Where Were You? is a remembrance by Jack Rusher, published here Thursday, September 11, 2003. It is part of Memories.
The morbid practice of re-living tragedy and the answer to half of the email I’ve received this week.
I was in Baltimore, asleep after eating breakfast with my wife before she went to work. I was meant to be in New York to talk about a gig writing image analysis software for a study on human brain function, but she had convinced me to stay until Wednesday. I would have been asleep at the apartment of my friends Stu and Carol Anne, two blocks from the World Trade Center, if I had been in New York City that morning.
The phone woke me up — my mother calling to ask me if Stu was alright, had I talked to him, maybe I should call him. Stu worked in the World Financial Center and had survived the previous bombing.
I stumbled out to the living room, turned on my laptop, surfed to the usual news organs — the New York Times, CNN, and so forth — but the websites were all down. We don’t have a television, so I turned on NPR and listened for coverage while I dialed Stu’s number. All circuits were, of course, busy.
It quickly became evident that something very bad had happened, but the descriptions were hard to believe and a little incoherent. I wanted, for the first time in a long time, to have a television. When news came through, a short time later, that another plane had hit the second tower I went to the flat upstairs and asked my neighbors — fresh transplants from Bed-Stuy — to let me watch television with them.
We watched the towers crumble, wet eyed and shocked. The telephones were still too overloaded to contact anyone in the city, but, amazingly, I got email from Stu’s flatmate telling me that he was alive and physically unharmed. He had walked to midtown, stopping at Canal Street to watch the first tower fall.
News from other downtown friends trickled in and I felt lucky that my friends were accounted for, that I wasn’t in the thick of it, that it wasn’t even worse.
My wife came home from work early and we spent the evening listening to NPR and talking about how terrible it was. We both felt physically ill; shell shocked, really.
Two weeks later I found out that a friend and colleague from California was in one of the planes.