Everyone remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the airplanes crashing into buildings. Those details, however mundane, are forever burned into one's memory. Sharing those memories helps me cope with the horror of that day. It may do little or nothing for you, but that's not the point of catharsis.
This little tale has only been mentioned parenthetically in conversation just a few times in the ten years since it happened. Nothing much happened to me. I had never written it out before because there never seemed to be a reason to do so. There isn't any better reason to do so now, on this tenth anniversary of the tragedy. Others have recounted how hearing the news interrupted their lives, and those ordinary events took on new meaning for them. They might have been bathing a child, getting a cup of coffee at work, or doing something equally inane, but it became an iconic event to that person. I realized that my personal recollections were no less important to me than those memories were to them. They may appear to be a random pastiche of unrelated trivia, but to me they remain a fully integrated series of indelible snapshots forever enshrined in memory.
When I switched on the little television in my bedroom that morning, I thought I was watching a live broadcast of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center's south tower. It turned out to be the replay that they had been showing every few minutes since the event had occurred more than an hour before, and which they must have shown hundreds of times in the ensuing days. They had that footage because news crews were on the scene soon after the first plane hit the north tower 17 minutes earlier. I remember glancing at the VCR to note the time of what was surely an historical event. It read 7:38, but I'm in the Pacific Time Zone, so it was 10:38 AM EDT, 1:35 after the clip was recorded. Even though that time is inconsequential, it's the time I remember. I had to look up the times of the planes' impacts today, but I still remember the blue LEDs showing 7:38. The VCR was discarded years ago, but the image of those numerals persists.
I had turned on the bedroom TV instead of the larger one in the living room because I was making the bed and waiting for my girlfriend to vacate the one bathroom of my modest apartment. We usually slept at her house, where there were two bathrooms, allowing each of us to use one. She had gotten up, preempting my access to the bathroom, so I lay there for a few minutes deciding if I wanted to sleep more or not. We were both unemployed and didn't have to get up if we didn't want to. When to rise, or not at all, required intent. She had been an early riser her whole life and I was wide awake too because we had just finished having intercourse. Sex that morning made me fully alert instead of making me sleepy as it had the previous evening and every nighttime encounter I can remember. I mused on that and concluded that I was also done sleeping. I threw back the bedding, sat up and switched on the peculiar TV that I had cobbled together by running my old VCR's tuner output to the monitor of an obsolete Amiga computer. The monitor could accept input from the computer's video card or use a standard analog video signal. It amused me how incredulous many people were when they saw the setup because they did not realize that a VCR had its own tuner to receive the signal it could record, and thus was a complete television set, except for the lack of a video display.
There I was, sitting in the nude on the edge of my bed, blotting at my genitals with tissues, needing to urinate and staring in stunned speechlessness at smoke billowing from a massive hole in a skyscraper in New York City. My brain abruptly shifted away from a lazy, erotic reverie mulling over the events in my bed during the preceding hour. I was transfixed by the riveting images of the burning buildings on the tiny screen, unable to speak for what seemed like minutes, but was probably only a few seconds.
When I snapped out of my paralysis, I yelled, "You gotta see this! A plane just crashed into a skyscraper!" She came through the door of the bedroom with her arms up and her hands behind her head, doing something with her hair or attaching a necklace. I wasn't looking at her, still staring at the screen. She was now fully clothed having washed and dressed in the bathroom. I don't think she had heard what I said, being slightly hard of hearing, just that I had called out to her. Unable to see the TV from where she stood, she calmly told me that she was going home to get started on some chores and that I could join her there at my convenience.
"Hey! Did you hear me? This airliner crashed into a building in New York, the World Trade Center! It's burning! Take a look." She sat down on the edge of the bed and began watching, finally aware that something momentous was occurring. I sprinted to the bathroom to relieve my bladder and swab off a bit with a wash cloth. When I returned, the broadcast was reviewing all the video footage of the events that had happened by that time, the fire after the first aircraft hit the north tower, the second aircraft hitting the south tower, the aftermath of the third aircraft hitting the Pentagon, reports of a fourth crashing into a field in Pennsylvania, and finally the collapse of the both buildings in New York. I had not realized that there was more than one plane. Finding out about the others made me frantic. I began yelling and swearing, both terrified and enraged, as I angrily stomped around the room while putting on my clothes.
I left the bedroom and went to the living room to turn on the big TV. She followed me there and sat down to continue watching. I started the coffee brewing and joined her. I was beginning to calm down, but was still commenting excitedly, speculating wildly and extrapolating from the details as they filtered in. Engrossed in the ongoing story, she had not said a word since she had sat down on the bed to watch, and remained silent in the living room, hunched forward in a chair.
When the coffee was done brewing, I brought us each a cup and we sipped as we continued to watch the television. After a she finished her coffee, she rose and repeated her announcement that she had to go home, but in a much more somber tone. I got up and we embraced, but she gave me only a very quick peck, denying me our usual protracted parting kiss. We clung together for a while afterward, in a tight hug. I began to rock her slowly when she began to whimper, sob and shudder a little. She sniffled and spoke softly into my ear, "I'm frightened, but I'll be OK." She let go of me, quietly gathered the things she had brought for the evening and left.
