That Morning

Being the habitual late riser that I am, I was utterly dead to the world until I heard the news. I would have slept right on into the early afternoon and awakened to one hell of a surprise since I'd never have heard the phone ringing down the hall in the old apartment. However, Sarah had just come back from classes sometime around 10 A.M. and tried to rouse me from my slumber by telling me with great understatement: "hey....you might want to wake up. Some really weird things are happening."

That didn't exactly get me going. I barely moved, and mumbled a toneless "uhhh like what" out of the corner of my mouth.

"Well...someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center."

Groggily, all I could muster was a noncommittal reply. "Huh. That sucks."

"Well...a few minutes later, another plane crashed into the other tower."

I didn't see that one coming. I opened my eyes and squinted at her in the bright light of morning. "What?"

Sarah then told me of the (erroneous, as it turned out) rumor of a car bombing at the State Department, then hit me with the haymaker punch: "And then, someone crashed another plane into the Pentagon."

That news did the trick, affecting me like someone had just dumped a bucket of ice cold water onto the bed. We'd just gone from "terrorism" to out-and-out war. I sat up fast and aimed an unbelieving, incredulous stare at her. "WHAT?"

A bleary-eyed hustle down the hall from the bedroom to the living room followed, and I flipped around from CBS to NBC to ABC to Fox and to CNN ... all of them showing the twin towers steaming blackly away like giant steel chimneys, alternating with views of the stoved-in side of the Pentagon. It struck me at that instant that the Pentagon looked to be in far worse shape than the Trade Center, which I think was due to my having been in close proximity to the place during a weekend trip to Washington D.C. in 1994. In contrast, I haven't been in New York City since I was a kid, and I have very few memories of the place, and thus I had no real sense of scale to apply to what I was looking at in those pictures. My initial thought was that the Trade Center towers had been broadsided by a Cessna packed with C-4.

A few minutes later, whatever network I was watching at the time flipped to a rerun of the second plane going into the tower. I don't think my eyes bugged that wide or my jaw went that slack since the morning of the Challenger explosion. It wasn't the spectacular fireball that made my stomach feel like it had just dropped into my lap, but instead it was seeing the object that caused the explosion -- certainly not a Cessna or a Lear Jet.

"Holy shit..."

A couple of minutes later, the first tower went down right in front of my eyes. Like so many others, it was at first impossible to grasp that what I was seeing something happening in the Real World and not some summer action movie -- the scale of this just completely poleaxed me.

I think it was at some point in the utter fucking pandemonium after the first tower had come down that my brain suddenly kicked on again and began to process what I had just seen, and I heard myself splutter out: "Jesus Christ! Were there passengers on those planes?!"

As it turns out ... yes, there were.