September 11, 2001 Last week, on ebay, Holden bought an old telephone. It arrived in the mail yesterday -- a heavy, black rotary phone from the 1940's, complete with the original "Wait for Dial Tone" sticker in the center of the dial. He set it up on his nightstand near his bed and last night we spent a while calling his home number from his cellphone just to hear the jangly ring. This morning it was the ragged ring of this phone that pulled me out of sleep. I didn't have to teach today, just had an office hour around one and a class to attend in the late afternoon, so I was luxuriating in sleeping past nine on a Tuesday morning. But then there was this ringing, urgent in its persistence. "Hello?" It was Holden, calling from work. "Kate, are you still sleeping? "I was." "Put on the television. Call your mom." His voice held a note of panic, which kept me from asking why until I turned on the set. As the screen became brighter, the picture that filled it seemed completely unreal. I had to sit still as seconds spooled past, the handset of the phone in my lap, until the truth of what I was seeing sunk in. Smoke was billowing from both of the Twin Towers. Lines of fire running across entire floors of the buildings. "Oh my God. My dad." My father used to work for Aon Insurance (formerly Frank B. Hall) and they had moved onto the 102nd floor of Tower 2, years ago, the weekend before the first Trade Center bombing. In my panic, I forgot that Aon had forced him into retirement five years ago; that he no longer worked in the Towers. I called the guidance office of my high school where my mother works as a secretary. "Bergenfield Guidance." "Is Lucille, there?" Normally, the other secretaries say hello and chat with me when I call. Today, the woman who answered only said, "Hold on, honey" and this spiked my anxiety. Then my mother was on the line, shakey-voiced and I knew she was crying. "Ma, what floor is Daddy on?" I knew that it was 102, but those fires looked like they started somwhere in the 90s and I was hoping that he was lower, 35, 40, even 75, but nothing over 90. I watched as they played the tape of the second plane crashing into the Towers and I felt like my heart was going to burst. In the midst of horror, though, my mother offered hope. "He doesn't work up there anymore. That was Aon. The new company is in the Trade Center but not in the Towers." ThankGod.ThankGod.ThankGod. "Have you heard from him?" "I can't get through; the lines are tied up." My mother was silent for a moment. I could feel her weighing if she should say more. I watched the tape of the plane rewind and replay. The sky was so unmercifully blue. Finally, she spoke, "Kate, he works RIGHT THERE. He could have been on the street when it happened." The little comfort of knowing my father no longer worked on the 102nd floor of Tower 2 faded into that Hollywood sky behind the Towers. "Kate, I can't reach him. He hasn't called. I can't get through from here. The lines are tied up. Oh Christ, who does something like this? The lines are tied up." She kept repeating that -- The lines are tied up -- and I knew she was trying to convince herself that this was the only reason she hadn't heard from my father; that he was somewhere in Manhattan, unhurt, and simply could not get through on the telephone. I offered the only help I could, "Ma, give me his number; I'll try from here." She rattled off the digits of his number and they seemed to me to be some sort of a secret charm, a password to knowing my father was safe. I hung up from my mother and began dialing. My fingers shook as I pushed the old rotary dial around and around and around again. This phone was old enough to have carried news of Pearl Harbor. And now this. What an inaugural use of the phone this was. The long distance lines into New York were clear. It was too early, the news just seeping into the cities and towns across the country, people were still sitting shocked in front of their televisions and radios, trying to make sense. The phone in my father's office rang and rang, each ring echoing back to me over 100 miles. Then his voice mail. "Hi. This is Frank. I'm not in the office right now so if you'll leave a message, I'll get back to you." I know. I know you are not in the office, Dad, but where are you? Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be okay. "Daddy, this is Katherine. I hope you're okay. Mommy tried to call you but the lines are tied up. When you get this, please call her right away. Please be alright, Daddy. I love you." I hung up because I had started to cry. And then there was nothing else I could do for my father and suddenly, I was remembering all of the other people I love who live in the city. Sabrina and Sammy. Oh, Christ, Sabrina works six blocks from there. The Rose Theater actors. They're all temps. Who knows where they were working? My childhood friend, Linda, and her husband. Kymm. Tracing. For a while, I focused on the people I knew and somehow, amidst the frantic worry, this was better because this way, I did not have to deal with the enormity of it; by concentrating on finding out if specific loved ones were safe, then I didn't have to try to get my mind around the concept that someone just flew two commercial airliners into the Twin Towers and killed more people than I ever have or ever will come into contact with in my lifetime. That, with one heinous act, American soil was no longer safe from attack. I watched the news and called Holden with updates. They didn't have a radio or a television