a mouse ran by on toy wheels

On 9/11, I was working across the street from the South Tower.

After living through that day, I found that I had a funny phrase struck in my head: “A mouse ran by on toy wheels.”

This is a line in an old novel. The characters are sitting in a drab old kitchen. Nothing is happening. And the writer’s way to paint the experience of nothing happening, to give body to nothing happening, is to have a mouse shoot across the floor.

And isn’t it just how mice look when they shoot across the floor? Like toy mice with wheels instead of feet. With the ones I’ve played with, they really go. A little thump makes them zip.

I was at my desk that morning listening to music. A co-worker had brought in a few Stevie Ray Vaughan bootlegs. SRV was tearing it up when the lights blinked.

One of my supervisors, John, was in my line of sight at the copy machine across the floor. John was a gentle giant. Bear like. He always moved slowly. After the lights blinked, he tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. The very embodiment of “Huh?”

Working in a slick modern office, you don’t notice things like how the lights never flicker. You don’t notice what doesn’t happen. In my 6-floor tenement apartment in the East Village, every bulb seemed to flicker. You didn’t think anything about a power surge that made the lights swell. But the office was a timeless, changeless antiseptic environment.

The last time the lights flickered like this was 1993 when the bomb exploded in the WTC parking garage. I was actually playing chess with a co-worker. Killing time waiting for jobs to come in. On my second move, I saw that I had already checkmated my opponent. I’m not that good at chess, so I felt like I had unlocked dark magic.

Then the lights flickered. I heard a deep, subterranean rumble. Then a massive wave shook up through the building.

My grandmother had those springy door stops. We loved to flick them. Boing! It felt like the building was one of those stops.

We collectively speculated that either a helicopter or small plane had hit the building or … yes, of course, obviously … a transformer had blown. Which is funny. What the hell is a transformer? Where are they? What  made us agree, almost with a shrug, that a transformer is something that blows up and shakes a skyscraper?

I went downstairs. Outside the South Tower, the sidewalk was crowded with people pouring out of the doors. They all had soot on their faces. Fat snowflakes were just starting to fall.

John’s “huh” look made me take off the headphones. I heard someone ask, “Was that thunder?”

Of course, the sky was cloudless that morning.

Then it sounded like a big hand was throwing sand outside the window. Then it sounded like it was raining broken glass. Because it was raining broken glass.

Some large object swished past the window and thudded against the street.

We were on the mezzanine level. The street was one floor below. So when more large objects flew down, we really heard it all crashing against the pavement.

The falling chunks of steel were burning. The flames made a swooshing sound like if you were waving a torch in the air. The canyon between our building and the next roared with metal rain.

I have a vivid memory of a twisted beam, like 25 feet long, trailing flames. It made an especially resonant clang against the ground.

I ran out to our atrium.  The very tall windows looked out at a wide deck that lead to the plaza between the two WTC towers. A crowd had already gathered.

This plaza was covered in flaming debris. The movies don’t show how dirty a plane crash makes everything. A layer of soot and broken airplane and building parts covered the ginkgo trees in their big brick pots, the benches around them and the whole patio.

A block of airplane seats was there burning about 25 feet from the windows. Sometimes I read comments on Instagram reels with 9/11 footage. All these lunatics claim that there were no planes. I shake my head and remember, among other things, the surreal sight of these seats. Like someone was about to perform an Off Broadway play set on an airplane. Then they decided to burn it.

I used to sneak a morning cigarette out on this deck. “Good thing I quit,” I said to myself.

If you craned your neck looking up, you could see the black smoke pouring out of the wound in the North Tower.

A shrieking, shaking woman, held up by friends, came up the escalator with her head bleeding.

From the intercom speaker high in the cavernous ceiling our fire marshal Jerry told us that a “terrible accident” had occurred in the North Tower of the WTC. He repeated the message, his voice echoing through the atrium. A terrible accident.

The term “shelter in place” came into use after 9/11. But that’s what they told us to do. Or, really, just to stay put. Too much debris was still falling from the sky.

Back in my work area, we all stood by the windows gazing at the wreckage below. Again, just a total mess. Metal, splintered wood panels, plastic, glass. Suspicious puddles of goo. Thick swirls of paper blowing down the block. All in a slant of morning sunlight.

“Oh my God!” someone cried. A guy named Michael was pointing at the ledge just below the window. A yellow life vest was snagged on the vent and flapping in the breeze.

This was especially shocking because, like the bank of seats on the plaza, it was so recognizably from an airplane. Right there on the other side of the glass. So damn yellow. We knew exactly what it was and where it came from. A passenger jet had crashed and exploded. A terrible accident had occurred.

A blob that looked like a sponge was next to the vest. Tiny glows of flame crawled around its contours. My brain morbidly wondered if the blob was perhaps a fragment of human skull, but it was more likely foam from a seat. I guess.

We waited for further instructions.

It’s shameful to say, but we all started feeling a surreal boredom. I mean, it wasn’t boredom for real. It was shock. But it felt like boredom. It’s not like we could go back to the documents on our computers. But we couldn’t leave. We were trapped in our office. We knew that we were onsite at a major disaster. But we couldn’t really take it in. We couldn’t really feel anything.

