Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  This is very much a storytelling museum. Yes, we’re an archive, but we’re a living archive. Like a living time capsule. This makes the experience very immediate. Very present.

  Our stories are told in the voices of people who lived the event. You begin with the voices of multitudes, remembering what happened that day. We use all the retrospective oral histories. We have the in-the-moment radio transmissions, the cockpit voice recorders, all the media that was capturing so much of the story. The news radio broadcasts on the day of 9/11, which is how so many people were taking in the information.

  So you experience what people twenty years ago experienced when they heard the 1010 WINS broadcast, or see a first responder interviewed on the news as if you were watching it that day. And, as I mentioned before, in the world after 9/11, you begin to see these acts of coming together in generosity and empathy.

  Then our guests leave the gallery and enter Foundation Hall, this cavernous space with a sixty-foot-high ceiling. Cathedral-like, if you will. And there’s this sense of “I can breathe again. We can go forward. We stand at the foundation of the World Trade Center. But look. The World Trade Center has been rebuilt.” There’s this sense of possibility and potential.

  Obviously, I can’t speak for everybody’s experience. But I would say that journey’s a fairly typical experience for people who didn’t want to visit the museum in the first place.

  Right now, we live in a world where the distinctions are going away. Our economies, our health, our environment. God knows … what we do here, or what somebody does in Russia or Australia, it can affect the entire world.

  COVID has shown us this. If there’s a fly that gets on an airplane or in a suitcase and comes to New York, you’ve got West Nile virus, right? If a virus in Wuhan, China, comes about, the entire world is affected. The same is true of the economy. What happens in the Hangseng in the morning has an impact on the New York Stock Exchange by the time I wake up. Or greenhouse gas emissions. So many examples.

  So the world has gotten much smaller. And because it’s smaller, we’re going to have increasing points of tension. We’ve got to figure out a way to negotiate these tensions that doesn’t involve the mass murder of innocent human beings.

  That may sound overly simplistic, but it’s certainly an aspiration of this project. The Memorial and Museum stands as a focal point for healing and affirms the commonality of seeking to understand the world we live in through remembrance. We remember these people who were so senselessly killed so that—and I know it sounds corny, but—so that it shouldn’t happen again.

  Well, it will happen again. It did happen again. And it does happen again. But if we collectively have the will to say, “No, that’s not the way to negotiate,” then other avenues can open up as ways to resolve our tensions.

  How have people changed when I see them leave the museum? I hate to make generalizations about other people’s experience, but I can tell you that people leave deeply moved. The experience affects them. What happens after that? No one can say.

  When you leave the museum, there’s no moment of “Now I get it!” We don’t have a call to action. There’s no rallying cry of “Now you’ve experienced it, go out and do something good!”

  Still, our hope is that what’s affecting our visitors is that recognition: This is not somebody else’s story, it’s everybody’s story. It could have been me. It could have been my child. It could have been my neighbor. It could have been my son’s teacher. My daughter’s friend. It could have been any of us. And is that okay?

  That’s really what we want people to be thinking about.

  When that first group of FBI agents came to us for what’s now their required training, the bureau’s director, Chris Wray, gave them a speech. He quoted lyrics by Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” It blew us away. We thought, That’s it. That’s absolutely right.

  None of this is to say there are easy answers. The world is complicated. We acknowledge that. But when you leave the Memorial and Museum, you might have a new set of questions. And these questions will be on two levels.

  First, the intellectual level. You might find you have a greater desire to understand how tragedies like 9/11 come about, and how we respond to them. You’ll probably see that our responses are complicated, too. They have their own repercussions. But here we are at the World Trade Center, so let’s try to figure this out together.

  Then, on an emotional level, we remind people that even in these horrible moments, we have the capacity for resilience. Hope is still possible.

  On the foundation level of the museum, as you’re leaving the building, there’s a single quote on the wall. It comes from Joe Bradley, an engineer and recovery worker. It’s something he said on the day they ended the nine months of rescue and recovery at Ground Zero:

  “We came in as individuals, and we’re leaving together.”

  That’s what we want people to think about when they leave the museum. Because I think, for all of us who work there, that summarizes what our project is all about.

  98 This interview was conducted in December 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

  99 To read more about Marilynn Rosenthal’s incredible journey, see the Washington Post article “Sons of the Mothers: Marilynn Rosenthal Struggles to Understand Her Child’s Killer, the Boy Who Grew Up to Be a 9/11 Hijacker” by Tamara Jones, September 11, 2006.

  TOM HADDAD

  I re-interviewed Tom Haddad, forty-nine, in late September 2020. It was a turbulent time. The world was seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic. The economy was teetering toward a recession. Debate over how to respond to the virus had highlighted divisions in a country that was already polarized.

  But COVID-19 seemed to be the least of our problems.

