Entering Limbo: the Hours and Days after Sept. 11
by Robert M. Herzog
I wrote this piece living in Lower Manhattan through the surreal time right after the Sept. 11, 2001 WTC attacks. I thought it would be relevant as we now confront another great crisis, that challenges our assumptions about our world and will no doubt also have lasting repercussions. Much of the piece is excerpted in my book, Views from the Side Mirror: Essaying America, weaving a fabric of how our country has gotten to where it is, and what we might do to make it better for all. Hope this resonates with you, as well as the book!
Tuesday
Stanley calls a little after nine in the morning.
“Turn on the TV,” he says.
“Which channel?”
“Any channel. You won’t believe what you’re seeing.”
Stanley’s sense of wonder is not mine, I have no particular expectation, other than it would be some odd tidbit of human behavior he reveled in mocking, probably to do with the Mayoral election. Some Sharpton shenanigan.
On TV, the World Trade Center Towers are burning. Erupting black smoke and flame. A mile south of where I live.
I run to put in my contact lenses. The next day I will find usual objects in unusual places, not remembering how they got there. I grab binoculars, dash downstairs. I live at the corner of Washington and Charles Streets, ten blocks south of Fourteenth Street, a mile and change north of the World Trade Center. From there I have a straight view looking downtown, a familiar view of a street that didn’t stretch into infinity but ended in a great glass and steel frame, so familiar I barely noticed it most days. Now the street ends in great plumes of smoke, an incomprehensible picture.
The street is full, barely known faces that are neighbors in a New York community. The air is full of explanation and exclamation. I look away a second, then back as a wave of screams and cries crashes up Washington Street, cars stop, people point, shouts, “Oh shit,” young voices, Hispanic accents, everybody, people pointing. My mind can’t process what my eyes see. I think it is just heavier smoke, further obscuring the south tower. Slowly I seem to see that only one tower still stands, but I keep looking for the other, a tongue gnawing at a cavity.
Red flames burn behind the gray/white steel girders of the remaining building, shreds of steel hanging like dead skin on the façade. I run upstairs, seeking on the TV a better understanding of what I had ostensibly witnessed. They play the collapse. What was unthinkable becomes inevitable. I run back downstairs. There is no doubt now. Watch as the second tower falls on itself, implodes. The crash smothers the flames, great black and gray and brown plumes shriek out around the tower. My mind holds them in place like after images. We can’t see the bases, only the smoke filling the sky.
They are gone, just gone.
I wait a while longer, but oddly, there is now nothing to see from the street, except huge clouds that smother the skies to the south.
I go back upstairs, watch with the rest of the world. It is happening so close, yet in another world. I can no longer distinguish between what I saw directly and what I saw on TV, over and over. From where I stood, the crashes were silent, the ground steady, only the cries of people filled the air until it burst with wonder and horror.
These buildings were gone, just gone. How could that be?
My wife Margot had returned to her part time work uptown that morning, after a summer off. On the upper East Side. I keep calling, get cut off, finally I reach her. Come home, I say, come home now. Just a few calls, she says. Don’t go down the East Side, I say, it’s near the United Nations. I don’t know where that comes from; have we all been implicitly trained for these kind of understandings? I wait for her, watch the screen, impatient to see more, impatient for her arrival. And the phone starts ringing. It hasn’t stopped.
I go downstairs to buy bottled water in the deli. Already people are lining up to do the same. Carry a couple of bottles up. Hit by the odd understanding of place and situation, I rush back downstairs, buy the now three remaining water bottles, a pound of ham, eggs, milk, juice. I don’t know what might be available, what might be cut off. Upstairs I fill pitchers with water.
Our son Stuart calls. He lives uptown, West Side. Talks of shutting all their windows, turning on the air conditioner to filter the air. I tell him he might want to think about stocking up on some essentials, for their two year old son, just in case. He says he doesn’t want to go outside, that the people who could do this wouldn’t stop at biological weapons. I have memories of a news report that Cipro was good against anthrax. We have some, to prevent traveler’s diarrhea, but where?
Margot and I walk where we can, down West Street, looking at the smoke, ready to turn back at a moment’s notice if the wind shifts towards us. The street is blocked off, an emergency thoroughfare. We look where the buildings had been, trying to place their position among the ones we could see, orient ourselves to a guidepost no longer there, as if compasses no longer had a true north.
An ambulance streams by. I think it’s on fire, trailing smoke. It doesn’t make sense, that it would be driving, but what does? I see another with a similar plume, realize they are trailing the dust that has settled on them. A train of smoking vehicles extends as far south as I could follow, as it grew dark their flashing lights, reds and blues and whites, stretched out the night.
