EYEWITNESS EXCLUSIVE: Darkness At Noon

By Marc-Yves Tumin

The platoon of firemen raced toward me and on down the block, screaming "Get back! Get back! It's coming down!" Foolishly, I didn't budge. This was Ground Zero of the terrorist attacks on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center.

On this day of doom, I stood firm atop a hummock of ashes and debris, stubbornly keeping my balance by clinging to some wreckage near the corpse of Deutsche Bank on Washington and Albany streets.

At the end of the short block, a towering asphaltic whirlwind of smoke swirled skyward. Every few minutes, the curtain lifted for a moment and the macabre skeletal hand of the South Tower jutted out of the torn and tortured ground.

When the first of the hijacked jetliners was flown into the North Tower, I'd made my way on foot from East 28th Street to Lower Manhattan to have a look. I simply had to see it firsthand.

The west side subways were halted. People were milling about on the Avenue of the Americas and staring downtown as I walked southward. Someone said, "A small Cessna crashed into the World Trade Center."

Here and there, activists in Greenwich Village were already haranguing the crowds that America was to blame: "If the U.S. hadn't oppressed the Palestinians, this wouldn't happen!" one man said. "W stands for wimp!" a woman hissed.

People were staring at the Twin Towers and sobbing as they threw themselves down on sidewalk benches with their heads in their hands. Others were lined up 10-deep at pay phones. A man in a wheelchair raced ahead of me, trying every phone and announcing the verdict.

I stopped at a bar near West Fourth Street to call the editor of the paper where I worked. The bartender there was extorting money from businessmen desperate to use the house phone. "You must buy drink," he was telling them. "I have orders."

As I lingered near the television monitor by the door, the bartender called across the counter to me, "Sir! Can I help you? Sir! Can I help you?"

"Look at what they did to the World Trade Center!" I exclaimed.

"You must buy drink, if you want to watch," he declared.

I stared at him. "You're an immigrant who's making a decent living in America," I replied. "Foreigners have attacked this nation. There could be a lot of victims. And you want to charge Americans to watch it on T.V.? Get out of my country!" I snapped.

"I have orders. Owner says I must charge. I suffer like you! I suffer like you!" he pleaded.

"Sure you do," I replied as I left in disgust.

The police were starting to direct pedestrians back uptown. Since I'd left my press pass at home, I couldn't get through and headed east near Canal Street. As I proceeded, it became apparent that cops at more and more intersections were directing pedestrians northward and I realized I might be cut off. Eventually, however, I slipped through.

At a firehouse below Canal, the air trembled from a blast. "That's the fourth explosion," a fireman yelled, and the men started running for the trucks. I told a policeman at the next corner and he raced toward the firehouse to confirm the report.

The cordon was heaviest near Foley Square, so I angled over into Chinatown and further east to South Street. A strategy was forming in my mind. On the way, I was riveted by the sight of the massive, dark plume of smoke blowing across the East River to Brooklyn. I realized now that this was a true catastrophe and stopped for a minute at the fieldstone redoubt of old St. James Church to pray and light some candles.

At the bank of the river, a parade of people trudged north under the FDR, hunched over, covered in ash, coughing and holding handkerchiefs to their faces or wearing paper dust masks.

The smell of the Fulton Fish Market commingled with the odor of the incendiary fallout. A workman was standing in the middle of the street, gaping at the Armageddon to the west. "Can you believe they're doing this to my country?" I exclaimed. "I can't," he replied.

I then told him of the mercenary bartender and he brought me inside the fish store and let me use the phone for free. I called some friends and editors at various publications and hiked on downtown.

At Pier 17 in South Street Seaport, I quaffed a cup of water as I continued my relentless march southward to The Battery. My plan was to wind my way back uptown on the west side through the narrow colonial streets and alleys, well below the tightening northern cordon. I wondered what was left. Peering westward through the side streets toward Broadway, I saw only a torrential volcanic blackness.

At one point, a cop asked me where I was headed. He was only doing his job but I had to do mine. I knew the ferryboats were out so I innocently inquired if this was the way to the Whitehall Street Ferry Terminal. He waved me through.

