Twenty-five years ago this morning, Islamic terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers in New York and a third into the Pentagon.
The idea of that being twenty-five years ago is strange. In many ways, it doesn’t feel that long ago in the mind. Time’s flow gets weird.
I cannot say my 9-11 story is interesting. It isn’t.
I was in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. I was part of a team to unload a truck and set up a new EB Games location (this one under the EBX banner) at King of Prussia Mall.
It was a Tuesday. I had taken Tuesday and Wednesday off that week, blocking the two days off to do some writing. Specifically, I wanted to write a story I had been noddling at ideas for Pocket Books’ Star Trek: Strange New Worlds short fiction contest, a story I was tentatively calling “Toy Story.” But Tim, my old district manager, called me and asked if I could help out his crew at this store opening, and it being Tim, I said sure.
It was a gorgeous day. The whole week leading up to 9-11 had been lovely, a mild early September. I’d been in Chestertown, Maryland a few days before with my sister; she had had an interview at Washington College, and I drove her.
I remember driving to KoP from my house in western Chester County (Amish country) and listening to an audio book of Ian Fleming’s “The Living Daylights.” I got to KoP sometime between 7:30 and 8 o’clock to meet the truck and the other managers. The truck arrived, we began unloading.
At some point, Tim, the district manager, learned from a tobacco shop at the entrance that a plane had struck one of the towers. The tobacco shop had a television, and we took a break and watched a little bit of the news coverage. But we were also on deadline — the store needed to be ready to open in two days — and we went back to loading in the store.
Then the second plane hit.
One of the managers, Rafael, freaked out and then peaced out. The rest of us carried on, a bit glum, especially once we learned the towers had fallen.
Tim asked me at one point if there were some significance to the date. Did the attackers choose this date to commemorate something? I said I didn’t think so.
We worked until mall security threw us out, about 11 o’clock. KOP didn’t even open that day.
The first Doctor Who DVDs were to go on sale that day — The Five Doctors and Spearhead from Space. I had intended to walk down to Suncoast at the other end of the mall at some point and buy both, then watch one or the other after I got home late in the evening. (I had planned to stay until 7 or 8 o’clock or so.)
I remember driving home from KOP and how quiet everything was. I put on CBS when I got home and sat with that for a few hours.
My best friend’s dad worked in the Pentagon. His office was where that plane struck. Thankfully, Larry wasn’t there that morning, as he was in a meeting at the Navy Annex. I talked with Jason on AOL Instant Messenger that evening, and he wanted to know if I saw the smoke plumes from Pennsylvania. No, I told him, I did not.
“Toy Story” didn’t get written. Tim asked me to come back the next day, and me being me I said I would. The second day was tense, not because of the towers but because there was a deadline to get the store opened.
I saw an airplane, a big military cargo jet, fly over KoP while I was waiting for others to arrive. No one believed me, but I know what I saw.
Dave, our regional vice president, had been in the air, on his way to Cleveland, when the planes struck the tower. Grounded there, several district managers did a chain relay to drive him back to the Philadelphia area, and I ended up having lunch with Dave on the 12th after he got back.
It’s just a well “Toy Story” didn’t get written. There wasn’t a story, just a visual image that I wanted to put into words. Don’t give up on your ideas; it might not be the time, and it might work somewhere else.
When I think about 9-11, I think more of my disgust and dismay at the knee-jerk patriotism that followed in the ensuing months. For example, the EB Games warehouse would affix American flag stickers to product, and I side-eyed this because it felt so over-the-top.
Plus, there was an unavoidable religious attitude that nearly drove me back into the atheist closet, and in some ways sort of did; I wasn’t quite as public about it as I had been before, but it also make me less jerk-ish. I didn’t go through a militant phase, but I wasn’t always tolerant.
And, of course, the military adventurism of the Bush regime radicalized me, but that was a year or two down the road.
That’s my 9-11 story. It’s not very interesting, but if I close my eyes I can put myself back into that EBX on a lovely day in early September when it seemed like everything was going to be perfect… until it wasn’t.
The paragraphs that follow were written on September 14th, three days after the anniversary, on TrekBBS. More about how I felt about the anniversary now than the events I experienced then, I thought they were worthy and interesting enough to append here.
This 9-11 anniversary has been an odd one for me in that I’ve taken an interest in the day that I never really had before.
I didn’t watch any of it live — I was working that day, unloading a truck to open a new EB Games store at King of Prussia Mall — and after I got home I watched some news coverage (CBS, I think), and talked with my best friend in the evening, as his father worked in Pentagon. (His office was located in the area where the plane hit. Larry was at a meeting off-campus that morning.) I remember my friend asking me if I could see the smoke plumes in Pennsylvania, and I said I hadn’t.
I was in New York three weeks later, but it was a soggy, sullen day. I remember looking in the direction of where the towers had stood, but there was nothing to see in the rain and the muck.
And then it kinda went out of my mind. It was a less an event than a catalyst for a number of other things I didn’t like, like the Bush junta’s military adventurism, a knee-jerk and sometimes absurdist patriotism, and a deeply uncomfortable religiousity. (I hate how “God Bless America,” both as a phrase and as a song, has become so ingrained in our culture.) The things that flowed from 9-11 loomed so much larger in my consciousness than the event itself.
That is not to say that I was walled off from it. I don’t know how many times I’ve read Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man,” and Tim Alberta’s piece on Glenn Vogt, the manager of Windows on the World, who was off-site that morning, has stayed with me for years. A coworker’s husband, a firefighter, has done an encumbered walk for at least a decade, if not more, in honor of the FDNY fallen. I wasn’t unaware of the human toll of that day. Hell, for years I’ve felt Peter Jennings was as much a victim of 9-11 as anyone on the planes or in the towers, because he took up smoking again that day to deal with the stress, and the resulting lung cancer killed him. I have even, in absolute sincerity, assigned Sandra Day O’Connor some measure of responsibility, as she helped install Bush as president.
This year, though, I went delving. (I am taking this word back, AI! You shall not claim it!) I watched videos. I looked at photographs. I read testimony and a chat transcript from a group of twelve who bailed out of the North Tower because there was nothing else they could do. I even listened to some of recorded phone calls. I was aware peripherally of some of this — I think I knew about the Waving Woman, who stood in the gash on the 94th Floor and waved for an hour and half until the North Tower fell, and I knew about the commuter lots with the cars of the workers who never left the buildings, and I knew that firefighters were able to get to the impact zone in the South Tower before it collapsed — but I had never really sat with all of it.
This year I let my guard down. I let myself sit with it.
My thoughts went to strange and dark and profoundly sad places. Maybe it’s my empathy, maybe it’s my writer-brain, maybe I looked at too much, but it left me a little shaken.
This has been a weird one.