Where I Was Then

September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday morning. (This is readily available information and not at all revelatory, but it always feels weirdly important to me that I remember this. Your guess as to why is as good as mine.) This was to be the first Tuesday with classes for that semester at NYU. I'd been in the city for a couple of weeks after my dad had helped me move in and driven back to Arizona. I had attended some freshman orientation programs (with help orienting yourself in the city, tips on how to avoid being pickpocketed, and practical-but-off-the-record advice that if you are going to buy drugs, for Pete's sake, don't buy them from undercover cops in Washington Square Park). I had attended one Thursday's worth of classes.  Tuesday was an election day (it must have been a primary? this was definitely before I paid attention to New York politics) and, since my dorm was a polling location, it wasn't initially surprising to see such activity downstairs. But as I went outside, I was surprised to see how many people were gathering. They were crowding the sidewalk and even standing in the street, and my first thought was, "Gee, people in New York REALLY turn out for elections." Then, once I got out onto Union Square West/University Place, I had a clear view of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, already burning.

I did not know anything about what was going on. I was approximately 2-2.5 miles away, but I didn't know the city well enough to know that yet (nor, certainly, did the people I loved back home). I hadn't seen any news that morning, so I didn't know why the towers were burning, just that they were (though of course I didn't see any fire, just the plumes of smoke rising from the tops of the towers; when I moved last year, I was surprised to see how many times I'd doodled the image of the smoking, and then falling, towers in the margins of my notebooks that year). I figured that emergency services would have things in hand, and anyway, I didn't know what else to do, so I went to class. As I walked down the ten blocks to my first class that day, things got scarier. People were huddled around car radios, and as you walked you'd hear different rumors being relayed among all the people who were just standing and staring.

"Bombs in both buildings."
"They've declared war."
"They hit Washington and Chicago and Seattle too."
"A plane hit the building."

I arrived at my first class ("History of the American Musical") and it seemed like, despite whatever was happening out there, we were going to try and get through a normal morning. Soon enough, however, the people sitting by the windows that looked out onto the street below (and Washington Square beyond that) announced that people outside were running up the sidewalk. And then phones started beeping and buzzing, and some of my other classmates informed us that the top of the first tower had collapsed. Our professor dismissed us and told us to go get in touch with whoever we needed to. When I got outside, I was puzzled at first too look downtown and only see one smoking tower. That's when I realized that it wasn't just a few floors that had collapsed, but that the entire tower had fallen. I walked back up to Union Square, figuring I needed to tell my parents that I was okay (and try to get word of the same to my brother at school). The walk home was similar to the walk down, with strange snatches of truth and rumor pulling at my attention. I had nearly reached the dorm when the screams and shouts of disbelief from the people I was passing got me to turn around to see the second tower blossom and fall. I got back upstairs and my roommate and some of his friends were watching the news, helping fill in some of the blanks for me of what had happened.

The rest of that day was spent feeling a weird mix of anticlimax (now what?) and fear (is there going to be another plane? am I safe now?). I remember seeing people walking uptown, covered in dust, and realizing that they must have been down there and that the dust was from the towers. I didn't have any friends of my own at this point, and I lived in an apartment-style dorm that housed relatively few freshman, but I met up with a guy I'd met at an orientation event and we went looking for a hospital where we could donate blood. But even by the time we set out to do it that afternoon, we were turned away because they had more blood than they needed (we learned, with the sick feeling, that of course the people in the towers mostly either got away or would not need blood).

The next days blur together in my memory:

There were armed National Guard checkpoints stopping people from crossing 14th Street without student identification or ID showing you lived down there (there was another "nobody crosses for any reason" line down at Canal Street; over time, the 14th Street blockade opened and the Canal Street one became permeable with ID).

The sirens of emergency vehicles could be heard constantly, for days. (For years, I'd get tense at the sound of low-flying planes, and anxious when I'd hear far-off emergency vehicle sirens.)

The streets had far less traffic than I would become accustomed to, and because of the blockade you could walk down the middle of empty streets below 14th Street. On the second or third day, the wind shifted and the smoke plume (always visible from nearly any place that had a view of the sky downtown) settled in our direction. The smell was not pleasant, and it certainly didn't calm the nerves to see people begin wearing surgical masks. At night, walking around deserted streets, it felt like walking around an imagined Victorian London, with the streetlights rimmed in an eerie glow (just replace the fog in your imagination with the smoke from the still smoldering towers).

One night, I went to a vigil in Washington Square. People gathered with candles and sang. The next night, I went to a vigil in Union Square.

I don't remember when I started seeing American flags hanging from windows, but I did.

There were missing person flyers everywhere. They'd be taped up on light poles and bus stops, and there were stretches where an entire wall or chain link fence would be covered with them. They had photos (wedding photos, prom photos, candid shots with pets and kids) and notes. Sometimes the notes were asking for information about the missing person, and sometimes the notes were written to the missing person, asking them to come home. Or at least get in touch.

We did not return to class for a while (a week? maybe two?), but one of my professors met with any of her students who wanted to show up in Washington Square one day. She just wanted to check in and see how we were doing, and talk about anything we needed to talk about. I didn't have much to say.

One day, my roommate and his friends invited me to the grocery store. We had heard that the emergency responders could use certain types of supplies, so we bought materials for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. When we got back to the room we made up as many as we could. Not having much else to contribute, I also threw in the majority of the socks I'd brought with me to the city. The West Side Highway was being used exclusively to take aid workers to and from the site, and big crowds of onlookers gathered to cheer them on, shaking hands with the people returning from the site and handing off care packages to the people on their way down. That was the only time I showed up with more than a bottle of water, but with little else to do, I went over there every day or two, if only to see somebody doing something to help.

The Union Square movie theater (now a Regal, then a UA) was closed immediately after the attack, but sometime in the following days they opened their doors and offered free screenings of all of their movies, with complimentary popcorn and soda, to give people in the area something to do with themselves. I went to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I had seen it once before, back in Arizona at the end of the strange, somewhat lonely summer between high school and New York. My first viewing was in a mostly empty auditorium in Scottsdale, and at that point the movie felt like a kind of private pleasure. But that second viewing in September is one of the most emotional experiences I've had in a theater. The auditorium was so full that there were people sitting on the stairs (and the theater employees didn't make them move). We shared our free popcorn, and an audience that ranged from college kids to young parents to senior citizens (including a woman in a wheelchair) embraced the movie. The sing-along bit about halfway through the movie that had played to silence in Scottsdale was joyous and loud. It's a naughty, defiant movie, but it's also beautiful and filled with aching emotion, and I'll always love it for the solace I felt watching it with that crowd.