The Birds are on Fire
A story of Java the Wonder Dog and NYC during and after 9/11
TRIGGER WARNING: Death, sickness, injury, terrorism, and overall heartbreak.
Note: This is a work in progress for proofing and, wherever needed, updates and end notes will be provided over the next two days (6/24/26).
The Birds Are On Fire
by Jeremy Baumann
I don’t feel good. I don’t know, I just feel all... anthraxy.
- Overheard in Grand Central Station weeks after 9/11
NYC, 2001.
When I was a kid growing up in New York City, I sent fan letters to the Mets, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers... I loved all the local sports teams. They would write back with thank-you letters and signed pictures I used to decorate my bedroom walls. A few weeks ago I wrote my first fan letter in nearly 30 years. It was addressed to, of all places, a parody newspaper. I wrote to congratulate them on their success in making me laugh for the first time in the months since September 11th, 2001. I heard the editor interviewed on National Public Radio; he said they wouldn’t skirt the issues of the 11th, but their first copy to come out in the aftermath would be of a different sort of humor than they were accustomed, it would be the sort of humor that would make people cry.
One of their stories quoted the suicide terrorists who were surprised to find themselves in hell, claiming it sucked and they had been lied to; there were no virgins, no paradise. Another story reported that hugging was up 76,000% from this time last year. “President Bush Urges Restraint Amongst Nation’s Ballad Singers,” they reported. It felt odd to laugh again in the new New York where it’s no longer unusual to see people crying while standing in line at the supermarket or on a corner waiting for the light to change. It felt odd to laugh again in this new place where Dan Rather and David Letterman cry on national television.
The city has changed in so many ways. The quietest public space I know is now Grand Central Station. There’s an escalator that slowly transports 7-Train riders three or four stories toward street level. It used to be a noisy place where people bustled and pushed, now they stand in silence and think. Like me, I imagine they worry about the daily bomb and anthrax scares in this building. I look down at the little window of faces as they rise like a never-ending snake below me and feel the pulse of New York. Some days people seem almost okay and some days their eyebrows raise and their foreheads furrow in group worry.
Some of the changes in the city seem almost comical at times. My friend Gabrielle called crying in the middle of the night, her boyfriend wasn’t being there for her during this difficult time. In the morning we met for coffee and bumped into her sister, Amelia, who looked frustrated.
“Man, I’m bummed, they’re sold out everywhere,” Amelia said.
Gabrielle shrugged at her sister and made the oh-well face.
Amelia turned to me, “So Jer, you getting a gas mask?”
I said, “Naw, I hear they’re no good for Anthrax.”
Gabrielle looked up at the clear blue sky, as if contemplating rain. Or UFOs.
“Yeh, but Small Pox and Seren gas they’re good for, right?” Amelia asked.
I said, “I think so but, I don’t know, I can’t keep up. There was some expert on CNN talking gas masks and his funding being pulled for developing a bioterror plan for the Feds...”
Amelia said, “I know! I was just watching that guy, what’s his name?”
I shrugged and looked at my sad, sweet, pretty friend standing there, looking off in the distance, her eyes focused on nothing. I hugged them both goodbye and have checked up on Gab everyday since. I’d forgotten how hard this was all hitting her. She’s never lived anywhere other than the Upper West Side where we both grew up. She’s a recording artist who writes award-winning songs about love and New York. She drew the cover of her album--a self-portrait of a hopeful hippie girl looking at the Oz of Manhattan in the distance, guitar in hand, the World Trade Center right there--her album is called Dream Town.
While eating at our favorite Indian restaurant in Queens recently, my girlfriend studied the Manhattan skyline across the East River and suddenly seemed sad. I asked her what she was thinking.
“The Empire State Building looks lonely,” she said, as an oversized flatbed truck rolled by our window with a police escort. The truck was loaded with something we’d never seen before, maybe nobody ever had: charred, twisted fire engines.
“You’re right,” I said, “it does look lonely.” I remembered thinking the WTC towers were like big brothers, taking the glory away from the Empire State Building by dwarfing it, not in beauty, but certainly in size. Now that they were gone, she could shine again, but that like a sibling, she didn’t want to. She wanted them back.
