scrypt
Head-Fi's Sybil
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- Jan 22, 2002
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What follows is my account of the Towers' fall (and a low-key tirade).
--------------------------------------------
9/11/01. 2:00 p.m.
Just arrived home from Maiden Lane, where I was finessing a letter to a film director until moments before the first plane hit World Trade Center Tower One. I look like Mount Vesuvius. I am literally covered with ashes.
In the course of an hour, I watched at least a dozen people catch fire. I saw many more hang from the ledges of 2 WTC. I watched them let go when the building collapsed at last.
9/11/01. 8:07 a.m.
Looking down from an eighteenth-story window off Wall Street, I noticed what might have been snow but for sheets of plastic and paper undulating in the sky. Their sinuous glitter seemed indicative of mischief, nothing more. Was this a prank? I wondered. Was it the detritus of a bon voyage party, a christening overhead?
I exited the building to find a sextet of lawyers loitering on textured marble steps and staring skyward. There it was, the WTC set afire. The damage seemed strangely contained. What I gauged to have been the sixty-to-sixty-fourth floors were now rings of gleaming exposed metal, their windows bent slots that spumed curlicues of black smoke. From the slots descended a light-beam filled with coruscating silver minutiae. It seemed naïve. This spotlight, this anachronism, might have framed a young and sparkle-tuxedoed Marlene Dietrich, or a wand-swirling pixie in a forties Disney toon. Instead, it flashed toward me.
The beam flowed down to my feet. Its contents: Burned paper. I squinted: So I wasn’t a pixie or androgynous god after all. Strange, to have been hypnotized briefly by litter's shimmering pirouette.
A chubby African-American woman emerged from the haze. Her lids were slitted with pain. None of the lawyers seemed to notice. Sweating and wheezing, she hurled herself up the steps.
"Hello," I called after her. "Do you have asthma?" She turned but didn't nod.
I produced my inhaler and told her to open her mouth. She did and I gave her three shots of synthetic adrenaline. Then I walked her into the building.
Two of the lawyers noticed at last and offered to take her upstairs to enjoy their fastidiously circulated air. It made me feel useful to know I might have saved her a trip to the hospital.
I decided to walk toward whatever had made the woman unable to breathe. I worried someone else might need a few puffs from my inhaler.
I walked up Fulton Street until I came within yards of the burning building. I gazed upward absently until a wave of people jumped to their deaths. This is what happens to us, I kept thinking as the people fell and flattened. We feel complacent in our ritzy little country and then Shiva appears to take us. He kills us lovingly, ensuring us time to realize we don’t matter.
Still, I didn't have to turn away from the carnage. Several people rushed down the street weeping and exhorting people to pray, but I wasn’t fearful -- not yet. Years of gazing at paintings of Kali and Shiva seemed to have done precisely what Hindus had always claimed: taken away a good deal of paralyzing horror. I felt like Buddha staring at his dead cow and contemplating the nature of suffering.
Someone near said terrorists had attacked the building. Someone else added the Pentagon had been attacked. I wondered where the people got their information. No one's cell phone worked, no message crawled across the electronics store monitor.
I had just reached Broadway when a plane flew around the tower, slanting down close to the base before its moment of impact: Blam. An assassin’s amplified gunshot.
People began fleeing frantically, as they do in all movies about the end of the world and comics about the Rapture. I turned to run, then stopped. What from? I thought to myself.
Behind me, an oblivious twit complimented the ingenuity of the terrorists. Then he praised the sturdiness of the buildings. "Look how well they're holding up," he said, gesturing upward.
Then the second tower collapsed.
Waves of people rushed toward the river -- many of them weeping, most of them panicked by the falling monolith and its onslaught of smoke and debris.
White wind chased me down a sloping alley and into a ten-story building, where the air grew so opaque I had to return to the street.
Police herded us down Water Street and past the Brooklyn Bridge. We were coughing the whole way; some people actually collapsed. For a long time, I breathed through my collar and couldn't see the sidewalk in front of me. I moved to the street briefly to avoid keeping three people in wheelchairs from embarking a bus. A policeman tried to assist them. By the time I reached Bayard Street in Chinatown, the air had cleared. I found myself standing outside Chinatown Manpower Project, the school where I used to teach English. Old people smiled vaguely. There were no familiar faces. I walked down to the park and gazed randomly toward the horizon. I was just in time to watch the first tower collapse.
