I wrote this shortly after September 11, 2001.
When I woke up in the morning everything already felt surreal. Why was I up before my alarm, and even more, so chipper? I ignored the feeling, assuming it was just more of what I had been feeling recently. I arrived at school with a little time to spare, entering physics and awaiting instruction on what I expected to be a dismal and repetitive topic: significant figures. It was. We moved through the lesson as I studied and explored my new calculator’s features: it’s a very advanced calculator.
The bell rang but we forced ourselves to ignore it: our physics teacher denied us of breaks between our two consecutive periods of class, instead dismissing us 10 minutes early. Almost immediately afterwards a rumble came around us, and people jeered about its cause, probably a sonic boom, or something. Yeah, it’s just a 747! I mumbled to my neighbor that 747s don’t fly supersonic. The next bell came, indicated the beginning of the next period and my physics teacher proceeded to post questions about converting units and arithmetic with significant figures. Soon the principal came onto the loudspeaker: “Teachers, please stop what you are doing,” he announced, and I expected that there had been another school shooting or something of that order. But the next line surprised me and the class jumped out of their seats: “A small plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We will decide whether, before the first lunch period, whether to let students out of the building.” The crowd around the window, and subsequent exclamations of “Oh shit!” gave some indication of the magnitude of the event. At first all I could see was the relatively new residential building in front of our school. But as I moved closer, the flames erupting from the 100th story and the debris fluttering down were stunning. Smoke billowed from around the building as through the office building had become a smokestack. Everybody was talking at once and trying to make sense of what was going on. A girl commented that we were such rubberneckers. I tried to justify our behavior, but couldn’t. But I didn’t mind.
I switched windows for an even more breathtaking and horrifying view of the nascent, and expanding, fire. It was almost comical how flames neatly lit a single floor across the visible side of the building, almost like the artificial graphics of SimCity. More debris floated down from the tower, not that which brings dread into your mind: what will happen to the people below, but the kind that is innocuous and hardly grabs your attention. This stream of debris was occasionally augmented by small fireballs flying outward and down into smoke. The best indication of the ferocity of the flames inside the building was the black ball that went into free fall, obeying almost directly the laws of physics that are almost common knowledge, the 9.8 meters per second squared acceleration caused by gravity. I silently tagged this object as a person seeking an impossible escape from the growing fire.
Our class soon utilized the TV with which our classroom was outfitted. We learned that the building had been hit by an airplane and the newscasters were mostly repeating themselves and taking eyewitness callers. I drifted back to the window and sat alone there. I was soon horrified to see a fireball wrap around the outside of the building as though a gas explosion had come from inside. I later concluded that it was the explosion of the second airplane strike I had seen. The period soon ended, punctuated by the confused announcements of the administration over the loudspeaker. I progressed downstairs to my third period class, history. This class had a far superior view of the damage, even of the crater created by the airplane, which was absent from view: I assumed it had fallen to the street. One boy was cursing at everything that happened: the announcement that there had been two explosions, then that there had been an explosion at the Pentagon, and so forth. I was watching the proliferating fire and the smoke that came off the building, and studying its location and intensity. Out the window at ground level, West Street was closed and filled with rescue vehicles. There was a mass exodus of people from the financial center coming to and from the park, and moving largely uptown. I looked back and realized the fire had spread on the right of my view all the way across the floor, and down as well.
Dr. Stern, my teacher, commented that they couldn’t put the fire out on floors that high up, and they had to wait for it to burn out, which seemed absurd to me. Weren’t there hoses in the building? Sprinklers? That’s what zoning is all about. We were soon told to move away from the windows. We lowered the curtains and I smirked at the idea of a lesson now being conducted. I took my seat, which was 3 steps from the window. I heard a comment that people were now running away, and then there was a rumbling. The lights flickered and the TV turned to static. We came up from out seats to be horrified by what was now presented: a massive cloud of smoke and speculation about the building’s collapse.
We were moved from the room into the hallway and subsequently to our homerooms, where more rumors of collapse came. Out the window the haze reminded me of a gloomy, rainy overcast morning, but I knew that the sky was solid blue. The movie quality of the whole event took a new turn as it dawned on me that the haze was smoke and dust. I piddled around the room, and tried to contemplate what exactly was going on. It was unsettling to have such a swirl of emotion and commotion around me. People’s voices and tears and some people’s panic and others’ stoicism left me uncertain. The loudspeaker came on again, now with the command to be orderly, repeat orderly, and leave the building out the north exit. Screaming erupted and some people ran from the room and to the stairs. Everything around me had such a superficial quality that I was surprised to find the hallway far emptier than even during class, yet the stairwell was crowded. The entire first floor was entirely crowded, and women I had never seen before directed the human traffic. Perhaps they were the federal agents that had been mentioned before. I watched a teacher pick a student out of his wheelchair and walk him at our pace into the crowd. When the majestic first floor stairs came into view where there was normally a view of the adjacent school was pure darkness. A fireman strolled from the entrance west. Three people held a set of doors open, crouching over what seemed to be an incapacitated body. I wanted to offer help, but I knew it would be rejected. I continued walking with the crowd, once again told to be orderly and bumped into Martin, a student from Columbia Prep, my middle school. “Aren’t you glad you came to Stuyvesant?” I remarked to him, eliciting a grin from the tall freshman. As we shuffled around the outside of the building toward West Street I saw the haze again. But this was more than haze now, as I turned the corner I saw the entire street obscured by a dense pall; what seemed so permeable was entirely unforgiving, barely giving view of TriBeCa bridge, probably one hundred yards away. As we moved away from the disaster area I tried to put myself at ease by remarking to Martin about one could write about this experience for their college essay. Hell, you could use it for every essay topic for the rest of your life. It was at about this time that my first thought of my family seriously ran though my mind. I wasn’t aware of my mother’s hearing in Brooklyn heights, or my father’s meeting in the Empire State building. Thank god Ryan had graduated. And that some of my friends had left school, although I missed them. I was certain they were all completely free of danger, and I wondered if my parents would even be aware of the tragedy that had taken place in the morning. They weren’t, after all, TV watchers. I imagined coming home that morning and saying, “hey mommy, the world trade center fell down.” Well, I wasn’t certain of that. Well, “a plane hit each of the world trade center buildings, and the pentagon, too.” I didn’t want my family worrying about me. I was fine.
