by Gwen Cooper
“I have to go now,” I told Tony. “I’ll call you later, okay?” It felt odd, I thought, to go through the polite formalities of hanging up on my friend when the voice over the PA had just told us, in a way his words hadn’t, that we were all being instructed to run for our lives.
A co-worker named Sharon stopped by my desk. Sharon was a few years older than I was and one of the directing partners of the company I worked for. We had collaborated on a few projects and exchanged friendly enough words in passing, but had never spent time together socially outside of the office. “You live around here, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I told her. “I live a block away.”
“Why don’t you come with me,” she said. “I was going to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and get a room at the Brooklyn Marriott. We can have drinks and call people to come over and meet us.” When I hesitated, she added, “You don’t want to go home and sit alone a few blocks away from all this.”
I’d had a half-formed idea that I might call Andrea or one of the handful of other friends I’d made since moving, on the chance that they, too, had been released from their offices. But going to see any of them would mean traveling all the way uptown. Getting into the subway or riding on a bus seemed unwise at the moment. The far side of the Brooklyn Bridge was actually much closer to my office than, say, Midtown Manhattan.
And I didn’t want to stray too far from my cats. Without really thinking about it, I was operating on the vague assumption that the fires would rage for a while until they were finally put out, at which time the dead would be collected and the grieving—bottomless, incalculable grieving—would begin.
But I also knew that, when all that had happened, and when I was tired of being with other people and talking over this thing, this horror, I would want to return to the quiet of my apartment, and to the warm certainty of the furry bodies of my cats.
So it was a relief, when Sharon extended this invitation, to feel that somebody else was taking charge. Sharon wasn’t exactly my boss, but she was one of the people I answered to and, moreover, had lived in New York her entire life. Sharon would know, better than I possibly could, what we were supposed to do.
The two of us walked the few blocks to the Brooklyn Bridge. Nobody else from the office joined us, and the thought occurred to me that Sharon’s invitation hadn’t been entirely casual, that she was—for reasons that couldn’t be found in the very slight interaction we’d had thus far—looking out for me. Clearly, we were not the only ones who’d had the idea of leaving Manhattan; the Brooklyn Bridge was a solid wall of human flesh. It had been closed to vehicular traffic, and people were climbing up the sides of the railings to access the bridge, pulled up and over by pedestrians on the other side, rather than walking all the way down to the pedestrian entrance.
For all that there were thousands of people on that bridge, the crowd was strangely quiet. The word terrorists could be heard in almost every single murmured conversation, and I was now long past the point of disbelieving it. Then somebody near us said, “What if they blow up the bridge?”
It was a preposterous idea. The notion of somebody having the audacity to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge—the sheer impossibility of its disappearance from the New York skyline—was so absurd as to sound almost like the punch line to a bad joke.
Once introduced, however, it was an idea that was impossible to put from our minds. Sharon and I tried to distract ourselves by talking about the likelihood of finding a free room at the Brooklyn Marriott, and making lists of the people we would call to join us. Did it make more sense to stop for bottles of liquor on the way, or to pay the exorbitant prices that the hotel’s honor bar would surely levy? Our backs were turned to the World Trade Center, and our view was of nothing except thousands of people and the sanctuary of Brooklyn before us. As long as we walked and talked like normal people, speaking of normal things, the world was manageable.
The air was acrid with the smell of smoke. A woman walking near us limped slightly, and she complained—with a forced, aren’t-we-being-brave-about-this good humor—that if she’d known she’d have to walk so much today, she would have worn more practical shoes. Sharon and I smiled sympathetically, and were on the verge of responding, when a man streaked by, shouting, “They blew up the Pentagon! They blew up the Pentagon!”
We heard a colossal crack and groan. The bridge trembled, a vibration radiated from the soles of our feet up to our legs. They were blowing up the bridge! They were blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge! People began to scream and cry and rush and push, they knocked into other people and those people fell down and the people behind them kept running over them and Sharon and I grabbed on to each other to keep our footing. I wanted to scream, too, but there was no air in my lungs. There was no air anywhere. The Brooklyn Bridge was exploding, disintegrating, and I was standing on it!
Every muscle and tendon in my body strained to be yards and yards ahead of where I stood. The only thing that held my body back was the hard barrier of my skin, which stubbornly refused to go forward. My hands and legs shook with the desperate effort my body made to jump out of my skin and rush away, away, away from all this.
A flash of vision swam before my eyes, not of my own life, but of grainy black-and-white footage from Holocaust documentaries I’d seen. It was of a group of old Jewish men, lined up facing a wall. Each had his hand clasped in the hand of the man next to him, and they were praying—the prayer all Jews are supposed to say at the moment of their death. I could hear them as clearly as I heard anything around me, and then I heard my own voice—as if it were something separate and outside of myself, thick and unrecognizable—reciting with them: Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai eh-chad …
Then everybody stopped abruptly, as if we had all been connected to a central power source whose plug had just been pulled. We had realized that the bridge wasn’t disintegrating, hadn’t been rent in half to spill us into the East River below. As one body, we all turned our heads to look back at the city we were fleeing.