  The murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd had rocked the United States all summer. Protestors marching against institutionalized racism and police brutality had been met with armed responses in cities like Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. Day by day, the divide between citizens shouting that black lives matter and all lives matter seemed to be widening. Plus, all this was leading up to a stormy presidential election between the incumbent, Donald Trump, and former Vice President Joe Biden.

  Due to pandemic restraints, Tom and I spoke by phone. Despite the seriousness of the times, we found ourselves laughing over days gone by—like the time we’d first met eighteen and a half years before.

  It was a bright, clear day in the spring of 2002. I interviewed Tom on a bench in Madison Square Park, here in Manhattan. Back then, I was still recording my interviews on magnetic tape micro-cassette. Digital wasn’t a thing yet. And in those days, two complete strangers thought nothing of sitting less than six feet away from each other, as the pandemic precautions dictated. That was part of a normal life.

  Not that there’s anything normal about Tom. There’s a reason I’ve begun each edition of Tower Stories with his account. Tom had an incredibly visceral experience on 9/11. One that, sadly, few people lived to talk about.

  If you haven’t yet read his original interview, I suggest you go back and do so before reading this.

  When I first met Tom, it was six months after the Towers had fallen. I found him distracted. He was very intelligent. Certainly present. But distant. Not knowing him personally then, I assumed this was how he typically presented.

  But the man I spoke to in late September 2020 was happy, easygoing, generous, funny, and quick to laugh. He represented almost a complete turnaround from the sullen guy I first met nearly twenty years before.

  I asked Tom how this change had occurred. His answer left me inspired.

  FOR A LONG TIME, I was a salaried employee. And in 2010, I was kind of led to believe that the company I worked for—same company I’d worked for on 9/11—wouldn’t be long for the world. I was a senior vice president. So I decided it would be better for them if I got off the payroll. They wouldn’t ha
ve to pay my benefits, my payroll tax. It would be a huge savings for them. I’d keep working for them freelance, and maybe they could stay afloat a little longer. I thought this was the right thing to do.

  We went from fifteen or twenty employees with an office in the World Trade Center to … well, now they’re down to just the two owners and one employee, I think. Basically, I went from having, like, a 401(k) match and really terrific benefits to having to do all this stuff for myself. It was a bit of a shocker.

  If I had to grade being a freelancer, I would give it a solid B. I don’t like having to worry about where my next gig is coming from, you know? I don’t like that. I’d always been a very traditional guy as far as employment. My dad worked for IBM for something like thirty-five years. So the idea of independence was never appealing to me. But now that it’s been ten years—which is shocking, by the way—I do appreciate it.

  Like, with the COVID pandemic. My youngest son is in the third grade. He needs somebody sitting there with him for his remote learning. Otherwise, he gets distracted. So I sit with him, doing my work off-camera. But I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t have this kind of flexibility.

  Originally, people were so psyched to be working from home because of COVID. Now, it’s just normal for people to constantly be working. Plus, there’s the constant fear we all live in of, you know … tomorrow, the place we work for might close. It makes people even more terrified, so they work even more now than they used to.

  I wonder if they’ll ever get that time back. I don’t think we will. I think that, in a lot of ways, COVID-19 has changed our lives far more than people even realize at this point.

  The first eight or ten years after 9/11 were rocky for me. Really bad. I had a lot of anger, but also a lot of detachment. There are whole blocks of time post-9/11 that I have no memory of at all. My wife will say, “Hey, remember when we went on vacation to Rhode Island?” And I’ll be like, “No, I don’t.” I don’t remember it at all.

  It’s funny because I was in this weird, internalized place … I just shut it all out. I mean, I was still functioning. I could tell people what happened on 9/11. How I ran through the street. It was logical for me to say I was scared, and so I would tell people I was scared. But I didn’t really feel it. I wasn’t processing anything emotionally. Like, zero percent.

  But then I took part in an experimental therapy program put together by New York Presbyterian, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Columbia University Hospital. It was one of the best things that could have happened to me. And like most good things that happen to me in my life, my wife found it.

  Right after 9/11, she saw that I was struggling. And me being an artist, she decided that, “Well, he’s never been one for words, but maybe he’ll keep a diary of pictures as opposed to writing.” She bought me a sketchbook, and she says, “You know what you should do? You should start making drawings and just let it all out. Don’t think about what you’re drawing. Just draw.” So that began this nearly twenty-year journey of drawing pictures and sort of working my feelings out like that.100

  She found this study when she realized I was getting to a place she could no longer help. I had, like, four interviews before I was accepted into it.

  It was basically a study where they were trying to come up with ways to treat soldiers returning from the Iraq War. They were looking for candidates who’d suffered what they referred to as “cataclysmic PTSD.” And the way they explained it to me was that anybody can have post-traumatic stress. You get in a car accident, for instance, you can have post-traumatic stress. But by “cataclysmic” PTSD, they meant that the world experienced it with you. It was your experience, but the world also watched. If you’re there on the ground during a mass shooting that got televised, it’s something you can’t escape because everybody’s watching it, everybody’s talking about it. They’re curious about it.

