Boston's Alternative Source! image!
   
Feedback

[This Just In]

HEARING THE NEWS
First blood

BY CHRIS LEHMANN

News of the World Trade Center attack first reached me, as many things do in the open-cubicle workspace of the Washington Post, as a vaguely irritating, staticky burst of noise from the paper’s Home section. Writers and editors there were closing the week’s assignments, and we, the nerdy book-review editors next door, had grown accustomed to their adrenaline-fueled, staccato exchanges over things like the sudden vogue for the color green or the latest umbrella-stand designs. Thinking I might strike a blow for peace and quiet, I went over to the Home sanctum, only to find the decorator scribes suddenly transfixed and speechless before images of the attack on the second World Trade tower.

As was the case across the country, reflexive horror mingled with sheer incomprehension as information of varying reliability coursed into the paper. It seemed like a gruesome newsroom practical joke when we got word over the wires that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon. Rumors began to fly. We heard, in rapid succession, that the old Executive Office Building had been hit, that a fire had broken out on the Mall, that the USA Today building in Virginia had been attacked. When my wife got wind of this latter tale, she demanded that I return home immediately. It seemed like a good idea.

As I left the building, white-professional Washington’s trademark calm and self-regard vied with its mood of mounting alarm. District police had already begun evacuating the Capitol’s corridors of power, and a fearsome knot of Lexuses and SUVs with Virginia and Maryland plates clogged Massachusetts Avenue, their horns blaring impatiently. Turning onto the street where I live — a predominantly gay stretch of Dupont Circle — I found myself in a throng of young congressional aides, decamped from one of the morning’s last Metro trains. It occurred to me that these were the people I’d seen every weekend, taking great pains in attire and manner to look alternately fearsome and desirable. Now, however, they were clad in ordinary office duds and uniformly scared, buzzing fervidly with rumors and speculation.

At home, I tried to assume the post–Cold War version of a civil-defense posture: the frenzied remote-clicking of the detail-starved CNN junkie. Phone calls began coming in from unlikely places. My stepbrother-in-law, a right-leaning libertarian soul, called to berate the Bush administration’s pitiful intelligence operations. My psychotherapist called, inopportunely, to cancel the day’s appointment. I phoned my wife to pass on the news that CNN was interviewing Tom Clancy as a terrorism expert. George Pataki, of all people, said something in a TV phone interview that set me off crying.

The moment the call went forth for blood donations, I bolted up, called my wife, and arranged to meet her at the nearest Red Cross. At last, we could do something useful instead of collecting stray snatches of anchorman speculation in a cocoon of cathode bewilderment.

With the Metro closed, I all but ran the mile or so to the donation center. Nearing the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, I noted that all the stalwart outlets of DC-yuppie commerce were shuttered. Jittery congressional aides and jowly lobbyists poured out of K Street power-dining venues. Traffic cones and police tape cordoned off Pennsylvania Avenue. Borders Books, where I’d hastily purchased a belated birthday gift for my sister on my way to work that morning, was now deserted. Even the three separate Starbucks outlets I passed — which, as I’d noted in the past year, remained defiantly open during WTO and Inauguration Day protests — were now dark and quiet.

The sole attendant on duty at the Red Cross center informed me that, with the city at a standstill, she was closing up shop; she was working two phones at once to try to get a ride home. Donors were flooding suburban blood centers, she said, and people were now being turned away. She added that they’d probably need more blood later, after emergency triage operations had run their course. An awkward silence passed between us as we each recognized what that might mean. I went back outside, phoned my wife, and made my way back to work down the empty street.

For More Phoenix Coverage Click Here

Issue Date: September 11, 2001






home | feedback | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy


© 2002 Phoenix Media Communications Group