knew that asbestos and human remains were more than likely. Within two days, once the wind had shifted, that cloud engulfed my building, fouling the air, as if hundreds of neighbors, on every side, were burning piles of leaves and tossing metal and plastic in by mistake. Like most people, I tried not to think about the smell, and what was in it. The first rain was terrible because it meant that rescue operations had to stop. Later rains were welcome because they meant that that smell, that ghastly smell, would be gone for an afternoon, or a day — though it came back, it always came back until around Thanksgiving, filling the lungs with the tragedy, becoming the medium we breathed. For what we smelled was not just rubble and toxic chemicals and not just body parts (though that would have been terrible enough) — but was, rather, the smell of two great buildings and of thousands who had been incinerated and would leave, if anything, only ash and bone.

From The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Written November 2001.