It is after midnight. Fifteen hours have gone by in a dull glaze of repeated visions that vexed plausibility. Multiple angles of planes plummeting dead on, without hesitation, slicing through the walls, the ubiquitous modern vision of home video, every moment and angle relentlessly captured. At first I thought the planes had been commandeered, rented even. When I learn they had been hijacked with people on them, my shock increases.
The weather is perfect. A breezy summer day, sunny and warm, usually embraced as a blessing, respite from the cold to come, evolves into an equally lovely night, the great NYC royal blue sky tinged over the Hudson with a red sunset and pink clouds. It is all so beautiful, in three directions
Wednesday
We are living in a demilitarized — or is it desecularized? — zone, a land of limbo. A few blocks north of us 14th Street is shut off. Nothing around us is open. Margot went to get a newspaper this morning and had to wait in line at 18th Street. She had to show ID to get back in, to prove where she lived. In New York. In America. A few blocks south, Houston Street is shut off river to river. We live in a large cage, accessible only to people with credentials. The streets are virtually empty, stores and restaurants all closed. At D’Agostino’s, the only vegetable available is celery. The shelves for bottled water are completely empty. I buy beer and a brownie, breaking all my diet rules.
Is this what it was like at the start of war? A sense of the past lacking its normal pull and meaning, the future as uncertain as it had ever been. How would it be possible to deal with this every day?
We walk south. At West and Christopher Streets, people are lined up and applauding the trucks and cars as they drive south, shouting thank you, cheering, holding up signs blessing them and their endeavor. Doing the same for those heading out, carrying what we can only imagine. A night of sleep suppressed emotion erupts in tears. I cry and try to keep it back.
Like all major events in New York, this one is a sell-out. I waited on line at St. Vincent’s yesterday, only to be told they ran out of equipment to take blood; today they are full up and requesting people schedule appointments next week and around the holidays. It is also hard to volunteer. I am ready to go down and dig, carry buckets, carry water, anything. I tromp to the Houston Street line. I had heard, waiting at St. Vincent’s, of a volunteer staging area at Greenwich and North Moore, but at every barricade am told they aren’t letting people in. I call a number, leave my name.
I wonder if we could even get out of town. I call around, what’s the name of the bridge at the north of Manhattan? who operates it? is it open? Suddenly I seem to know nothing that’s essential.
Conversations become strings, passed from one friend to the next, incorporating TV commentary and information, on topics so far out of our norms as to be unrecognizable. Prevent hijackings in the future. There hasn’t been a hijacking in 10 years, this is not a system that has not been failing repeatedly. Will we be fighting the last war? It doesn’t matter, make them impossible. The former head of El Al security is on TV; it can be done, he says. Cockpit doors are like cardboard. I report this to my brother, who says the problem with heavy steel doors is that they could turn into lethal missiles if a cabin suddenly depressurizes. A friend with piloting experience says make it a double door, a steel grating to prevent an implosion. Serial conversations about new topics; we are learning with the focus of children, confronted with a new problem.
The desire for response, overwhelming in its fury and wrath, is universal. But it’s hard to imagine a response that will be both satisfactory and successful. Will this evolve into a global conflict — us! today! I keep asking, but no one knows what Taliban means. We try to distinguish between fundamentalists and fanatics. Are we going to launch a counter-jihad against hundreds of millions of Muslims? Do we now embark on a course that will define the rest of our middle-aged lives, and perpetuate grief and sorrow, fear and early death for our children? We talk of living in a land of bombings in restaurants and stores and other innocent public places. Resolve is a balm for sadness, but it is not a cure. It’s hard to see happy endings, but still the need and desire to take swift and devastating action is overwhelming. But there’s no way to keep up or vet every voiced threat; we’ll end up jailing the kindergartners along with the villains. Ignoring the civil liberties questions, practicalities will have to dictate long term response. Or the country will look in the universe’s mirror and not recognize itself.
In the evening I walk to the edge of the restraining line at Pier 40, again try to get down, can only leave my name and numbers. I am thanked, it is sincere and polite, but feel like the wall of authority has descended and with the best of intentions is dismissing me. Strangers who happen to have a form of uniform can witness this carnage to my house, while I am excluded. I watch the plumes of smoke, seeking messages of hope. The smoke moves east, as if brushed away under Liberty’s outstretched arm.
