Deep in my bones, I still remember the impact of the jetliners.
The tremor that shook the windowless building of our high school across the street from the twin towers felt like a minor earthquake.
Mr. Capo, our energetic accounting teacher, stopped the lesson mid-sentence and sat down at his desk. The class fell quiet.
How did the jitters hush a class of teenagers who would usually take over if a teacher disengaged? Did the vibrations that traveled down the steel beams of the north tower, into the ground below, and up to our room carry in them the last heartbeats and agony of the souls that perished above?
The principal’s voice on the intercom broke the silence.
“We are going to shelter in place,” he said, likely not realizing that none of us knew what was going on. The top two floors of the building had windows, and he saw what we didn’t.
If it was quiet before, now it was ominous. I closed my eyes and rested my head on the desk.
The school trembled again, sharply this time. The south tower was just 500 feet from our building at 100 Trinity Place. I didn’t believe in the unseen at the time, but that tremor carried with it a cold, electric pulse of anxiety. As I kept my eyes closed, images flashed before me of feet clad in heels, and sneakers, and black leather oxfords running in terror over the polished floor of the mall beneath the towers.
I knew the spot where all these feet rushed by. I passed by it every morning with the crowd of commuters who poured out of the turnstiles from the A, C, and E trains. I had bought strawberry-banana smoothies from Mrs. Fields Pretzel Time here after school. I wonder whether the lady who worked there made it out alive.
The principal was on the intercom again. “Line up against the wall outside the classrooms,” we were told. We filed out and stood in silence with our backs to the walls. Messages crackled over the radios of the security guards, and we were told to go down the fire escape.
The stairwell had steel safety bars separating us from the outside. A surreal rain of ash and paper came down steadily, on and on. It had wafted onto the landings and the stairs.
As we came out onto Thames Street, we were met with the figure of a soot-stained, ash-covered firefighter, collapsed in a motionless heap on the curb, staring into space. After years of risking his life, after rushing into a burning skyscraper, what did he see that stunned him so? From stories from those who were near the buildings that day, I think that I know.
The teachers corralled us down Thames Street toward Greenwich Street, where the burning towers would come in full view and where I would experience what psychologists call peritraumatic dissociation and micropsia. Instead of seeing the full view of the disaster, my field of vision became a black canvas, in the center of which a tiny black-and-white television showed the footage of the towers burning. I had the sense that I could turn its controls to change the channel.
My buddy Mohammed patted me on the back and shook me out of it. I now saw the towers burning in full frame, debris snowing down, fire and smoke roaring. The school staff hustled us away, downtown on Greenwich Street toward Battery Park.
The English teacher told a group of us that this was a terrorist attack and that planes had crashed into both towers. Mohammed and I had a bright idea. We'd split from the group and go see the airplanes sticking out from the other side of the buildings. We broke off and headed to Broadway, which was abandoned except for our gym teacher, his hands on his waist.
He asked where we were going. We told him about our plan. I thought that he might join us.
He said, “You guys are [expletive] stupid.” He may have saved our lives. In roughly the amount of time it would have taken to walk to Ground Zero, the south tower collapsed.
We watched the dust wave race up Greenwich Street toward the park, and then we were engulfed, and everyone panicked. We ran into the park, feeling ahead of us as it was hard to see. The class clown, Freddy, followed another kid who crawled under a bench.
We grasped around the park until we found the river and sat there with nowhere to go to flee the cloud. As the dust settled, the Statue of Liberty rose in the distance. I had an intense fear that they would hit the statue next.
Someone said, “This is war.”
Small ships and ferries began to arrive and pick up some of the crowd stuck in the park. The only way out was by water.
Mohammed lived in Queens, and I lived uptown. None of the ships were going our way.
So we stuck around. We watched the second tower fall, and another cloud of dust engulfed the park. We made face masks out of our T-shirts. A man with a van showed up and passed out water, Band-Aids, and gauze. All of the ferries were going to New Jersey, but after a while, The Screamer, a tourist speedboat, pulled beside us and the captain asked whether we'd like to get on. I asked where they were going. The captain looked at me like I was the most ridiculous kid on Earth and said, “Chelsea Piers.” We got on.
The eight-or-so of us were all covered in the dust and ashes from the towers. The captain gave us life vests. He said he would go slow for us and steered uptown. The Screamer sailed in silence.
I walked east on 23rd Street and caught the subway home to Washington Heights.
I still remember the tears of our chemistry teacher. Before the first tower collapsed, we ran into him, a small-statured man who was passionate about his job. He was leaning against a wall with two streams of tears steadily running down his face and wetting the top half of his shirt. I asked him why he was crying. He said he'd realized that hundreds of people had died in the towers that day.
It would be a long time until my psyche let a genuine emotion like this surface. I dealt with the shock mostly in nightmares in the years that followed. When our building was dug out of the rubble six months later, I looked the other way while ducking through the crowd of gawkers who came to see the pile.
I still can’t bring myself to visit the 9/11 Memorial. I sense that when I look at the reflecting pools, I will be like my chemistry teacher for the first time. After 25 years, I feel the day has come.