At the Terminal, people were lining up for buses. I walked past them. Battery Park was deserted, as I knew it would be. Now there would be no one to stop me from getting as close to the disaster as I wished.

This was Pompeii reborn. The statues were swathed in a fine, cream-colored ash.

There were no pigeons, squirrels or seagulls squeaking like pulleys. Every sign of urban wildlife seemed to have disappeared in the ominous, embalmed silence.

State Street was shrouded by a rippling carpet of ash some 2 inches deep. Near Bowling Green, a frenzied construction worker raced from pay phone to pay phone, trying to make a call. I was very familiar with the area and knew that all the phones had been out of order as recently as the previous week. I advised him to try one on State Street near the U.S. Custom House but he ignored me and continued his vain quest.

At Bowling Green, in front of the Museum of the American Indian, I made some more calls from the phone I'd recommended,

I looked around. The horizon seemed unfamiliar and strangely contorted. Then I caught sight of a sandstorm of beige and gray ash blowing downtown toward me like a gigantic wave. I knew I had to make a decision: retreat or go forward.

I put my head down and plunged ahead along the west side of Broadway. The thick cloud hit me like a tornado. My skin stung. I was gagging. I turned my back to the deluge. For a few seconds, I couldn't see 10 yards.

The maelstrom subsided and I proceeded northward and zigzagged over to Trinity Place. The subway stairwells were inundated with ash and the historic church was immured in a hideous backswash of debris.

I ambled west, past Greenwich Street to Washington Street, and turned northward again. At Rector and Carlisle Streets, the devastated blocks looked like half-empty boxes of cement. Everything was ravaged and inundated by the permeating powder.

The waxen light and perspective itself appeared distorted. And all the while, amid the colossal wreckage, a fearful death breeze whipped about and spread the acrid smell of destruction.

At this point, my trudge became a climb across rubble and the cerements of ruination. The atmosphere writhed like a tormented patient in his death throes, tossing and turning in a paroxysm of fever. Portentous snippets of sound were the city's unintelligible speech as it picked at its bedclothes.

Then I sensed that I was entering the "bear's cage," as the curtain-edge of a rain-wrapped tornado is called. And I drew as close to the sick epicenter as I dared.

The street signs were illegible. At Albany and Cedar Streets, long metal storefront signs were indecipherable or had been blown back against the light poles, wrapped around them like scraps of aluminum foil. Parked cars were destroyed, some with their tires burned off.

There was a blanket of papers from curb to curb, corner to corner, increasingly burned around the margins as one drew nearer the center of the calamity. A block northward, I saw that every piece of paper was merely the center of a page in the book of oblivion.

There were menus, diaries, and inventories. There were file folders, personal phone books, and the minutes of business meetings. There were schedules, screenplays, and architectural drawings. There were note pads, cell phones, and magazines. There were printouts, brochures, and memoranda. Everything was bemired in filth and in tatters.

"There are more looters over there!" some security officers yelled into their walkie-talkies as they dashed westward across the street, practically splashing through an ankle-deep surf of ashes and rubble.

As I made my way farther north, I had to start climbing over a mausoleum of boards and piles of rubble and sharp metal heaps 3 feet high. As I waded through the increasingly larger ash dunes, I saw what appeared to be a cave. I ducked inside and found myself in the ghostly shadowbox of a deserted parking garage, which had been inundated by a tidal wave of ashes as though it were King Tut's tomb in the desert sand.

Back outside, at the blistering edge of the inferno, a cyclone of black smoke obscured the northern terminus of the block. Had someone told me that a meteorite had smashed into Wall Street, or that an atomic bomb had been detonated near Bowling Green, I would have believed it.

Now and then, the impenetrable whirlwind ahead of me wafted eastward or lifted for a moment, revealing a macabre scene of tangled rebar, roaring flame, and the skeletal remains of the South Tower, whose jagged hand seemed to be appealing to Heaven for mercy.

