Ten years ago, I moved to New York City to go to college. September 11th, 2001 is one of my first New York memories. I wrote down my story on the first anniversary, and I’m telling it now.
Ten twenty-seven AM. I stare ruefully at the glowing red digits and try to wrap my mind around their significance. I have a calculus class in a half hour. It’s the second week of the first semester of my freshman year at Columbia University, and I have been in New York City for almost two weeks.
I touch the plastic of the clock, but I don’t press the snooze button. My sleep-addled hearing has just made sense of the announcer’s words… something about an attack at the World Trade Center.
Wait, really? My mind lolls between memories of 1991 when someone detonated a van in a parking garage and flashes of George Orwell’s War of the Worlds. When that script was first read over the radio, people tuning in to the show midway thought that earth had actually come under attack from aliens. Panic ensued. I press the snooze button and deliver myself back to the sheets with a comforting flop. What the hell kind of radio show would get people worked up like that?
At precisely ten thirty-six am, the alarm comes back on. They are still talking about the World Trade Center. Something about airplanes… I don’t know. I wrap myself in a towel and a robe, shuffle my feet into a pair of worn-out Adidas sandals, and prepare to trudge down to the showers to wake myself up. With any luck, I’ll only be four or five minutes late to class. As I grab the little basket that contains my soap and shampoo, the phone rings. I fumble the ugly, beige handset up to my shoulder and eke out a guttural greeting.
“Dude, thank God you’re alive.” It’s Steve. Steve is a senior in my fraternity, and I look up to him quite a bit. Unbeknownst to me, it is also Steve’s birthday. [Happy Birthday, Steve!]
“Of course I’m alive, what the fuck are you talking about?” I mumble into the receiver.
“You haven’t heard the news?!” He sounds shocked, an unpleasant change from his relief at my continued life. “Somebody flew an airplane into the side of the World Trade Center.”
“That was for REAL?” My confusion at the radio broadcast has been abruptly and uncomfortably halted. “Oh my God.”
“Find a TV, and stay there.”
I swing open my door and make my way to the floor’s lounge with fumbling urgency. I must cut a striking figure in the doorway: robe and shower sandals, pillow creases still on my face, clutching fitfully the basket of soap and shampoo. A dozen concerned faces look up at me from around the lounge, then return to the television. There, silhouetted against the blue morning sky, are the twin towers of the World Trade Center with a column of black smoke pouring out of each.
This can’t really be happening, I think. Those buildings are only a few miles south of here. If this were really happening, then I should be able to see it from —-
I stand up and run to the south side of the building, shower basket still in hand. I can see clear down Amsterdam Avenue, past the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, over the streets congested with north-bound cars and south-bound emergency vehicles, to the point on the horizon where a rising tower of black smoke cannot be doubted or argued with or dispelled. This is happening.
My heart fills with an anxiety, my mind is clouded with questions I can’t answer. Do I still need to take a shower? Do I need to go to class? Do I try to get out of New York? What comes next? Is this the start of a war? I plop back down on the couch and resume staring at the television, the black smoke burned in my memory from the window now reflected on the screen.
I sit and watch with half of my floor as the President of the United States ascends the podium and instructs the nation on what to do next. I still don’t know what to do next, so I go back to my room.
The phone lines out of New York are overrun, calling out is impossible on land lines and cell. Thankfully, the internet still works, so I instant message everyone I know and assure them I am OK, and instruct my best friend at home to call my parents and make sure they know the same. After assuaging the fears of friends, relatives and some acquaintances, I still feel the anxious knot in my stomach… What does one do at a time like this? I throw on the most findable clothes and roll out the door. Classes are cancelled.
I find myself walking, almost automatically, towards my fraternity house. I don’t know where else to go, but I know there will be people there.
The brothers that gather at the house form a sort of makeshift support group. We all have the same fears, the same discomforts and the same anxiety. Here, we can be a member of a whole, not only as fraternity brothers, but as New Yorkers, as Americans, as Human Beings.
As a whole, we can be confident, we aren’t weak in the face of adversity. We find a way to joke about it. We also find ways to help in the relief efforts by volunteering at the Javits center, and by collecting money and medical supplies, but perhaps most importantly by staffing our makeshift support group.
We were a microcosm of the experience in New York as a whole. People band together, there is a solidarity possible in the density of a city that I’ve seen repeated in other times of need — the blackout in ‘04, the transit strike in ‘06, the hurricane a few weeks ago, and plenty of smaller-scale examples set in subway cars or on streetcorners and measured in moments rather than hours — where I’m reminded of that nebulous thing that brought us all to this city, that keeps us all here despite our differences, that we care about more than stuff and work and sex and money. I’m a part of this city, and it’s a part of me.
