Homer's Odyssey

19 • A Hole in the Sky

We wept and lifted up our hands to heaven on seeing such a horrid sight, for we did not know what to do.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

THERE ARE EARLY-FALL DAYS IN NEW YORK SO STAGGERINGLY BEAUTIFUL, so laden with the promise of fall beauty still to come, that to experience them is, you tell yourself, worth all the money and hassle, all the striving and frenzy, that it takes simply to live in Manhattan. The leaves are still green and the air hasn’t turned cool yet, but it isn’t hot anymore, either. There’s a crispness to it that siphons off the brown industrial haze that hovers over the skyline during the humid days of July and August, leaving the air as clear and crystalline as God ever intended.

It was on the morning of one such day, at around eight fifteen, when I found myself facing an empty cat food bowl, an emptier cupboard, and a dilemma. I typically fed the cats a premium dry food (Vashti had developed food allergies, and the only brands that didn’t trigger them were, naturally, the most expensive) supplemented by a can of moist food made by the same manufacturers (I had also learned that the more expensive the moist food, the less likely it was to make Homer gassy). Occasionally I fed them a can of the cheapest cat food out there, because my cats loved the cheap stuff with all the ardor of a child who’d much rather eat McDonald’s than her mother’s healthier home-cooked meals. But I had nothing on hand at the moment, not even a can of tuna that could substitute as a festive, hasty meal in a pinch.

I could rush out now to the little gourmet grocery store across the street and refill their food before leaving for work. While they didn’t sell the specific brand I liked, I could buy a small box of a good-enough brand that would be gentle on Vashti’s sensitive system and hold us over for a day or two.

Or I could wait a few hours until lunchtime, walk over to the pet store that was closer to Broadway, buy the better food, and dart back to my apartment to feed them then. My office was only a block away from my apartment, and only three blocks from the pet store, and I had made this round trip often enough. Living so close to my office, I hated the idea of being even five minutes late to work—feeling that I had no excuse not to walk in punctually at the dot of nine every morning. So it was usually during lunch that I made these midweek pet food runs. Besides, I liked to visit my cats midday. It was about the only free luxury my life in New York offered, and the cats—particularly Homer—always treated these spontaneous midday appearances like a holiday.

In the end, it was the complete emptiness of their food bowl that convinced me. I had sometimes gone to work leaving them with only a little food, but never leaving them without anything. Vashti sat next to the bowl and squeaked at me in a beseeching, yet pointed, way. No food at all? she seemed to ask. You’d really leave us with no food at all? Sighing at my own lack of foresight for not having stocked up on supplies over the weekend (I was running dangerously low on kitty litter as well), I grabbed my purse and headed out.

The street in front of my Financial District apartment was one of the oldest in New York, and so narrow that I could cross it in fewer than five steps. The line at the grocery store’s cash register was long, as it always was in the mornings when nine-to-fivers grasped for their coffee as if it were a draught of sweet life itself. But the queue moved efficiently, and barely fifteen minutes had passed before I was once again in my apartment.

I had just emptied the entire box of food into their bowl, with all three cats seated in an eager semi-circle around me, when there was an enormous, muffled BOOM! It was more felt than heard, like the vibrations caused by a speaker with the bass turned all the way up. My apartment building shook slightly, and a few kernels of food spilled from the bowl onto the floor. Scarlett and Vashti darted under the bed so fast, it was as if a chain had been yanked that jerked them under. Homer leapt to stand in front of me, all his hackles raised, his nose sniffing the air as his ears moved from side to side. He growled a warning to whatever this invisible menace was. Stay back, the growl said. Stay away from us …

“It’s okay, little boy,” I said, stroking his back. “It was just a car backfiring. There’s nothing you have to protect Mommy from.”

