Blue Morning

Is It For Real?

The morning is blue and full of light, too much light for my eyes, light through my windows and through the tangled fire escapes, light in my room — too much light for a blue morning.

There is a cup of coffee in my hand. A backing delivery truck down the street. Lengthening shadows on the sidewalks. There are emails to read and the screeching of the 56K modem. A warm and wakening shower. Headache from sleeping pills.

My building is fairly empty, with the exception of the old lady upstairs who hasn’t left her apartment since the early nineties and never talks to anyone.

I lock my door, go downstairs and start walking down 8th Avenue, still numb from the night.

Then, the smoke and the sirens rise.

People are gathering together around TV screens inside bars and bodegas, exchanging silent looks and fast-paced words. Phones start ringing.

There is a CNN camera following an object moving at speed in Manhattan’s sky, struggling to keep in focus — surely a small aircraft, or is it the distance that makes it look so frail? And there is a glimpse of hope in the camera’s eye as the plane comes close to the tower, a glimpse of hope in the form of a slight zoom motion past the building, as if the jet would just go behind it and reappear on the other side, soaring and unscathed. But the camera pauses and goes back a notch, the operator’s confusion almost palpable through the screen as swelling flames are spilled out the tower, the tilted and dark and fast shape of the aircraft melting into a growling fire ripping open the walls and filling the world with debris and black fumes and pain and —

There is a second plane now, followed by the same camera, filmed by the same operator, a second plane closing even faster than the first one on the second tower.

Except this time, the camera just frames the tower and waits.

How wiser we got in the lapse of seventeen minutes.

“There’s people in there!” a bike messenger says. I see the stares and the hands clenched tight. I can feel the collective gasp resounding across the city. “Is it for real?” someone asks near me.

It can’t be true, I want to think. It can’t be true, I try to think. “It can’t be true,” I say out loud as a fire truck blazes past me on 47th.

I look up and the smoke is still there in the sky.

Alicia Keys’ “Falling” is playing in a car parked in front of a fire hydrant on West 33rd. A woman listening to the radio on her stoop says “they got the Pentagon!” People are running to their houses and other people are running to their offices.

“You going there too?” a man asks me. I wonder what there means. There is everywhere. There is no there anymore. I nod to the man and we start running down Hudson Street.

And then the dust grows and grows and grows and covers us, gray faces everywhere, dust in our hair and our eyes, running in packs, bunches of businessmen, deli workers and homeless running along each other, no cabs, no cars, no buses, just ambulances and flashing lights, the whole city stopped in its tracks, and the doctors saying “we won’t need your blood” in the hospitals, and the nurses repeating “we won’t need your blood,” over and over and over…

The morning was blue and full of light.