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I was chosen for jury duty on September 10.   The rest were allowed to leave and resume their lives and for some of them, their jobs in the nearby World Trade Center.  Having to submit to the inevitability of jury duty, I left  the courthouse and gave myself a lemons-into-lemonade thought.    I  looked up at the Twin Towers  and decided that since these were the halcyon days of September in New York, I’d try Windows on the World for lunch or maybe breakfast.  I’d never  been there.  After all, my life for the next few weeks as a juror in the NY Supreme Court was to start the next day, at 10:30 AM on Centre Street and I’d want to get out for a little fresh air.

I was awoken the next morning by what sounded like a broom handle battering ram hitting against the door of my top floor East Village  railroad apartment. It was nothing, but it was very disturbing. I was there alone, so I was a bit vigilant.  All my loved ones were out of the city.  I showered and got ready to walk the mile to the New York City Supreme Courthouse in the shadow of the Twin Towers.  I was to be there at 10:30 that AM and was running a bit late when it all began.  Looking out of my window onto the street as the towers burned was the incongruous scene of young mothers pushing their strollers with coffee cups and freshmen NYU students rushing to their still unfamiliar campus.  Insouciance on a New York City scale.  The towers burned.  The people jumping… seen easily even if a mile away.   The towers fell.  The fall was felt under my feet , a whimpering 3.6 on the Richter scale.

My mother had been on the phone with me during the deluge.  “Well dear, don’t you think you really ought to go to the courthouse anyway.  Don’t you think you’ll get into trouble for not SHOWING UP?”  (Had I been there on time I would have been in the chaos and debris).  I figured it was her dizzy way of denying her daughter’s life was in danger.

When the initial layers of adrenaline washed and waned over me about a thousand times. When I realized I was alive.  After I watched the news from the only station I could receive (CBS), when I realized the manhole covers weren’t going to blow up in some final infrastructure fuck-you aftershock, I still didn’t dare go outside for fear of the air.  Although the sky was clear around me, I didn’t know whether the wind would shift.   But for some strange reason, perhaps succumbing to the mania of apartment fever, I had the most bizarre yen: I wanted a facial in the baddest way.  I’ve never even had a facial.  But as I sat in my apartment after having re-potted my jasmine-scented bonsai and playing the same Schumann piano piece over and over again, faster and faster,  I wanted a bubble bath and a facial.  Then I thought I’d go to the local Duane Reade for  an antidote for anthrax and potassium iodide for nuclear radiation poisoning.   For certainly those things were the after shocks to come.  And Duane Reade would be closed soon and there would be a run all those things.  And the St. Ives apricot scrub would be sold out.  Cause after an apocalypse, who doesn’t want a chain store facial scrub to feel detoxified?

I am affiliated with St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan’s West Village.  The WTC was in its catchment  area and I did my internship and residency training there.  I was an intern during the first attack on the towers and the place got all the action.  I worked the ER then.  This time my gut told me to get out of New York ASAP.   But here,  my mother appealed to my professional purpose. “But, they’ll NEED you!”  She echoed what I already  knew I was going to do anyway.  But not today.  Today I AM ALIVE.  I’ll go tomorrow, after I slept.  Plus there were highly trained emergency personnel at the ready and whole slew of actual housestaff. I slept the deepest sleep I can remember.  I didn’t know it then, but by so doing I ensured my mental health for the weeks and months to come.

I volunteered “for duty” early the next morning at St Vincent’s.  I put on my white coat and joined my white coated physician brethern all huddled.   Barely looking at me and without as much as a full sentence they cooed a bark:  “New School!  The Families!”.  I left for the New School, a campus in the vicinity, now set up to address the families who had already started congregating there in throngs.  They stretched around the  city block.  I was assigned a work station by a benevolently smiling gentleman of the cloth and was given reams of stapled updates and rosters of area hospitals and make shift morgues from Staten Island to Jersey city to Columbia to Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.  I was also supposed to do crisis intervention with the families.  But no one was really in crisis. It was ultra-calm.  There was a real sense that most made it out.  It was just a question of unraveling  the worst rush hour congestion in the city’s history.  Everyone was being tended to  somewhere!  It was only a chaotic skein of yarn of an order of magnitude of chaotic chaos. It’s funny how we all turned into urban Pollyannas with furrowed brows.   Fortunately I had slept.  I was unusually clear-minded as I became part doctor, part hostess,  part soldier, part victim.

