Homeland Elegies(62)

I went on: “My phone rang. I only had a landline back then. It was my parents. They were scared. I mean, they were relieved I was fine. There wasn’t any reason I wouldn’t be. I mean, in all my years here, I’d only ever been that far downtown twice. But then again, you never know. They made me promise I wouldn’t leave the house. I didn’t tell them I was supposed to go to my friend Stewart’s place to print out a play I’d just finished. He was a graphic designer and had a fancy laser printer he was letting me use to print copies to send to theaters and festivals.

“It was such a gorgeous day outside. Everybody remembers that. How clear and blue it was. Uptown, there was a gentle breeze coming off the river. It still felt like summer. People out in the streets—but nobody was going anywhere. I remember thinking that it didn’t seem like a Tuesday morning.

“Stewart’s door was open. I found him standing in the hallway outside the kitchen, crying. He just kept repeating over and over that the tower was gone. I didn’t understand what he meant. I went into the living room, where his roommate—who was white; Stewart is black—was watching it all on their huge plasma screen, a thrill in his eyes. He turned to us: ‘It’s all happening now,’ he said. ‘The shit show’s finally started.’ Then he started laughing. Stewart screamed at him to stop. Apparently the guy had been saying that all morning. Stewart started crying again, and his roommate jumped up from the couch and stormed out.

“I stood there and watched. Soon enough, the second tower just disintegrated. Right there. Right before my eyes. A column of smoke and powder tumbling down, like some terrible black flower collapsing in on itself. Stewart lost his shit. He howled and keened. I held him while I watched the footage of the second tower collapsing over and over.

“I called my parents from his kitchen. I knew they would be trying to reach me. My mother was beside herself. ‘Where are you? Why aren’t you picking up?’ I told them I’d gone to a friend’s house to not be alone, and then she started crying. My father told me she was worried about my cousin Ibrahim, who lived downtown. He was at NYU, in his second or third year, living in a dorm down in the financial district, which I remember thinking was weird when he first told me—but NYU had started buying so much real estate in the city, and they had these empty buildings down there they were putting students into. My father’d been trying Ibrahim, but it was almost impossible to get through to anybody’s cell phone that morning.

“Once Stewart’s boyfriend showed up, I left his place and went out into the street. From where I was, you could see the smoke and smell the faintest traces of it on the wind, though that far north—I was in Morningside Heights—the wind was blowing in the other direction. It felt safer to be uptown, but something was pulling at me to head south. I don’t know why I wasn’t more scared about what was happening than I was. The only thing that kept going through my mind was how shocked I was not to feel even a trace of surprise. Some part of me, I realized, had been expecting something like this for most of my life.

“The subways weren’t running. The streets felt strange. There were people in them, and cars, and buses. They all seemed to be moving at the same speed. I’d had a dream about there being an attack in the city a few nights before—”

“You did?” she asked.

“Yeah. That there was an attack and that people were buzzing in the streets like insects. It looked the way ants do after their colony’s been destroyed. That’s actually the thing that sticks with me the most, that animal sense of fear.

“I started walking. I walked down Broadway, through the Upper West Side, through midtown—people were pouring out into the streets, stopping to talk, people who clearly didn’t know one another huddled in groups, corner after corner. In Times Square, the scene was eerie. Traffic was at a standstill. Thousands of people were standing and staring up at the huge screens everywhere, watching it all like it was a scene in a movie.

“In the electronics stores farther down Broadway, the walls of TVs were showing the same thing, over and over—the fires, the smoke, the second plane flying into the side of the building, the falling bodies, the collapsing columns of steel and powder, the shell-shocked survivors covered in that white, ghoulish dust.

“There was a blockade at Twenty-Third Street. I told the officer guarding the gate I was trying to get to my cousin at NYU, and he let me through. At Fourteenth Street, the policeman told me they weren’t letting many people below Houston, and nobody below Canal. No exceptions. Here, the smell was so much stronger, like sugar and wood on fire with bitter smoke that stuck like grit to your teeth. Above us, a mountain of rising smoke towered over the buildings. It was so vivid it almost seemed alive. Angry. I remember suddenly understanding why the Hawaiians thought of volcanoes as gods. I was coughing now, and the air was getting worse. It didn’t seem to make much sense going any farther.

“I should’ve gone back. I should’ve gone home, or to someone’s place, like so many of my friends would end up doing. But I didn’t want to. I felt like I needed to be close to what was happening. So I walked west along Thirteenth Street to see if there was a better view from that side. On Seventh Avenue, people were coming uptown, some of them covered in that white dust. Everybody was worried there would be more attacks, and I heard people say there were boats at the pier taking groups off the island. Another person said she saw on some TV that Palestinians were cheering in the streets. She looked at me. ‘Can you believe that?’ she asked, seething. ‘I mean, can you believe that?’