JEFF'S LIFE
by Jeff Stimpson

Gone

"Sunday afternoon, Pearl Harbor was sure of only one thing -- wherever the Japanese were, they would be back." -- Walter Lord, Day of Infamy.

Sometimes when I'm bored at work, I make a tiny World Trade Center out of four clips of staples. I guess I won't do that anymore. Most of my real World Trade Center memories were from a great distance, as I walked to work or from a movie or to or from somewhere that used to be. I was at the top of the towers only once. My uncle took me, in 1980, on December 7th.

The new World Trade Center era dawned on September 11th, when I surfaced outside the 14th Street subway station and looked down Seventh Avenue. I had a kamakazi's-eye of the huge black patch on the silver side of one of the towers. Orange licked the edges of the patch. I asked someone what happened. Plane, he said, off-course. Pilot error. Standing there, looking south as history rose in thick black ribbons of smoke, I thought at least it wasn't terrorists, who would have packed a plane with explosives and aimed for the towers' bases.

I headed for work, passing knots of people at all the intersections. I work about a mile north of the Trade Center, and had a clear view all the way. I got to my office at about 9:20. Co-workers said it was like watching a movie. "You can't believe what you're seeing out the window," I heard a colleague tell his wife on the phone. Jill called twice. She'd tuned in to see "Martha Stewart" and just couldn't believe what she was seeing on television.

I told my boss my base and explosives theory. "Yes," he said, "but this way the firefighters have a harder time getting at the fire, and it's more spectacular." My boss is a good guy to have around when things get wonky.

At one end of my office is a conference room -- at least a conference room was there when I saw my office last -- and the room has a big, big window that faces south. At one point a co-worker said, "The roof is collapsing. Better go quick if we want a look." By the time I got into the conference room one of the towers was gone, and lower Manhattan was dust and smoke at the base of the one tower that still stood. Co-workers who were making any noise at all were crying.

"Wow," I thought, "imagine a world with just one World Trade Center tower."

I told my boss I was heading immediately to scoop Alex from his school, on 19th Street off Fifth Avenue. I said I'd walk him home if necessary, but I was sure that I'd catch a bus. All the way to the school, I turned often to glance south. The tower was still there, still smoking. With the forethought of a child of the Cold War, I stopped into a grocer's and bought a bottle of water. The counterwoman brushed tears as she took my $1.25.

At 17th Street and Fifth Avenue I turned around again, and as I watched the smoke and dust billowed hard and dark, and from the edges of the cloud rained silver confetti. The smoke and dust billowed solid at the base of the tower. Then above the smoke, against the sky, there was no more tower.

The street moaned. "It's gone, it's gone, too," someone said. "Fuckers!" one man screamed southward. "Motherfuckers! This is my country, goddammit! I love the United States of America!" He moved off. I think he was disappointed that no one applauded.

Most people cried. I moved toward the school's door with what I hoped was an appropriate expression of shock -- much as anything was appropriate anymore. As I rang for the elevator, a sobbing woman tried to touch my arm. She still cried as the doors closed, but by the second floor she had collected herself enough to say, "You wife called. She said you'd be coming."

I found Alex in his classroom, silent over his mid-morning granola bar. He reached up his arms to me. He hates school. I turned to his teachers. Are there any subways, had they heard? Buses, maybe? They started to give me directions to the nearest subway stop, then realized that they'd heard no trains were running. I asked if the school would be open tomorrow. "Call us," they said.

"Up for a hike, Alex?" I asked. We started east, toward Madison Avenue, on 19th Street. Jill and Ned were waiting home, on 108th Street. It takes about a minute to walk a Manhattan block, a little longer if you have to carry a 3-year-old boy, his bat backpack, and one of daddy's T shirts that he keeps at school to feel secure during naptime.

To pass the time this clear fall day of infamy, I told Alex how they'd gotten the Trade Center, how he and Ned wouldn't remember the Twin Towers, how somebody was going to get the shit bombed out of them for this. People moved in a human river north -- cars and buses were sparse, but just numerous enough to keep the pedestrians on the sidewalk -- and every few blocks a knot would be gathered around an open, parked car that would have the stereo blaring one of New York's all-news stations. Imagine that: a car stereo blaring an all-news station.

Alex and I had gone about nine blocks, and I was prattling to him how his grandma wouldn't have thought twice about an 89-block stroll when I crashed into a knee-high standpipe. My forehead closed with the sidewalk as I shot the heel of my right hand to the pavement and tried to lift Alex's head clear. I made it by about two inches. It would have been a bad morning to have an injured child on your hands in Manhattan. People offered me help up.