I kept watching the news for a couple of hours, but soon became bored with the incessant repetition, especially that clip of the plane crashing into the south tower and the same few seconds of billowing smoke. I left the set on but turned the sound down so I could listen to radio, work on my computer or play guitar while taking an occasional glance at the screen to see if a new story was breaking. I ate a couple of times and by mid-afternoon, having run out of things to do, packed up a few things to head over to the girlfriend's house for the night.
At her house, I found her in a much more relaxed mood, but by no means cheerful. Over dinner she explained that watching the disaster on television had nearly put her into shock. She had had flashback memories of both her near death experiences. The first had been an auto accident more than twenty years earlier. Her car had been flipped up onto the guardrail of a bridge by a jackknifed trailer truck. The car was crushed, totaled, but she was only bruised and scratched a little. Trapped upside down in the vehicle as it teetered on the brink of plunging into the water far below, she had prayed to Jesus and and made her peace with God. She had readied herself to die in those minutes before the emergency vehicles arrived to extricate her from the tangled wreckage and pull her to safety. She barely knew what to do with herself when that danger was removed and she was thrust back into her ordinary life with its petty requirements, but plodded on under "automatic pilot" mode. The emergency room was in the same medical center as the doctor's office to which she had been on her way for an appointment. Walking in barely an hour late, the staff was stunned to hear that she was the driver of the car they had seen on TV in the wreck with a heavily laden truck. "That was you? Oh, my God! I thought whoever was in that car must have died!"
The second near-death experience for her had occurred only seven months before the September 11 attack during the Nisqually Earthquake. She had been at work in an older highrise office building that had not yet been properly upgraded to meet new standards for structural survivability during earthquakes. When the shocks hit, walls began to crack and windows popped, spewing shattered glass everywhere. Office workers scrambled for shelter. She crawled under her heavy, metal desk and recapitulated her negotiations with God, but this time, even more sure that she was going to die, forgave God and told Him that it was all right for her to go now that her children were grown and she had had a full life. The quake only lasted for 45 seconds, and the the building, though damaged, remained intact enough that Jesus would have to wait a bit longer before he made her acquaintance. While the shaking was going on though, the general consensus was that the building was coming down and they were all going to die. The women were sobbing and wailing while many of the men swore loudly, cursing everyone and everything. My girlfriend said that she thinks she was numb and in shock and not making much sound. She felt oddly at peace and resigned to dying having gone through a similar experience over twenty years before.
I had not even been frightened, standing on the lawn outside the one-story office building where I worked. We watched the trees and utility poles sway as the shock wave passed under our feet, noticeably swelling and rising. When we went back inside, I tried to call my girlfriend at work, but the lines were all busy. We reunited at her house that evening, had a nice dinner with wine and were in a good mood by bedtime. We made love and slept like babies. I had expected her to be more shaken than she was, and not likely to be in the mood for sex, but the earthquake scare, once past, had made her more active than usual, clutching at me desperately in the throes of passion. Like her, I felt extra joy in being alive and in having a lover with whom I could celebrate life in such a primal manner.
On the evening of September 11, 2001, the mood was quite different. We had not been in any danger and the ominous threat of war loomed. She was worried that her older son's National Guard unit would be activated and that he might soon be in danger. I'm reasonably sure that she just wanted me to hold her that night, but I'm not certain. The adrenalin-fueled, high-retention, long term memory "movie camera" of my brain was gradually slowing down, getting back to normal, short term mode. The stored recollections were becoming sparser and more obscure already. We resumed our sexual relationship soon; I'm sure of that. However, things were never quite the same again between us.
By November, she had become cranky, alienated and fed up with me. Neither of us had found a job and she was on the verge of financial ruin, including losing her house to a predatory ex-husband who had swindled her in the property settlement. She muttered about bringing me down with her, but her main beef seemed to be with my failure to resume my high-income professional career and be her white knight. She appeared frantic for me to get more liquid resources and be able to rescue her.
One day she got up early as if she were going to work. I asked if I should get up and she said, "When you want to." I went back to sleep, got up an hour later, showered and dressed. She had made breakfast shortly after getting up and had been waiting for me to come downstairs and eat with her. I walked into the kitchen and she was grim-faced and stern, clearly smoldering with pent-up rage. She was perched on a stool with her arms folded. She complained that diabetics like her should not delay meals and that she was on the verge of going into a coma. We ate the leathery, overcooked fried eggs in silence. As soon as I was finished she yanked my plate away from me and barked at me to get my things and go. She followed me up the stairs to her bedroom and monitored me closely as I packed up. Was she making sure that I wouldn't steal any of her things? "Don't take that boom box! You gave it to me as a gift!" Yep. As she hustled me down the stairs toward the front door, I was mortified. I had been dumped before, but never given the bum's rush. She opened it and yelled at me as I stepped through, "Get out of here, you goddamned asshole!"
Did the September 11, 2001, attacks ruin my life? I'm not entirely sure that they did not. We both had a sweet thing going, and things went sour right after that. It also could be that the negative turn of the economy after the attacks drove her nuts, instigated her dumping me, and thereby saved my tiny nest egg from her nefarious ex-husband. Sometimes I feel like Candide and Dr. Pangloss rolled into a single person.