At the barrier line, people try to talk their way into going all the way downtown, to help. A couple of guys claim they are EMT workers, have construction experience, live in New Jersey, had been called by their local hotline to come in to join the bucket brigades. They wear yamukkahs. Their story keeps changing slightly, I sense they are adjusting what they say as they go along. But there is no doubting their intention, to get down, to help, with hands and backs and will, to help an area that had to test faith, that God seemed to have forsaken. But human faith grows inversely to the desperation around it. I stand with them, figuring their story is better than mine, and if they can get in, I will tag along. Finally I walk home. A schoolbus full of men in work clothes, the orange vests of construction workers, burly men, halts on the way south. A dozen people quickly hold up to them water and sandwiches, pass it through the windows. As the bus drives by, its interior lights on, I can see the men as if in a movie, so determined, passing the food and water around, standing, talking quietly, whisked south toward hell.
The informal gathering cheers the trucks and people heading north or south on West Street. A UPS truck rolls by, probably to get to its garage nearby. The people cheer. A TV announcer walking along the side of the street next to the trucks mutters, “America’s gone ballistic, they’re cheering a UPS truck.”
Our house starts to smell. Forgetting, I think we are burning something in the oven. No, it smells electrical. I check wiring. I sniff at the windows. It is coming from there, a hint, but sharp, bearing its terrible connection. Stuart call, tells me the wind has turned north, that we are no longer to be spared. There is asbestos, they say, in the smoke, but it is only dangerous under long term exposure. I run through the house, shut all the windows, lock them to get the best seal. Turn on all the air conditioners, close the vents, on some theory I could create a positive pressure in the house to help keep outside air out. I think of the bathroom vent and its perpetual suction, a betrayer within my house. I find tissue, cover the vent. How do we think of these things? What implicit training and messages have we been receiving? How dangerous was it to think I knew about such things, when most likely my threat response was immeasurably futile. I shut blinds for further insulation. A cord is tangled on phone wires, an innocent tangle that becomes ominous and frustrating, minutes to straighten them. One by one, I grab the filters out of the air conditioners, and vacuum them.
We are now a cocoon within a cocoon, further isolated, retreating, besieged. Scared. The air seeps through, the TV burns on.
The scariest and most compelling television images I have ever seen were on the first night of the Gulf War, pictures from Israel wondering if missiles with biological warheads were headed that way, the desperate imperative pleas of home anchors telling the reporters to put on their masks, the shots of people in shelters, not knowing. We had become those people.
Thursday
Leave town, most of those who call suggest, asking why not. We can’t explain. It’s our home, our city. I was born here. We are sewn into its fabric, its essentials, there are not boundaries between place and self, between mutual love and support. They will not drive us from here. If the city is hurting, we will help heal it. We will stay.
For the first time in my life, I envy people with a place to go for work, steady income, a built in community. Even as an independent worker, I rely on having an infrastructure in place within which to operate. With the collapse of that infrastructure, lives like mine become immeasurably more tenuous. The state of the economy had already made things difficult. But it’s one thing to have the rug pulled out from under you, another to have the ground crumble beneath the rug.
In the morning the first sight is a Ramapo Valley ambulance, heading south on empty Washington Street. I remembered the long line of ambulances lined up after the bombing in ’93, marvel at the continuity of regional institutional response. We pass through the 14th Street checkpoint on our way to find a paper. I am bedazzled, amazed to see buses, cabs, cars, people walking the streets with purpose, shops and restaurants open. It is another world, like going from black and white to color. I had forgotten there were vehicles without flashing lights.
We walk back, stop in a restaurant, one of the few open here, for some breakfast. The waitress asks me if I want rye or white toast. I look at her for a second, and for the first time in my adult life in a restaurant say, “I don’t care.” Really, it’s never happened before.
The phone rings. I don’t recognize the name on caller ID. But the woman asks for me by name. I respond cautiously, ask who is this. I’m not the right Robert Herzog, after all. “But it’s good to hear your voice, anyway,” she says. I thank her.
I think about the next time they’ll play “New York, New York” at Yankee Stadium. How it will be received. Sung with love and defiance. As happens so many times, I start to cry.
We walk carrying air masks, remnants from a spill of toxic solvents in our building a few weeks ago. I am alert for shifts in the wind, look at flags flying, as if I am an operative on unfamiliar streets.
Trucks and equipment rumble in all directions. Houston street is lined with trucks holding scaffolding equipment along its north end, and endless dump trucks, sanitation and housing authority, on the south side, block after block, waiting for service on these once innocent streets. It’s another world, the world we now live in.