This was a good day to be a New Yorker and an American, even if you'd just lost your biggest building. One church set up a table on the sidewalk and offered paper cups of water. "This is nice," said one woman who stopped for a drink. "This is New York," the church water guy answered, then he turned tp bellow inside the church, "I need trashbags!"

Every 10 blocks I stepped out of the river into the doorway of an office building, into the cigarette smoke of suddenly discharged office workers, and set Alex down and gave us both a swig from the bottle of water. I then stepped back into the human river flowing north on Madison Avenue -- flowing smoothly at times, slow at other times as mobs of optimists waited for a city bus or gathered around a storefront TV. Many hugged cell phones.

"You know the World Trade Center towers? They ain't there no more."

"That's what I'm tellin' you! The World Trade Center is gone."

I held onto Alex and kept walking, walking, walking. My feet burned and my shirt was wet with sweat when, on 100th Street, a messenger asked me, "Is it true about the World Trade Center?"

I said it was, and that I'd seen the second one go.

"I just made a delivery there yesterday," he marveled.

Small world. Eight more blocks and Alex and I were home. He could watch Elmo while Ned played on the blanket and Jill got me a glass of ice water, and we could all wait for what would happen next. (September 2001)

After the Fall

I'm writing this in a Starbuck's in Manhattan. Everybody in here is reading a paper. The whine of the expresso machine makes me jump. If I step outside and look down the avenue, I will see a cloud of dust and smoke.

After the World Trade Center went down, I carried Alex from his school on 19th Street to our home on 108th Street. The walk took two and a half hours. I carried him all the way up Madison Avenue -- no chance I was setting him down in that human flow -- and yet again he was a hero. Never squirmed, never cried, smiled a couple of times at especially funny storefronts, and obediently dismounted daddy's aching arm once or twice for a sip of bottled water. The flow of people was also an orderly credit to a city plunged into nightmare.

Alex and I stopped at grandma's because I was worried about her getting to dialysis. At grandma's, Aunt Julie tickled Alex on the bedroom floor while I instant-messenged Jill that we were fine and on our way home. (All payphones on the walk up Manhattan were busy, and the regular phone lines were out between grandma's and home.) Aunt Julie fed me melon on a fork while I held Alex, and we started out again.

We got home about 1 o'clock. My legs ached. (Later I'd find five blisters on my toes.) The TV was on in our living room, broadcasting CBS, the one network still reaching non-cable viewers in New York. All other networks and stations had their transmitters atop World Trade Center One. "Can you believe this?" Jill asked, referring, I think, to more than the TV situation.

We took Alex and Ned to two playgrounds. The weather was splendid: cool, leaves sparkling on a light and dry northern breeze, the skies split now and then only by the scream of F-14s low over New York City, flying what I think carrier pilots still call Combat Air Patrol. I tried to donate blood on the afternoon of the 11th. They said it would be a four-hour wait. They took my number, but have never called. Police have sealed off streets near ERs and cleared the way for imminent wounded.

Alex did the ladders and all the slides -- he's getting very stable on both -- and Ned and Alex rode the swings until my legs began to cramp. We stayed late on the playgrounds. "What do you want to do?" I asked Jill. "Go home and watch video of planes hitting the World Trade Center over and over?"

"U.S. Attacked" read the two-inch-high headline of Wednesday's Times. Alex's school and my office closed. Two more buildings fell down (later I'd learn that one of them housed my bank's main server). The weather reports began featuring a gray oval -- the smoke cloud -- pointing out from lower Manhattan. We packed the double stroller and headed across Central Park on Wednesday for more playgrounds. All the way across the park, and often in the days since, I glanced down the avenues.

Nope, still gone, just like dead people. "Everything does look different, doesn't it?" Jill said.

People called. One friend saw both planes hit and both towers fall. Everybody knew somebody who worked there. "94th Fl.," read the fluttering flyers. "27 years old. 5'11", 155 lbs. Rose tattoo on wrist. Please call with ANY info." "Worked on 102nd floor, WTC 2. Cell phone call home at 8:59 a.m. Red shirt. Wore a gold neck chain." "Worked on 98th Fl. of North Tower. 5'9", 125 lbs. 26 years old. If seen, please call."

Theories flew, including mine that a) more human beings enjoyed the World Trade Center than have ever enjoyed Bin Laden's company, b) terrorists surrender their only real defense when they strike first, and c) Pearl Harbor didn't work in the long run, either. Among the facts: the blossoming of American flags; few survivors appeared at those ready ERs; Manhattan had 90 phony bomb threats by Thursday night; and, in the parking lots of commuter rail lines in New Jersey and Connecticut and up the Hudson, 1,000 cars suddenly sat untouched.