I had a relatively intellectual discussion with a guy named Chris as we stared down at the debris. Chris was pursuing a PhD in history. The situation was very dramatic. A jet had collided with this major landmark. The World Trade Center! It was all “spectacular” in the technical sense. But, in essence, it was still just a plane crash. If we had been in a quiet suburban neighborhood, we’d be feeling the same shock looking out at the high school football field where the pilot had attempted and failed an emergency landing. We’d be looking at the same catastrophe of metal, flame and soot. We’d be engaged in the same struggle to access our feelings through the shock. The same struggle to know what to do with ourselves in that moment.

This is what it’s like to be near a major aviation disaster.

But, again, I hate to say it, but it felt like boredom.

I went over to the window on the west. If I pressed myself against the glass, I could see the North Tower still smoking. Endless smoke.

I looked straight up at the sky between our building and the next. Some French intellectual once said that Manhattan is not a tall city. It is a deep city. We’re always looking up through the ascending buildings.

The sky was pure blue. I mused to myself … quite specifically … that if I only looked at the blue, if that’s all someone could see, I wouldn’t know that smoke was pouring out of the skyscraper a few degrees to my right. I wouldn’t know that the street was covered in wreckage. Just looking up at the sky, it felt like the calmest day in the history of the world.

Then a mouse ran by on toy wheels.

A funny thing, when you see a mouse or anything zip past, it makes you want to shout “STOP!”  But at the exact instant, you also know that whatever it is zipping past is long gone.

When something zips past like that, I experience a weird feeling of thinking faster than words. My brain, in a flash, says, “Ah, yes, that is a mouse crossing the kitchen. Hm. That reminds me that I need to buy traps. Glue traps I suppose. But disposing of them is no fun. Anyway. He certainly is quick. Isn’t it funny that I want to jump up and catch him. But, ha, ha, ha, that’s absurd since he is disappearing under the oven in practically the same moment that I even see that it is a mouse. Hm. Fascinating.” But all this happens in a nanosecond before I can even think the word “mouse.”

Before I can think the word “plane.”

When I saw that plane zip past, my faster-than-words brain, in the same odd way, fully grasped the whole situation: “Ah, yes, a second plane. Ah, why did it not occurred to any of us that the first plane was a terrorist attack? I mean, that’s clearly what it was. We are under attack. A second plane is not some coincidence. It’s not like all of the pilots in the sky have suddenly become incompetent. This is obviously deliberate. I mean … duh.”

I know that time plays tricks with the memory, but it was like in that moment I could see that whole story that we all learned over the following months. I could see these mysterious guys in the flight school. I could see their indifference to the lessons about how to land. I could see them in that strip club the evening before.

When I turned away from the window, I was … FASCINATED. I knew that I was the only one in the room who had seen this plane. So I was eager to tell everyone about it. It was like, guys, you will … not … believe … this. I just saw a second plane.

It was frustrating because no one was paying any attention to me.

Are you not listening? I just saw another plane fly by. Another plane!

Hey, Andrew! Andrew, I just saw another plane. Flying really low. It just zipped …

Hey, Frank, Frank … I just saw …

Frank, grabbed my arm and calmly said, “We know. We know. Maybe you should sit.”

Everyone else had heard the boom. They heard more metal rain pounding down outside. Everyone else knew that another plane had hit the South Tower. They were all totally losing their shit.

Of course, I realized then that I was in a genuine state of shock. If I had been in a Hitchcock movie, you’d have seen my face with a crazed smile moving forward while the background receded.

I’m always a little numb when 9/11 rolls around. It’s finally far enough in the past so that it doesn’t feel like the whole world is making a big deal about it. But you still see plenty of earnest Facebook posts. People are full of sorrow for that day. Crying emojis. And some people will ask me if I’m okay. I guess they see me as having been more directly impacted by the disaster than other people.

But I think, on some level, I’ve never moved past that shock. A mouse ran by on toy wheels.

To this day, the sound of jets in the sky triggers me. Especially that shrill whine. Yet I have no memory at all of hearing that second jet. And I have no memory of the peel of thunder when it hit the building. No memory of the clanking shower of debris outside after the second plane.

I’m frozen in the moment of disbelief. The SIGHT of that second plane.

I’m frozen in a completely irrational feeling that something else could happen. The cold, hard fact was that … if you follow my logic … the instant that jet was out of my sight, it was about the length of itself from hitting the South Tower. In other words, you could maybe fit the jet between my building and the South Tower. Given its speed, what else could have happened? It couldn’t have made a sudden climb into the sky. It couldn’t have flown around the building. The jet I saw had to hit that building.

Yet I only saw it fly past. It hasn’t hit the building yet. It will hit the building. That is inevitable. But it hasn’t hit the building yet.

If you say “reality itself changed on 9/11,” most people who lived through that day as adults seem to know what you mean. I don’t mean anything all that deep. We lived in world where something as surreal as 9/11 hadn’t happened. Then suddenly we lived in world where it had.

But I feel like I’m caught in my own Twilight Zone between those two realities. The plane hasn’t hit the building yet.