The subway deposited me at the Broadway-Nassau stop about fifteen minutes later. As I was exiting the station, I noticed a larger than normal number of people running back towards the trains. People had that deer-in-the-headlights look, but some still took the time to stop and explain things to us newcomers.

"The World Trade Center is on fire and people are jumpin' out the windows!" a man breathlessly told us. I heard others shout something about bombs and terrorists. My initial thought was somebody had left a suitcase in the subway station and somebody freaked out and said it was a bomb. But that didn't explain what the guy said about the World Trade Center fire. So I went to the surface.

People were jammed on every sidewalk corner. Traffic was at a standstill and everybody was looking up at the towers. I was at the corner of Broadway and Fulton, one block from the Trade Center Plaza. I looked up at the towers, which were indeed on fire. Despite what you may think, looking at the World Trade Center Towers on fire from a block away was no easier to absorb than seeing it on TV, as I saw later. It just didn't make sense. Flames and black smoke shot upwards from the gashes in the buildings. It looked exactly like one of those disaster movies, like Earthquake or The Towering Inferno. It did not look real.

I thought there must have been some kind of gas explosion, some kind of accident. I started walking up Broadway without really thinking of what I was doing. I work at 7 World Trade Center, the red-brick building adjacent to the plaza. It's actually across the street from the Tower courtyard, connected by a tubular glass walkway. I guess I was trying to find an alternate way around to get to my job as a web designer for American Express Bank. I walked over to Barclay Street, surrounded by countless New Yorkers, some walking, most just staring up at the burning buildings. I made it to Church Street, but cops were telling everybody to go back. The cops, and many people pushing by on the street kept repeating, "Everybody should just go home," but nobody was going anywhere. There wasn't any way to react except to mill around and look at this thing happen.

I turned around, walked over to City Hall park. I was dimly thinking I needed to call my boss, call Brooke, my girlfriend, call my friend James who worked down in the Wall Street area several blocks south. Every phone I passed had a line of people waiting to call out. I thought if I could get down to James' office, I could use the phone there. I headed around Park Row, cutting a wide berth around the Trade Center on my way downtown. I ended up walking down a bunch of really old streets, like Gold and Water Streets. As I walked I started to piece things together from the conversations I overhead.

"Two planes hit the towers" was the first thing I heard. I first assumed it was an accident, although it seemed awfully strange that not one, but two planes could hit the towers. At some point I came to the conclusion that two planes must have flown by and shot missiles at the towers. I heard somebody say the attackers were hitting other major US landmarks. People were fixed on the buildings, some screaming, some crying, many saying "Oh my God" and "Holy shit" over and over. I passed a corner that had a good view of the fires and people were pointing and shouting "People are jumping off!" I could not bring myself to look at this, and kept going.

I made it down to Whitehall Street, and started back up Broadway to James' building. People were roaming everywhere, some uptown towards the fire, some away. I took the elevator to James' floor and found his company offices. There was only one person there, a guy named Paul who said, "I just got here and there's nobody else here." He told me that James was away at a trade show in Chicago, so at least he was okay. Paul asked if I knew what was happening. He said he heard it had been two planes that had rammed into the towers, and all I could say is, "Well, you hear a lot of things." He let me use the phone and I called Brooke. She confirmed that it was in fact true that two planes had been purposefully flown into the WTC Towers, and that the Pentagon had been hit as well. It sounded like the plot to a right-wing action movie, like Red Dawn. I told her I'd come home right away. It was 9:30. I tried calling my boss, but I only got busy signals. I thanked Paul and headed for the subway.

Brooke called the office number back moments later to tell me the subways weren't running, but I was already gone. Paul was reportedly hysterical, as black smoke started to filter down around his office. I was out on the streets again, going against the flow of foot traffic back up to where the A/C trains ran. I heard more about what had happened, but nothing really registered. Somebody finally uttered the word "hijacked" and it sunk in a little more. There was a perfect circle of people surrounding a grizzly homeless man who had his radio tuned to the news. The newscasters had no idea what was going on and kept saying as much. Still, surprisingly few people seemed to be trying to get out of the area.

I made my way down to the A/C platform, surprised that more people were not following suit. I guess everybody wanted to be topside to see what would happen. An uptown A train came by, but no downtown trains were showing up. I figured there might be a delay from the confusion, but the longer I waited, the less likely it seemed a train would show.

Suddenly there were screams from the far end of the platform. I glanced down the tunnel and saw people running towards me, shrieking their heads off. I had no idea what was going on, but I decided to worry about rational thought later and joined in the panicked mob. We ran to the far stairwell, everybody crowding to get up. We managed to jam ourselves together so well that nobody could get up the stairs. Finally people started yelling "What the hell are we running for?!" A moment passed, and nothing seemed to be happening, so the throng dispersed back onto the platform. I looked at the far end of the tunnel and saw white smoke slowly pouring out. That must have been what set off the panic. I stood around waiting for the train a little longer. Somebody got on the PA and said the A/C trains were running on the F line, whose nearest station was many blocks away. I walked up the stairs and was completely engulfed in the white smoke. The exits were jammed as people tried to get back to the street.

