I was 22, fresh from Midwestern college, at work in an office in Bethesda, one cup of coffee into a hangover when the first plane hit. Shelly called from the road with the news. I was there alone.
The night before I’d decided to shave my head. Not all the way, not Bic it, but close enough with the electric clippers I’d run and bought minutes before. It had seemed like a wild thing to do, to up and shave your hand, clippers in one head, a scotch in the other, and I was looking for wild things where I could find them. I was locked into my first office job. Three month of it had shown me just was a horrible and boring mistake I’d made.
Shelly was the other, senior office assistant at the real estate office. Her life seemed to me at the time a total waste. Recently divorced, she talked constantly about studying for her real estate license and cute boys who gave her mixed signals. She was a female body builder. While she ate lunch at her desk she’d rattle off to me the grams of protein she was currently consuming, the calories, the unsaturated fats. She never took a break during lunch, instead worked right through.
She had a smile too bright and too wide. It was like she was trying to squeeze every positive emotion left into her out from her face like someone might force the contents of an old toothpaste tube through the opening that’s long crusted over. I suspected Shelly was either heavy into diet pills or dabbled in prescription drugs. I’m sure she didn’t know what to think of me, newly shaved head, three-day stubble and yet another set of bleary eyes.
Shelly called just to tell me about the plane. This in itself was unusual because we did not have conversations that didn’t conform to three topics: Work, Shelly’s Vague Dating Life, and Shelly’s Workout/Eating Schedule. After I hung up, I looked at the New York Times website and saw the Towers, a faint trail of smoke streaming out from one, born by the wind.
Minutes later the phone rang again, with Shelly on the line. The second plane had hit the other Tower and something sounded off. I checked the Times website, but it refused the connection. Too much traffic.
*** *** ***
It took all the concentration I had to start working through the morning’s tasks, printing out daily market reports, transcribing voicemails, and then printing out my boss’s emails from the night. I took this last task as evidence of her idiocy. Planes and skyscrapers quickly faded from my mind. I bore down against a newly pounding sweaty headache.
Shelly called back ten minutes later to say one of the towers had collapsed. Down, I asked, all the way down?
I don’t know, she said over the phone. The radio just said collapsed. I’m on my way back in.
Anita, my boss, was one of the top-selling agents in Montgomery County, Maryland, home of corporate lawyers and million-dollar diplomats. When work dictated that one of these people move to or from Washington, D.C., they went to Anita. She’d built up her own real estate empire almost entirely by herself. Originally from Michigan, all the Midwest had been sucked out of her. She drove a Mercedes and yelled when she talked. She made a show of listening to clients, but cut Shelly and I off after 10 words. She had quit her job as an elementary school teach to sell real estate. I took this last fact as all the evidence I needed of her soullessness.
Me? I just wanted to write some poems. I had a vague daydream of publishing a book review or the like in the Washington City Paper, D.C.’s alt weekly. My dreams didn’t really go much beyond that anymore.
Shelly walked into the office faster than usual, which in itself was impressive because her daily gait was akin to a stock car race.
The second one’s gone, she said.
I looked up from my computer screen. What second one, I said.
The second tower. It fell too. They both did. It’s all over the radio.
This was the first indication that something was wrong, that this wouldn’t be contained to the usual 24-hour news cycle of breaking/analysis/react and then comfortably tucked away a week later into page-12 wire stories. Shelly tossed her purse on her desk and wheeled around to the portable TV on top of the filing cabinet. After flipping the dial and waving the two short antenna around to nothing but snow, she sat back down, quiet.
*** *** ***
We worked like that for awhile until the phones started to ring.
The second or third call was Anita, and I had the bad luck to answer. She was in her car and wanted her messages. I put her on hold, hustled back to her office and snatched the pile of pink slips off her desk.
Okay, I said, almost out of breath, I’m back.
Read them, she said.
I went through the messages, asking at the end of each if she wanted the return number. After the first one, she say, I’ll call back when I’m in the office. With each subsequent message, she simply responded by snapping, Call Back!, as if there were no time to waste on her way into the office.
At the end of the messages and five or six Call Backs!, she said, where is Michael?
Michael was the agent of a couple who were about to close on a million dollar home in Bethesda. Anita was anxious to reel them in for reasons I didn’t understand. Her anxiety served as a fretful wind, whipping Shelly and I around like flimsy ships in a black-sky storm.
He didn’t call last night, I said.
There was silence on the line. I waited.
I want you to call him, she said with a sharp voice. Call him and ask him when we’re meeting today to close. She hung up.
Ted stuck his head in the office. He was one of the lesser agents but had a voice like a set of brass knuckles dipped in whisky. He did voice work on the side, local radio commercials and recorded announcements in public places.
Bullshit like that, he said when I first met him, waving his hand in the air dismissively.
I can do the outgoing message on your phone if you want, he offered one day. I begged off but thanked him.
No problem, he said. Shit like that is easy.
Ted hated Anita, which didn’t make him special in the office. How’s working for the bitch, he asked me one day. I didn’t like Anita, but I didn’t like him calling her a bitch either, so I made a half-hearted stab at a lie. Ted just rolled his eyes and grinned.
