The Lies That Bind(36)

“Air traffic control? On a perfectly nice day?” Scottie says. “NBC was broadcasting on Rockefeller Plaza earlier this morning….It’s beautiful there, isn’t it?”

I glance out my window, confirming saturated blue skies, not a cloud in sight. “But if the instruments aren’t working, then does it matter what the weather is like?” I ask, thinking aloud, hoping.

“Pilots don’t just fly planes into buildings! No matter what air traffic control is telling them to do!” Scottie says. “This has to be terrorism.”

Deep down, I know he’s probably right, and I feel the fear growing in my chest and stomach, as Jennifer, the first witness, gets back on the phone with Matt. “I—I’ve never seen anything— It looks like a movie!” she says, now hysterical and breathless. “I saw a large plane, like a jet, go immediately, headed directly into the World Trade Center! It—it just flew into it, into the other tower coming from south to north! I watched the plane fly into the World Trade Center! It was a jet! It was a very large plane! It was going south! It went past the Ritz-Carlton hotel that’s being built in Battery Park! It went—flew right past—it almost hit it—and then went in…”

Katie calls it shocking—and says something else I can’t hear over Scottie. I shush him, as the witness continues, “I’ve never seen anything like it! It literally flew itself into the World Trade Center!” Her voice is now shaking, as if she’s about to hyperventilate.

    I sit there, staring in disbelief, as they show a slow-motion replay from a different angle of what is unmistakably a jet, careening toward the tower before smashing into the side. It looks like a special effect in an end-of-the-world movie, the plane literally disappearing, absorbed into the building—poof!—before exploding into a huge ball of fire. It can’t be real. It can’t be real. Yet I’ve just seen it with my own eyes. Chills run down my spine as Matt Lauer spells it out, Now you have to move from talk about a possible accident to talk about something deliberate that has happened here.

At this point I’m freaking out inside. They replay the footage, followed by a close-up of fires raging, thousands of pieces of paper floating in the air like a ticker tape parade.

“What we’ve just seen is about the most shocking videotape I’ve ever seen,” Matt says, his voice steady, yet somehow not at all calm. He’s completely freaked out, too. I can hear it. I can feel it in the air.

“What are the odds of two separate planes hitting both towers?” Al Roker asks, his voice trailing off as the screen goes fuzzy for a second.

“It’s completely impossible to understand why this is happening—and to figure out what in the world is going on,” Katie says.

One beat later, I get call waiting, and see that it’s my mom. I tell Scottie I have to go talk to her, then click over to hear my mother muttering something.

“Mom?” I say.

“Oh, thank God!”

They are words she never uses unless she is actually thanking God—and another chill runs down my spine.

“Are you okay? Are you watching this?” she says, either on the verge of tears or already weeping.

    “Yeah,” I say, answering both questions at once.

“What in the world is going on?”

“I don’t know, Mom. It’s just…awful,” I say.

“I called your cellphone first,” she says. “And it didn’t even ring. Or go to voicemail. I was so scared….”

“I’m fine, Mom,” I say, wishing I could hug her. “I think the circuits are just overloaded….Where’s Dad?”

“He’s right here, sweetie. He’s not flying today, thank God….How close are you to those buildings?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe forty blocks?”

“That’s it? Only forty blocks away?”

“Mom, that’s pretty far,” I say, trying to reassure her. “It’s, like, two miles away.” Even as I say it, I realize how near that really is, in the scheme of the world, and I find myself eyeing my windows, thinking about an escape plan. As if an escape plan would do any good if a jet plowed into my apartment.

“What’s the tallest building near you?” she asks, as I get a flashback to all the times she corralled my sister and brother and me into our basement during tornado warnings. We’d hunker down with sleeping bags, sometimes all night long.

“The Empire State Building is, like, twenty blocks away,” I say.

“So, a mile?”

“Something like that…I promise, Mom. I’m totally safe here,” I say, as it occurs to me that this isn’t a promise I can make.

“Okay. Just please…stay put,” she says. “Don’t go to work today.”

“I won’t,” I say. “I already called in sick last night.”

She asks if I have enough groceries and water. I tell her that I do, even though I don’t, as a chorus of sirens wails outside my apartment.

“Is that near you?” she says. “Or on television?”

“On television,” I fib again. “Please don’t worry, okay?”

    “Okay,” she says, then says she needs to go to call my brother and sister, and other relatives, to let everyone know that I’m okay. “Just stay put.”