Beyond its eerie fingers was the depression that would become known as "The Crater." Within that funerary pit was "The Pile." Under that shattered visage -- that appalling cenotaph of broken bodies and shattered plans -- were thousands upon thousands of civic hopes and dreams.

Through it all, the torpid silence was punctuated by gusts of ash and pierced by whistles, demented sirens, and deep, minatory rumbles. Here and there, pockets of flame sprouted and burst like geysers from piles of metal on the sidewalks, lurching hungrily from the Gordian underbrush and shards of debris. So this was what Dante had described in his "Inferno." It was a phantasmagoric still life. It was an embalmed tableau vivant. It was a medieval tapestry depicting a hippogriff swallowing stars in the celestial map of a mad sorcerer.

Pushed back by the intensity of the heat, which I could only compare with what I've seen of oil well fires, New York's Bravest were powerless.

"There's nothing you can do," an exhausted fireman advised me. "Go home and take care of your family."

"Everyone above the fire line is dead," another lamented as he gazed at the wracked and ravaged sky.

All that the smoke eaters could manage without further risk to their lives was to muster up, circle around, set their hoses, and watch. A few tested the half-submerged hydrants.

"Here's one that's working!" a fireman called excitedly.

Then someone began screaming, "Gas! I smell gas!" and everybody scattered.

Farther down from the crater of doom, people seemed eager to talk to anyone who scurried by, just to communicate with the living.

"Is this America? This should never have happened," a man said to me.

"Somebody should pay for this. I'm 53 years old and I voted for Reagan, so you know where I'm coming from."

"It's like the end of the 'Planet of the Apes,' the original," another said of the trembling sliver in the maw of Liberty Street.

A few photographers just stood about exclaiming, "My God! My God!" Some tried to buy cameras from passersby. The few shops that remained open were sold out. Their cheap disposable cameras had been scavenged for their film. A journalist ran up and asked me, "Is this the way to the World Trade Center?"

"It used to be," I replied.

On West Street at Liberty Street, a cadre of appalled police and firemen watched the scaffolding on a corner-building fall onto the asphalt as if heavy icing on a cake. "The heat's melting the brackets!" a fireman shouted, and we all retreated.

I spotted a torn Bible open to Malachi on the pavement, Malachi with the words "And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."

As I stood in line for a drink of water, an exhausted fireman ahead of me knelt with his head under an open hydrant and was offered medical attention. I followed him, genuflecting beneath the achingly cold wetness as a photographer snapped away. When I arose, I almost passed out from the sudden chill and had to lean against a streetlight pole for support. I hadn't realized how hot and parched I was.

After 4 hours downtown, I reluctantly turned back. I paced eastward through the narrow streets, passing a hurriedly abandoned street vendor's cart on Hanover Place. Its scattered boxes of strawberries looked like monuments in a miniature cemetery covered in gray ash.

My hair was filled with grit. I was gagging on dust. The dying wind had a bitter aftertaste. My shoes and clothes were white with the burial powder.

I saw people plodding across the Brooklyn Bridge as I limped footsore through the Lower East Side to friendly, crowded Chinatown. Everyone was gazing southwest. Someone asked if I needed medical attention. Others pointed and nodded and started to dust me off.

I rested on a stoop, then staggered on, stopping to pray once more at St. James Church, which miraculously reappeared. It had been turned into a medical outpost. There I chatted with a police officer named Haig, who'd been dispatched from Police Plaza to take charge. Someone asked me if I wanted to lie down but I declined and eventually caught an uptown train.

Later, at home, watching the television reports, I recognized one of the War Zone photographers. He'd stayed there longer than I had and said that he was almost killed when a third building collapsed. And more structures fell after that.

All through the night, ambulances raced back and forth while the news filtered in. By 4 a.m., the NYU Medical School library was being used by the city's chief medical examiner as a "missing person's clearinghouse." Staffers were instructed not to call it a morgue.

This had been the big town's longest day. As I thought back to the tragedy that I'd witnessed all too closely, I wondered if it would come to symbolize what we're about. Say a prayer that it doesn't.