Hey, Ted said now, his well-coiffed grey hair peeking from the door frame, did you hear?
I did, I said. Ain’t that some shit?
He grinned and then noticed my hair. Whoa, he said, when the hell did you do that?
Last night, I said, then shrugged by was of explanation.
Well you look like a damn terrorist, said Ted. You sure you didn’t have anything to do with those planes?
That was the first time I heard the word terrorist that day.
*** *** ***
I called Michael, the agent on the other side of the Bethesda deal, a little later. By then the office had taken on a confused, loose feeling. People were standing around desks, talking about the Towers and trying to get news. The Times website was still down, flooded with server requests. The radio didn’t offer much more than what we already knew.
Both Towers had come down and no one had expected them to fall. Lower Manhattan was sending off a huge column of black smoke. I scanned a mental list of people I knew from school. None of them that I could remember lived in New York.
When I got Michael on the line, he seemed surprised to hear me, as if expecting a different call. I looked down at my notes. Anita would be in soon. She would want to know when the deal was happening. If it was happening in the next hour, I would have to call her cell to reroute her to wherever she needed to be. But Michael’s voice seemed too thin and all of a sudden I felt sick in the stomach, my body tingling with anxiety that came whenever I had to force myself to do something I didn’t want to do.
I asked him about the meeting, and Michael sort of gasped and guffawed at the same time, a guttural reaction, and my arms went numb with faux pas embarrassment.
I don’t know, he said. My clients’ city is in flames right now.
The buyers were from New York. I didn’t know that, but Anita did. And she still wanted this deal done. Today.
I hung up and immediately began rearranging the mess of papers on my desk. I felt like I had just walked into the middle of a funeral home elegy and asked if they were about through.
Anita still wasn’t in when Ted came in a second time with news about the Pentagon. No one knew if it had been bombed or had taken a hit from another plane. Shelly and I jumped up and jogged to where three or four people were listening to a radio. No one knew anything. It was a bomb dropped from a plane, said one lady. No, a plane, like New York, said the second. The radio told us all flights had been grounded. There were more planes in the air, they said. Hijackings. Two or more. Maybe three. Several heading for Washington. The White House. Congress. Air Force bases. Fighter jets had been scrambled. Nobody knew anything.
We were starting to hear sirens outside, the long wails or fire trucks. Anita came in an I gave her the news about the deal. She took it badly, threw me a look of disgust and went to her desk. Shelly and I went to ours and I gave it my best acting job at working, looking quickly at Shelly every now and then. She seemed to be steadily typing away at a spreadsheet, but when I looked back five minutes later she was no further along than she had been.
Eventually, Anita walked in and stood between our desks. I guess there’s no point in staying, she said. Nobody is working.
She said it was okay, if we wanted, to leave. I grabbed my bag. Shelly stayed behind. Walking out the door, I wondered how long both of them would stay.
*** *** ***
I drove out of the underground parking garage and then I knew. Today was too big. For me, there were no historical or emotional reference points. I listened to NRP as I crept along on surface streets, edging my way in the great mass of traffic that had formed when offices around the city had shut down and sent employees home.
I thought it would be a good idea to fill up my car with gas, so I pulled into a station and sat in line four deep for the pump. While I waited a female reporter came on the air–the news was frantic now, both format structure and the anchors’ broadcast cool had disappeared. She was interviewing an Army officer live when her mic picked up someone telling her to shut the interview down.
You can’t say that, said the voice.
There were some muffled words of cross talk and then the radio went silent. It was four or five seconds before an anchor broke the dead air. He sounded confused and afraid. I topped off the tank and took out $200 from the ATM inside the gas station. It was the most I could get from one machine.
By the time I got on the inner loop of the Beltway there were emergency vehicles screaming by on the outer loop. Details were starting to come in now, the size of the planes, the fires and dust in Manhattan, thousands feared dead, the streams of people walking over the bridges into Brooklyn. Just like Dante, I thought. Just like Eliot. The damned weeping on bridges.
I hadn’t seen any of the video yet, so everything I heard was feeding the movie in my head. Later, when I got home, I sat on my bed watching the news. The major networks showed the towers burning, the great wall of dust and debris heading toward the camera when the first tower went. But the Spanish-language TV station showed what the networks didn’t, bodies dropping from the top stories of the towers, coming one after the other, sometime together, joined at the arms. The camera panned down with them for what seemed like an impossible amount of time before cutting away just before impact.
The traffic crawled on the Beltway. I rolled my windows down. Against the shutter of helicopters, I couldn’t help but look at the blue sky. It was as crisp as a glass of cold vodka. We all crept along and for the first time I heard what sounded like thousands of screaming people trapped in a tunnel. A fighter jet cut through the sky, heading south. It was moving too fast for me to see its markings. Two more shot over my head, the same sound trailing them after they had gone from sight.
For the next few weeks during the night, that was the sound I heard when I woke up in the middle of the night. Muffled engines of F-18s, running up and down the Potomac, looking for God knows what.