As each family and non-family member came before me, the tragedy went to the particulars. “Yes”  a mother said about her son, both immigrants from South America,  “he worked at Windows on the World as a prep cook, he wanted to go to law school.  He called me twice. ‘They’re telling me I should stay up here, mama,’  he said the first time, then ‘I’m going down the stairs….mama,  I don’t think I’m going to make it’”.  He didn’t.  Later he was featured in a TV news magazine show.

As grand as the devastation was, so equally grand were the specificities of people’s lives I began to learn about.

“She wasn’t supposed to have gone into work today, but her boss wanted to go play golf and he wanted her to cover for him “, a man said about his mother,  a secretary to a financial firm CEO.  She survived.   Some people were desperate.  “Have you found her?  She has really big boobs.  I mean really big boobs”, a sister said of her missing, never found sibling. In they came,  more stories, more updates, more instructions.  As soon as the forlorn loved ones left my station,  I could see them get back on the end of the line to wait the two or three hours it took for them to come back to me, eager for any news.  I quickly realized what my colleagues were also realizing. We were being told by the trauma teams and ER that no one was being found.  Most everyone who was to be found was already found.  We became paper shufflers, leafing through dead data simply to distract.

One man I will never forget.  He typified the complexion of the victims.  Young bright and upwardly mobile. He was vivacious, young, and clearly adored his little sister.  She had just gotten out of college and had landed a plum position at the ill-fated Cantor-Fitzgerald (everyone perished there except for its head who decided to take his children personally to the first day school).  He showed me the picture of his sister, Brooke, saying “Look how beautiful she is, look how alive”.  Every time he’d approach my station,  he’d politely ask me if he could use my outlet to recharge his phone.  He did this seven times.  That meant I was there for over fourteen hours. Sitting. Not budging.  A sessile constant in these people’s up- heaved lives.  The benevolent gentleman of the cloth forced me to eat and drink.  I took a few bites of  sandwich he brought.  I ate with the  appetite of the grief-stricken.  I offered my food to others who took it but likewise didn’t take to it.  Mother’s came in with their children looking for their children’s grandfather. Co-workers who made it out, fiancees, divorcees, lovers,  friends, children.  It is truly hard to describe the spine- chilling bonhomie of these moments.  We were truly united.  A greater mass love I can’t imagine.

I kept a log of the number of people I was “looking for”.  Around 120.  Speaking to rounds of people looking for said 120 people, I told them I would contact them if I found anything.  I wrote down thumbnail sketches like “really, really big boobs”.  I’m now left with that log.    The day ended and I  walked the abandoned streets of the cordoned off area below 14th street.  Walking in the middle of Fifth avenue alone for stretches at a time with no vehicles or people was truly something to experience.

I tried working in my lower east side clinic the following day, but by then the air had shifted bringing the electric stench to my neighborhood.  That was it.   I had to get out.  Whitman and the EPA declared it safe and I said “bullshit”.  I was stentorian about it.  I told all my patients to go home, get air purifiers, or leave the city if they could. The air became heavy with toxins and you could hear passersby talking gibberish to themselves.  I eventually breached the envelop of containment with my face mask, to enter what was the usual bustling of New York above 14th street.   I left for a week.  When I came back, I purchased the accompanying  photograph a local photojournalist had taken while he was just below the towers.  He only suffered a broken limb.

It’s funny how one can retrospectively connect the dots of synchronicity.