When I hit the sidewalk, the city had changed completely. There was a thick layer of white dust on everything. Some people were covered head-to-toe in the stuff. I could not think what it could be except soot from the fire. It was just after 10:00 AM. I would find out much later that the first tower had collapsed and we were covered in fallout from it. A huge mass of people were walking through the dust, heading east towards the F train and the bridges to Brooklyn. Many people had painter's masks on. I don't know where they got them, but no doubt some enterprising person was out there making a small fortune. Other people tore their T-shirts into strips and passed them out. I covered my mouth against the dust and started a very long walk.

The dust was very concentrated in the area near the Trade Center, and when we got farther east, it abruptly stopped. We walked under the Brooklyn Bridge, and I was about to find my way onto it, when I realized that to get to the entryway, I'd have to walk back into the dust cloud. I kept going until I reached the Manhattan Bridge. It was a strange sight, this enormous group walking to the bridge. We looked like the footage I'd seen from Bosnia, refugees walking because there was nothing else to do.

They had stopped car traffic on the bridge and allowed pedestrians to cross on the street level. It was then I noticed what a beautiful day it was. Nary a cloud in the sky, and the sun shone brilliantly on the bridge. I looked over my shoulder at the burning buildings. It was then I realized that I could only see one tower standing. I had noticed this on my way to the bridge but had assumed that one tower was obscuring the other. Now I realized the tower was just gone. I trudged over the bridge, looking over my shoulder every few seconds. There was no way not to look. It was hypnotic. Had the terrorists (as I finally allowed myself to think of them) wanted, they could have wiped out hordes of spectators simply by virtue of their being transfixed by the incredible sight of the towers burning. It was about 10:30 now. I turned and looked at the remaining tower. Somebody shouted "Look!" and I watched the top half buckle, then drop straight down. The rest of the tower just disappeared with it, and another cloud of that white dust rose in its place. More screaming, more crying.

Despite the amount of walking New Yorkers do on a daily basis, many of them are annoyingly slow. I walked the length of the bridge, dodging and weaving around people who seemed to be moving at the pace of the casual tourist. When I got off the bridge in Brooklyn, I saw that many of the people who crossed lived in the far reaches of the borough, or did not live there at all. They had just wanted to get out of Manhattan.

The World Trade Center was just now a big cloud of dust which was moving over Brooklyn Heights and into Carroll Gardens. I was heading east to my apartment in Clinton Hill, which turned out to be further away than I thought. I didn't think that the G train would still be running, even though it doesn't go to Manhattan. So I just kept walking. The farther I got into Brooklyn, the less evidence there was that anything had happened. There were more people on the street than usual for a workday, but when I turned onto St. Felix Street, out of view of Manhattan, everything seemed like it always did. A man stepped out of his apartment with a camera. He walked up to a wino on the next stoop, who was drinking from a flask in a paper bag. "Ain't this some shit?" the man with the camera said. "What happened," said the wino disinterestedly.

I got home at about 11:15 AM. Brooke and my other roommates, Noah and Sarah, were all there watching the reports on CBS, Channel 2. It was the only station we received now, as the other networks apparently broadcast from the antenna on top of the Tower. The phone lines were screwed up and most calls resulted in busy signals. Our DSL line, however, was working fine (thanks AceDSL). Emails were sent out assuring everybody we were okay. I finally got through to my mom who relayed the info to my sister and father. I was fine, if a little dusty and tired. I watched them piece together the story on the news, but it still didn't make things any easier to understand. Noah went off to give blood, but was eventually told to come back later due to lack of hospital staff to draw it. I wondered if I'd have to go to work tomorrow.

That question was answered later in the afternoon, when I watched my building succumb to fire and collapse as well. I can't quite figure out how that happened, considering there are three other buildings in closer proximity to the tower that are apparently still standing. However it happened, there was no denying what I saw: 7 World Trade center crumbled like a wet graham cracker and was no more. I tried to think if I had left anything there I would need, but I soon realized that even after working there a year I hadn't done much to personalize my cubicle. I didn't even have the voicemail set up in my name. When people called, it still responded for some guy who worked there before me. I had always felt a little guilty about not doing more with my space (but like being on time to work, it wasn't strong enough to move me to action). My coworkers all had fat books about Javascript and ASP, I had only a collection of timesheet fax receipts and a copy of "Civil Disobedience" which I had been Xeroxing for a class Brooke teaches.

I was, however, worried about my computer. I had had a lot of writing on it. None of it was any good, but some had potential. Also disconcerting was the fact that any portfolio-padding work I might have had was now lost. The sites I worked on had mirrors in the UK and Singapore, but I had a lot of graphic-related projects that never made it to any of these servers. No amount of backing up one's files can measure up to having your entire building burned down.

So then I just tried to figure out what to do next. I found my boss' home email by chance on the web and he said he'd contact me when he knew what was going to happen. My staffing service (this AmEx job is actually a long-term contract job) called me to make sure I wasn't dead, but had little else to tell me in terms of my employment status. So I spent the rest of the day trying to drink myself into a stupor which never seemed to come. We went out to a good Cambodian restaurant later on, and ended up at the Alibi, a dive in Fort Greene. On our way home the cloud of smoke from Manhattan had finally begun to dissipate. I woke up in the middle of the night trying to decide if this whole thing had been a dream. But I knew it wasn't. In my dreams, even when bizarre things happen, I always understand implicitly why they happen. What I had seen in the previous day refused to coalesce in my brain and probably never will.

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