By Harriet Pike
The other night: I hear a woman at a literary reading in California describe her reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. I squirm in my white folding chair, looking at the black-painted walls in the gym-like room, at the serene faces of the audience, anywhere but the podium speaker.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” I want to shout and shake her. “How can you know? I was there. I was at Ground Zero. It is my memory, not yours.”
She tells about the horror of watching the Twin Towers flame and implode, sitting in her living room in Los Angeles, 3,000 miles away. Her 6-year-old daughter cuddles a ceramic angel to “protect those falling.”
“It was not a television show,” I have the urge to jump up and scream, like a lunatic in Times Square. I replay in my mind desperate people leaping to a death only slightly less horrible than being consumed by flames so hot I can feel them two blocks away. In a slow moving ballet, they fall through the viscous air. I watch in frozen agony amid a silent crowd on South End Avenue.
The speaker continues her reading on how we are all interrelated, like knitting.
If you pull out one stitch, you unravel the whole. I think about the south tower unraveling in thunderous clasps as beam by beam it shreds, pulling its aluminum skin straight down 110 stories and disappearing into a neat pile into the subbasement. In a death bellow, the tower belches a thick gray cloud that pursues and blots out the fleeing bystanders as we race south to Battery Park. Tiny specks of silver rain down on us, the shattered bones of the building and its inhabitants.
Hundreds of feet pound past me in the enveloping fog, but no human voice cries out; there’s an eerie lack of panic. I pull my T-shirt over my nose to block the smell of burning plastic, oil and flesh.
“How can you presume to write about your 9-11 memory?” I silently ask the reader. “It’s like viewing a painting of a picnic. You receive the emotions third hand. You don’t taste the apple the boy is holding. You can’t savor the wine his father is about to drink or smell the cherry blossoms overhead. You aren’t even seeing the picnic with your eyes. The artist is filtering your ‘memory.’”
It’s as if 9-11 is such a core event for the nation, everyone wants to claim a part. “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” That kind of thing. Millions have memories, but no experience, just a televised report.
The further away people are from 9-11 the more I question the authenticity of their trauma. Without witnessing the towers fall, workers fleeing the Wall Street area did breathe the same foul mixture of chemicals and incinerated humans as those at Ground Zero. They, too, in their dreams run through chaos in search of safety. But as I look back on Manhattan Island from a ferry speeding to New Jersey, I see an Upper West Side bathed in the clean air of a brilliant blue September day. I marvel that so many other New Yorkers are untouched.
Certainly someone watching a news report in Kansas or Idaho cannot feel the same shock, anger and bewilderment of Battery Park City refugees disgorged on New Jersey’s shore. I find myself resentful when someone far removed from the tragedy appears to bleed over it. I suspect that it is borrowed emotion.
Perhaps it is like that phenomenon where psychologists “uncover” a person’s “hidden memories” of child abuse by suggesting it in the first place.
My memories come unbidden as I travel through Manhattan. A trip down Broadway reveals a hole between buildings that opens a once-blocked view to the World Financial Center. I shudder. A walk near the New York Stock Exchange with its concrete barricades, policemen and dog patrols sets off panic bells in my brain. I stopped seeing my dermatologist because her office is on the 74th floor of the Empire State Building. The ghosts chase me from my birthplace. I flee to the far shores of the Pacific.
Those of us living through 9-11 still flashback to the emotions of the day. They are burned into our DNA, embedded in memory. The scars itch when tweaked. (Harriet Pike Epstein is a native New Yorker who now lives and writes in Santa Monica).
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 11, 2003. Read the original PDF.