Homer didn’t like it. For no reason at all that I could discern, he didn’t like it. He ran from corner to corner of the apartment, hackles and ears still at full attention, a sentry securing a perimeter. Every so often, he would come to stand in front of me, continuing his growl. Scarlett and Vashti were equally unnerved, refusing to put so much as a whisker out from under the bed. By the time I lured them out, it was a minute or two past nine o’clock. It looked as if, for the first time since I had started my job in New York, I was going to be a few minutes late after all.

I had slung my purse over my shoulder when the second BOOM! came, shaking our building once again. This time, the cats couldn’t be comforted. My apartment was a corner unit, with windows facing north and east, and Homer leapt to the sill of the westernmost of the northern-facing windows, hissing wildly.

There was snarled traffic and endless construction work around my building all the time, and the very narrowness of the streets—surrounded like a canyon with buildings that stretched thirty, forty, fifty stories high—echoed and magnified random sounds beyond their actual volume, even all the way up where I lived on the thirty-first floor. So I truly wasn’t worried about anything at that point beyond how upset the cats were. I hated to leave them in that state, but what could I do? I certainly couldn’t call my boss and tell him I was taking the morning off because my cats were upset.

So I left them, Homer still hissing at the window, Vashti and Scarlett huddled up beneath the bed.

The lobby of my building was serene as I dropped three pairs of pants with the on-site dry cleaner and crossed toward the front door. Tom, my doorman, usually waved a cheerful goodbye to me, but today he was on the phone, speaking in a hushed, anxious murmur. His expression was pained, and I remember feeling a fleeting sympathy for him as I passed. Tom was a good man; I hoped that whoever he was talking to wasn’t delivering bad news.

The street in front of my building was as crowded as it had been earlier, when I’d darted out to get the cat food. There were people everywhere. They stood on sidewalks, in doorways, and in the middle of the street itself. But now, the street wasn’t the buzzing hive of rush-hour activity it had been less than an hour ago. These people standing here now were completely frozen. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. It was as if wax figures from a museum had come to life, wandered out into the streets, and then simply decided to stop and resume their waxy poses where they stood. The only noise I could hear was what sounded like the sirens of a thousand fire trucks, spilling over one another and competing to be the first to blare their panic into the early-fall air.

The silence and stillness of that Manhattan street, in the heart of the Financial District, at the height of rush hour, was the first time that day when—still not knowing why—I felt a creeping fear. Everybody was looking in the same direction—due west. Of course I turned, to see what they were all looking at.

The World Trade Center was on fire.

The towers were etched against the perfect blue of the morning sky, and they were on fire. They loomed over everything, appearing to be five feet from me rather than the five blocks they actually were. Black smoke billowed up, and shards of glass and debris fluttered down, as gracefully as the fall leaves that were only a few weeks away. Then I saw what couldn’t be, it couldn’t possibly be—and yet it was, it was—a man on fire, falling from one of the highest floors. He didn’t fall in the elegant spiral of the debris, but in a straight-down plummet.

My stomach contracted into a painful dry heave and I retched, suddenly grateful that I hadn’t eaten breakfast.

The people around me had seen it, too, and many of them turned to clutch the arms or bury their faces in the shoulders of those standing closest to them. From the stiff, automatic way in which these gestures were received, I guessed that some of those grabbed were strangers to the people who’d grabbed them.

I didn’t want to touch anybody, and I didn’t want anybody to touch me. There would be an indisputable reality in human contact, like when you say to somebody, Pinch me, so that you know you’re not dreaming. Holding myself as carefully stiff as something carved from wood, I walked the block to my office.

The message light on my phone was already blinking, and the phone itself rang incessantly. My co-workers were speaking quietly, clustered in groups of two and three around the windows in our office that faced onto the World Trade Center. A plane hit it. A small plane. But how could a pilot not see … got disoriented … an accident … a horrible accident …

The windows from my own desk looked directly onto the World Trade Center. The black smoke still gushed upward. I saw helicopters weave through the smoke, circling … circling. Helicopters have always been the paranoiac’s symbol of government omnipotence, gliding with sleek menace through movies about evil federal conspiracies or dystopic futuristic societies. Now I thought that I had never seen anything as helpless-looking as those helicopters, small hatchlings continually repulsed from their nest. There’s no way they can land, I thought. How will they get those people out?