  The way the doctors explained it to me is that, when you experience trauma of this level, your mind basically has two options. You can detach your factual experience from your emotional experience. Or you can go crazy. Those are your two options.

  Fortunately, for me, I detached. Which is why, in the first ten years after 9/11, I could tell my story in such incredible detail. I described what happened to me in a factual manner. Almost emotionless. That was this detachment I’m talking about. Detachment of the factual experience from my emotional experience. The therapy was designed to combine the two again.

  They made these MRI maps of my brain at the beginning and then at the end. I was in the tube for, like, five hours. They taped a computer monitor to my face, like goggles, and they would show me pictures of things so I would react to them while they were mapping my brain. Sometimes they asked me questions and I had to answer them. And sometimes it was just showing me a series of photographs. It was an intense, intense experience.

  Then, the way it worked, I had to relive my experience of 9/11 for an hour and a half each day, every day for fourteen weeks. I liken it to … you know that scene at the end of A Clockwork Orange where he’s put in front of the TV with his eyeballs held open?101 This sort of extreme exposure. Actually, that’s what they called it—extreme exposure therapy.

  They were looking for people who could emotionally handle it, and I guess they thought that I could. And did, by the way. So I guess they were right.

  They didn’t put me in front of a TV screen. Not in the beginning, anyway. All I did was tell my story as it happened from the moment I woke up that day until the moment I got home. I had to tell it in as much detail as I could possibly remember. They recorded this on audiotape.

  So one day a week, I would go up to Columbia Presbyterian all the way up on the East Side. The psychologist would record me telling my story, what I did on 9/11. Then, once a day for the next three days, I would listen to myself telling the story. At the end of the week, I went back up to Columbia Presbyterian and listened to the recording with the therapist. And we would talk about it.

  Sometimes I’d tell the story and more of the details would start to come out. But you could also hear in the tape sometimes, I was annoyed. Like, I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be doing it.

  Then, on week ten … I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there’s this totally amazing documentary that was made by a couple of French documentarians. They happened to be downtown filming on 9/11, and by accident they recorded everything as it was happening. So as homework on week ten, I had to sit and watch that movie.102

  There’s a part in the film where they were actually inside Tower 1. And there’s a sound that would happen every now and again. This horrific loud thump and crunch sound. And that sound would haunt me. I could never quite figure out what it was.

  But when I watched the film, I saw that it was the sound associated with jumpers hitting the ground. And it all flooded back into me. Emotionally, I remembered it all. In my body. All of a sudden, I collapsed to the ground and started crying uncontrollably. Fortunately, I was at home. Even thinking about it right now, it makes me upset.

  And you know what’s funny? By that point, I’d told the story of 9/11 so many times in front of so many people. At college symposiums. Radio tours. I told my story, and I never once remembered that I actually saw people hit the ground.

  When I was able to piece it together, watching that film, it was like … I can’t even explain what it felt like. Like being punched in the gut. I physically collapsed to the ground and started crying uncontrollably.

  That is the exact moment, according to the therapist, that my emotional experience reattached to my factual experience. And suddenly I realized this whole thing I lived through, it really happened to me. It was like years’ worth of emotion all came out at once. I was completely spent for four days afterwards.

  At thirteen weeks, I had to go back to Ground Zero. It was my first time back there. I went alone. And when I got there, I had just a terrible feeling. I just felt awful. I didn’t want to be there. But I
knew that I had to do it for the therapy.

  I don’t know if you recall from my story, but for me, the hardest part of my experience on 9/11 was when I got out on street. So I had to retrace my steps in the street as a part of the therapy. The idea was to help me know that this place was real, it all really happened. And so I went there. And at first, I was just like, this is stupid, I don’t want to be here, I’m just going to go home. And then I decided, you know what? I’ll do it. All right? I’ll humor you. I’ll do it.

  I tried to retrace my steps, but I couldn’t at first. The site was under construction back then. There were all these barricades up and fences. I couldn’t get to where I’d started: Point A.

  So I was standing there in the middle of the street and I thought, you know what? I’m close enough to where I started that day. And on 9/11, I ran. So I’m just gonna run and see what happens.

  People must have thought I was nuts. But then again, it’s New York. So I started at Point A, close to where I figured I must have started that day in the street. And I just started running. And before I even knew it, I was sitting in the Au Bon Pain where I ended. I mean, I was sitting in the exact same seat where I wound up that day all covered in dust, and this time I actually started yelling and crying. I was like, “I’m doing it again! I’m doing it again!”

  It was such an exhilarating feeling, I did it a second time. I went all the way back to Point A and started running again. And then, like, as if it was a blur, I’m sitting in that seat again. And I was like, this is the coolest thing ever! It was like it was all stored there in my muscle memory, you know?