I walked down a dark alley at dusk, studying the unseen and unkempt faces of the buildings that most people didn’t normally visit. On every fixed horizontal surface above eye level, every air conditioner, every window ledge there was a thick coating of white-gray dust. I stopped and stared, puzzled. It was nearly an inch thick in places, like light snow had collected.
The phone is ringing. I open my eyes. My head is pounding like I’m Phineas Gage. For the love of God, somebody pull out this iron rod. What did I drink last night? Jet fuel maybe. My mouth tastes like what jet fuel must taste like. Kerosene. No, it’s just acetone. The byproduct of alcohol metabolism. I pick up the phone and my girlfriend is on the the other end of the line, agitated.
“Luke, a plane just hit the World Trade Center.”
“Huh?” I blink hard trying to get my eyes to focus. The room is gray, the blinds pulled. I keep it that way for the frequent occasions when I wake up like this.
“A plane just hit the World Trade Center. I’m watching it on TV right now!”
“That kinda shit happens, hon. Planes run into buildings. It’s called ‘cee-fit.’ Controlled flight into terrain,” I pause to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “A bomber flew into the fucking Empire State Building in the 40s. Don’t worry about it. I’m asleep. I’ll call you later. Love you.”
Phone back in the cradle. My head back on the pillow. I should get up and get water and Advil and take a piss. Nah, it can wait. I drift off.
The phone rings again, I begrudgingly open my eyes. It’s twenty-five minutes later. It felt like 3 seconds. I look at the caller ID. It’s my girlfriend again. I am annoyed.
“What,” I groaned, “I’m trying to sleep here. I’m hungover. I think…I think I drank most of a handle of Captain Morgan last night. Ugh.”
“Another plane hit the World Trade Center.”
Now she has my attention. I’m awake.
“And one just hit the Pentagon. The people in the office think we’re under attack. I’m scared.”
I’m sitting bolt upright in bed. I don’t notice the pain in my temples anymore.
“You’re in Indianapolis. You’re, like, 700 miles away from New York, and probably 600 from the Pentagon. You’re fine. I’ll call you back in a bit. Love you.”
I walk to my computer. I’m still on a dial-up modem. My phone line was installed in my new apartment yesterday. The cable modem I’m so excited about is supposed to be installed today. The sound of the modem training…my head fucking hurts again.
c-n-n-dot-c-o-m On the keyboard.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Timeout.
Reload.
Nothing. Something. Now there’s a picture. It’s the World Trade Center and both Buildings are on fire. CNN doesn’t have any information, just a picture and a headline. This isn’t going to work.
I need TV.
Shit. The cable gets installed today. There’s no cable yet. No antenna either. I go to the box in my closet and grab a piece of coax cable. Fast. To the kitchen. Knife. Jesus. Off comes one end. Strip. Like peeling an apple. Aluminum foil. Faster. Fuck. Wrap the wire around the foil. Wrap the foil around the cable for support. What the fuck is happening?
I jog across the living room and connect it to my TV. On button. Tune click-click-click. CBS. The picture sucks, but I can make out two burning buildings.
Then one collapses on itself like there’s nothing to resist gravity, falling as fast as a stone dropped from 1000 feet.
1000. 5000. How many people did I just see die? Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. My ex in New York. You can’t love someone that way at some point in your life and not be terrified in that moment, even if you resent the fuck out of them. Where is she? She works in Midtown, right? But where does she live? I haven’t talked to her in months.
There’s a knock at the door that I answer. It’s our friendly cable installer. He walks into the living room just in time to see the second tower fall. Thousands more lives snuffed out in an instant.
What the fuck did I just see? I can’t even process it.
When you see or experience something painful, particularly an act of violence, that your brain can’t process emotionally it results in trauma. Like when I watched my mother chase my father around our living room, slashing at him with a knife, cutting a 2 foot gash in the portrait of Sigmund Freud that was on the living room wall. The violence of it was terrifying, unprocessable by a little boy.
Or my first week of Kindergarten when a 14 year-old boy grabbed me and forced me to simulate fellatio on him. (Yeah, stuff your cock in a little boy’s face because it’s funny, you horrible motherfucker.) And nobody could or would stop him. How can a five year-old process the feeling of what at the time seemed like a grown man, with his hands wrapped around my head, forcing my face into his crotch as I struggled to get free, and then to breathe? And nobody to save me.
Safety has always felt like an illusion to me. The next threat right around the corner.
That’s what happened that day. The almost every American experienced some form of existential trauma. We haven’t felt safe since. All of us who experienced that experienced some degree of trauma. In some, the survivors, the first responders, it resulted in overt and crippling PTSD, in the rest of us, the world wasn’t safe anymore. And there was nobody to save us. So many wounds that nobody could see.
I touched the dust. I rubbed it between my left pointer finger and thumb. It felt coarse and gritty, like pumice, and at the same time soft like talc. I looked around. It felt very cold now. The late autumn sun was below the buildings, and the light was growing dimmer. The dust. I looked on top of the air conditioner at eye level. Gray with black specks. Then I froze. I realized what was on my fingers and looked at them in disbelief. It was the dust from when the the world changed for the first time, five years prior.
These were the remnants of the ash and dust blew through the caverns of Lower Manhattan, coating everything. Somewhere, mixed with the concrete and rock and glass, were some of the remains of those who didn’t make it out, the ones who were pulverized when the towers fell.
“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
-The Book of Genesis, Chapter 3, Verse 19
I felt very small in that moment. A mere speck of dust in a very, very large and dangerous universe. Very insignificant. And very vulnerable.