Balcony View, Living at Ground Zero After 9/11: 20th Anniversary Edition

By Julia Frey

Very quietly Ron said, “You know, I think the Towers are going to go. Maybe we’d better get out of here.” ßWe suddenly realized that if either of the Towers fell at a certain angle, our building was directly in the line of fall. Above the raging flames, the perpendicular steel I-beams were beginning to bulge out, softening in the heat. Again his unnaturally quiet voice, “I can’t stay here. If the Towers fall on us, I’ll die of fright.” (BALCONY VIEW - a 9/11/ Diary )

Julia Frey’s account begins on September 11, 2001, as the couple decide that despite her husband’s illness, they must somehow flee. They abandon his wheelchair; he is too frail to climb on a boat. Later that day, covered with ashes, they struggle home through a neighborhood pitched into destruction and chaos, to look out his study window at their new view: “the stage set for Dante’s Inferno.” The domino effect of one burning, collapsing building setting fire to the next one makes it clear that their own building could still go. “The electricity was out. Ron could never go down 26 flights on his rear end. We were trapped in the sky.”
That’s when Julia decides to write it all down -- if only for the people who will find their bodies. Describing the first night in the the ruins, being evacuated, then returning weeks later, to live at Ground Zero, she discovers that their world has totally changed, yet finally not changed at all. “Our previous problems didn’t magically disappear. They were just waiting for us to come back in the door.” This powerful narrative of double coping -- with Ron’s progressing disability and with the after-effects of 9/11 -- describes a situation the manuals don’t cover -- caregiving in a disaster.
Julia Frey’s intense, wryly humorous ‘you are there’ style buoys up the diary and moves it swiftly along, catching us in a gripping, touching, brave, tender, funny story of falling towers, a failing husband and a floundering ménage à trois. “Nothing happens in a vacuum,” she says, weaving in the leitmotif of a long-term love affair. Unflinchingly, she faces the ruins out the window and her own disturbing ambivalence as she sacrifices her creative and professional life to become a full-time caregiver. Ron is no angel, either. He’s a self-centered, willful novelist who after convincing her to take a lover, now wants her to give him up. “What makes him think he can turn us off and on like televisions?” she wonders.
Ron’s own writing creates an important counterpoint to Julia’s voice, as she weaves into her diary quotations from his posthumous novel, Last Fall (FC2, 2005). In a poignant Coda, another tale comes to light -- the almost supernatural coincidences between Ron’s last short story and a series of events that occur after Ron dies. There is even a happy ending.

Now, twenty years later, Julia's experience is no longer an extraordinary occurrence. This historical diary is important not only to historians, sociologists and psychologists helping patients recover from PTSD, but above all, to those who find themselves unexpectedly plunged into similar catastophic situations: becoming caregivers during a major emergency. The international Covid-19 pandemic and regional climate-change disasters like wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, repeated Gulf Coast flooding and the 2021 Texas freezes have left many unprepared peopleto deal with a very ill family member, without electricity, gas or clean water. Julia's dilemma unfortunately is no longer rare. Many people will find it comforting to know that even unheroic people manage to get through such times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Aug 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662912801

Book preview

SEPTEMBER

DAY 1: September 11, 2001

Oh my God, oh my God.

Get the field glasses.

Ron would get them himself, but he can’t.

Coming back with them in my hand, I pass a mirror. We both are stark-raving naked. Well, now’s not the time to get dressed. I focus the binoculars on the street below.

The enormity of what is happening enters a human dimension. A hurtling chunk of something has destroyed the rear end of a car stopped at the intersection. Pieces of body, unrecognizable clods of flesh, are scattered across West Street, outside our building, in front of the Marriott Financial Center Hotel. Traffic is stopped. I see a black man in black Marriott livery come out with a stack of brilliantly white, ironed, folded tablecloths. He goes from place to place, spreading a tablecloth over each body part.

When this all starts, it’s around eight AM. We are getting up. I am brushing my teeth when I hear an enormous BOOM! and come running out. I join Ron in front of the picture window in his study. We just stand there, gaping up with craned necks at the top quarter of the north tower of the World Trade Center, which is burning. Flames are roaring upward, bright orange, with huge clouds of black smoke churning out, opaque against the bright blue sky.