The first call I made was to my mother. I felt an absurd need to announce to somebody that I was okay—even though, obviously, I was okay. This was something that was happening to other people, to the ones in the World Trade Center. Not to me.

Once I heard my mother’s voice on the phone, I felt comforted. “Don’t look at it,” she instructed. Obediently, I drew down the shade over my window.

My next phone call was to Tony in Miami, who was watching the story unfold on the local news. “They’re saying it was terrorists,” Tony said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I replied immediately—and it wasn’t denial. I really meant it. Terrorists! Who could believe such an absurdity? The people putting forth this theory were of the same ilk as the ones who believed the government was hiding little green men in the deserts of New Mexico. “Of course it wasn’t terrorists. It was an accident.”

“Gwen, they flew two huge passenger jets into those buildings on purpose,” Tony insisted. “I’m watching the film footage on the news right now.”

The PA system in my office building, the one that informed us of fire drills or elevator outages, began to spit and crackle. The Jamaican-accented voice of the security guard downstairs came on, only it didn’t have the jovial resonance of the voice that greeted me every morning with a “Hello! Good morning, miss!” This voice sounded strained and awful. Our building was being evacuated, the voice said, and would not reopen that day. We were to proceed calmly to the emergency stairs and exit the building as quickly as possible.

“I have to go now,” I told Tony. “I’ll call you later, okay?” It felt odd, I thought, to go through the polite formalities of hanging up on my friend when the voice over the PA had just told us, in a way his words hadn’t, that we were all being instructed to run for our lives.

A co-worker named Sharon stopped by my desk. Sharon was a few years older than I was and one of the directing partners of the company I worked for. We had collaborated on a few projects and exchanged friendly enough words in passing, but had never spent time together socially outside of the office. “You live around here, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “I live a block away.”

“Why don’t you come with me,” she said. “I was going to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and get a room at the Brooklyn Marriott. We can have drinks and call people to come over and meet us.” When I hesitated, she added, “You don’t want to go home and sit alone a few blocks away from all this.”

I’d had a half-formed idea that I might call Andrea or one of the handful of other friends I’d made since moving, on the chance that they, too, had been released from their offices. But going to see any of them would mean traveling all the way uptown. Getting into the subway or riding on a bus seemed unwise at the moment. The far side of the Brooklyn Bridge was actually much closer to my office than, say, Midtown Manhattan.

And I didn’t want to stray too far from my cats. Without really thinking about it, I was operating on the vague assumption that the fires would rage for a while until they were finally put out, at which time the dead would be collected and the grieving—bottomless, incalculable grieving—would begin.

But I also knew that, when all that had happened, and when I was tired of being with other people and talking over this thing, this horror, I would want to return to the quiet of my apartment, and to the warm certainty of the furry bodies of my cats.

So it was a relief, when Sharon extended this invitation, to feel that somebody else was taking charge. Sharon wasn’t exactly my boss, but she was one of the people I answered to and, moreover, had lived in New York her entire life. Sharon would know, better than I possibly could, what we were supposed to do.

The two of us walked the few blocks to the Brooklyn Bridge. Nobody else from the office joined us, and the thought occurred to me that Sharon’s invitation hadn’t been entirely casual, that she was—for reasons that couldn’t be found in the very slight interaction we’d had thus far—looking out for me. Clearly, we were not the only ones who’d had the idea of leaving Manhattan; the Brooklyn Bridge was a solid wall of human flesh. It had been closed to vehicular traffic, and people were climbing up the sides of the railings to access the bridge, pulled up and over by pedestrians on the other side, rather than walking all the way down to the pedestrian entrance.

