That Day

The young Asian woman outside the deli on John Street where I bought water at 8:51, her face etched with confusion, turned up to the sky, through which scraps of paper floated. The smell of something on fire. A lone siren, maybe, though there would be more, a cacophony, by the time I emerged, fifteen minutes later, from the green line at Union Square. The empty registration lobby: one white clerk not making eye contact as she entered my course load, all the other bays empty. The young Black admin in Financial Aid, crying because “He hasn’t answered the phone.” Something wasn’t right. I didn’t know what, nobody knew what, but I understood the general tenor of panic when it entered my body. I thought: I should go get my stuff and get on a train home now. I can wait in New Haven till Sebastian gets out of work. The walk back to my apartment, downtown along Fifth, then Broadway, against a steady, then stronger, stream of people. Soon, a river.

Downtown, all the way to Canal, maybe lower, when I couldn’t anymore. A white woman—highlighted hair, sleeveless silk blouse, ivory slacks; so beautiful she could have been an actress—came running around a corner screaming, Run! The tower is falling. Torrents of people. Rapids of people. I turned around, headed uptown again, I didn’t know what else to do. Smoke. Sirens. Eddies of people sometimes breaking into a run. Huddled in doorways crying. Waiting in lines for a payphone. My apartment inaccessible; the direction of Bea’s apartment in Brooklyn a mystery. I walked for hours. My stomach a raw knot of frustration. I called my mom from 34th Street, finally, after the Latina cop blocking the entrance to Penn Station barked at the crowd, NO TRAINS ARE RUNNING—THE CITY IS SHUT DOWN. Both Towers were down by then. So many sirens. Nowhere to go. Keep calling. Keep walking. I bought water in an empty McDonald’s. I lingered around a group of construction workers, hard hats still on, speaking a language I didn’t understand, listening to a truck radio turned up loud on 37th Street. But what was happening? No one could say. Ambulances on the south-bound avenues. Fire trucks. Not a cab to be hailed. No subways. Would I ever get home? I stumbled into Times Square, deserted. I walked east. Wasn’t the other train station around here? Alone. Blistered. Sweating. Would I be trapped in this foreign place, knowing no one, forever?

It must have been after Noon when I stumbled upon a single glass door almost concealed along a narrow block. An unguarded side entry to Grand Central. I entered the hushed marble landing of the secret passage that might lead out of all this, not knowing what I’d find. 

At the bottom of a steep set of switchback stairs, four Black men in dark green conductor suits waited with Post-Its on their thumbs. I braced to be turned away, but one asked where I wanted to go. Anywhere, I said, but New Haven would be best. He wore tiny, almost antique looking, silver-rimmed spectacles, glancing down through the lenses before he said, Track 17. For the first time that day I ran, down the long hall flanked with different doors to different destinations, stopping only to buy a ticket, a rush hour ticket even though they’re more expensive; I wanted to be safe. But nobody took my ticket that day. I used it later, on a trip that wasn’t rush hour, and so the date and time imprinted on it, one scrap of evidence, the merest slip of paper that might give proof to who I was and where I was and when I was, is gone.

Is a Tower a long hall connecting heaven and earth? Were those men angels? I thought so for a long time. They got me home that day, after I’d given up hope I might return. On the train, I took a seat between two white business men. They’d never disembarked, had been sitting, spooked, in the tunnel. One asked what I’d seen, the other offered me his phone. I called Sebastian and asked him to come pick me up. When? In a couple hours, I said. That’s how long the trip usually took: 110 minutes. The car was air-conditioned, the business men tidy in their suits and ties, and after a while I took my long-sleeve from my bag and pulled it over my sweat-stained undershirt. The train was a local, stopping at every station. I tried to read Ulysses. Small progress had been made thus far; I wasn’t sure I liked it. The old cover—black, with a large U and dropped L, a long diagonal crease along the lower corner—floats in my vision. There remains the ghost-weight of the book in my hands. When I left the apartment that morning, not knowing the neighborhood (the world!) I was stepping into (had I ever known?), I chose it over my journal. The day I had planned involved exploring Manhattan, maybe a museum, plenty of walking to save subway fare, and I didn’t want to carry two heavy books. I meant to return to my apartment that afternoon, pack the stack of clothes and journal I left ready, and catch an evening train to New Haven where Sebastian would be waiting. I hadn’t told anyone else I was coming home early for a doctor’s appointment on Friday—I wanted this secret span of time where we could be alone, I wanted to tell him what I’d discovered in the city. But the day had other plans: Ulysses escaped the fate of being covered in dust and my journal did not. I never finished reading Ulysses. Later, I gave it away. Witness can be a burden. God, how I wanted to get free of it, how I wanted to un-see. I confess I destroyed almost everything related to that day. It only looks methodical in retrospect.

To imagine the men in the train station as angels is to establish a connecting line between god and human, their heavenly presence bestowed upon a traveler in need, their existence a bright spot on the road to salvation. They got me out! 

Never mind I thought God an antiquated concept then. Never mind those four men in Grand Central were probably regular men, men who went home and shed their work uniforms and cried with the rest of us. Most likely, one of those men, at the very least, lost someone they loved that day. Almost four hours after the train departed, I walked into Sebastian’s arms. I was saved; I had arrived right on time, early even, despite everything. Was I so innocent to believe that this gift would protect me from the pain I didn’t see waiting? 

I know I’m not supposed to, but I will make the four men mythic, because how else does a humble earthling show gratitude? I elevate their green polyester suits, their kindness, the yellow Post-Its stuck to their thumbs, the silver spectacles, the words Track 17 in rough melody. Sing their praises. Place them on high. I have to trust that on a day like that day I brushed up against some otherworldly grace in that divine corridor. Even if it makes no sense, even if all that remains of my record is dust.