where he was. They just bombed the Pentagon. Automatically, I found myself using "they" because there was no way that whoever did this had any kinship with me or with America. How could you if you could so callously destroy Americans? Holden, one of the towers just collapsed. I was watching when it happened. NBC. They had a live feed going of the Towers and they were both on fire, smoke billowing, but they were both still standing straight in the sky, and then Matt Lauer said, "Is there any way we can rewind? I think I just saw something happening." and the technician rewound the tape and Matt Lauer and everyone at NBC looked closer at the image, and we all looked closer at the image, everyone across America who was watching, and there it was, the second Tower was beginning to crumble away and they let the feed roll until there was only one Tower standing. Somebody in the studio asked if they could rewind it again. Yes. Please. Can you rewind it again? Can you rewind so Tower 2 crumbles upward and becomes whole again? Can you keep rewinding so the planes come back out of the Towers and the flames go with them and can you keep rewinding so it is last night and everyone is safe and the Trade Center is still standing and the Pentagon is still inpenetrable and America is still the strongest, most secure nation on Earth? Can you do that, please? Holden left work after the the remaining Tower collapsed. I made phone calls. ..."Sammy?" "Hi, sweetie." Sammy sounded exhausted. He had been crying. But he was okay. "I am so glad you're okay. And Sabrina?" "She's here. She's fine."... ..."Frankie, have you heard from Daddy yet?" "No." "I left a message for him at work." "So did I. Look, Katie, you know Dad. He's always late for work. Never gets in before ten. He's probably stuck in the Lincoln Tunnel." "Yeah." "Maybe he's in a bar somewhere. That'd be just like him." "I guess." My brother kept repeating that our father was always late. That he never got to work on time. So there would be no reason that he would have been in the area when it happened. He sounded like my mother, saying "The lines are tied up" over and over. Holden came home. We held onto each other hard. I cancelled my office hour. Didn't go to class. We sat in his room and silently watched the images flicker across the screen. The plane hitting the second Tower. The fire. The cloud of smoke over Manhattan. The Pentagon in flames. The desperate people jumping from a hundred stories up in the sky. And people kept calling. Erica. Pat. Scott. Teddy. Holden's co-workers. Kendra. Colleagues from school. People who knew my father worked in the financial district. People who had no personal ties to New York and so I became their link, the small, specific point on whom to focus their worry and fear, to escape the bigger picture. I appreciated the support, but every time the phone rang and it was not my mother or my brother, I died a little. When Aon first moved into the Towers, my father complained bitterly because they were making the last of the Die Hard movies in the financial district and they kept fucking up the subway service and blocking off parts of the street. Today, I would have given anything to see Bruce Willis appear out of the smoke and rubble with his leading lady in his arms and Samuel L. Jackson by his side, for him to have vanquished the fire and defeated the terrorists so that the credits could roll and the entire horrific mess that was unfolding before my eyes could have been just what it looked like: a movie. Later, my brother called. My father was okay. His train was just pulling into the city when the first tower was hit. They wouldn't let him get too close. He spent the afternoon in a bar, trying to call home. My brother told me the stories, the ones my father had just told them. As his train was pulling into the city, my father and another man were looking out the window. Everyone else was reading, sleeping, gearing up for the work day ahead. No one knew what had happened. At that point, only the first tower had been hit. My father and the other man saw smoke coming from it. The man called a friend on his cell phone. He announced that the first tower had been hit by a plane. Everyone craned to look out the windows of the train, to get a glimpse of the smoking, burning damage. People started theorizing as to the cause. "It's an accident," someone said, "It had to be an accident." Because at that point, with only one tower burning, an accident certainly seemed possible. But my father looked out at the impossibly blue, cloudless sky and he knew. "That was no accident," he said, "Not on a day like today." He could have been Arnold Schwartzenegger talking about some fictional disaster. I wish he had been. I am always amazed at these moments, life imitating fiction, playing out like scenes from a summer blockbuster or a Tom Clancy novel. And I am not only thinking of collapsing buildings or the dust clouds that ate up lower Manhattan, or even my father's eerie, unintentional Schwartzenegger impersonation. In crisis, human drama unfolds more poignantly than any writer or filmmaker could create. In the bar, my father met a man whose wife had been murdered a year ago. He was trying to get home to his two children so they wouldn't think they had lost both parents. When they reopened the George Washington Bridge, he and my dad shared a gypsy cab home. When my dad tried to pay for half, the man refused to take his money, thanking him, instead, for the company that helped him cope. Behind my brother's