What sickened me was how none of the little shops in the business district, none of the places that depended on Wall Street customers to survive, would open their doors to the rush of choking people. The shops had become fallout shelters guarded by anal survivalists. I could see timid clerks standing at the backs of the stores, safely distanced from locked glass doors the crowd could have shattered easily. This is what we are to each other, I thought to myself. Outsiders. This is what we’ve always been.
I reached a friend's apartment and tried to get buzzed upstairs. My friend's husband seemed to be having a problem with the door. I continued walking and bought things to swallow at random, perhaps to weigh myself down: lox and borscht, an Excedrin from a Muslim cashier in Panjali Deli. The cashier looked frantic and told me how sorry he was. I know you are, I told him and patted his shoulder. I know you. It’s not your fault.
I went to a Polish diner, ordered coffee and caught a bit of the news. I was the only dusty person there -- the only person from the site -- but I didn't look bereaved and so the female waiter concentrated on a pristine shaking man in a suit, a man who said he "didn't want to hear about it."
I arrived home in time to turn on the television and hear Bush shout, "This is an act of war!" Yet the obliteration of WTC did not seem the result of wartime strategy to me -- not in the utilitarian sense. What defense systems had the terrorists taken out? Why kill such a melange of civilians, many of them from the Middle East themselves? It seemed to me that the hijackings were the result of simple sociopathology -- thousands of civilians executed sadistically in planes and in sprawling falling buildings -- all for the orgasm of retribution craved by sociopaths, who mistake accident for strategy, complexion for conspiracy. The objective seemed not to atomize wartime soldiers, as at Pearl Harbor (which reporters mentioned every few minutes during network coverage). The objective was to scapegoat the wrong victim, which is what sociopaths usually do. I thought of Ted Bundy, with his legion of dark-haired casualties, women who bore some superficial resemblance to his mother and his girlfriend -- both of whom had rejected him in the past. The WTC victims weren’t responsible for American military crimes any more than Bundy's targets had engineered his earlier years of rejection. He might have been a savvy predator, but Bundy got blame wrong. And so did the Trade Center kamikaze phantoms.
Bundy used to say he did not feel for his victims because, once they got into his car, they were already dead. The Palestinians who danced in the street over this familiar tragedy seemed not to realize the casualties were merely human, just as Bush defines terrorists as those who would do to us as we’ve done to them. I didn't need to see an updated fatality list to know the WTC victims were often working class, often women, and often women with children. Fascinating, to see Palestinian women and children, the poster-demographic for victimization, dance over the deaths of members of that self-same demographic -- to watch perennial victims become Bundy chrysalides.
The revelers basked in the deaths of people whom they presumed to be spiritually dead. They rinsed their faces in death. Noticing this, I hoped desperately that the same ruthless jingoism would not define the president's retaliatory initiative. I might have steeled myself for the worst: both sides are ideologues. As Montaigne said, "It is rating one's conjectures at a very high price to roast a person alive on the strength of them."
Remembering it suddenly, I opened my satchel to look at the papers I’d shoveled inside while on the marble steps standing in the hub of that glittering beam: A singed life insurance policy that had floated down from the 81st Floor. Life insurance: a one-liner, the build up, thousands of corpses. An hour before, I’d sat in the Polish restaurant while someone approached to ask if I’d sell them my corpse-dusted satchel.
After ten minutes of news, I called a co-worker, Roy Wight, to make certain he'd gotten home safely. He said he'd veered so close to the WTC he'd been hit by debris. He mentioned he'd seen flames shooting from a clothing store we both used to frequent -- Century 21.
I described the WTC spotlight and he echoed my impression.
"I was just telling Kieran I saw silver -- everywhere silver."
----------------------------------
9/11/02. 12:00 p.m.
I, too, hate the pomp and coincidence of grief observed during calls for preemptive strikes against Iraq. When Saudis kill, it's terrorism. When the U.S. does, why, it's the defense of democracy.
Nevertheless, the people who suffered were real. I saw them. And as trite as you might find certain speeches proffered today, the core -- grief itself -- is cravenly sincere. It is wrong to pit groups of victims against one another, theirs for ours.
Of course countless others had been murdered before our own last year. But don't blame the people who died -- that's an act of self-hatred. It's the rulers who deserve your scorn, not the river of victims.
In honor of the victims who died in front of me -- in honor of the victims themselves, not mere symbols of some carrion country -- I am sending you an account of what I saw: written last year, within falling distance of the Towers themselves.
