For 9/11, I Want Rain

A September blue sky brings back too many memories.

“Look at that sky,” I say to Herb, as we head uptown to the cancer hospital. “That perfect September blue. Still, it always brings it back.”

Red convertible, 72 degrees, Susie Arioli singing “What a Difference a Day Makes” in French. Even Herb, who finds both cars and Manhattan traffic annoying, is happy.

 “Brings what back?” Herb says, because when it comes to denial and repression, he is the king.

“You know,” I say. “September eleven.”

 Koch Cancer Center – hospitals are always named for rotten rich guys-- Memorial Sloan Kettering, East 74^th, on the East River.  A circular driveway, a valet who grins when he sees the car. Even for only fifty feet, it’s fun to drive a Mustang.

 “Much better than some of the other times we pulled in,” I say.

There’s no need to spell that one out. Five months ago, Herb went to see doctors in a wheelchair in a specially equipped taxi, his face frighteningly close to a hard partition, with a driver who might or might not know how to safely get him in and out.

 Now Herb, sharp in a crisp shirt and khakis, carries a collapsible cane that snaps into place when he stands and waves away a hospital aide who comes to help him get out of the car.

  “I’m fine,” he says.

 I was working at the New York Times. I am not a hard news guy, but it’s an election day and the editors want everyone to keep an eye out so I wear my press ID and when I leave my voting center at Fifth Avenue and 12^th Street a guy says to me, “You’re a reporter, you might want to know – a small plane crashed into the World Trade Center.”

 “Yeah, right,” I think. “Asshole.”

 Then I look south and see orange flames coming out one of the Twin Towers.

Herb’s oncologist is on the 14^th floor. We get the seats we like, right next to the windows, looking out at the river and Roosevelt Island.

 “Is that a giant chess set over there?” Herb asks, after the blood tests, pointing at a group of tall yellow objects on the island.

Even with the excellent visibility, it takes me a while to figure it out.

 “Beach umbrellas, I think,” I say. “Furled.”

There are high-heeled shoes on the sidewalk when I get downtown, which I don’t understand at first, and two people tell me it was a large, commercial plane that flew into the building. People are such unreliable witnesses, I think, but when I call in an editor tells me yeah, commercials planes; they hit the Pentagon, too, the country is under attack. The police won’t let people go further downtown, nearer the Twin Towers, so I go cross-town. The charcoal grey smudges I see falling off of the Towers are people. I have only one way to process this,

“It’s like a movie,” I think.

Herb had a rare blood cancer, his red blood cell count was so low he had to be transfused twice within four days. Friends, visiting him in a nursing home, thought he would die. 

“Our star patient!” the physician’s assistant says now, walking into the exam room.

Herb, in the exam chair, grins.

 “Oh yeah?” he says.

“Your hemoglobin is better than mine,” the oncologist says, when she arrives a few minutes later. “We’re not doing a maintenance dose – your response was so good, we decided you don’t need it.”

I walk west, ending up near the West Side Highway, near Stuyvesant High School. Looking south, I see the North Tower. The orange fire looks larger and more dark smudges are dropping off the building. People aren’t saying, “Look, there’s somebody jumping off the building,” as they did fifteen minutes ago, they’re just saying, “Look, there goes another one.”

“My girlfriend is in that building,” a middle-aged guy standing next to me says. “I hope she’s dead, I just hope she’s not suffering.”

 The man isn’t cryng, he isn’t showing any emotion. I think he must be in shock. His girlfriend worked on the 105^th floor, he tells me. I want to be of comfort.

“We don’t know,” I say. “She could have made it out, she could be okay. Maybe there’s a back stairway we don’t know about” and just as I say it, the building comes down, the greatest contrapuntal to journalistic bullshit I will ever see. It comes down in slow motion, in two waves. First the top half, then there’s a pause, then the second, then there’s a cloud of dust that gets bigger and comes towards us and we all run.

“That’s pretty great, to be the star patient at a cancer hospital,” I tell Herb, when we’re back in the car, heading home. “You can’t get better than that.”

The next day, I go outside to the green market and it’s another goddamn perfect September day.