I THOUGHT IT WAS A NUCLEAR BOMB
Inigo Thomas was a mile from the
Twin Towers when the planes hit. Here he describes his day of terror
IF you have lived in New York for some time, you will know that the days in early September are often the most beautiful of the year. The tropical heat and fogs of August give way to the brightness and clear skies of early fall. In New York after Labor Day, the holiday which marks the end of the American summer, when New Yorkers return from their vacations on Long Island or the Jersey shore or Cape Cod, there is the sense that the year is about to begin a second time, that life in the city will become exciting. At least that's how it was; but I shall not think of early September in this way again.
On the morning of 11 September — and that morning was as beautiful a morning in early September as one could imagine: warm, bright, cloudless — I was breakfasting at Teresa's, a Polish restaurant on First Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets. As I paid the bill, I heard a muffled explosion followed by a lazy, masculine jeer. Unusual bangs and explosions in New York are not strange. Unless the explosion is spectacular enough to draw television crews and newspaper reporters, you will never know its cause. Nor is a lazy jeer a surprise. A truth about life in New York is that it can sap one's curiosity, and I had heard so many jeers in response to mysterious explosions. It is street punctuation, another way of saying 'Who knows? Who cares?'
I left Teresa's and went to my apartment on Fifth Street, walked up the six flights of stairs, unlocked the door and, as I did so, heard sirens. But I didn't pay much attention to them since one always hears fire engines and ambulances in New York — just as one expects to hear inexplicable explosions and insouciant jeers.
In New York, you can establish the direction of the fire engines. One waits, hears the sirens grow closer, then fade away. On the 11th, the sirens were perplexing. I listened, but couldn't discern their direction. It took me a moment or two to understand why: there were so many sirens. They were neither coming nor going; their wailing flooded Manhattan. There was a second explosion, this one more of a rolling boom. The roof is immediately above my apartment, and I went upstairs expecting to see smoke rising from a building in the Lower East Side. Perhaps a Chinese sweatshop had caught fire, or an Italian bakery's oven had exploded. I climbed the stairs, opened the door to the roof, and immediately before me stood the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, set against the morning sky. Even from 40 blocks away these two skyscrapers are arresting, dominating the Midtown skyline, their windows and the metalwork at their summits gleaming in the morning sun. To the north, there was no smoke, but when I turned to the west I was surprised to see that the rooftops of the East Village were crowded with people. Then I turned to the south and saw what everyone saw. A mile away, black smoke vented from a giant hole in the north tower of the World Trade Center; the south tower was, at three-quarters of its height, wreathed in flames.
Downstairs, I turned on the television. Every news channel showed the second plane disappearing into the south tower, a fraction of a second later its fuel exploding. The footage was shown over and over again. I watched it over and over again. On as clear a day as this one — 'severe clear' was the aeronautical term for conditions on the 11th — there was no chance that this was an accident. Everyone knew that this was terrorism. I tried to phone London but the lines were jammed; soon, even friends in Brooklyn couldn't be reached by telephone. All bridges and tunnels into Manhattan were shut. I was about to experience a profound feeling of isolation.
When the south tower collapsed MSNBC, the cable news network I was watching, reported — wrongly, as it turned out — that there had been a third massive explosion at the base of one of the towers. The angle of their Midtown camera meant that the north tower obscured its southern twin, and there were no close-up shots of the towers on American TV: live pictures of people jumping from windows were deemed too horrifying to broadcast. (I must have heard that people were jumping from the towers, but it wasn't until I saw the photographs printed by the New York Times the next day that I saw the evidence.) My fear was that this was a chemical or a nuclear explosion. I rushed back to the roof to see which way the wind was blowing. Television conveyed no sense of the scale of the cloud that had enveloped all of southern Manhattan, a cloud whose colour was utterly unfamiliar, and which was drifting south-east to Brooklyn. I stormed downstairs and returned to the television. Brian Williams, the presenter, had by now corrected himself, There had been no third explosion, he said. The southern tower of World Trade Center had collapsed. So it was just the tower collapsing, not a chemical or a nuclear bomb, I said to myself, with some relief. Just the tower collapsing? A 110-floor tower, where 25,000 people worked, was destroyed?