voice, as he recounted the stories my father had given them in payment for their worry, I could hear the rest of my family crying. My mother. My sister. My father. Cliche or not, father never cries. It was humbling to hear him sobbing in the background. I couldn't speak to him, because he wasn't in any shape to come to the phone. I asked my mother to tell him that I loved him. From a distanct, I heard him choke out, "I love you, too, but I also loved those people and now they're gone." It was yet another sucker punch in a day full of sucker punches. I had forgotten. All of those people that my father had worked with at Aon. Some for twenty-five years. People who had been to our house for barbeques and parties; people who always asked for my brother and sister and me, who took an interest in our growing up. Just because my father didn't work for Aon anymore didn't mean they didn't. Names flooded back to me: Tommy Vitrano, Joan, my father's old secretary, Christine, Han Jung, who always made us laugh with stories about his crazy adventures with my dad. My mother reeled off a list of people I hadn't even thought of in my panic. They had all hated working on the 102nd floor. When my father was still with Aon, we went to visit him at the office. The floor was spacious, open, the cublicles low so everyone could enjoy the view. The outside walls were made entirely of glass. New York spread below them. The Statue of Liberty in the distance. And everyone had hated it. They hated the way the tower shook in heavy winds. The vertigo that overcame you if you looked down too suddenly. The constant fear that an airplane would crash into the building. I remember Joan being particularly vocal on this subject. Unfortunately, she was right. They were all right. My mother was still listing names. And Will. Will McDonagh. Ah, Jesus, Ma. No. For my first communion, Will McDonagh and his wife gave me a gold bracelet with a little pearl flanked by two diamonds. His daughter is a year older than me. We went to the zoo with them and to the Museum of Natural History. He laughed when my sister ran away from the stuffed elephants in the entrance hall. This is the way it plays out when your life is so firmly entrenched in a place. When you are from somewhere. You can move away, but there are always people left behind, in memory, in history, in human connection. You learn someone is safe, but there is always someone else to take his or her place: Will is safe. He called at one o'clock this morning. Thank God, but what about Jim, Mary and Mike's son? He's a firefighter. For that matter, Mike's a firefighter, too. Please tell me he's retired. We just heard from Joan. She told your father that Tommy Vitrano and Christine are okay. Have you heard from Uncle Paulie? Was Stephanie down there yesterday? Sammy says that all of the actors are okay. But isn't Carey's boyfriend a firefighter? Carey hasn't heard from him since he was called in. We're praying. Linda and her husband are okay. He works in midtown and she went early on maternity leave, Thank God. They still can't find Han Jung. What about Ken Phano, from high school? It was his dream to work in the financial district. He used to tell me that when I was peddling my novels on the street corner, he'd look down from his corner office at the top of the World Trade Center and watch me. He went to Yale. Got his MBA from Columbia. There's no reason to think he didn't carry through on his dream. They still can't find Han Jung. What about...? Still no word from Carey's boyfriend. What about...? What about...? What about...? And I am angrier than I have ever been in my life. More scared than I thought possible. And racked with guilt. Guilt that the tragedy has, for the most part, not so directly touched me and mine, or at least not the inner circle of my life. My father is okay. Sabrina and Sammy are okay. My friends are okay. The horror and the worry are one degree of separation removed from me. It is hard to think of all of those lives destroyed, all of those families and friends grieving -- people who lost two, three, four relatives and friends -- and not feel a pang of guilt at the relief you feel when you are down to worrying about acquaintances and friends of friends. On a larger scale, I think that this is what Philadelphia is feeling. Sandwiched between New York and Washington D.C., we in this city know we are very lucky. They closed the historical district today, put security around the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall; people worried that the plane that crashed outside of Pittsburgh was headed here. Oddly enough, people almost seem to be trying to will this to be true. Survivor guilt, I suppose. It's difficult to watch tragedy unfold around you and be unscathed yourself. You almost feel like you don't have a right to mourn. Yet, this pain is a pain that all Americans feel. It is sharp and deep and gutteral and it takes the breath from your body. Even if you didn't know anyone in New York or Washington or on those planes. It is a pain shared by the world. America will never be the same. The world will never be the same. None of us will ever be the same. Eventually quiet returns. The phone stopped ringing. There were no more emails to be sent. The news stopped breaking and we were left with the same horrific images that we had seen played and replayed all day. Holden had to finally get some sleep. I lay in bed next to him, in a darkened room, and watched Dan Rather trying to make sense out of the senseless. The