Missing

On the morning of 9/11, Stuyvesant was just beginning its first full week of classes. Teachers were just learning students’ names, [and] setting up class protocols. I had sophomores and seniors, and was teaching Book II of The Odyssey, and the “Christmas dinner” scene from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I remember the morning of 9/11 as a series of flashbulb images rather than a continuous flow of events. These include:  

- Hearing the alarms of all the cars parked on Chambers Street go off at once, but being so focused on writing the day’s Aim on the board in 615A that I don’t stop to wonder why. 

- Standing frozen in the hall outside the English office with my buddy Charles while the lights flicker off and the building’s foundations shake. 

- Being sent to homerooms to await instructions and pulling the students across the hall into room 836 with my homeroom when I see that they don’t have a teacher. 

- How quiet and orderly everyone is on the stairs when we are finally asked to evacuate.

- Dust and debris so thick that it’s impossible to tell whether the towers are still standing.  

- Being in the middle of the exodus of students up the West Side Highway. 

- Seeing my student Chaz and, even in that blur of faces, recognizing something different about the way he keeps looking back over his shoulder. 

- Asking if he’s okay and hearing him say, “It’s my dad. He works in the North Tower.” 

- Standing on a concrete piling to try to find Ms. Fletcher, who is eight months pregnant, because my apartment in Chelsea is much closer than her apartment in Harlem. 

In the days and weeks after the attacks, time began to resume its normal flow, even if life did not. Stuyvesant was inaccessible; Tribeca was cordoned off. Riverrun, the Franklin Street bar where my teacher friends and I used to meet on Fridays after work, would never reopen. Above Canal Street, every lamppost, storefront, and kiosk was plastered with “Missing” fliers, a city wallpapered with broken hearts. I remember feeling, for the first time, that I was living through history.  

10 days after the attacks, classes resumed… but at Brooklyn Tech. To accommodate us, Tech students shifted to a morning schedule; Stuy held classes in the afternoon. A few teachers—Ms. Fletcher, Ms. Katz, Mr. Maurer (my buddy Charles)—and I would meet each day for lunch at Junior’s, a few blocks away from Tech, on Flatbush Avenue. As eager as we were to return to Stuyvesant, there was something luxurious about those meals, having french toast (or “freedom toast” as Congress would soon rechristen it, to protest France’s opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq) with friends at noon before the start of school. 

It’s hard to convey—even to remember—just how uncertain everything felt during that time. That fall, there was no reason to think that 9/11 represented an isolated attack, that we hadn’t entered some new era where such attacks wouldn’t become commonplace (one thing about living through history is that you don’t know how it ends, or even what happens next). We were all just waiting for the next shoe to drop. Although very few people ended up leaving New York, everyone I knew at least talked about it. I had a toddler at home, and I remember wondering if staying in New York, if choosing to keep living in Ground Zero—not just for the attack that had happened, but for future attacks as well—was selfish and irresponsible. I’m glad I stayed, but at the time, it wasn’t clear to me whether that decision represented bravery or willed blindness.