I wanted to see them one more time. I wanted to stand in awe and horror, drinking in fully the sights and sounds of the day I knew that my grandchildren would hear the details of from my aged lips. I knew that I would tell and retell the story of what was happening as I stood there countless times in the decades between then and now. I knew that I was witnessing History with a capital "H." I felt responsible for looking. I resisted the urge to keep running north and not look back. As I arrived at the four-lane crossing of the one of the biggest intersections below Canal Street I found hundreds of other people who stopped to do the same.
I stepped into the crowd like I was joining in an audience gathered to behold the Second Coming. All heads were tilted backwards, all mouths hung open, and all eyes were transfixed. Some shielded their faces from the sun now looming over the tall buildings to the east that cast long shadows on the concrete in front of us like the tree trunks in a thick forest. It was silent. In the silence, we watched. The sky was so clear that it was possible to see the ghastly teeth of the torn and jagged metal ringing each rupture. I saw individual licks of flame that stretched serpentine into the air above them. I thought for a moment about the people above the holes. I couldn't think about them for very long. I wasn't much for prayer but I said one anyhow. I wanted to grab the world with my hands and spin it backwards on its axis like a plastic grade school globe to make the fiery holes disappear.
A wave of anger washed over me and I changed my mind. I didn't want to grab the world like a globe and spin it backwards, I wanted to wad it up in my palms like a piece of trash and hurl it across the universe, out into the unreachable depths of deep space. Because things like this happened. Because we do things like this to ourselves, human beings. I was looking right at it; the very worst of human potential, a mass murder of monumental proportions.
And then the south tower fell.
My hands went to my forehead, landing heavily and then pushing against my skull, pushing backwards on my scalp, forcing my watching eyes open wider, the skin pulling taut as the cascade of ruin gained momentum, raining downward on downtown with a waterfall's torrential roar. It wasn't a sound so much as an atmosphere; loud enough to choke out all other sounds besides my own screaming, "No!" that echoed in my head. No. No. It was the word on all the donut shaped lips and hollering mouths around me, all futilely screaming against destruction's rumble that drowned out everything and blasted past our ears like an invisible freight train.
The building evaporated into a roiling cloud, like a densely piled thunderhead gaining strength and momentum only four blocks away. It was a dank gray and black ball of demolition propelled outward and upward by the force of its own falling, thousands of tons of concrete and steel and glass all collapsing and bursting forth from the confines of its structure. For a moment it was simply awesome to behold, I was so close as to be able to see the mass angrily folding in upon itself and surging back outwards. I could see the rounded edges of isolated clouds in the larger mass that looked soft, but fearfully dark, as if it was comprised of the taint of death itself, the Creeping Death of the Old Testament come crawling across Manhattan looking for first born children.
And then death came barreling down Fulton Street, moving fast, getting close to and then nearly on top of the mesmerized crowd in an eye blink's span, tumbling over itself like the leading edge of a tsunami flood surge. Still screaming heads turned to run, arms thrust out in front of them, fingertips reaching into the open-air ahead of them as if grasping for an unseen rope that would pull them from danger's path. The slow to move, the elderly and less able, were knocked over and left to writhe on their backs before the crashing wave. I hesitated momentarily as an old woman behind me hunched over, holding her arms out to brace herself against the crowd, more afraid of the scrambling pack than what pursued it. But I ran. Every man for himself. I was irrationally convinced that if one particle of that sinister cloud managed to touch me I would die. The thought of being engulfed by it urged me forward, running blind from the fear of choking to death on the ashes of the dead.
Jeff Deeney is a Philadelphia-based writer who was living and working in lower Manhattan on September
11th, 2001. He is currently seeking a publisher for
his book about the black market trade in the
pharmaceutical, OxyContin, titled, "Pill Hill." He can be reached at jadeeney@yahoo.com.
Did you love this article. Help promote it on netscape by clicking here, then voting on the article. You'll have to sign up (free) with netscape, if you haven't already done so.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).