May it comfort someone now, in their shawl of settling ash.
--------------------------------------------
9/11/01. 2:00 p.m.
Just arrived home from Maiden Lane, where I was finessing a letter to a film director until moments before the first plane hit World Trade Center Tower One. I look like Mount Vesuvius. I am literally covered with ashes.
In the course of an hour, I watched at least a dozen people catch fire. I saw many more hang from the ledges of 2 WTC. I watched them let go when the building collapsed at last.
9/11/01. 8:07 a.m.
Looking down from an eighteenth-story window off Wall Street, I noticed what might have been snow but for sheets of plastic and paper undulating in the sky. Their sinuous glitter seemed indicative of mischief, nothing more. Was this a prank? I wondered. Was it the detritus of a bon voyage party, a christening overhead?
I exited the building to find a sextet of lawyers loitering on textured marble steps and staring skyward. There it was, the WTC set afire. The damage seemed strangely contained. What I gauged to have been the sixty-to-sixty-fourth floors were now rings of gleaming exposed metal, their windows bent slots that spumed curlicues of black smoke. From the slots descended a light-beam filled with coruscating silver minutiae. It seemed naïve. This spotlight, this anachronism, might have framed a young and sparkle-tuxedoed Marlene Dietrich, or a wand-swirling pixie in a forties Disney toon. Instead, it flashed toward me.
The beam flowed down to my feet. Its contents: Burned paper. I squinted: So I wasn’t a pixie or androgynous god after all. Strange, to have been hypnotized briefly by litter's shimmering pirouette.
A chubby African-American woman emerged from the haze. Her lids were slitted with pain. None of the lawyers seemed to notice. Sweating and wheezing, she hurled herself up the steps.
"Hello," I called after her. "Do you have asthma?" She turned but didn't nod.
I produced my inhaler and told her to open her mouth. She did and I gave her three shots of synthetic adrenaline. Then I walked her into the building.
Two of the lawyers noticed at last and offered to take her upstairs to enjoy their fastidiously circulated air. It made me feel useful to know I might have saved her a trip to the hospital.
I decided to walk toward whatever had made the woman unable to breathe. I worried someone else might need a few puffs from my inhaler.
I walked up Fulton Street until I came within yards of the burning building. I gazed upward absently until a wave of people jumped to their deaths. This is what happens to us, I kept thinking as the people fell and flattened. We feel complacent in our ritzy little country and then Shiva appears to take us. He kills us lovingly, ensuring us time to realize we don’t matter.
Still, I didn't have to turn away from the carnage. Several people rushed down the street weeping and exhorting people to pray, but I wasn’t fearful -- not yet. Years of gazing at paintings of Kali and Shiva seemed to have done precisely what Hindus had always claimed: taken away a good deal of paralyzing horror. I felt like Buddha staring at his dead cow and contemplating the nature of suffering.
Someone near said terrorists had attacked the building. Someone else added the Pentagon had been attacked. I wondered where the people got their information. No one's cell phone worked, no message crawled across the electronics store monitor.
I had just reached Broadway when a plane flew around the tower, slanting down close to the base before its moment of impact: Blam. An assassin’s amplified gunshot.
People began fleeing frantically, as they do in all movies about the end of the world and comics about the Rapture. I turned to run, then stopped. What from? I thought to myself.
Behind me, an oblivious twit complimented the ingenuity of the terrorists. Then he praised the sturdiness of the buildings. "Look how well they're holding up," he said, gesturing upward.
Then the second tower collapsed.
Waves of people rushed toward the river -- many of them weeping, most of them panicked by the falling monolith and its onslaught of smoke and debris.
White wind chased me down a sloping alley and into a ten-story building, where the air grew so opaque I had to return to the street.
Police herded us down Water Street and past the Brooklyn Bridge. We were coughing the whole way; some people actually collapsed. For a long time, I breathed through my collar and couldn't see the sidewalk in front of me. I moved to the street briefly to avoid keeping three people in wheelchairs from embarking a bus. A policeman tried to assist them. By the time I reached Bayard Street in Chinatown, the air had cleared. I found myself standing outside Chinatown Manpower Project, the school where I used to teach English. Old people smiled vaguely. There were no familiar faces. I walked down to the park and gazed randomly toward the horizon. I was just in time to watch the first tower collapse.