For all that there were thousands of people on that bridge, the crowd was strangely quiet. The word terrorists could be heard in almost every single murmured conversation, and I was now long past the point of disbelieving it. Then somebody near us said, “What if they blow up the bridge?”

It was a preposterous idea. The notion of somebody having the audacity to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge—the sheer impossibility of its disappearance from the New York skyline—was so absurd as to sound almost like the punch line to a bad joke.

Once introduced, however, it was an idea that was impossible to put from our minds. Sharon and I tried to distract ourselves by talking about the likelihood of finding a free room at the Brooklyn Marriott, and making lists of the people we would call to join us. Did it make more sense to stop for bottles of liquor on the way, or to pay the exorbitant prices that the hotel’s honor bar would surely levy? Our backs were turned to the World Trade Center, and our view was of nothing except thousands of people and the sanctuary of Brooklyn before us. As long as we walked and talked like normal people, speaking of normal things, the world was manageable.

The air was acrid with the smell of smoke. A woman walking near us limped slightly, and she complained—with a forced, aren’t-we-being-brave-about-this good humor—that if she’d known she’d have to walk so much today, she would have worn more practical shoes. Sharon and I smiled sympathetically, and were on the verge of responding, when a man streaked by, shouting, “They blew up the Pentagon! They blew up the Pentagon!”

We heard a colossal crack and groan. The bridge trembled, a vibration radiated from the soles of our feet up to our legs. They were blowing up the bridge! They were blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge! People began to scream and cry and rush and push, they knocked into other people and those people fell down and the people behind them kept running over them and Sharon and I grabbed on to each other to keep our footing. I wanted to scream, too, but there was no air in my lungs. There was no air anywhere. The Brooklyn Bridge was exploding, disintegrating, and I was standing on it!

Every muscle and tendon in my body strained to be yards and yards ahead of where I stood. The only thing that held my body back was the hard barrier of my skin, which stubbornly refused to go forward. My hands and legs shook with the desperate effort my body made to jump out of my skin and rush away, away, away from all this.

A flash of vision swam before my eyes, not of my own life, but of grainy black-and-white footage from Holocaust documentaries I’d seen. It was of a group of old Jewish men, lined up facing a wall. Each had his hand clasped in the hand of the man next to him, and they were praying—the prayer all Jews are supposed to say at the moment of their death. I could hear them as clearly as I heard anything around me, and then I heard my own voice—as if it were something separate and outside of myself, thick and unrecognizable—reciting with them: Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai eh-chad …

Then everybody stopped abruptly, as if we had all been connected to a central power source whose plug had just been pulled. We had realized that the bridge wasn’t disintegrating, hadn’t been rent in half to spill us into the East River below. As one body, we all turned our heads to look back at the city we were fleeing.

One of the towers of the World Trade Center was collapsing inward upon itself. Within seconds, there was nothing left of it but a smoky hole in the skyline where it had stood. The smoke of the fire had been black, but the residue of the collapse was a shimmering beige. It hung in poised perfection, like the afterbirth of fireworks, in the brilliant blue air.

“It’s okay,” I said to Sharon. “It’s okay. It’s just the tower collapsing.”

It was a ridiculous thing to say. What could be less “okay” than the collapse of a tower of the World Trade Center? And yet, in that moment, it was okay—not only because it meant that the Brooklyn Bridge hadn’t been blown up, but also because it made sense. Buildings burned, and then they fell down. What was the expression? Burned to the ground. I’d never seen it happen before, but I’d heard that expression all my life. It burned to the ground, some reporter would say. Firefighters responded to the four-alarm fire but were unable to overcome the intensity of the blaze, and the warehouse burned to the ground. This was a thing that happened all the time and everybody knew it and it made perfect sense.