Walking back near NYU, a bum approaches us, starting his usual “lovely couple, will you…” patter. I just look at him, as we walk by. He stops talking. I have achieved without seeking that stop-them-in-their-tracks look one aspires to living in New York.
Stories start to trickle in, of friends and friends of friends, and family. So many of them have to do with the pride in being in that place. A friend’s daughter whose boyfriend had finally advanced to where he was making a presentation. On the 106th floor. Another friend’s daughter whose girlfriend had proudly started a job with Amex. On the 101st floor. Floor numbers became equated with sentences, life or death. A visiting father attending a conference. Colleagues reported his heart failed him rushing down, slowing stairwell traffic. They tried to help. Firemen came, said you go down, we’ll take him. The rest made it. The father and the fireman are gone.
At the barrier line, people are lined up with small boxes, marked ASPCA. For their pets. Stranded in Battery Park City. Who could predict these consequences? People talk about those waiting for owners not coming home.
I keep thinking of all the unimaginable endings people have endured these last days: on the airplanes; passengers who struck back and crashed; those high up on the Towers, jumping or forced into the sky. Nausea competes with tears. I don’t want more input, and cannot turn the television off. Only the habit of feeling the need for sleep curtails watching and listening.
I am not hungry, listless, anxious without definition. Immune to remediation, the necessities of life. Grief is always personal, each person’s measure not properly subject to scrutiny or judgment. We will live with grief, be surrounded by it, embedded in it, for a time as shrouded as the smoke billowing forth from the impact crater, and clearly will have to learn how to function with it, balance respecting it with continuing, allowing even the trivial to be restored in the balance of full lives.
I dream I’m talking with a friend about his son. “Will is alright,” he says. “He’s just a little worried about your bloodied upstairs.”
We watch Bush, hopeful. His speechwriters are terrific, but impromptu, he seems to have a working vocabulary of 300 words, says he’ll get support for the things he’s said, as if he can’t quite remember them. He talks about “folks,” his shirt collar is too large, so that he doesn’t look like he fits his suit or his role. We can only hope he’ll get it together, he is the President we have, maybe simplicity will be a good thing, “hunt ’em down, get them out of their holes.” But it sounds like faux Texas tough, more costume than authentic. Maybe it will do the job. But the issues are so complex, the consequences so far-reaching and severe. He’s surrounded by people whose policies seem to have stopped twenty-five years ago.
I have conversations, realize I am listening to dissident voices, and for the first time wonder not if they will be heard but if they will face reprisals. A friend catalogues the harshness of our culture, a virtual attack on empathy that is conveyed daily on TV and in media. Flying flags is easy, but what if it becomes another outlet for existing prejudices and vile energies? I’m not religious, but if there was ever a brief opportunity for a genuine spiritual revitalization in this sprawling nation, this is it. More likely we will return to what was, and be patriotic proud of doing so.
We talk of failures of intelligence, many levels. A flight school with four Arab nationals asking instructions about large planes. Was payment in cash? A report mentions a Muslim radical in German prison giving a warning that specifically mentioned the World Trade Center. Known terrorists using their own names come through L.A.’s airport. And there’s a bit too much relish embracing the need for a realpolitik in using unsavory — the favorite word — characters for obtaining information. The history of the CIA and FBI don’t lend confidence. Is the problem of our intelligence community the absence of its own intelligence?
Already we talk about rebuilding, what to do with the site. We are, after all, New Yorkers. No one says it should just be used for a memorial, that’s not what the space was about, not what New York’s about. Build it higher, some say, fuck ’em. Others think that would be hubris, unsupportable for security, but build them solid and full, powerful buttresses of this City’s essence, a city that rebuilds itself continually in normal times, and will continue to do so. Convert their echoes into places of vital, sustained human activity, in commerce and government, a center of world trade, the global population convening each day to engage with each other. Find a place to remember the dead, but honor them most by living. Ring them with missiles, gird them with radar and fly-bys and sophisticated defenses befitting their status, but we will put something there, steadfast in its purpose, effective in its functions, symbolic in its presence.
Unable to be alone any longer, we go to the White Horse, one of the few re-opened restaurants, for the comforts of a hamburger and a beer, and the sounds of people talking. But Hudson Street has few cars, and all of those are official, spraying us in the red white and blue reflections of their lights. Traffic moves on Hudson in both directions, as if we could no longer afford the luxury of one way.
My wife’s family is Dutch, and calls from there are filled with concern and stunned amazement. I hear similar reports, that Italy is dumbfounded, parties and weddings cancelled, Germany silenced. For Europeans, there was always a sense that no matter what happened there, if they went over the top, they always had America to look to, for support, help, and as a safe haven. With that gone, what was left?