One of the towers of the World Trade Center was collapsing inward upon itself. Within seconds, there was nothing left of it but a smoky hole in the skyline where it had stood. The smoke of the fire had been black, but the residue of the collapse was a shimmering beige. It hung in poised perfection, like the afterbirth of fireworks, in the brilliant blue air.
“It’s okay,” I said to Sharon. “It’s okay. It’s just the tower collapsing.”
It was a ridiculous thing to say. What could be less “okay” than the collapse of a tower of the World Trade Center? And yet, in that moment, it was okay—not only because it meant that the Brooklyn Bridge hadn’t been blown up, but also because it made sense. Buildings burned, and then they fell down. What was the expression? Burned to the ground. I’d never seen it happen before, but I’d heard that expression all my life. It burned to the ground, some reporter would say. Firefighters responded to the four-alarm fire but were unable to overcome the intensity of the blaze, and the warehouse burned to the ground. This was a thing that happened all the time and everybody knew it and it made perfect sense.
Except it didn’t, of course. The thought that piled into my already overactive brain in the next millisecond was that there had been people in that building. Whatever hope had remained for rescuing those trapped in the fire was now gone. Again, reflexively, I began to pray, this time murmuring the Mourner’s Kaddish. Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mae raba …
The ball of smoke held itself carefully aloft for a moment, a hooded cobra that swayed and hypnotized its victims with its eyes. We watched it, mesmerized. Then it began to descend and spread. It radiated outward in an opaque cloud of soot and debris that swallowed up everything in its path for blocks around—birds and trees and people and buildings.
The building where my cats still were.
My body followed the direction my head was already pointing in, and I began to push my way through the crowd that was now, with frightened cries and more determination than
ever, heading into Brooklyn. “Excuse me,” I said politely. “Excuse me.” Weren’t you supposed to say excuse me to people as you pushed your way past them? They jostled against me, bumped into me hard, but that was okay. I understood. They had to go one way, and I had to go the other. If I was patient and persistent enough, I would get through. Every time someone knocked into me, I repeated, “Excuse me.”
Sharon grabbed my arm. “Gwen!” she shouted. “What are you doing? We have to go this way!” and she pointed vigorously in the direction of Brooklyn.
“Let go of me!” I began to fight a double battle against her grip and the crowd that wouldn’t let me through back to Manhattan. “My cats are in there!”
“Gwen!” she shouted again. She grabbed my shoulders with both hands and shook me a bit, and I wondered, with a sort of detached and analytical interest, if she was going to slap me. Was I hysterical? I didn’t feel hysterical. Despite my panic and my shrieking, I felt perfectly lucid. Sharon pointed again, at the remaining tower, which listed dangerously to one side. “Gwen, the other tower is going to collapse any second. You cannot go back for your cats! We have to keep going!”
Almost as soon as she said it, the second tower began to implode. People buried their faces in their hands, they covered their eyes, they sobbed and wailed. I felt dry-eyed and hollow as I watched a second beige ash monster merge with the first one. It had already reached the foot of the bridge, and nothing was visible of the city anymore.
“Your cats will be fine,” Sharon said. “They’re in your apartment, and they’re safe, and they will be fine. I promise.”
Broken windows, I thought. Broken windows and a blind cat.
“They’re not going to let anybody off this bridge and back into the Financial District,” Sharon continued. “This bridge is going one way, and that’s the way we have to go.”
Of course. I had made a stupid decision—an insanely, cataclysmically, unimaginably stupid decision—when I had first set foot onto the Brooklyn Bridge and left my cats behind. They were alone and unprotected, and it was my fault, my fault, my fault.
“We’ll figure it out when we get into Brooklyn,” Sharon said. There was a note of desperation in her voice. “We’ll make calls, we’ll find someone in your building, and they will be fine.”
We turned and walked toward Brooklyn once again. This time, there was no discussion of what we would do when we reached the Brooklyn Marriott. Without saying anything to each other, that plan had been scrapped. Our only goal now was to walk until we got out of reach of the soot cloud, which fell wrathfully upon us within minutes. Soon we could barely see or breathe; we took off our shirts and tied them around our faces in an attempt to filter the air. With the part of my mind that was numb and detached, I thought how astonishing it was that one minute you were in one of the most technologically advanced cities the world had ever produced, and a minute later you were any refugee of any war zone at any time or place in history, fleeing for your life on foot.
Our skin and hair were gray from the ash by the time we reached the far side of the bridge, and still we were in the thick of the cloud. We walked for miles. The rhythm of my footsteps echoed in my head. My cats. My cats. My cats my cats my cats. Somewhere in Brooklyn—I didn’t know where we were by now—a mechanic was standing in front of a garage, handing out surgical masks to people as they walked by. We nodded an acknowledgment to him, our throats sore with smoke and stunned into silence.
