Stunned with their briefcases, ash dusting their clothes and shoes a ghoulish gray, they make their mass exodus across the Brooklyn Bridge. A shoe store doles out sneakers to the women; they change out of their pumps, sometimes leaving these oddly elegant displaced bursts of color, in their tracks. Go North, keep going North -- yes, they have made it out of Manhattan alive.
Yesterday morning at a quarter of nine, I woke up to a rumble. The sunglasses perched on my dresser toppled to the floor and Carol, the family friend who I was staying with, let out a yodeling shriek from three flights below. Together we ran the block and a half down Orange Street, across the river just opposite downtown Manhattan. I saw a woman clamp her hand over her little girl's eyes and then followed their line of vision: the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, each with a flaming wound at the waist, a snowy avalanche of smoke obscuring their peaks.
The bystanders huddled close, trying to call their cell phones. We stared in a paralysis, speculating of bombs and terrorists, searching the stretch of untouched sky above our own heads. I ran back to the apartment to watch CNN when the apartment rumbled again. A blind flash of panic and we ran outside again, everyone clucking and gawking like Chicken Little's gang, waiting for smithereens of sky and flame to fall upon us. Picture this: the silhouettes of those familiar steel giants lose their legs, lose their middles, lose their shoulders, and then are oddly prostrate. Imagine that magnitude, the freeze-frame moment like a Dali painting, when a tower melts to the ground.
I ran back inside the apartment and Carol and I closed all the windows: the dust was already thick in the Brooklyn air. Instinct told us to put on our running shoes. I sat on the kitchen floor, lacing them tight when the radio announced the Pentagon had been hit. I am from Washington, D.C -- In a cold vertigo, I ran for the phone. The connections would not go through. I waited for five minutes in a terror that denied logic (my parents don't work anywhere near the Pentagon) until I finally reached them.
I watched CNN again, settling back into that cold, abstract shock, wondering why I had such a steely grip on my composure. I stayed in that state for awhile, until I remembered that one of my close friends, Sarah, works in the financial district. I frantically searched my glossy-carry-with-me-everywhere map to see how close her office was to the World Trade Center. After three hours of this ordeal, it was the first time I could cry, the first moment when I realized that in all these inconceivable losses, one of them might be my own. I reached her soon after. I have overheard so many comparable weepily-relieved phone conversation reunions in the last two days.
I have spent this past week in New York, trying to mimic that blas, unapologetic demeanor of the crowds. I had been perfecting the selective eye contact alongside the
don't-mess-with-me thrust of hips that seemed to be the city's trademark. In the last two days, my stereotypes of this city have shattered to the ground. People now look at each other and smile, vulnerable smiles without veneer; strangers offer to lend each other cell phones, and crowds wind around the blocks to donate blood. In the devastating aftermath, an astonishing irony lingers -- the solidarity which has emerged will permanently alter this city; we are left more nakedly in this cloud of ash that remains.
