A witness remembers Sept. 11

Flight fear
Though the television no longer worked, I still had electricity and phone service after the first collapse. I spoke again with my wife, still at work, to let her know that I was OK.

“Come here now,” she said. She may have said more, I don’t recall. I don’t remember what I said, but I still remember those three words as clearly as if they’re being spoken into my ear as I write this sentence. I heard them not only from my wife, but at once from the children we have yet to bear. I heard my grandchildren. I heard my sister and my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and every ancestor and friend I ever had, all saying, “Come here now.” I felt 10,000 hands grab me by the front of the shirt and shake me as if to say, “This isn’t a game, this is everything. Everything that brought you to being and everything you will ever be will all end now if you don’t get out. Get out or die.”

I suppose another name for this fear is cowardice. Perhaps heroes don’t hear these voices. Instead they hear the voices of victims from that pitch black where the towers were: “Come find me, come pull me from the rubble.” If those voices were calling to me, I couldn’t hear them. I feel some shame about it now, but at the time I had only one thought, with three words.

I tried my best to plan ahead. I put my cell phone and charger in my pocket. I wet a T-shirt to put over my face against the dust. I covered the fish tank with a towel, closed all the doors. I pulled my bicycle out of the closet, thinking I would ride up to Midtown. The front tire was flat, but I could always walk it over to that bike shop in Tribeca… Of course I could not, I didn’t even know if there still was a Tribeca, and as I paused with my brain stuck on that fact, there was another rumble that again lasted longer than any rumble should. The windows, which had lightened to a dark gray, again flashed to black as the remains of the North Tower blew by.

The fear that follows
As it turns out, the lessons in fear would live past that morning.

Even though seasons change gradually, there is always one day that is distinctly not the humid haze of dying summer but the crisp clarity of autumn. There are days when you step outside and you can’t help but breathe in the day. Since then, with that first breath of fall, my stomach drops and I feel a sense of dread. Sept. 11 was one of those days, and now when there’s a nice day, especially the first nice day in a while, I still get the twinge, an emotional flinch. I was dismayed to discover that I even get it sometimes in the spring.

I’ve also lost my ability to dismiss things I can’t identify. Having stretched my conception of a worst-case scenario, the possibilities of what a mystery noise could be are more ominous and harder to ignore. Things that I would have shrugged off or not even noticed now distract me.

Sustained rumbles are especially bothersome. I run through a mental checklist while I wait for them to end. Subway? Motorcycle? Thunder? Truck? A car with a booming stereo? What I wait for is confirmation that it’s not the enduring rumble of an incoming plane or falling building.

I think there is a word for this fear that follows and lives in my mind, out of my consciousness until something triggers it to surprise me with anxiety. There is a word for the loss of the ability to dismiss a sound with a wave and a casual, “What’s the worst it could be?”

I think the word is terror.

Will Femia, an msnbc.com producer, still lives in the same apartment building two blocks away from where the World Trade Center used to be.

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