— 9/11 and a Woman I Never Knew
Somewhere under the indefinite folds of blankets, pillows, sheets, and a tee shirt I had shed during a nightmare torn nyght, my cellphone shook and rattled and buzzed. Inhaling deep into the emptiness of my lungs I gasped for a first breath. Mouth open in the remains of an ever dark December morning, I pulled whatever my hands could find to take the sweat that cowered over my face and bare chest away.
That first breath, the breath that would tell me I was alive and this wasn’t just another nightmare, drifted further from me and I began to fear that I was in an eternity of a night — a nightmare I had so many nights before. It is 9–11. I watch in horror, helplessly, vacantly, remembering the faces of people I had known — known in the New York sense of knowing. Most were dead now, or had never been found. Among them 17 I knew — knew well enough to have coffee. Well enough to know what made them happy, what brought a smile to their face.
Among them was a woman.
Every time I saw her, I felt my breath weaken, my hands shiver, and my breath take leave of me. Every morning, and most every evening for three years, she had taken my breath from me, and every night and every morning I told myself that somehow I’d find the words, the courage, the determination to say something to her.
Anything.
Finally, my first breath.
The phone was still vibrating, rattling, stammering, when I found it near the foot of the bed. It had been a long night — between getting home from work just about at 3 AM and the nightmares, I had hardly slept.
“Yeah, what the fuck do you want?” I had been in the City for nearly 3 years. Fuck was an adjective of sorts — multipurpose and multi-functional. It worked when you were happy, had a recent, unexpected success, and when you were angry, frustrated, or, well, whenever you wanted to say it. Except I was well past the limits of angry, and I was caught up in the memory of a morning now three months ago to the day when a call like this one had taken me to Cowdersport, PA.
Were it not for that call, I would have been in the PATH station, three floors under the first tower. At precisely 8:45 AM.
I should have been dead. Another number among the 3,000, give or take a few dozen, who did die that day.
I listened as my manager detailed a long list of technical problems I needed to fix. NOW.
“Yeah, I heard you.” He repeated himself. “I said, ‘I HEARD YOU.’ FUCK MAN.”
The car service would be outside in a matter of minutes and I needed to get my ass to a facility called Level3 where our servers were hosted. One, a critical back end database server, was down. Every minute the server was down was draining revenue from the company.
He repeated himself again. I did what any New Yorker would do — I hung up on him. It was 6:30 AM. He called exactly at the same time three months to the day earlier. Another moment of cold terror. Another wave of faces I remembered. All now dead. The Hasidic Jewish man who read Torah every morning on the train. The Latina who spent the ride to Hoboken looking at photos of her children. The lawyer who read briefs silently. The stock broker who scoured the Wall Street Journal endlessly.
And her. Every morning and most nights for three years.
For a while there had been posters, well, more like letter-sized pieces of white paper, stapled and taped everywhere. The train station in Hoboken, where I went down a flight of stairs to rush into one of the compartments in the PATH to make my way with all the people I rode, under the river, under the Tower, up the stairs, into Manhattan.
Except, I never saw a poster with her face on it.
I don’t remember how I made it to the bathroom, but I did. I bent over the sink, my heart racing, sweat still all over me, as I tried to wash the memories away. I stood up, picked up the razor to shave, and collapsed back down on my forearms which were all that kept me from crumbling to the floor.
I felt cold and dead.
The fourth time, I managed to get the razor to clear my face, brushed my teeth, gathered my jeans that were still on the floor where I left them, found a more or less clean shirt, grabbed what I took to be my leather winter coat, and headed out of my apartment. The car was already there.
“What the fuck took you so long,” the driver said with a mixed Jersey/City accent.
“And what the fuck do you care? Add it to the fucking bill.”
Before we were half way down Union Ave, I was out cold.
“Hey,” I heard a voice and felt a hand on my knee, “hey, bud, wake the fuck up. This is a car service — not a fucking hotel.”
“What the fuck do you care?” I said as I fumbled to find the door handle. My feet were hardly on the pavement when he pulled away. The door, not quite closed, rattled as the car tripped over potholes and seams in the pavement. I did what any New Yorker would do. I gave him the finger.
There are few memories of that day. Next to none, actually. At one point I was so asleep I didn’t hear my manager talking to me. When I picked up my head, he was furious, of course, and I had no patience for him or his attitude. “Look,” I said, hoping not to lose my job over a temper tantrum born in severe exhaustion, “I haven’t had more than 3 hours sleep in the past three nights.”
“And?”
“I am fucking tired.”
“And I don’t fucking care.” He reminded me that my contract required me to complete other duties as assigned, and if that meant being up all night however many nights I had to stay up to keep the servers running. I could do it, or leave.
After 9–11, there was nowhere to go. He knew that. I had no choice.
The rest of the day faded into a continuum of days marked by their relationship to 9–11. I adjusted to the gray skies, the stench of death, the ever present ash that coated everything. As much as it pained me, I realized all the details about each of the people that I wanted to never forget were slowly being taken from me. I promised myself I would never forget the day when the plywood that was covered in fliers of missing people from the train was suddenly gone. I remember standing where the plywood had been, people scurrying around me, looking at the now empty space.
I closed my eyes and told myself I would never forget that moment. Or those people.
Hoboken was crowded with people, and I was in no mood to adjust to people darting around and often in to me. I just wanted to get to the apartment, find the sofa, and fall asleep. I took the longest step my legs would allow me to reach, and there, where she had sat for three years, there she was. As I had every time I saw her, I stopped in mid stride. I waited until I could breathe again.
My eyes never left her. I never wanted to forget her or that moment when I realized she was alive.
Usually, when the train pulled into Rutherford, I was one of the first people out the door and I would race past everyone until I reached my apartment.
Tonight, I didn’t. I waited until she left the train. I would have stopped to talk to her then, but my courage was as fleeting as the light of day in a New York December. She crossed the street, oblivious to my torment, and walked up Union Ave. In all the years, I never realized she lived somewhere near me.
That made all the grief I had suffered far worse.
I crossed the street to Union Ave and kept a safe New York distance behind her.
Either she sense I was following her, or the branch I managed to step on gave my presence away. She turned quickly, pulling her pocketbook against her chest. I responded by raising my arms as I tried to keep my backpack from falling off my shoulder to the ground. I mean, I didn’t know what else to do. I might have been in New Jersey, but that really didn’t matter. It was dark — exceptionally dark — and she had no idea who I was and what I wanted.
“Please,” I said, hesitantly, “I am not going to hurt you.” She released her pocketbook just enough to let me know she was not concerned to the point of screaming or using a cell phone to call the police. “It’s just….” This was not the time to lose my voice, my courage, or anything else. My heart was racing, and under my leather coat, my shirt was wet, wet to the point it has attached to my chest. “It’s just,” I said again, “after all that’s happened… I thought…. I just…” She was perplexed and restless. I needed to get it out. “I just want to tell you that you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” I couldn’t believe I had finally spoken the words.
She smiled. Her pocketbook fell to her side. She extended her hand — and I took it. I held it. I looked into her eyes. I blushed. Down my face. To my hands, which were now so warm I wasn’t sure what to do or say.
“Thank you.”
We talked for a few minutes. Ironically, she was from Concord, NC, about 70 miles from where I had lived.
As she walked away, I didn’t move. I just watched her walk into the darkness until even her shadow had disappeared.
I never saw her again.
A few months later, I left New York and Rutherford. My car packed, I walked down Union Ave one more time until I reached the train station. I turned in the evening light, and followed the path I had taken that night. I stopped where she had given me her hard.
In the stillness, I remembered.
In the stillness, I remember.