News now came from Washington that a plane had slammed into the Pentagon. I switched channels from MSNBC to CNN, where a presenter stood before a large television displaying a website called Flight Tracker. It illustrated the position of all airplanes in the American north-east: there were too many to count. How many more would become weapons of mass destruction? (As I later learnt, at 9.55 there were still 3,520 planes in US air space.) I was intensely frightened. 'I am very, very alarmed. It's terrifying here,' I wrote in an email to a London friend just before the north tower fell. And then the north tower did fall, and the mushroom cloud looked even more like a nuclear explosion than its predecessor. Then a fourth plane was reported to have crashed in Pennsylvania.
You must understand that there was no certainty: was this the beginning of a gigantic attack on New York and Washington or was it its culmination? I didn't know; nor did anyone else. For an hour, I thought I would be lucky to see the end of that day. Was New York about to be torched in an uncontrollable firestorm? The city became quiet — so quiet that I looked out of my window to see why there was no traffic on First Avenue. But the avenue was jammed with traffic; it was silent because no car or bus or truck moved. Drivers had turned off their engines. On the sidewalks, thousands of people, many covered in ash and soot, walked north.
Some time later I left my apartment and walked to the Beth Israel Hospital on Second Avenue and 19th Street to give blood. Hundreds of nurses dressed in operating green stood outside the hospital with their gurneys, stretchers and stethoscopes; some spilling on to the avenue to get a better view of southern Manhattan and in the hope of seeing an approaching ambulance. No one came. No ambulance arrived. No blood was needed. The surgeons had no one to operate on. No one was injured. You were dead or you were alive.
Was the worst over or was this the beginning? I had established that my closest friends were alive, but someone I knew must have perished, 1 thought, and the number of potential dead was incomprehensible: 10.000, 15,000, 20,000? (Some British newspapers sneered when that figure began to fall, from 10,000 to 6,000 to 3,000, then to less than 3,000. So typical, so overly dramatic of Americans to inflate even the proportions of a tragedy! Yet there was no attempt at inflation in New York. In fact, it was a miracle that so few people did die.)
The New Republic's literary editor. Leon Wieseltier, wrote a splendid attack on those who attempted to beautify what they had seen. John Updike, who saw lower Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights, wrote, 'Smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure's vertically corrugated surface.' Wieseltier was withering: '[This aestheticism] is provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy. Its precision is a trick: it appears to bring the reader near, but it keeps the reader far. It is in fact a kind of armour: an armour of adjectives and adverbs. The loveliness is invincible. . . . The weather was indeed sadistically beautiful. But why is [Updike] writing about the weather? It was a deathscape that lay before him. There are circumstances in which beauty is an obstacle to truth.'
Yet if you were in New York, you cannot think about 11 September without remarking on the weather, meteorological conditions that suited the terrorists' plot so horribly well — severe clear. On that day, and the days that followed, how I wanted it to cloud over, for it to rain, for night to fall. With daylight, there was this sense of being so exposed, even if US fighters now howled over the city. Only at night, when one felt safer, did one drop one's guard, and allow fear to turn into shock or rage or grief. No one wanted to go to bed at night, no one wanted to be alone. I never saw bars and saloons so packed and animated — there was so much drinking — although every room instantly fell silent when television showed Mayor Rudolph Giuliani approaching a microphone.
There was no beauty to the words spoken by the mayor on 11 September or the days that followed. There was very little emotion, either. But what he said hour after hour, day after day, was always accurate, and his measured remarks were an important part of the city's extraordinary recovery. At a ceremony five days afterwards. Giuliani addressed 100 cadets who were that day promoted to the Fire Department of New York. 'Your willingness to go forward undaunted in the most difficult of circumstances is an inspiration to all of us. It sends a signal that our hearts are broken, no question about that, but our hearts continue to beat, and they beat very, very strongly. Life is going to go on.' These words, read almost a year later, retain all the conviction they had when I first heard them.
Previous page
