WORLD TRADE CENTER MEMORIES

I was not there at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. I had only been to the top of one of the towers once in 1985 but had walked past it or in the concourse below uncounted times when my younger brother and my former wife worked in the nearby Bankers Trust Building during the 80's. The Towers were, of course, massive, impressive, monumental. Yet, I never felt safe near them.

I remember the sunlit beauty of that 9/11 morning, (especially after the torrential, cleansing downpour of the previous evening), a neighborly chat with a woman on the bus, the ritualized but nonetheless sincere exchange of office greetings and pleasantries, the morning coffee followed by the routine staff meeting... Then the shocked looks of realization on the faces of my friends and co-workers, (people for whom I have come to care so much about and with whom I spend more time than my own family and non-work-related friends), at the horror of what had just been learned. They crashed into the Pentagon too? And a fourth jetliner into rural Pennsylvania!

Stragglers and refugees paraded north on Broadway, an exodus from the distant inferno. Yet I heard no words of the atrocity; only self-absorbed talk of finances and office politics as though merely an unexpected and welcomed holiday had just been declared rather than the deaths of thousands of lives and the destruction of an economic landmark, symbols of our world power and pride.

People gathered at banks and ATMs to collect what money was available should the emergency spread. What are we, after all, without money?

The brief comfort of potato chips and beer, a hug and hopeful assurance that everything would be all right. Friends and co-workers, faces familiar but not familiar, transformed by grief and fear...silent, reflective, weeping... Tears, feeling foolish, feeling afraid. What will happen now? Who did this? What monsters could possibly do such a thing? And which innocents will pay for the deaths of our innocents and when and where will it end? Do we know anyone down there? Are they okay?

The faces of strangers, the faces of friends, thoughts of family - they'll be worried! The need to be with loved ones! I have to get my daughter! The phones are out! Alone in the middle of a crowd... Go home, go home... The sound of fighter jets patrolling the skies above in search of more monsters... Don't be afraid, they're there to protect us... Will we ever feel safe again?

The white paneled morgue trucks escorted by police cars with flashing lights rolled slowly east on 14th Street...

Home, through the door, turn on Cable TV (the regular broadcast antennas had been destroyed with the towers); see the horror of the jetliner's murderous, suicidal plunge into the South Tower.

See people, friends and neighbors waving from above the gaping, flaming floors of murderous impact in the desperate, futile hope of rescue. Then, singly and together, jump thousands of feet to their deaths on the pavement below rather than suffer the suffocating smoke, heat and flames.

See the South Tower crumble at the point of impact and fall in its entirety in a massive cascade of smoke and debris.

See the terrified New Yorkers, men, women, uniformed personnel, ordinary people and heroes flee the onrushing, almost pyroclastic-style clouds generated by the collapse of such an architectural giant.

Then the inevitable fall of the North Tower and the horror is repeated a second, unendurable time. Over and over on the TV news, over and over in your mind... The dazed expressions of catastrophic disbelief on the faces of the mayor and other city officials, other buildings on fire, the collapse of WTC Building #7, everything, everyone covered with thick coatings of dust and tears... Exhausted survivors, police and firefighters, their eyes flushed, faces cleansed with bottled water by medical personnel... Words of comfort, arms embracing heaving shoulders. Alive, you're alive, I'm alive... What more can one do...? What more can one do...?!

Stunned rescue workers going through the steaming, smoking ruins to the sound of the chirping location beacons of the scores of fallen firefighters crushed beneath the rubble... Is this New York City or Dresden, Hiroshima...? A war-zone... Thoughts again of morning coffee and the routine staff meeting. There but for the grace of... Who...?

The vision of one man without hope falling alone down, down, down to his death... Some Chinese food, several Scotch-and-sodas... A big-budget Hollywood disaster film, a nightmare come true and the realization the morning after that it had all actually happened!

The memorials... The lost survivors. The candles, the flowers, the unanswered messages and unanswered prayers, the heart breaking photographs of missing loved ones... The faces of the dead, the faces of the living, all one and the same... Thousands... And an overwhelming sense of profound sadness...

And the sting, the taste, the smell...of the burning...in my eyes, in my throat, in my nose...in me...

Will Franz