9/11

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Chapter 2 from Having Maddie

It was a magnificent September day. Blue skies and warmth. I was hard at work in my cube at a major brokerage firm in downtown New York across the street from the World Trade Center, putting the finishing touches on a publication intended to be a primer for investors in the major airlines. 

There was a deep and low rumble. John, a senior analyst in an office in view of my cube, calmly peeked his head up at the same time as me. We looked at each other. I squinted my eyes for a moment and then raised my right eyebrow, indicating oh well.

He did the same. He likely thought the same as me—the irregular pounding of ongoing construction in the area.

I heard a muffled voice over the “box” in John’s office. The box was an internal broadcast speaker system for traders and salespeople to communicate offerings, trades, and often other nonsense. 

John called out to me calmly and confused, “Someone just said a plane hit the World Trade Center.”

I returned a quizzical look, trying to determine if this was the nonsense that so often spewed from the box, or something real.

We both stood up, not sure what to do. I called Carrie. 

“Car,” I said. “Do me a favor and turn on the TV. I think something is going on.”

“OK. What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Let me call you back in a minute,” and I hung up. 

John and I considered our directions. “Which way is east?” Our offices were on the west side of the building, looking out at the Hudson River and to New Jersey. 

We headed to the east side of the floor, facing the World Trade Center complex. There was not too much action on the floor, though as we got closer to a corner office with a view of the Towers, we noticed a few people gathered, looking out the window. 

As we walked into the office, we could clearly see the Twin Towers, which looked as normal and beautiful as they did on the day I brought Carrie to see them for the first time years earlier. I remember how proud I was to show them off on Carrie’s first trip to New York, as though I built them or had something to do with their enormity. 

I took a few more steps into the office, toward the window, then had to bend down and look nearly straight up. 

Thick black smoke poured out of a massive slanted gash in the side of the Tower. I could see flames raging from inside and dancing up along the outside of the building. A ticker-tape parade of documents, files, resumes, and business cards fluttered around the smoke. 

It was eerie. I attempted to process the scene. One of my first thoughts was that it would take a very long time to repair the building, and that you can’t get scaffolding up that high. 

I looked down for a moment to the street. Blue-tinted glass covered the street and entryway. Two fire engines, which I am certain later were crushed, sat at the base of the building. 

Looking back up, I watched as a very small, dark piece of the building fell.

As it dropped toward the ground, I recognized the reality. A life had just plunged nearly a hundred stories to the street below. The reality of the grave situation began to set in.

Not entirely certain what to do, and somehow not feeling much danger, I headed back to my desk. I picked up to call Carrie, dialed, and then the line died. I tried again, but the lines were coming and going. I ran into Brian, another colleague of mine.

“A plane just hit one of the Twin Towers,” I said.

“Shut the fuck up,” he replied, laughing. We joked around quite often, so his response was not surprising nor as inhumane as it may seem in retrospect.

“No. It’s true. It’s on fire, and there are people jumping out.”

“Are you fucking serious?” he asked as his cheeks dropped and expression changed dramatically.

I led him over to the east side of the building and was nearing the office when another deep, muffled thunder rolled with a sudden brightness in the office. The people staring through the window a moment ago were now running toward us in terror. “Run! It’s falling!”

I turned, enveloped for the first time that day with fear of death, and ran for the hallway. I had a vision in my head of the Tower tipping over on top of our building and destroying it. 

We ran first for the elevators until someone had the sense to yell for the stairs. Like a flock of birds turning with the wind, we shifted toward the fire stairs. The person in front of me tried the door, which was locked. He turned and ran another direction. I tried the door as well, pushing instead of pulling. It opened and I yelled back for others to follow. 

I ran into the stairway, followed by the others, and lunged forward to grab the handrails. I swung my legs underneath me and ahead, bounding from landing to landing and skipping all of the stairs. I even ducked slightly for fear the roof could be coming in at any second. It wasn’t until the seventh floor that I saw a single other person in the stairwell. The seventh floor was our trading floor and I saw a couple of our traders calmly opening the door to come into the stairwell. I was perplexed by their calm attitude and quickly felt embarrassed about appearing so frightened. This only lasted a second as I continued down, landing to landing. After twenty-one floors, I reached the ground floor and pushed through the exit onto the street, flooding the bottom of the stairs with sunshine. 

I jogged away from the building and around the end, allowing the Towers to present themselves to me, over our office building.

There stood two burning candles, sending a long trail of black smoke into the crisp blue sky.

The second explosion, I would learn later, was the second plane hitting the second tower.

I dropped onto a curb and stared upward.

I have no idea how long I stared. It felt like an hour, but later figuring on the timing, it could only have been a few minutes. I watched body after body drop. I looked away several times, each time turning back to a scene that I already realized would never be properly captured by words, photos, or videos. For those who did not see it in person, there is no way to fully capture the sight, sounds, and confusion.

I gradually caught my breath and my senses began to return. I reached into my pocket to call Carrie on my cell phone. No signal. No signal. No signal.

I wondered for some time if I should be going back to work. The idea must appear crazy to anyone reading this and to me in retrospect, but in the moment it was difficult to understand what had happened, and without knowing what was still to happen. After all, there was nothing wrong with our building. I finally decided to leave.

I headed briskly uptown toward Union Square, where Carrie was working in an apartment as a nanny for a family with a little boy. People stood on the streets staring back in the direction from which I was walking. Radios played on the streets. Queues twenty people long attached themselves to any pay phone. Cell signals were few and very far between.

As I walked, I tried Carrie over and over, getting beep beep beep each time. As luck would have it, I finally got through. Our conversation was hurried, as I feared losing the signal. 

“J! Where are you? Come to me now!”

“I am walking uptown to you right now. I am okay.”

“Another plane just hit the Pentagon, and there are reports of other planes in the area. Please hurry!”

“Fuck. Assholes. I’m coming. I’ll be there in fifteen or twenty minutes. Let me go so I can walk faster. I love you.”

With that, a woman ran up to me, asking to borrow my cell phone. I explained that it was just lucky that I got through, having dialed about fifty times. I let her try—to no avail. She thanked me anyway and hurried onward.

As I got closer, I heard talking. “The building fell,” I heard someone say. Idiots, I thought. It’s on fire, but it didn’t fall.

I arrived at Carrie’s building and the doorman waved me past and right into the elevator. I pressed for Carrie’s floor and the car rose slowly until finally stopping for the door to open. At the same time, the apartment door opened, revealing my bride—with a look of panic. She gasped and we embraced tightly. 

“One of the buildings just fell, and I didn’t know which way it fell—if it fell on you!” she cried.