It’s boiling smoke, Ron says.

Hugging each other, me crying. The windows of the North Tower are bursting in the heat, a sparkling shower of glass cascading to the ground. The double-glazed window is shut, making everything outside oddly quiet. The breaking windows across the highway are making a distant popping sound, like fireworks going off. How many people are trapped in there? Devastated. Nauseated. The beginning of a workday. Everyone is in their offices. Now it’s maybe fifteen minutes later. Our window is like a vast TV screen showing a disaster movie. Our own private viewing. We are still standing here, mesmerized.

I was here when the first attack came on the World Trade Center in 1993. As far as the terrorists were concerned, that attack had gone wrong. The truck with the explosives blew up in the parking garage before they could get their act together. It nonetheless killed some people and caused terrible chaos. I watched out our windows all that day, counting 171 emergency vehicles. I knew back then there eventually would be another attack on the Twin Towers. At some point I said to myself, They must be frustrated because they didn’t succeed in blowing the whole place up. When they get a chance, they’re going to try again. The towers are a symbol, and what they wanted was a symbolic act. An explosion in the parking garage, however devastating, wasn’t going to do it for them. But right after I had that thought, I forgot it. I knew it was going to happen, but it was unacceptable, so I didn’t accept it. I just forgot about it.

Now, in the far corner of Ron’s window, I notice a large commercial airliner veering over toward the North Tower, on its north side, very low, in a place where a plane shouldn’t be.

What’s he doing there? Disaster tourism?

It curves off to the southeast. Perhaps five minutes later we hear a gargantuan roar from the south, behind our building, out of sight. It sounds like a plane going full throttle. Boom! Double boom! A second hole, in the second tower, the south one. Fire comes volleying out our side of Tower 2, directly across the street from our apartment. Flames move very fast horizontally across nearly the whole story, charring the floors above it. Building parts dangling and dropping within seconds. What’s happening outside is unbelievable. I turn on the TV to see what’s really happening. They finally admit it’s no accident.

Very quietly, Ron says, You know, I think the towers are going to go. Maybe we’d better get out of here. Again, his unnaturally quiet voice. I can’t stay here. If the towers fall on us, I’ll die of fright.

Between us and the World Trade Center, there is only West Street. All at once, it’s become obvious that if either of the towers falls at a certain angle, our building, Liberty Court, will be directly in the line of fall. Above the raging flames, the perpendicular steel I-beams are red hot, wilting. They are beginning to bulge out.

The fires are going to be impossible to put out. There is no place to aim hoses from. No building nearby is even half as tall as the towers. Sooner or later they will burn to weakness, and then they will fall.

Malcolm is going to be wild with worry. We need to have breakfast. I catch another glimpse of myself in the mirror. My toothbrush is still dangling out of the corner of my mouth. Portrait of naked woman with toothbrush. Where did those thoughts come from? That’s just like you, Julia, in the midst of unspeakable horror to start thinking about something else or cracking jokes. Apparently a weird, inappropriate sense of humor is an attention deficit disorder thing. When caught in chaos, we ADHDs get distracted by irrelevant trivia or the comic implications of even the worst situations. Remove toothbrush, lay it on Ron’s desk.

That makes me realize that I’ve forgotten to take my Ritalin. If I don’t take my meds, I’m hopelessly distracted. I can’t concentrate enough to make decisions, not to mention function. I always turn to the most recent demand, no matter how unimportant.

Get serious, now. We have to get dressed.

Like me, when he heard the explosion, Ron had emerged from his own bathroom naked and unshowered, using his cane for support. But no toothbrush. He needs my help to brush his teeth and put on his clothes. What do you wear to a catastrophe? I decide to wear black, washable pants and T-shirt. Fairly respectable, maybe we’ll never be back. Sturdy sandals because I may need to walk for miles.

We eat peaches over the kitchen sink. I load the backpack with items from our safe deposit box that I brought home from the bank Monday because Ron’s illness is progressing. We need to update our wills. Right. Today more than ever. On top I pack checkbooks, cash, water, apples. I can’t carry Ron’s manuscripts. Or mine.