Eventually, we had walked so far that Sharon said we might as well keep going to her apartment in Bay Ridge, which was a good ten miles from where we’d started out that morning. “You’ll stay at my apartment,” she said. I was grateful, but it was more of an intellectual gratitude than an emotional one. I knew Sharon was doing a kind thing; where would I have gone, where would I have slept that night, if not for her? Yet I felt dissociated from all outcomes. What difference did it make where I went or where I stayed? The only thing that mattered was how I was going to get back.
I wanted to call my mother, to let her know I was all right, and I wanted to call my apartment building. But our cell phones weren’t working. “My mother’s office is near my apartment,” Sharon said. “We can use the landline there.”
It was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon, according to Sharon’s watch, by the time we reached Bay Ridge. We had walked for almost five hours. We were now far enough away from Lower Manhattan to attract stares, covered as we were from head to toe in grayish beige ash. The streets were wide and clean, and the crowds were orderly. I noticed the order and the stares in a dim sort of way that didn’t connect to anything inside me. Things were happening around me, and I was aware of them, but I couldn’t participate in them or feel anything about them. It was like sitting in the backseat of a cab and watching the world rush by, knowing that you had no part in what was happening outside the cab’s windows.
It was in that same detached way that I watched Sharon’s mother grab her into a damp, tear-laden hug as we entered her office. Another woman who worked there showed me discreetly into an empty back office. “There’s a bathroom, if you want to wash up,” she said tentatively. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt, capri pants, and open-toed sandals, and the ash had settled into my skin until the one was indistinguishable from the other.
The first call I made was to my mother’s elementary school. “Thank God, thank God,” the receptionist breathed when she answered the phone and I identified myself. “Your mother’s in the teacher’s lounge. Some of the other teachers are sitting with her. I’ll let her know you’re on the phone.”
There was a brief hum of hold music—which struck me as another bizarre thing; why should something as innocuous as hold music still exist?—and then my mother was on the phone, and she was crying. She cried so hard that she couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. Her sobs sounded more like howls and they were continuous, painful, as if something were being wrenched out of her body with brute force.
I hadn’t shed a single tear yet that day, and I didn’t want to. If I started to cry, I would break, and the most important thing now was that my core remain firmly held together. But all the tears I hadn’t cried rushed up into my throat to choke me, and my voice was thick as I repeated, “Mommy, don’t cry. I’m okay. I’m okay, Mommy, don’t cry.”
One of the other teachers took the phone from her. “Tell me where you’re staying,” she said quietly. “We’ll let her know.”
I told her I’d be staying with my friend Sharon, and that I would call later with the phone number. After we hung up, I tried the front desk of my apartment building. There was no answer. I tried the apartments and cell phones of the handful of other tenants I knew in the building. Nobody was home. Nobody could be reached. The one hope I’d had left, that somebody at my building would answer and say, Gosh, how silly you were to worry! Everything’s peachy-keen here! flickered out.
Broken windows, I thought. Broken windows and a blind cat.
Sharon and I walked the few additional blocks to her apartment—a homey, plant-and-sunlight-filled two-bedroom affair. We immediately turned on the TV. Sharon had been right; not only had both towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, but all the buildings in the plaza around the Trade Center had either collapsed or were about to. Manhattan was completely shut down below 14th Street. The perimeter had been barricaded. It was being guarded by the military, and the only ones allowed in were military personnel, police officers, firefighters, and rescue workers.
There was no point in thinking about broken windows. It was a counterproductive thought. I had to believe that my building was intact. The cats would be fine. I’d left them with plenty of food and water, and this would be no more to them than if I had gone away on an overnight business trip. Because surely, I thought, I’d be able to get to them tomorrow.
We knew we should shower, or eat, or do something, but Sharon and I couldn’t pull ourselves away from that TV screen. They were playing cell phone messages from people who’d been trappe
d in the rubble of the collapsed buildings. Their final words, the reporter intoned. The pain of it was insupportable, and Sharon grimly produced two bottles of vodka.
I drank as I had never drunk before. I wanted to drink until the bottle ached as much as I did, to drink until the room spun and I forgot my own name. I wanted to drink until I passed out. And, mercifully, I did.
20 • September 12, 2001
I took a wallet full of provisions with me, for my mind misgave me that I might have to deal with some who would be of great strength, and would respect neither right nor law.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
I SHOULD HAVE AWAKENED THE NEXT MORNING WITH A VICIOUS HANGOVER, but I didn’t. In fact, I had never felt so clearheaded and single-minded of purpose in my life. It was as if my mind had spent its unconscious hours solving problems for me, so that by the time I woke up the process had resolved itself, and all that was left was the series of steps I would undertake.
A quick check with the news revealed several things. The first was that Lower Manhattan was still shut down, still barricaded, and still restricted to military and rescue personnel. The roads below 14th Street were closed to vehicular traffic, and the subways and buses weren’t running down there—although the rest of the trains and buses in and around the city were essentially on schedule.
This meant my best shot at getting in would be on foot. I fired up Sharon’s computer, consulted an online subway map, and plotted three separate routes that would get me as close to the sealed-off perimeter as public transportation would allow.