I’d been too embarrassed to share my thoughts on the subject until Sybil did, but I’m certain we’re not the only ones to think such things. Jaded New Yorkers stop and stare at the Empire State Building like tourists now, as if seeing it for the first time.
It’s become common to attribute human characteristics to buildings since September 11th. Of the vigils spawned that night, the largest was probably in Union Square where children’s drawings and paintings were hung on fences, hundreds long, intermingled with photos of The Missing. A little girl did one in crayon showing the World Trade towers as Gumbyesque people, their faces twisted in fear, their arms wrapped around each other, as they cried NO! NO! at the planes approaching. I worried for the future of our children’s sanity when another kid’s drawing showed pairs of shoes and bottoms of bodies and tops of bodies and heads in all different colors. A blue arrow pointed to the blue shoes and blue body parts. Another the same with red or green. In her child’s handwriting it said, Maybe with hope we can put them back together.
Shortly after the 11th I went for a long walk around the city with my dog. I’d spent days glued to the 24-hour news and needed to be outside, to see that things weren’t all that bad. I found myself near where my mom grew up in the West Village, an area I’d lived for about a year. I headed towards the little firehouse where the guys were always hanging out front playing with the local kids. Everybody loved them. But something felt wrong as I approached. There weren’t the usual crowds singing songs and holding candles like they were at all the other fire stations. I could see a police barricade in front of the garage door from down the block. I ran towards the station and for the first time since the 11th, broke down and bawled like a baby when I saw the truckload of bouquets that filled the entire driveway. They were all dead.[1]
The incessant rains had snuffed all the candles, and the ink and paint on the cards and letters covering the exterior garage door and firehouse walls ran like tear-streaked mascara. One that had not run was in crayon, a card from another little girl, which said, simply, “I’m sorry you lost your lifes[sic]. I’m sooo sad. May your souls please rest in peace.”
I walked down the block to Banditos, one of my old party hangouts, and asked for a pack of matches. The hostess of the Mexican restaurant must have seen me coming through the window for she smiled and asked me to light one for her, too; she was pissed they kept going out. The candles snapped and sparkled from the rain as I lit them.
Doesn’t the little firehouse look like a sad face, the hostess had asked. Yes, I said. They all do.
Journal Entry 9/30/01: Today I went down to Ground Zero and smelled the smell of burning bodies. And hair. And computers. And asbestos and benzine and glass and plastic and wires and clothing. The fires still burn after three weeks despite the torrential downpours, as if a gateway to hell has opened for us all to ponder.
I went because I was forgetting too quickly what had happened here. As if very shortly we’d all get back to normal and forget the smell and taste and feel of this horror; it felt wrong to laugh again this soon and this close to this place.
I also went because my dog, a big German shepherd named Java, had his papers rushed through to do volunteer work in New York City. We had worked in kids’ cancer, AIDS and burn wards, veterans hospitals, psych wards, geriatric facilities... but this required a new kind of training. We had just spent the day in a Grief Class for trained dogs to accompany family members to The Site and now had to decide if this was a place I would want ether of us to frequent. At the class one of the things we were told was:
Your dog will be depressed and need debriefing, as will you, if you are chosen to escort the families into Ground Zero. Your dog’s nose is at least 400 times more sensitive than ours; the stench you smell from the burning piles, your dog will break down, process and identify specifically and accurately. Your dog will not be the same afterwards as he was before, nor will you, if you spend time at Ground Zero. This is sacred ground. It is very busy with very sad souls. Thousands of them. You can feel them in the windows and the buildings and the rubble…
They warned us that the rescue workers were going insane. They won’t leave the site. They sleep on plywood when they can no longer stand from exhaustion, but they won’t leave the sides of their buried brothers. With wild eyes, they’ll run to you and embrace your dog. So far removed from reality, they do not know their strength and some may be out of control. We’re supposed to calmly let the rescue workers know that we’re here for the families and to please be gentle with our dogs. The workers need help forced upon them, we’re told, even if that means arresting them, for they are no longer emotionally well. But, we are asked, who will arrest them? They are the police.