crickets whirred outside the window and the fan hummed and Holden's arm and leg were warm, sleepy weights on the left side of my body and I thought, This shouldn't be. After everything, life cannot return to crickets and sleeping and dark rooms and quiet. But it does. On the television, Dan Rather said something about 8:48 am on September 11th being the moment when life as we knew it came crashing down around us. I was flashforwarded fifteen years and my future children, my sons and daughters who were born into this new world created today, a world without the Twin Towers that were such a part of my childhood in the New York Metropolitan area, and I know that, one day, they will come home from school and ask me where I was at 8:48 am on September 11th, 2001. And before this, before my children, who will only know this tragedy from pictures in history books and documentaries and from the personal accounts of their mother and father and grandparents and aunts and uncles, before this, there will be the inevitable "Where were you when...?" conversations that surround monumental tragedies like these and these conversations will happen until I am at the end of my years here on Earth. And, you know what? I am tired of them. I am tired of living in a world where tragedy of such monumental proportion happens frequently enough that I remember I was driving down Route 17 South on my way to the Gap in Paramus, New Jersey when I heard about what happened at 9:03 on an April morning. Or that I was sitting in Charlie Brown's in Tenafly, New Jersey, having lunch with my mother, Holden, and my sister and brother when I first saw video of students running from their Colorado high school. Or now that I was sleeping in a quiet bedroom in Northeast Philadelphia when the ringing of an antique phone jolted me awake into a world that would never be the same one I had known before. 8:48...9:03...September 11....December 7....It is beginning to be that I fear times that are not nice, rounded increments of minutes and seconds. Dates that are not multiples of five or ten. Nothing good happens at 8:48. Ironically, last night, I read the following before going to bed: The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went. She ate a meal and drank a glass of wine and walked to the rail or ledge and there it usually was, bulked up at the funneled end of the island, and a man stood next to her one evening, early, drinks on the roof of a gallery building -- about sixty, she thought, portly and jowled but also sleek in a way, assured and contained and hard-polished, a substantial sort. European. "I think of it as one, not two," she said. "Even though there are clearly two towers. It's a single entity, isn't it?" "Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think." "Yes, you have to look." This is from the novel Underworld by Don DeLillo and I read it last night before going to bed and I marked the page in what seemed then to be a fit of nostalgia for the New York of my childhood and what seems now like an amazing instance of prescience. I've returned to this passage several times today. Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think. And we do. This is the most terrible thing that has ever happened in our collective history. We sit in our homes and we watch these images play and rewind, play and rewind, because we must look. We have to look at it. If only to understand that this is the end of life as we know it. The end of the childlike belief that America is the only invulnerable nation on Earth. And we have to look at it, so we can remember. So we can remember all of the people that we lost today, all of the tragedy, and we can make sure it never happens again. ~*~ I grew up in North Jersey, but, in many ways, New York is my home. It is where I am from, where my roots and my family are entrenched. Bergenfield was always just an annex to New York, an outgrowth, a sprawling continuation of the people and attitudes of the Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn, Manhattan. The Twin Towers have been part of my personal landscape since the day I was born. Even at thirty, I still insist on calling them the Twin Towers, instead of the WTC or the Trade Towers, because this is what I called them as a child. Growing up, the towers meant Saturday treks to St. Patrick's nursing home to visit my Pop Pop, Sundays at my other grandparents' house, special outings with my uncle Paulie and visits to my father at his office, followed by a "humburger and fwench fwies" at the Pig and Whistle; they meant New York to me and all of the things and people and experiences that come with the city. When I went to college in central Jersey, the Towers were always the first sign I had that I was nearing home -- I'd be driving up the Turnpike and I'd pass Exit 12 and there they'd be, shining out across the river, anchoring the Manhattan skyline. They still demarcated home turf when I moved further south to Philadelphia. They signaled the end of a long drive and a return to familiar, loved surroundings populated with people who didn't find my hard-edged "New Yawk" accent funny. And now they are gone. Crumpled to the ground by an act of unfathomable evil. All those people are gone. The Pentagon is wounded. America is changed. I have just put thousands of words in this document and I haven't said nearly enough or anything eloquent or insightful enough to ease some of this pain or make sense of this tragedy. Ultimately, I think the only thing I can say worth anything is "I'm sorry."