As the past defining disasters of our lives became chickenfeed, sirens made pedestrians turn their head -- and there were many sirens. So did the bang of heavy boxes dropped accidentally on the floors of delivery vans. So did people just running for a bus, mistaken over and over for the first signs of fresh attacks and a spark of panic.

On the home front, I looked at various buildings and wondered how much rubble each would make. Alex crawled up more ladders, slid down more slides, got a runny nose, and stood resolute for dumping CBS for an Elmo video. Ned squirmed through non-stop TV bulletins. Both boys continued to love their evening baths, though news stations replaced CDs of Johnny Horton and Meatloaf.

We ran Alex ragged on playgrounds during afternoons. A tired boy is one less worry at bedtime. He seemed to love the afternoons that I almost thought of as idyllic until late Thursday, when the breeze shifted to the south and the playgrounds began to smell of smoke. (September 2001)

Rumors of War

Rumors are already circulating after the WTC attack. A police officer rode debris down 80-plus stories of a collapsing tower, for example, and witnesses reported seeing Satan's face in smoke from the buildings.

No doubt about the Devil's presence in the attack. The surfing cop scuttlebutt, sadly, is just that. But since you can't fight a war without rumors, here are a few others that flew around New York after the Trade Center was destroyed:

-No mail pickup from street boxes. Jill's mother started this rumor when someone in her building told her that there'd be no more mail collected from the box in the lobby and that everything had to be mailed from the Post Office. Jill squashed this rumor last Friday, when she had a stack of stamped Rosh Hashanah cards and she spotted a mailwoman on the street. "Can I give these to you?" she asked the mailwoman. "We heard there's no pickup in street boxes." "Where'd you hear that?" the mailwoman demanded. "It's a lie!"

-Middle-eastern food will kill you. I had Alex out for an afternoon stroll on Sunday when we passed his favorite falafel joint. I had visions of them putting glass in his lunch, or of being caught in the shop when vigilantes tossed in their firebomb, or other fantasies common to Americans at the outbreaks of wars. These people have always been kind to Alex, however, often giving him six falafel balls when we paid for only six. At last I wheeled him in. An American flag hung on the wall, and the cook was wearing a U.S.S. John F. Kennedy baseball hat. Alex enjoyed his six falafel. Nonetheless, we steered clear of the neighborhood mosque on the way home.

-We're all preparing for biological or chemical attack. Not Jill. Last night she baked a cake. If we can ever get Alex back on a regular schedule of school attendance, she also plans cookies.

-This looks like a movie. This was an especially popular one around my office on the day of the attack. Rescue workers later told this to local New York news stations, too, and Jill read about the analogy in the Times (the difference being that, for the terrorists, the movie ends with the bombing, and for us it just begins). Certainly is realistic, I'll say that.

-Commutes are fouled up. Not mine. The express train home now stops its southern run at W. 14th Street instead of the southern tip of Manhattan, which means I have an excellent nightly shot at boarding a freshly emptied train and getting a seat. I have made quick progress through a book on Franklin Roosevelt; I find recollections about the earliest days of the Depression heartening as I ride through the dark tunnels.

-Life is returning to normal. Yesterday I saw two cops stop a guy on the sidewalk in connection with a shoplifting from a grocer store. Such scenes have almost become a relief.

Getting back to normal, however, is hard without most of your TV stations, and mine turned to snow with the collapse of their transmitters on one of the towers. Jill and I couldn't eat dinner to "The Simpsons" last Sunday night. I won't see the Redskins play the Packers this Monday. Alex can't watch fresh Elmos on PBS's "Sesame Street." For evening entertainment, we have turned to tapes of and "Wallace and Gromit" and Groundhog Day (and how chilling now to think about re-living one day over and over). Professionally, I've had to postpone pestering not-for-profit groups about signing me on as a speaker on a dad's experience in the NICU.

No one in New York, probably no one anywhere, hears a siren or a jet in the same way anymore.

Thankfully, Alex and Ned don't realize the fear when the doors of the subway close, the train doesn't move, and I swear I smell gas. The fear of strangers and their unchecked shoulder bags, the fear of walking the streets and trying not to glance south at the still-billowing face of the Devil.

The parks remain open on these fiendishly clear and cool fall days. With Alex's school schedule riddled with sudden days off, he finishes each day with dirt on his pants and fatigue in his eyes. Ned can't say "Afghanistan" yet, but instead he's trying to stand and walk. Jill endlessly throws out papers and straightens up the dining room table. These are facts to live by. (September 2001)

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