The speaker showed us a pair of protective dog booties that were designed to last for weeks or months. They were torn to shreds--from a one-day visit to The Pile.
After the class, Java and I went to Pier 94 to do some work. The place is as big as an international auto show with scores of booths for every organization, utility and business that has been affected or that wants to help. There are areas for food and massage and clothes and phones and fax machines and copy machines and interpreters for every language under the sun and everything is free. We went to spend time with the kids of the victims and workers so they could briefly forget their troubles by playing with happy dogs. We wandered around first, to let adults come to us and take a break from their grown-up roles by playing with waggy-tailed furry animals for a while. The short version is this: take a person stressed to their limit from anything--physical or mental illness, accident, loss--add one dog trained to pay close attention in tight quarters, hospital rooms, kindergartens, or near collapsed buildings, and people will reveal and get what they need to. Stories abound of research into burn victims healing faster, people coming out of comas when made to pet an animal, kids speaking who have been silent for years... I don’t know which are true and which are not. What I do know firsthand is people transform before your eyes from lost in their minds to reveling in the moment. Tears flow that have been blocked and may have remained so. Dogs are very good listeners.
In the Kid’s Corner a seven-year-old named Stacia played Peek-A-Boo with Java. He was too big for her to pet, she said, but she watched closely as all the other kids climbed and pulled on the gentle beast. When we got up to wander the pier some more, Stacia came over and handed me an artwork of a smiling dog made from pipe cleaner, sparkles, pom-poms and fabric. It said “WOFF!” and had another dog’s name on it; the one she’d made it for never come back, she said, so she wanted Java to have it. I promised we’d return in a few days, and she could make something with Java’s name just for him, if she wanted to. Stacia said she’d be gone before then. In a day or two her mommy was coming to take her home. I felt great relief until a nurse standing nearby caught my eye and shook her head, no.
Java. We had been through a lot together over the years. His mom was one of my first dogs. She was exhausted by the time she tried to deliver him. It was her first litter and he was her ninth and last pup and she was out of energy. He was the biggest of the nine and got stuck, but worse yet, the little space-orb looking sac he was in broke and by the time I pulled him out he was not breathing. I gave him with mouth-to-snoot resuscitation and he came to life. He returned the favor and saved mine probably several times I don’t know about, in addition to the ones I do.
Despite our work and play and life together, Java did something with that skinny, pretty little girl who was scared of dogs, that I had never seen him do before or since. He got up, walked over to her and leaned his heavy body against her tiny one, so she had to hold onto him or she’d have fallen over. With a big huff of a sigh, he lay down, Stacia draped herself around him, closed her eyes and held on--so it seemed--for dear life.
After working for an hour or so Java needed a break, so we paid our respects as we inched down the Walk of the Teddy Bears, the largest Wall of the Missing in the city. It must be 50 or more yards long. You can’t do the whole thing in one swoop. It’s just too much. It’s too many photographs of too many healthy, happy people holding their children. Too many wedding and vacation pictures of people with their mates, smiles on their faces, surrounded by too many words of unspeakable loss. New words would have to be invented to attempt to do this justice. It’s... it’s... all of them. Pictures of those lost adorn the wall from the ground up to as high as people could reach on chairs to tack up and staple photos and cards, letters and notes. The bereaved started writing in marker on the drywall behind the flyers, cards and photos in order to keep their words from being removed. Even if they were covered by more cards, they’d know their words were still there next to photos duct-taped and glued into place. As if it made a difference. And to them I’m certain it did.
After three weeks, the tone of the notes was changing in heartbreaking ways. What used to say Missing: Mary Smith – 5’1, Cantor Fitzgerald, Missing since Sept. 11, Please Contact Bob Smith at (212)... had changed to: Mary, we love you. Come home soon, the kids and I can’t make it without you... to: Mary, we’ll always love you. We’ll never never never forget you, we promise with all our hearts. Rest in peace knowing your babies will always be yours. You will never be forgotten. Never, Mary. Never.
Next to a handsome grown man in a business suit: Bobby, you are the best son in the world and we’ll always love you. You gave us everything we ever could’ve wanted in a boy and we thank you for spending the time you were able to with us. Love, Mommy and Daddy.