Except it didn’t, of course. The thought that piled into my already overactive brain in the next millisecond was that there had been people in that building. Whatever hope had remained for rescuing those trapped in the fire was now gone. Again, reflexively, I began to pray, this time murmuring the Mourner’s Kaddish. Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mae raba …

The ball of smoke held itself carefully aloft for a moment, a hooded cobra that swayed and hypnotized its victims with its eyes. We watched it, mesmerized. Then it began to descend and spread. It radiated outward in an opaque cloud of soot and debris that swallowed up everything in its path for blocks around—birds and trees and people and buildings.

The building where my cats still were.

My body followed the direction my head was already pointing in, and I began to push my way through the crowd that was now, with frightened cries and more determination than ever, heading into Brooklyn. “Excuse me,” I said politely. “Excuse me.” Weren’t you supposed to say excuse me to people as you pushed your way past them? They jostled against me, bumped into me hard, but that was okay. I understood. They had to go one way, and I had to go the other. If I was patient and persistent enough, I would get through. Every time someone knocked into me, I repeated, “Excuse me.”

Sharon grabbed my arm. “Gwen!” she shouted. “What are you doing? We have to go this way!” and she pointed vigorously in the direction of Brooklyn.

“Let go of me!” I began to fight a double battle against her grip and the crowd that wouldn’t let me through back to Manhattan. “My cats are in there!”

“Gwen!” she shouted again. She grabbed my shoulders with both hands and shook me a bit, and I wondered, with a sort of detached and analytical interest, if she was going to slap me. Was I hysterical? I didn’t feel hysterical. Despite my panic and my shrieking, I felt perfectly lucid. Sharon pointed again, at the remaining tower, which listed dangerously to one side. “Gwen, the other tower is going to collapse any second. You cannot go back for your cats! We have to keep going!”

Almost as soon as she said it, the second tower began to implode. People buried their faces in their hands, they covered their eyes, they sobbed and wailed. I felt dry-eyed and hollow as I watched a second beige ash monster merge with the first one. It had already reached the foot of the bridge, and nothing was visible of the city anymore.

“Your cats will be fine,” Sharon said. “They’re in your apartment, and they’re safe, and they will be fine. I promise.”

Broken windows, I thought. Broken windows and a blind cat.

“They’re not going to let anybody off this bridge and back into the Financial District,” Sharon continued. “This bridge is going one way, and that’s the way we have to go.”

Of course. I had made a stupid decision—an insanely, cataclysmically, unimaginably stupid decision—when I had first set foot onto the Brooklyn Bridge and left my cats behind. They were alone and unprotected, and it was my fault, my fault, my fault.

“We’ll figure it out when we get into Brooklyn,” Sharon said. There was a note of desperation in her voice. “We’ll make calls, we’ll find someone in your building, and they will be fine.”

We turned and walked toward Brooklyn once again. This time, there was no discussion of what we would do when we reached the Brooklyn Marriott. Without saying anything to each other, that plan had been scrapped. Our only goal now was to walk until we got out of reach of the soot cloud, which fell wrathfully upon us within minutes. Soon we could barely see or breathe; we took off our shirts and tied them around our faces in an attempt to filter the air. With the part of my mind that was numb and detached, I thought how astonishing it was that one minute you were in one of the most technologically advanced cities the world had ever produced, and a minute later you were any refugee of any war zone at any time or place in history, fleeing for your life on foot.

Our skin and hair were gray from the ash by the time we reached the far side of the bridge, and still we were in the thick of the cloud. We walked for miles. The rhythm of my footsteps echoed in my head. My cats. My cats. My cats my cats my cats. Somewhere in Brooklyn—I didn’t know where we were by now—a mechanic was standing in front of a garage, handing out surgical masks to people as they walked by. We nodded an acknowledgment to him, our throats sore with smoke and stunned into silence.

Eventually, we had walked so far that Sharon said we might as well keep going to her apartment in Bay Ridge, which was a good ten miles from where we’d started out that morning. “You’ll stay at my apartment,” she said. I was grateful, but it was more of an intellectual gratitude than an emotional one. I knew Sharon was doing a kind thing; where would I have gone, where would I have slept that night, if not for her? Yet I felt dissociated from all outcomes. What difference did it make where I went or where I stayed? The only thing that mattered was how I was going to get back.

