9/11 remembered: a ringing phone and rising smoke

I don’t like to answer the phone. Even when my caller ID tells me who is calling, my throat still tightens and a small pit forms in my stomach. The response is so reflexive that I don’t notice it most of the time. The symptoms get worse with phone calls that are out of the ordinary, like when my parents call me late at night. My mind immediately jumps to the worst possible scenario, and I have to pause and gulp before answering the phone.
For the past eight years in American politics, the insult that one’s opponent has a “pre-9/11 mindset” has been used as a bludgeon to shore up one’s anti-terrorism credibility. I can’t really say that I’ve ever thought about looking at the world in a pre- or post-9/11 way. I just remember that there was a time when I could answer phones without immediately thinking about what horrible news was awaiting my ears from the other end.
Eight years later, I can still relive the day that my dread of phone calls began—down to the minute. As any account written about that day can attest, September 11, 2001 was a clear, warm day. By early afternoon, I had heard what happened and listened to the radio as my mother picked up my sister and me from our middle school in Brooklyn to take us back home to Queens. From the car, I saw the immense plume of smoke billowing—the same smoke and dust that had earlier caused such a stench that all the windows in our school were closed. At the time we couldn’t comprehend what we were smelling, but to this day, I’ve never forgotten that smell.
On the car ride home, my mother tried to give us a more complete picture of what had happened. Our father, a thirteen-year veteran of the FDNY, had been on the Brooklyn Bridge heading home when the first plane hit—he had just gotten off a 24-hour shift at his firehouse, but seeing what happened, he immediately turned around and went back to work. My dad’s brother, a sergeant in the NYPD, had gone to my aunt’s house to wait with her until she heard from her husband. My stomach sank—until that moment I hadn’t even thought about my Uncle Kevin, who worked in the north tower of the World Trade Center.
When we got home, we all went to the south side of Jamaica Bay, about ten miles south of Ground Zero, to see what was happening in lower Manhattan. Watching the dust move toward me once more, this time with burnt documents from the towers, I couldn’t conceive of the possibility that something bad could happen to a family member. The tears in my mother’s eyes belied the fact that she could understand the number of people who wouldn’t be returning home that night.
We stayed on the bay for hours, the night sky obscuring the smoke—all we could see were the lights that allowed the rescue teams to work through the night. Eventually, around eight o’clock, we went home. We had gotten little news of my father during the day, and absolutely nothing about my uncle.
My mother took the dog for a walk. I was hypnotized watching the news and listening to the messages on the answering machine from friends and family, asking if everyone we knew was alright. Even at that late hour, it was too soon to say.
A minute or two after the messages stopped playing, the phone rang. In a daze, I got up to answer the phone. I snapped to attention when I heard my father’s voice on the other end.
I asked him where he was; he said that he was calling from a pay phone near Ground Zero. He asked where my mother was; I told him she was walking the dog. His voice during that phone call—I have never heard anything like it before or since—was overwhelmed and broken. There was a long pause. I didn’t know what to say. He finally broke the silence.  “Your uncle’s dead,” he said.
More silence. A pit formed in my stomach. My mother came in from walking the dog at that moment and took the phone from me. I sat back down on the couch, trying to comprehend what had just happened. It took several days for the news to sink in. But the dread of the phone call, that was instantaneous.