9/11: How I Lost the Country I Used to Know and the Person I Used To Be

Author's note: The following piece is a memoir. It is an accounting of my memory of the experiences; actual events may have, and likely did, differ in small ways. Likewise, quotes from others are my memory of what was said, not the precise words that were spoken.

He walked through the front door, a thick roll of blueprints tucked under his arm, his eyes brimming with the kind of excitement a six-year-old displays opening his first box of Legos.

"Know what this is, honey?" he asked.

I looked up from the television, where he found me each night, attention focused on one news show or another.

"The World Trade Center!"

We were married then, he a project manager in a small construction company, I a freelance journalist who wrote mostly about the collision of religion and politics. His company specialized in the interior build-outs of retail stores and office suites; they had just landed a job for the renovation of a flower shop on the ground floor of the South Tower. It was maybe 1994 or 1995.

He unrolled the prints on the rickety dining-room table in our Weehawken, N.J., apartment. We had the top floor of a two-family house built late in the previous century, just two blocks from a magnificent park perched on the Palisades that offered a sweeping view of Manhattan, all the way out to New York Harbor, from the west side of the Hudson River. The towers were built when we were entering our teenage years, a source of true excitement at the prospect of yet another technological wonder just on our doorstep -- the tallest building in the world! -- and the subject of great debate as to their appearance. The lines were harsh, the buildings unornamented, and, once finished, they appeared to overweight the tip of Manhattan Island, whose skyline had long featured its tallest buildings at the island's center, with the building heights tapering downward at the northern- and southernmost points.

None of that mattered now. Ben* had a job to do in one of the biggest buildings in the world. He stood over the unfurled prints, examining the electrical schematics with an obvious sense of wonder on his face. Then he looked up with a quizzical look, saying, "You know what's so weird, Addie? I just walked into the building engineer's office and asked for these prints. They didn't ask for ID or anything.  I think they would've given 'em to anybody." It was only two or three years before then that terrorists loyal to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman had tried to blow up the buildings with a bomb, and failed, but still managed to kill six people in the effort.

* * *

Ours was not what you would call a good marriage, but it was filled with many kindnesses we accorded one another, perhaps to make up for our fundamental incompatibility, or to try to get the other one to see things one's own way. Or maybe we just loved each other. When I had to make impossible deadlines, he'd drive me to the city with my manuscripts and fellowship applications in the middle of the night; when he put in a long night at the 2 World Trade Center, I'd bring him a meal, traveling to and from the site via the PATH train, a subway that runs between Jersey and the Big Town.

The PATH station sat underneath the south tower, as 2 WTC was also known, its escalators leading to a large concourse filled with retail stores, some chain stores, some quirky little family-owned business, like the coffee joint where I'd hang, waiting for Ben to catch his break. At rush hour some 25,000 people moved through that concourse; more than double that number worked in the Trade Center. Long before Ben got his first WTC gig, I knew that concourse and the landscape of the financial district that surrounded it. Once within the buildings, there was more to appreciate aesthetically than was apparent from a distance -- especially the narrow, arched windows that echoed the Gothic forms of the ancient Trinity Church, just yards way, where George Washington prayed on the day of his inauguration, now cast into shadow by the towers.