One was a child’s painting I had picked up a few years before because I liked its composition.  It was of lower Manhattan’s skyline.   But the Statue of Liberty was looking away from the city, her face looking away from the simple childishly drawn plane that was flying above the city toward the towers, while at her feet, at the confluence of the East and Hudson Rivers, there floated a sailboat called “Trouble”.

The other, occurring some  years before that:  A set of faux postage stamps I bought on the East Village’s Avenue A from the artist who made them.  They were just like real postage stamps.  In fact, I used one successfully to mail a letter.  On the postage stamps were both Twin Towers ablaze with  the caption: Wish You Were Here.

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KevenSeven
Member

Crushing. Touching. Fabulous. I am so delighted and humbled that you posted that on ppov.

My 9/11 story is less inspiring. I was on assignment in DC. I was working for a firm that produced executive (junior executive, really) business conferences. You know. Slick glossy, tuition? Industry “experts” give lessons or speeches?

I had developed an unusual version of one such. Usually these things were a day and a half, with a work shop, perhaps, on the weekends perhaps, or in the week.

I was expected to crank out 14 of these per year, but we repeated them. I developed a four and a half day course. We charged like three thousand to attend.

Three and a half hour sessions. One speaker each. Nine all told. No. The Friday had two doing a tag team. Ten.

Tuesday morning we were in session, in a basement conference room on M Street, if memory serves. Before the morning break I went out to check that the coffee and danishes were OK, and a hotel employee rushed by saying that a plane had hit the WTC (which I had only just recently first visited, Windows on the World, for another conference) and I said, “What, a Beech Baron or something?” and he said yes.

I went upstairs to the bar, were the cable news delivered all that I needed to see. At that point I think it was only one hit.

I went back down stairs and sat in the back of the conference room for about half an hour while an engineer discussed the regulatory and financial issues involved in siting new transmission lines to tie new power plants into the grid. I had seen this before, half a dozen times.

He got to the right point and said “I think it would be time to break?” while looking at me. I had to walk to the front of that group of 20 people and tell them what I knew, and of course at that point I did not know the full horror.

We all went upstairs and shortly there after the police ordered the hotel vacated.

Everybody in DC had got in their cars and driven out onto the streets, to sit in the most hideous gridlock imaginable.

No cells were available. No phone lines. The hotel was closed to us. We went to a bar and watched the news. I assumed that every last fireman in NY was dead.

I could not get my instructors into DC. The conference was canceled, with a voucher to attend the next one.

I could not get out of DC until the next Monday. I went to Dulles several times, as my sister lives near Dulles, and of course I crashed with her.

My wife and five year old child had only just weeks before sold our condo and bought a house. My housing costs had doubled.

I was back at work for three days before they fired me for not keeping the conference going. I have never matched the income I was making there, since.

Just if you ever wondered where my dark bitter self came from….

Jenuwin
Admin

Powerful and moving story. Thanks so much sharing this!

nellie
Member

Very powerful. Thank you for sharing this memory.

AdLib
Admin

Wow.

Brilliant, moving, clever, poignant, funny, compassionate, reverent…a truly remarkable piece, Questinia.

And thank you for your sacrifices and your sharing your talent, skills and compassion to help so many at a time when you must have been fighting off some powerful fear and shock yourself.

As I witnessed in the Northridge quake and Katrina, disasters do bring out in many a remarkable empathy and connection towards their fellow human beings. It’s that humble and transcendent trait in people that usually just lives in fiction and history…a society that is truly caring about each member.

But it does exist in reality and your powerful and inspiring example only underlines that.

It’s too bad that it takes tragedy to detach ourselves from the provincialism, self-absorption and other superficial things that cause us to be so insulated from our fellow human beings, both in our communities and around the world.

Still, when it occurs, it reminds us of what noble and admirable creatures human beings can be and what we can aspire to be in good times as well as tragedies.

KQµårk 死神
Member

Wow Q that was an incredibly moving true story. Thanks so much for sharing it with us. You folks that were there and reacted in the truly compassionate and heroic way you did will never be forgotten. About the only good thing that has lasted since 911 is the fact how at least for a while this nation came together under crisis.