Some days the bear eats you…
The crowd spills out of the concourse on the Liberty St side of WTC 4. Then everyone just stops, no obvious place to run to or from at the moment. All surfaces outside are covered by a layer of fine ash or dust. The air is full of particulates. Clearly, some sort of massive destruction has occurred nearby. The grim thought that suicide bombers are to crowds as tornadoes are to trailer parks propels me away from the milling crowd. Nearby, some construction workers are pointing up at the North Tower. Smoke and flame is billowing from a slash ripped in its side, about three quarters of the way up. Along with the conflagration, the air is filling with paper, thousands, maybe millions, of pages of commercial lifeblood, carried aloft by the super-heated updrafts. The horrifying, yet fabulous, confetti slowly descend on the watching and the wondering.
This is a moment of surreal beauty amidst the still unexplained carnage all around. It is burned into my memory as the exact divide between how it was before and how it is now. In that instant of passing innocence, paper continues to flutter down, a mass invitation to the apocalypse. RSVP.
Every siren in the city is now screaming and converging on the site. The better part of valor is to clear the area and let the professionals do their job. Braver men than I would shortly be climbing the stairs toward that inferno because… it’s the job. I have a bad feeling about this already.
There is much debris around but nothing my mind can assemble into any coherent idea of causation. Lacking any other explanation, I am left to wonder how anyone got such a big bomb up into the building.
Venturing further from the site, I join a crowd of onlookers gathering near St Paul’s Chapel on Church St. No useful information to be had there… it’s like standing inside a murder of crows trying to make sense of their din; there is much agitation but little information. I hear the word “plane” repeated again and again but my mind can still only grasp the idea of a bomb.
As I leave the group, searching for a pay phone (all cell service is down), it seems as if the hammer of Thor has struck a massive blow to the earth. It is the sound of an airliner striking WTC 2 not two blocks away at over 500mph. It is a sound not to be heard but to be felt in your flesh and bones.