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9/11 in Manhattan

Zach Murphy

    “A plane just flew into one of the twin towers!” Kelly exclaimed. She had just opened the door to the apartment after having walked our dog Henry.
    That was how I woke up on September 11, 2001. I loved those buildings. From our apartment, it took about twenty minutes for me to walk down there. Sometimes I walked down by the Hudson River and crossed the pedestrian bridge at Stuyvesant High School. Most of the time, I paused on the steps to the street to take a long look at the twin towers. I marveled at their size and symmetry. I gazed at them frequently. Walking around New York, buildings often block your view of other buildings. Whenever I could see them, I drank them in.
    “What?” I uttered.
    “This plane was flying really low. It was very loud! I was talking to this woman, who was also walking her dog, and we both heard it and looked up at it. Then we heard this loud explosion and saw that it had hit the World Trade Center!” she said.
    I immediately got out of bed, put some clothes on, and went down to the east corner of our block. There it was: the gaping, smoking hole in the building that was left by the first plane. I stared at it, along with other people who had stopped at the same street corner to look at it. After giving Henry some food, Kelly joined me.
    “Wow. What if a terrorist had been flying that plane?” I asked Kelly.
    “Wow,” she said.
    We continued to stare at it. We were transfixed by what we saw.
    “Does anyone know how it happened?” a man from our corner group asked.
    “A plane hit it,” Kelly replied.
    “I don’t know about that,” said another guy at the corner. “I didn’t see a plane hit it.”
    “Well I did,” said Kelly.
    This guy continued to verbally doubt that a plane had hit the building.
    We were looking at the burning building when a huge explosion occurred on the face of the other building. One of the things I’ll never forget about that explosion, from seeing it on the street, is the huge fireball that slowly rose and poof! It disappeared.
    Our corner group reacted to that. I went back inside, grabbed my camera, and took pictures of the burning buildings. Equally interesting to me are the people who were caught by my camera’s eye, who were on the street watching the buildings.
    “It was a plane! I saw it!” said one of the men on our corner about the most famous explosion in world history. Strangely, he had a smile on his face when he said that.
    It was confirmed that we were under attack. I looked down and kicked the concrete below me. I was an angry American. Not only was this my country, but it was my city and my favorite buildings.
    Our group became larger as more people stopped to watch.
    “There’s niggas inside there?” a man asked.
    Kelly and I looked at him and nodded.
    “Oh, shit!” he exclaimed.
    I saw some people on the street who were laughing. I saw a woman running uptown; she was crying. I saw our downstairs neighbor, Danny.
    “Hey, Danny,” I said.
    This little old man was angry. “Can you believe this? They hit the Pentagon, too!” he said.
    That was news to us. We followed him into our apartment building like zombies. It was time to turn on the television. We were freaking out. What if more planes are headed to New York? What if one of our planes shoots one down, and it crash lands on Manhattan and kills us? Those thoughts were running through my mind.
    Poor Henry seemed to be confused and troubled. I remember him looking at me. He knew that Kelly and I were upset, but we weren’t fighting.
    The phone rang. Kelly picked it up. “Hello?” she said. “Oh, hi Doug! I know! So I assume that the store is closed until further notice. Okay. Good-bye.” She hung up the phone. “The store is closed until further notice,” she said to me. That meant I had the day off from work.
    When the towers fell, I was shitting: literally. I felt like I didn’t have the luxury of being glued to the TV set; we might have to run for our lives. I better take care of business while I have a chance to. I’ve never been more afraid for my life before or since. Upon exiting the bathroom, I realized that Kelly had gone out. I went out as well. While standing on LaGuardia Place, I saw World Trade Center Building 7 collapse. More cries from the witnesses were heard.
    A white man, who appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties, passed by on a bicycle. “Deport every Arab. Kill every Arab you see,” he was chanting to whoever might be listening.
    “Shut the hell up!” a voice yelled loudly from behind me.
    The man on the bike shut up.
    I turned in the direction that the angry voice had come from. I saw a young man with an olive complexion return my glance with furious eyes.
    I saw a man jogging shortly after the Towers fell. That’s a man who’s serious about his exercise. I suppose that would make some people angry: not me. I exercise four days a week without exception. It’s important to me. Besides, if he had nothing to do with the attacks, then why hate him for jogging?
    What bothered me was seeing a man and woman, both in their twenties and dressed in black, riding bicycles on Bleecker Street right after the Towers fell. They looked like East Village bohemians. They were smiling and laughing, and they seemed to be completely unaware of the catastrophe that was only a twenty-minute walk away. Oh, you’re so different from everybody else, aren’t you? You’re so cool.
    Kelly and I got dinner from a Chinese restaurant and ate it in front of the television. We were listening to an interview with a man who had escaped from one of the Towers. He was covered in dust, and he was telling the story of how he had survived.
    “As I was going down the stairs, I passed by handicapped people who were waiting for someone to help them,” he said before choking up.
    Kelly and I both cried for the first time that day.
    The next day, like many people all over the world, we continued to watch television coverage of 9/11. The phone rang. Kelly answered it.