What sickened me was how none of the little shops in the business district, none of the places that depended on Wall Street customers to survive, would open their doors to the rush of choking people. The shops had become fallout shelters guarded by anal survivalists. I could see timid clerks standing at the backs of the stores, safely distanced from locked glass doors the crowd could have shattered easily. This is what we are to each other, I thought to myself. Outsiders. This is what we’ve always been.
I reached a friend's apartment and tried to get buzzed upstairs. My friend's husband seemed to be having a problem with the door. I continued walking and bought things to swallow at random, perhaps to weigh myself down: lox and borscht, an Excedrin from a Muslim cashier in Panjali Deli. The cashier looked frantic and told me how sorry he was. I know you are, I told him and patted his shoulder. I know you. It’s not your fault.
I went to a Polish diner, ordered coffee and caught a bit of the news. I was the only dusty person there -- the only person from the site -- but I didn't look bereaved and so the female waiter concentrated on a pristine shaking man in a suit, a man who said he "didn't want to hear about it."
I arrived home in time to turn on the television and hear Bush shout, "This is an act of war!" Yet the obliteration of WTC did not seem the result of wartime strategy to me -- not in the utilitarian sense. What defense systems had the terrorists taken out? Why kill such a melange of civilians, many of them from the Middle East themselves? It seemed to me that the hijackings were the result of simple sociopathology -- thousands of civilians executed sadistically in planes and in sprawling falling buildings -- all for the orgasm of retribution craved by sociopaths, who mistake accident for strategy, complexion for conspiracy. The objective seemed not to atomize wartime soldiers, as at Pearl Harbor (which reporters mentioned every few minutes during network coverage). The objective was to scapegoat the wrong victim, which is what sociopaths usually do. I thought of Ted Bundy, with his legion of dark-haired casualties, women who bore some superficial resemblance to his mother and his girlfriend -- both of whom had rejected him in the past. The WTC victims weren’t responsible for American military crimes any more than Bundy's targets had engineered his earlier years of rejection. He might have been a savvy predator, but Bundy got blame wrong. And so did the Trade Center kamikaze phantoms.
Bundy used to say he did not feel for his victims because, once they got into his car, they were already dead. The Palestinians who danced in the street over this familiar tragedy seemed not to realize the casualties were merely human, just as Bush defines terrorists as those who would do to us as we’ve done to them. I didn't need to see an updated fatality list to know the WTC victims were often working class, often women, and often women with children. Fascinating, to see Palestinian women and children, the poster-demographic for victimization, dance over the deaths of members of that self-same demographic -- to watch perennial victims become Bundy chrysalides.
The revelers basked in the deaths of people whom they presumed to be spiritually dead. They rinsed their faces in death. Noticing this, I hoped desperately that the same ruthless jingoism would not define the president's retaliatory initiative. I might have steeled myself for the worst: both sides are ideologues. As Montaigne said, "It is rating one's conjectures at a very high price to roast a person alive on the strength of them."
Remembering it suddenly, I opened my satchel to look at the papers I’d shoveled inside while on the marble steps standing in the hub of that glittering beam: A singed life insurance policy that had floated down from the 81st Floor. Life insurance: a one-liner, the build up, thousands of corpses. An hour before, I’d sat in the Polish restaurant while someone approached to ask if I’d sell them my corpse-dusted satchel.
After ten minutes of news, I called a co-worker, Roy Wight, to make certain he'd gotten home safely. He said he'd veered so close to the WTC he'd been hit by debris. He mentioned he'd seen flames shooting from a clothing store we both used to frequent -- Century 21.
I described the WTC spotlight and he echoed my impression.
"I was just telling Kieran I saw silver -- everywhere silver."
----------------------------------
9/11/02. 12:00 p.m.
I, too, hate the pomp and coincidence of grief observed during calls for preemptive strikes against Iraq. When Saudis kill, it's terrorism. When the U.S. does, why, it's the defense of democracy.
Nevertheless, the people who suffered were real. I saw them. And as trite as you might find certain speeches proffered today, the core -- grief itself -- is cravenly sincere. It is wrong to pit groups of victims against one another, theirs for ours.
Of course countless others had been murdered before our own last year. But don't blame the people who died -- that's an act of self-hatred. It's the rulers who deserve your scorn, not the river of victims.
In honor of the victims who died in front of me -- in honor of the victims themselves, not mere symbols of some carrion country -- I am sending you an account of what I saw: written last year, within falling distance of the Towers themselves.
May it comfort someone now, in their shawl of settling ash.