And we can’t take Pearl. I layer the bathroom with two inches of newspapers, put out huge bowls of dried cat food and water, and lock her in. She has grown senile and can’t find her cat box anymore. If we are gone very long, she’ll pee all over the house.

I shoulder the backpack and give Ron his cane. Just then my sister, Suki, calls from Denver.

I’m a little busy, I say. The towers are going to fall…

Our plan is to go up to get Ron’s three-wheeled electric scooter, which is stored on another floor. But when the elevator comes, everybody is going down. We decide to skip the scooter.

A woman with two dogs is saying, My daughter’s in the elementary school on the other side of the World Trade Center. I don’t know what to do. Should I try to get to her? My ADHD self silently wisecracks, You’ll need to borrow a hot-air balloon. Gallows humor.

As the elevator doors open on the ground floor, there’s a man trying to get in. He’s got a big tear in the knee of his pants and he’s bleeding. I was outside when the first explosion hit. I fell down running to get away.

This is definitely not funny.

Are you all right? I ask.

I’m OK. But I’m very frightened.

We go out the back door to West Thames Street, Ron leaning on his cane. He can still walk at a very slow shuffle. We head toward the Hudson River Esplanade. The air is full of sirens. On South End Avenue there are numerous police and a lot of bystanders. For the first time ever, there are no cars. In the middle of the street, a couple is embracing, their faces turned upward to the burning skyscrapers.

We make our way west to the river, then turn upstream, north to Liberty Terrace where our friend Barbara has an apartment. She lives in England and has left me her keys; I think we might be safe there. A lot of people are crowded along the metal railing of the Esplanade by the water. Everyone is looking up at the blazing towers.

I don’t want to go into Barbara’s building, Ron announces. I’m afraid we’ll get trapped in there. I want to stay outside and watch.

My own instinct is to put something between me and what is about to happen, but I stay with Ron on the waterfront, near the railing. Just as we get to Rector Place, the first tower falls.

I see only the beginning of the implosion, enough to realize it looks as if it’s falling straight down. When it hits the ground, it creates a huge eruption of blinding smoke. I can’t tell if the whole building fell, or just the top half.

A massive, turbulent discharge of smoke and dust several stories tall comes rolling out of Rector Place horizontally, toward the river at amazing speed. We are showered with a fine gray-beige powder. It feels like ground glass.

Everyone starts running, but there’s no way Ron can run, so we just stand there. For one second, I think: But I can run! I could just leave Ron here, and run as fast as I can, and maybe I’ll have a chance of surviving. Maybe he’ll be dead all at once, and he won’t have to die cell by cell, the way he’s been doing.

Then I know I’m not doing that. How would Ron feel if I ran off without him? We move together like a movie in slow motion, making our way south, clinging to the railing. Black smoke surrounds us, so dense we can’t see at all. Dust is in our eyes and hair and mouths. All around us, it’s as if the film is moving on fast-forward; we glimpse the rushing outlines of people fleeing for their lives. Some have pulled their T-shirts up over their noses and are breathing through them. I stop and open Ron’s shirt, pulling the collar up over his nose and mouth, closing it over the bridge of his nose. I pull the neck of my T-shirt over my face the same way.

Every now and then a gust of wind thins out the smoke. All around us people are running. If they bump into us and knock Ron down, he’ll be crushed. I spread my arms out purposefully, walking behind him to make sure nobody hits him, hoping people will flow past us.

A shadowy figure comes walking calmly by, repeating, Move south as quickly as you can. Move far away from the World Trade Center. The other tower is going to go. Go to the tip of the Battery. Boats will pick you up there.

We make our way blindly along the Esplanade toward South Cove, still clutching the railing. Visibility is less than a yard. As I pick my way, I see at my feet a pair of brand-new men’s wingtip shoes and a silk necktie, lying in the dust. Is someone running sock-foot in his three-piece suit? Several baby strollers, presumably empty.

Typical Julia. The scareder I get, the more I make sarcastic cracks. Ron calls it my Gothic humor. Looming immediately ahead of us in the smoke is a peculiar sight, a cloth-draped figure with what looks like a long proboscis. It takes me a couple seconds to realize it’s a man with his suit jacket draped over his head. He is holding one empty sleeve out in front of him.