This was our third visit and I felt comfortable enough to enter the staff cafeteria for the first time. It was like a commissary on a Hollywood studio lot where you really do eat beside people dressed like aliens, belly dancers and giant mice. Except here, on Pier 94, we ate beside people dressed as National Guardsmen, Firemen, Police, Sheriffs, Troopers, Doctors, Nurses, CIA, FBI, NSA, FEMA and Red Cross workers to name a few. On every table, as far as you could see, were stacks of papers, inches in height. Not wanting to disrupt the voluminous paperwork, I sought a table with no stacks of paper but could not find one, so I sat beside some cops and some women from the FBI who fawned over Java like kids. A little old lady in a Red Cross uniform asked if she could get me something to drink. I told her thanks, but not to make a fuss over me, I was just a volunteer and would be happy to get her a drink if she’d point the way. She said no, that she had come all the way from Bozeman, Montana, in an RV with her husband to help out. She was a nurse but with an overabundance of volunteers, there was little for them to do but wash dishes. So, with tremendous pride and dignity, they washed dishes and emptied trashcans. Now could she please get me something to drink.
After she brought me a coke (with ice and a lemon wedge), she returned with a plate of roast beef and a bowl of water for Java. As we started to eat, I realized the giant stacks of paper everywhere were letters and cards from people all over the world. In addition to the many thousands upon thousands of letters out in the public areas, adorning every available inch of wall space, here were thousands more. I put on my game face and read a few, but a rogue tear betrayed me when I read yet another crayon-smeared card. This one was written twice, once in the child’s handwriting, and again, I assumed, in his mother’s hand below the original for the sake of legibility. It said: Dear firemen and rescue workers. Thank you for all you are doing. I wish I could help you, but I can’t because I’m only 4 years old. But I’ll help when I grow up. I promise. Tommy.
After we left I needed to talk, so I called my cousin Sarah. We hadn’t spoken since before the 11th, so we compared war stories. She won. She’s a first and second grade teacher not far from the World Trade Center. As the teachers and young students watched the buildings burn along with the rest of the neighborhood, pupils cried out that the birds were on fire and were falling to the ground.
There was a moment of silence while I soaked that one in. I asked about Sylvia, our 92-year-old grandmother that Sarah visits weekly at Grandma’s apartment on the Upper West Side.
“She’s okay. I went over on the 11th to make sure she was all right. She was watching the news on the Spanish language channel.”
I said, “I didn’t know Grandma speaks Spanish.”
Sarah said, “She doesn’t.”
“Oh,” I said, and we laughed way too much for way too long. It felt good.
Sarah said, “I asked Grandma, ‘Why are you watching the news in Spanish?’ She said, ‘Oh, I thought there was something unusual about it.’”
I said, “My mom thinks a lot of old people are probably confused and thinking that they’re watching the World Trade Center Collapses Movie. Does Grandma?”
Sarah said, “Well, I asked her: ‘Grandma, do you know what’s going on?’ Grandma said, ‘yeh,’ she does. So I said, ‘Do you know that’s where you and Grandpa went for your 50th wedding anniversary? Windows on the World on the top floor of the World Trade Center? It’s not there anymore.’”
I asked her what happened next.
“Grandma looked me in the eye and nodded slowly. She said, ‘Yes Dear. I understand.’ And we changed the subject.”
I teared up again thinking my grandmother’s memory of our deceased grandfather had been stolen from her somehow, when my cousin suddenly said, “Hey! Did you go on the Walk of the Teddy Bears?”
I hadn’t read the signs, so the premise had eluded me, why the pier’s giant Wall of the Missing was dubbed the Walk of the Teddy Bears. There had been teddy bears all along the ground, stacked up and out, deep piles of them; there were thousands of them. Sarah explained they had been trucked in from the people of Oklahoma City—who had experienced their own terrorist bombings—to the people of New York City to let us know their hearts were with us. She said they came in a caravan of trucks through Times Square, with a full police escort, flashing lights and entourage, press meeting and the whole bit. The Bears all had notes attached to them; I’d only read a couple since the photos of the missing had me a little preoccupied. One I read said, “This teddy has been in my family for over sixty years and three generations, I hope it will bring a little happiness to someone in New York. With love, the people of Oklahoma City.”