I wanted to call my mother, to let her know I was all right, and I wanted to call my apartment building. But our cell phones weren’t working. “My mother’s office is near my apartment,” Sharon said. “We can use the landline there.”

It was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon, according to Sharon’s watch, by the time we reached Bay Ridge. We had walked for almost five hours. We were now far enough away from Lower Manhattan to attract stares, covered as we were from head to toe in grayish beige ash. The streets were wide and clean, and the crowds were orderly. I noticed the order and the stares in a dim sort of way that didn’t connect to anything inside me. Things were happening around me, and I was aware of them, but I couldn’t participate in them or feel anything about them. It was like sitting in the backseat of a cab and watching the world rush by, knowing that you had no part in what was happening outside the cab’s windows.

It was in that same detached way that I watched Sharon’s mother grab her into a damp, tear-laden hug as we entered her office. Another woman who worked there showed me discreetly into an empty back office. “There’s a bathroom, if you want to wash up,” she said tentatively. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt, capri pants, and open-toed sandals, and the ash had settled into my skin until the one was indistinguishable from the other.

The first call I made was to my mother’s elementary school. “Thank God, thank God,” the receptionist breathed when she answered the phone and I identified myself. “Your mother’s in the teacher’s lounge. Some of the other teachers are sitting with her. I’ll let her know you’re on the phone.”

There was a brief hum of hold music—which struck me as another bizarre thing; why should something as innocuous as hold music still exist?—and then my mother was on the phone, and she was crying. She cried so hard that she couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. Her sobs sounded more like howls and they were continuous, painful, as if something were being wrenched out of her body with brute force.

I hadn’t shed a single tear yet that day, and I didn’t want to. If I started to cry, I would break, and the most important thing now was that my core remain firmly held together. But all the tears I hadn’t cried rushed up into my throat to choke me, and my voice was thick as I repeated, “Mommy, don’t cry. I’m okay. I’m okay, Mommy, don’t cry.”

One of the other teachers took the phone from her. “Tell me where you’re staying,” she said quietly. “We’ll let her know.”

I told her I’d be staying with my friend Sharon, and that I would call later with the phone number. After we hung up, I tried the front desk of my apartment building. There was no answer. I tried the apartments and cell phones of the handful of other tenants I knew in the building. Nobody was home. Nobody could be reached. The one hope I’d had left, that somebody at my building would answer and say, Gosh, how silly you were to worry! Everything’s peachy-keen here! flickered out.

Broken windows, I thought. Broken windows and a blind cat.

Sharon and I walked the few additional blocks to her apartment—a homey, plant-and-sunlight-filled two-bedroom affair. We immediately turned on the TV. Sharon had been right; not only had both towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, but all the buildings in the plaza around the Trade Center had either collapsed or were about to. Manhattan was completely shut down below 14th Street. The perimeter had been barricaded. It was being guarded by the military, and the only ones allowed in were military personnel, police officers, firefighters, and rescue workers.

There was no point in thinking about broken windows. It was a counterproductive thought. I had to believe that my building was intact. The cats would be fine. I’d left them with plenty of food and water, and this would be no more to them than if I had gone away on an overnight business trip. Because surely, I thought, I’d be able to get to them tomorrow.

We knew we should shower, or eat, or do something, but Sharon and I couldn’t pull ourselves away from that TV screen. They were playing cell phone messages from people who’d been trapped in the rubble of the collapsed buildings. Their final words, the reporter intoned. The pain of it was insupportable, and Sharon grimly produced two bottles of vodka.

I drank as I had never drunk before. I wanted to drink until the bottle ached as much as I did, to drink until the room spun and I forgot my own name. I wanted to drink until I passed out. And, mercifully, I did.