    “Hello? Hi, Doug,” she said. She became very angry. “Are you serious?!” she yelled.
    “Give me the phone,” I said to her. She had just yelled at my boss.
    “Hi, Zach,” Doug said. “We are opening the store today.”
    “Okay,” I replied. It was Wednesday, one of my scheduled work days.
    Kelly was really pissed off. She thought it was a terrible idea to open the bookstore the day after 9/11. I understood why she felt that way. You’re living on a small island, and the day after thousands of people were murdered on that island, you’re going back to business as usual. In fairness, Lynn and Doug, the owners of the store, opened it seven days a week. They probably reopened it out of habit. I was concerned about the fires that were raging fairly close to my home. In retrospect, it was very unlikely that the fires would be allowed to spread that far. At the time, though, I was still a little shell-shocked. I was thinking, okay, I’ll go to work. However, if I need to leave, to help Kelly evacuate, I won’t hesitate.
    Doug had told Lynn about Kelly yelling at him over the phone. She was angry at Kelly. “Wouldn’t you rather be here than watching TV?” she asked me.
    No, I thought. “Yes,” I said.
    The store was busy that day. It annoyed me. It’s the day after 9/11, and you’re shopping? We had no break room to eat our lunches in. We would just sit in a corner of the store and eat. Sometimes we had to move because we were blocking books that a customer wanted to browse. Frequently, we had to stop eating to help a customer. It was pretty annoying, but at least it was paid time. Once again, my lunch was interrupted by someone who needed help finding a book. This time, I was more irritated than usual. I have to be here. Why are you here? I know that a lot of people demonize television, but aren’t you interested in what’s going on in the world today?
    I’ve heard people say, “Never forget what happened on 9/11!”
    I couldn’t forget it if I tried. I think about it nearly every day. Even after that day, I would still look in the direction of the Towers, hoping to see them. Ground Zero burned for months. One night, there was ash on the sidewalk in front of our apartment building that looked like snow. It’s still a little hard for me to believe that it all really happened. I’m somewhat obsessed with 9/11. I have magazines and newspapers from the day after. I’ve recorded lots of documentaries about it.
    I love music: especially heavy metal. The next CD I wanted to buy was Beneath the Remains by Sepultura. Before I went into the Sam Goody store that used to be on Sixth Avenue near Eighth Street, I looked south toward Ground Zero. The familiar plume of smoke emanating from there was drifting toward New Jersey. This is a pretty morbid title to be purchasing, considering what happened down there. Should I buy it? Sure, I thought. I had nothing to do with those attacks, nor would I ever do anything like that. I bought it. Besides, if I hadn’t bought it, then the terrorists would have won, right?
    I walked down to Ground Zero while it was still burning. I was very familiar with the route I took, it was the circumstances that had changed drastically. I came as close as I could, and in doing so joined a small group that had gathered at the gates of hell. Two cops were there to keep anyone from getting any closer. They appeared to be quite irritated. Traffic was also blocked from coming any closer to Ground Zero. A man walked onto the street so he could get a better picture with his camera.
    “Get out of the street!” yelled one of the cops angrily at the man with the camera.
    “Okay,” he said, while snapping another photo.
    “Get out of the street or you’re going to be arrested!” shouted the cop.
    That did it. The man went back to the corner, where we were looking at a building that had tons of steel and other debris on top of it. That was all we could really see, but it was an incredible sight nonetheless. A woman went into the street to snap a photo or two. Apparently, you could see a little more from the street.
    “Get out of the street now!” the other cop roared.
    “Okay,” she said. She continued to take pictures.
    “Do you want to go to jail?!” he shouted.
    “No,” she replied. She went back to the corner.
    “These people are pathetic,” one cop said to the other, who agreed with him.
    I disagree. I can’t speak for the rest of the people on that corner, but I was there to see part of an unbelievable moment in world history. I believe that 9/11 is the most incredible day in human history. You almost can’t overstate the importance of 9/11. Who knows? It may turn out to be the beginning of the end of our world. It led directly to one American war, and, as many people have alleged, it made the war in Iraq possible. How many people have died in these wars? How many people have been killed in the war on terror? As for the cops, instead of being angry at us, they should have directed their anger at those who were responsible for planning and carrying out the attacks.
    Life must go on though. 9/11 happened on a Tuesday. Kelly took the rest of the week off from work. After all, she had seen all the major events in New York with her own eyes: not through the filter of television.
    Weeks later, I was working at the store with my coworker Jose. The phone rang. Jose picked it up.
    “Memoir Bookshop,” he said. His demeanor suddenly became serious. “It’s started? Okay. We’ll turn on the radio. Thanks. Bye-bye.” He hung up. He turned on the radio and twisted the knob to find the station that he wanted.
    “We’re attacking Afghanistan,” he declared.
    “Wow,” I said.
    Some of the customers heard that exchange. “Excuse me, what did you say?” a lady asked.
    “The military is attacking Afghanistan,” Jose replied.
    Some of the people in the store displayed fear on their faces. They knew our country was heading down a dangerous road. I’m sure they knew that a response to 9/11 was inevitable, but it seemed like they weren’t quite ready for it.

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