Sarah asked if I had been working since the economy had been so bad. I told her about an ad agency I was writing for and that I learned a lesson not to talk about The Incidents with people you don’t know well. I told her about a temp who arrived in the city recently to be an actor. He said to a group of employees that he hadn’t personally met anyone who’d lost a loved one. He said something like, “I don’t mean it’s not a big deal or anything, but what are the odds of even knowing someone who was there, right?”
Sarah said, “Uh-oh. What happened?”
I told her everyone went silent in the large open workspace of dozens. In that space was a woman who’d lost her daughter and her mother, my buddy who’d lost three family members--cops and firemen--and a woman whose 14-year-old daughter had been admitted to the psychiatric ward of a hospital. She was a student from a nearby High School who ran over to see if there was some way she could help. People jumping from the upper floors of the buildings landed near her, which was more than her young mind could bear.
I told Sarah I was writing a story about my experiences since the 11th, and I worried that things so heartbreaking only weeks ago hardly raised an eyebrow now. I worried that these things that made me weep only days earlier now just seemed like tales. The tragedy of other peoples’ losses doesn’t seem to bite so deep as we’re becoming more concerned about our own losses. At first the worry was that four more planes were supposedly hijacked. Then bridges might be blown up, or trains and buses. Then anthrax and bioterror. Then the war started. Now everyone’s looking for work.
At times getting through your day in New York is no longer like watching a movie that flows, it’s more like a slideshow of intense images that flash before you without segues; a new picture appears before you with no reference or context. One minute you’re in a subway with a bomb threat, the next you arrive in Grand Central with National Guardsmen yelling at tourists to drop their suitcases and RUN! RUN! THAT WAY, RUN! The next minute a fireman’s crying and hugging you for letting him pet your dog. I timed it, yesterday was less than three and a half minutes long.
Did Sarah and I even say goodbye? Somehow I am back at Ground Zero, as if awaken from a dream. It seems an hour ago we were in the Grief class, then on The Pier, then talking to my cousin, then at the fire station in The Village. Now we’re right back here, the clouds of smoke illuminating the sky in a lovely purple hue, juxtaposed by haunted shadows of razor shards weighing a hundred tons, projected on the sides of buildings. The office building across the street looks like a hunk of butter someone left a knife in.
The editor of comics for the New Yorker was on a talk show, discussing submissions he’d received or published. One comic showed two businessmen in front of a restaurant. As a handheld metal detector is run over him, the businessman on the left says, “The food is just so-so, but the security is excellent.” Another shows a woman with a pet carrier going through security at an airport. The guard says, to the visibly shaken woman, “We’ll need to declaw the cat.” Why this suddenly comes to mind at Ground Zero, I have no idea. Maybe I’m decompensating. I’m talking to a National Guardsman about dog food next to a war zone in Manhattan. You’d have to be crazy not to be losing it. The Guardsman bums me out pretty badly by telling me that, of all the dogs doing volunteer work down here so far, the only ones that have died were German shepherds. “They feel things other dogs don’t,” he said, as he pat Java’s head.
Looking up at me, Java seems to be saying, “Check please.”
More memories come to me as I watch the cranes work. My mind is trying to figure out how we got here, how everything changed. As if I could undue all this damage somehow, if only I could figure out what went wrong. Let’s see, my sister called and woke Sybil and me up on the 11th saying that traffic was hell due to a plane hitting the WTC. While she was still on the phone, we turned on the news and watched as the second plane hit. The hope that something had gone wrong with the air traffic system was quickly erased and reality set in. I asked Jenny if she was leaving, getting the kids out of town. She jokingly said, “Nope, we’re going down with the ship.” I worried about my eight-year-old niece who, my sister said, watched first on TV as the buildings collapsed, and then in the distance as a plume of smoke rose outside her window a moment later. Just after that Sybil and I tried to donate blood but were told the wait was three days long. No blood was really needed since there weren’t any survivors. The triage centers on the Hudson River piers were staffed with scores of empty gurneys and eventually doctors were ordered down to The Site to perform amputations to extract, hopefully living, bodies. We hadn’t done anything wrong and we couldn’t undo any of this, plain and simple.
