I got up at 8:00 in the morning, and the night before on
Monday
the most I had to worry about was expensing a $140 dinner.
On
Tuesday Morning I turned on the TV at 8:50, and noticed
the top of the trade center
burning, and I thought it was an
accident, some horrible
accident. I stepped outside my building on
Greenwich Street and saw it burning, the top of it burning, but
intact. As I walked down 4th street to get to the
Stern School,
for class, I kept on watching.
All of the cars and cabs were stopped in the middle of the road,
the radios on, everybody standing and watching.
The church
bells were all ringing.
I went to the roof of the Stern School and I saw them burn and
burn. In the tiny people that I saw jumping out from
50 floors
up I saw my friends, and my family. I saw faces, and lives. I saw a building fall which, on my 5AM
winter runs in the dark I had used as a
beacon, like 2 great blocks of light and
heat. I had once taken comfort, on nights alone with a
headache and working, that my friends and family were also working there in that building that I could see from 2 miles away. I'd
imagine them, and pretend I could see their individual
windows among the thousands of
lights on in that
building, and be comforted.
A few months ago I had convinced my friend from
boarding school
,which we attended together many years ago,
to come to the city. Back then, we
rowed together. We lived
and cried and copied each others homework and snuck off
campus
to drink in the
woods together and lied to each others parents.
He had just graduated from
Harvard with a shiny new BS in
Economics and a minor in
math and I convinced
him to come to to
New York to work at
Morgan Stanley instead of consulting in Boston. I told him
it was the
greatest city in the world.
I always made fun of
Boston.
I went to his new
office once, in tower 2, and I could see
my
apartment building
from there, so whenever I would call him there I would look at
the place where his window must have been. I was looking at
that
window when it started to fall.
My cousin had graduated 5 years ago from my school, the
Stern School of Business, and he was a veteran trader on an
options desk on the 100th floor. I asked him to give me a job
there, earlier last
spring, and he told me that I could have it
if I wanted but he didn't think I'd be happy there. He was quite wise in the ways of
Wall Street and life in general, my mentor, so I did as he
advised.
I counted 80 floors up, on Tuesday from the roof of Stern and I saw a burning
hole and stopped counting.
I went to my office and turned on
CNN, I watched it over and
over, and I saw more things get hit, I saw 5,000 people die
in four seconds, right outside my window. I heard of the plane
crash south of
Pittsburgh, and I thought of my father, who works
at the
DoD nuclear hq there, where he does something top
secret with
weapons development, I thought he was dead.
The
phones were all out, and I couldn't reach anybody.
On the island of
Manhattan, I always figured I had 3 people I could
turn to in any situation, no matter what. In 4 seconds, I saw them,
I saw 2/3 of them die.
I couldn't reach anybody, all the phones were busy,
circuits full.
I emailed my
sister to let her know I was all right, found out
my dad was safe in a
bunker and his facilities undamaged.
I set out around the
city, I went on the streets to the hospitals
and to the makeshift
morgues set up around the city, dodging
emergency vehicles going the wrong way on the wrong streets, I was looking
for my
friend, for my cousin,
Have you seen my friend, he was tall and
so smart and cocky who actually wears his Harvard alumni tie, have you
seen my cousin, who was tired of trading, tired of options and wanted his P
hD before he got too old? Having grown up so far away from home, these people were my
family.
I went home with no news, nothing to tell to my friends parents
or to my aunt or to anybody, nobody being able to reach the
overworked
hospitals, nobody else being able to get into
Manhattan to search for them.
Called my boyfriend, who was always there, who absolutely always
worshipped the ground I walked on, I told him to come down and get me,
because I haven't talked to anybody,
face to face, all day, and my friends were all
dead. He wouldn't, he said, because
always the engineer, he didn't see how he could help in person when we could
just talk on the phone, plus it would take
forever to get here. So I dumped him, I
dumped him right there
because he didn't see, and he didn't understand. I dumped him
because he was the last person I knew in
Manhattan who was
alive,
I dumped him because I needed to see him and everybody else was
dead.
I checked in with my
parents, I checked in with everybody one last
time and no news. I went to lie in bed, feeling
Manhattan as an island for
the
first time in my life.
At
midnight I got a phone call from my friend at Morgan that
as soon as he heard the
explosion in the other tower, started to
leave the building, despite being advised not to. He told me that he
took one look at the burning building, and started running,
across the
bridge, got his car, and started driving, driving away from his
office in the trade center and his apartment on Church St.
His cell didn't
work and he ended up at his father's deserted, sheet-covered
summer house in
the Hamptons on
Long Island. Some of his coworkers didn't leave.
I heard from my aunt that my
cousin, providentially arriving at work
late, finding
it on
fire, upon leaving was struck by a piece of debris and must have been taken to the
hospital by a kind stranger. He then took the ferry to
New Jersey to my aunt's
house in
Fort Lee. Most, if not all, of his coworkers are dead.
I am still missing various acquaintances and
schoolmates. I hope
they are only missing, for the moment. That day, I saw those 4 seconds rob me of my security, yanked me out of my little
Louis Vuitton packaged world.
We were
invincible-- we were the
smart, the
young, Wall Street cocky-ass hotshots. We'd work crazy hours
and take
crazy positions on the
capital markets, go
drinking after and wake up the next morning at 5:30 with the options properly hedged. We were
invincible, and I just saw them all die, everything dead, all in 4 seconds from the roof of
Stern.