I am so sad that this wonderful experiment in freedom is itself imperiled.
Friday
During the memorial service, an Airborne Express person calls to ask if I still want a package delivered. They can’t deliver it south of 14th Street, but can’t hold on to it, they are overloaded. What would I like to do? For the first time in days I get angry at someone, when for days it seemed that personal irritation would be unseemly, a betrayal of the times. I tell her her timing is inappropriate. I haven’t heard from my cousin since the attack, she says, I’m just doing my job. There’s no solace to be found; I give her alternate information, and return to the service.
For days, the words of “America” have sounded in my head. I protested against the war in Vietnam, have struggled against authoritarian impulses in this country, railed against easy military interventions. Margot asks me if I was twenty-four and war broke out over this, would I enlist? I think a second. I am not feeling pacific now. Yes, I answer, I would. When they start singing “Oh beautiful for spacious skies” and I hear the words aloud that have been in my head, I burst into tears. I recover, only to start again with the verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, “as he died to make men holy let us die to make men free.” This freedom is precious, this strange amazing country which lets us say and do what we want unlike any other, even as it incarcerates more people than any other and roils with prejudice and division. Yet now its anthems stir only love that is born from grief and overwhelms old feelings, logic and analysis, skepticism and judgment. I wonder what of this will last, what of that will be for the better, what for the worse.
A friend and I manage to talk our way past various checkpoints, all the way to ground zero. Why do I so want to get there? It is not for prurient curiosity, I am sure of this. It is more — this is my home, my city.
As we walk, I hear myself muttering, “Oh God, Oh God,” the sound fetid under my air mask. Seven WTC looks like the compressed mass that could become a black hole, pancaked concrete and steel of unimaginable density, the largest pile of rubble above ground that can be seen. We get to in front of the Plaza which opened on to the buildings. Four and Five WTC, which flanked the entrance, are both black and rust-brown charred hulks. All the glass is gone, they are charred husks. Four has a V-shape staved in at its southern end, whether from debris or collapse we cannot tell. The street ends in a ten story lattice work of steel, thrown from the upper levels of presumably the south tower, embedded in the ground like a giant knife. It’s crisscross pattern looks like the sugared top of a cake. As far north as we can see, an unending stream of trucks, people and material pour towards the site; I wonder how it can keep absorbing it all.
This is New York City? 2001?
These great buildings, I think, these magnificent creatures. They absorbed a shock that would have toppled any other building immediately. Even as they were wounded and dying, they stood, stood long enough to let thousands of their residents escape, protecting their own to the last, until even their massive strength buckled under the onslaught. In their last moments I could see the fires burning behind the steel girders, into empty space, almost like when the building was first built and the interiors unfinished. They gave to us their last full measure, beyond what anybody could have expected, protracting as long as they could the moment when shock and heat, fire and hate crumpled them to the ground. Like all New Yorkers I have a favorite picture of them, lit as red slivers in sunset coming back on Amtrak from Washington, or on the turnpike, the first indications of being close to home.
Of course they were a symbol. And no matter how many such icons may be attacked, the deep spirit that built them will never be hit, much less destroyed.
It is, let’s face it, perversely thrilling and solidifying to be in the grip of something so much larger. I am reminded of college readings of existentialists who said they only found personal meaning in the midst of World War II. In an age incessantly in search of identity, we are having one handed to us.
The shredded skins of surrounding buildings — One Liberty Plaza, the Millennium Hotel — look raked, slashed by talons of steel, concrete and glass. Here, the flat abstractions of TV take on their full dimensions — the enveloping feel of the destruction, the sense of desolation, dislocation, the quiet purpose that fills tired men and overwrought machines trying to enter the void. We speak in whispers. Like the image of the buildings collapsing three days ago, it is almost impossible to relate what I see to what I hold inside. There was no continuity, just this abrupt falling off the edge of a catastrophic cliff. It will take time to reconcile what was with what is.
Behind the plaza even higher steel lattice works somehow stand. The smoke obscures any further views to the west, as if this place still wants to hold a claim on our vision. High atop the lattices sparks of iron cutting dot the sky. They will work and work and work. The dead will rise slowly. We will seek action that invites reaction. This is just the beginning.
If you found this worthwhile, please check out my book at Entering Limbo
If you found this worthwhile, check out my new book, Views from the Side Mirror: Essaying America, which ranks highly on Amazon in Political Commentary and Historical Essays, and and I’d love to hear what you think about it.