I recall a great mass anxiety filled the streets of New York as healthy people wanted to help, but were offered no options to do so. Some people drove around offering free rides to strangers since public transport was nonexistent or undependable. The volunteer work with Java was a Godsend for us, but it took several weeks before the Pet Therapy canine system was set up. Until then, writing was my only outlet, but I didn’t even know what to write, there were too many terrible stories. By default I started a list of:
THINGS THAT MADE ME CRY TODAY.
Day One: The image of a couple holding hands and jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center to their death. Wondering if they even knew each other, or just needed not to be alone for this truly ineffable act. Wishing that if they had to die, that they could have done so without having to go through that.
Day Two: “Ma’am, I understand you’re upset the fountain isn’t on, but all the Parks Department workers are helping extract bodies from the rubble. If you can get down there and are willing to ask them to put down a dead body to come fix the fountain, you would be perfectly within your rights.” – My girlfriend on the phone with a constituent.
Day Three: Connie Chung’s interview with the Irishman who was in the U.S. visiting his sister and her kid. He was by the WTC when the planes hit. He took a badly burned woman into a bathroom to put water on her and asked how he could help her. “Pray with me because I’m dying,” she said. Jet fuel had melted her hair to her head and her clothing to her body. Praying with her, the second plane crashed. He said, I won’t let you die, and carried her out. Despite the mayhem, people parted to let them through to get her to an ambulance. He later learned his own sister and niece were on the United flight.
Day Four: “I explained their daddy was dead and wasn’t coming home anymore. They asked if he was in heaven. I told them, yes, he was. They asked if they could still speak to him on his cell phone.” – A woman on the news.
Day Five: Having a cab driver from Yemen explain to me quite eloquently that these things are done by Osama bin Laden and his peers because they are terrorists, and that’s what terrorists do: instill terror. “It’s eponymous,” he said. “It’s their job. Everybody has to have a job.” Later that night I dreamt of fiery, haunted, M.C. Escher-y upside-down stairways.
It’s been close to three months now and the escalator in Grand Central seems almost like the old days. People are starting to push past each other and muttering again. The fire engine, police and ambulance sirens were so constant for so long that people, myself included, used to worriedly say “What’s that noise?” and quickly look around when there was a moment of silence. Now people feel resolved that the nearly constant sirens are all for false alarms and hoaxes and that everything is maybe, sort of, kind of, okay. People are starting to point and laugh again at the guy carrying the ninety-pound German shepherd up the Grand Central escalator like a baby. Java once saved me from four pit bulls, but he doesn’t do escalators. He’s not very fond of elevators or small dogs, either.
The sense that things are getting better sent me back down to Ground Zero for the third and final time, on Thanksgiving night, to see if it was starting to feel okay down there, too. I knew as we approached that this world was separate from the rest. That it would never be okay down here. Incredibly, fires still burn. As soon as the stench and smoke wafted over, I was reminded of the gravity of incomprehensible numbers. It’s been reported that over 1,000 kids lost a parent just from the New York Fire Department. One business left 1,500 widows and kids with one or no parents. Over 100,000 people are out of work.
My girlfriend and Java and I were able to get into Battery Park City where I lived a couple of summers ago. The building is a block from where the World Trade Center stood. The doormen remembered me and opened up with their stories. The turbine visible in the news footage, flying away from the impact, crashed into the north face of my old building and took out some apartments. Amazingly, nobody was killed. In fact, nobody in the building was even missing except the doctor, a young woman, who mysteriously went missing the night before.
As the doormen and I spoke, a woman with two young children entered the building. One doorman shook his head in disbelief when I asked if a lot of families with kids were returning. He said yes, even those with babies. There are some subsidized apartments on the damaged North side of the building. The management company won’t let the lower-income people move into vacancies on the safer sides, away from the lights and noise and smoke. They threaten to sue those who try to break their lease.
It’s really not okay down here. The Embassy Hotel is closed, and plastered with asbestos hazard signs. Medical problems, of children and adults alike, are rampant with a host of respiratory ailments: RADS, nose bleeds... vomiting blood. The noise is unbearable as I-beams and concrete are moved and dumped around the clock; the work lights are those of a night game in the Superdome. Unlike the rest of the city, people here still stand and stare and weep. They tie ribbons everywhere and place photos, wreaths, bouquets and teddy bears in every open crevice, on every lamp post and bit of chain link fence.
There is some good news, though. The rent in Battery Park City has dropped. If you want an apartment in my old building today, my former generous landlords will offer you up to a 25% reduction in rent. You might be able to rent a nice one-bedroom apartment for as little as two grand a month!
The doorman got that familiar look in his eyes as he told me how they ran that morning, the black clouds and debris flying towards them, the ground shaking so hard they fell down as the World Trade Center collapsed in a deafening roar that he hears as clearly now as months ago. How he lifted others as they fell, how they lifted him when he fell, all possibly saving each other’s lives. A simple “thank you,” was the etiquette, he said, for such an act that day. He told me how the collapse blew out most of the windows of his and surrounding buildings. Menus from Windows on the World, on the 110th floor, landed in their lobby. One doorman stayed at the building for 24 hours to help evacuate, and to help people get their pets, wallets and such for them. He used a Pampers diaper as a respirator the entire time.
We stood up the block from the charred and broken remains of the buildings, my girlfriend, dog and I. Sybil had enough, but I held onto one long last look, for I knew I’d not be there again before it’s all cleaned up. It’s all too sad; the tattered remains of a once-proud building looking like the gigantic carcass of a woolly mammoth picked apart by buzzards.
A fireman came over to pat Java. I asked if he had any words to describe what he’s experienced, since I couldn’t find words big enough. He kissed Java’s snout, looked up and said, “Biblical.”
On our right was the now shattered glass-enclosed promenade of the AMEX complex, where I’d romped with Sybil and Java on one of our first dates. To our left, people sold T-shirts and FDNY and NYPD hats. In the foreground one of many couples held up their little boy, the carnage in view behind him, and snapped happy pictures and laughed as if they were at a carnival or Mount Rushmore. Did they know or would they even care that a few blocks away was a shrine to the lost officers? That a little boy, probably around the same age as their child, wrote a card that said, “Dear Daddy, happy birthday. We’re still celebrating even though you are dead. You are my hero.”
We turned and walked away.
It’s been about six weeks since that first talk with my cousin Sarah. She invited us over last night to watch Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes, an old French flick, with her husband and some of their friends. Sarah said her young students were getting better. They’d finally stopped building WTC towers in the building block area and knocking them down with toy airplanes. We agreed that was a good sign.
In the kitchen Sarah asked about my latest job and I said it was okay. That I’d told my boss about those students. She poured some juice and asked which ones.
I said, “The ones who cried that the birds were on fire.”
She said, “Oh,” and reached into my bag of corn chips.
My boss said, “But, wait, they couldn’t see birds from the ground, what do you mean ‘the birds were on fire?’… Oh, my God, you mean the kids thought the burning people jumping out of windows were birds? That’s horrible! But, at least the children didn’t know they were people, right? I mean, that’s really a beautiful thing that they were spared. That those children didn’t know...”
And I knew what she meant, we all did. And we all agreed. In this new reality, in this new New York, it was something to be thankful for. In that moment, it was the most beautiful thing I could imagine.
There weren’t enough chairs, so I sat on the floor and leaned back against Sybil’s legs as Sarah turned off the lights. I pulled Java’s heavy torso up in my lap and stroked his big head in the crook of my arm as the movie began.
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[1] A year or two after writing this story I happened by the West Village firehouse. Turns out it was built in an era of horse-drawn fire trucks and on 9/11 it was closed for renovations to shore up the flooring to bear the weight of modern rigs. Because of this, the men were all stationed elsewhere and they all responded to the call and perished at the WTC, except one. The man who shared this detail with me had the very difficult role as the lone survivor of the firehouse with an all new crew. He had been away on vacation that day.
Fantastic writing about a specific time that I have almost forgotten about. Thank you for all you did to help! I really appreciate your writing.