I’m having trouble breathing, comes his scared voice. I’m breathing through my sleeve. I need to sit down.

We are in a sort of slow eddy near the railing, but a few feet away I can see silhouettes of people running by, fast. Hundreds of them. I’m afraid to go help this poor man. If I leave Ron, he’ll be knocked down.

Does someone need help? says a man emerging from the clouds of dust. He is wearing a pinstriped shirt.

Pinstripe takes the man’s arm and leads him to a park bench. The next time I see Pinstripe, he is walking quietly alongside us, directing traffic, steering people around us. I realize he’s the same man who was telling people to move south. He’s repeating that, along with Move carefully, as quickly as you can. I ask him if he is an emergency worker.

No, I work in the Mercantile Exchange. But I’m used to directing people. Maybe I can keep down the panic.

Even in the crush of shadows running by, at least a dozen people stop to ask if they can help us. No, we’re OK. We just can’t move very fast.

One kind man offers to carry Ron on his back, but Ron refuses. The man runs off.

What if he dropped me? Ron comments.

A lot of people suddenly seem to be wearing white filter-paper masks: nosepieces with an elastic headband. Someone gives me his. I put it on Ron. Someone else gives me another one. A third person shows me how to wet them to make them work better. A boy gives us a liter of ice water from his backpack. Later a man gives us another liter. People can be so kind.

One man, about forty, tall, thin, bald, slows down and insists on walking with Ron for a long time as we struggle down the Esplanade. He takes Ron’s arm up the ramps and in the crowded spots until we get to a railing near the Museum of Jewish Heritage. Boats are spontaneously pulling up along the water’s edge: tugs and fishing boats, even pleasure craft, taking people off the peninsula to safety across the Hudson. Looking behind me into the smoke, I see dark shapes breaking down the wooden railing at South Cove so they can board a ferry.

I want to stop here. Ron isn’t going to be able to go further without a rest.

We know the North Tower will fall at some point, but we are no longer so close, are no longer directly in line with it. The bald man makes sure we are in a safe, protected area along the railing. Then he politely asks us if this is really where we want to stay, and if it would be all right if he continues on. When we say yes, he leaves, running. He was wearing a wedding ring.

We are in the lee of the Jewish museum when the second tower falls. We have gone less than four blocks. Another huge, churning cloud of dust comes barreling toward us, incredibly fast. Again everyone is caught in the ash and black smoke. It’s like the replay. We look as if someone has dumped flour on us.

But now a strong wind has sprung up, coming off the Jersey shore. It begins to blow the dusty air a few feet inland, and in a swath about six feet wide by the water, we begin to make things out again. Just next to us, toward Manhattan, a huge wall of smoke is still rising as high as I can see, blocking the sun. Through that violent surge, nothing is visible, but on the Esplanade, the air clears occasionally and we can take off our masks. Herds of people stream south past us as we stand, recuperating, in dust that has settled half an inch deep along the water.

Ron is too tired to move, but I have to go to the bathroom. Naturally. The public toilet is two blocks away at the south end of Wagner Park, near the old fireboat dock. I’ll just run down there and come right back, I say.

You can’t do that. Ron is adamant. It’s too risky. No matter what, we’ve got to stay together. Everything’s too unpredictable. If something happens, what if we can’t find each other? That would be disastrous.

He’s much more clearheaded than I am. Step by step, we work our way down to the restroom, crossing a long line of people waiting to use a public telephone. Many of them are still optimistically hitting redial on their cell phones. Inside the bathroom, the water is off and the electricity is down. Naturally.

We sit down on a low wall in front of the Wagner Park arch. All kinds of boats: commercial ferries, fireboats, Coast Guard boats and Chris-Craft have begun taking people to New Jersey. A lot of men in police badges, some with yarmulkes, are urging everyone to evacuate Battery Park City. Survivors throng the railings, pushing to get on the boats, to get away. No one has any idea what will happen next.

I’m not going to be able to climb a railing or walk on a gangplank.

Voices from the crowd tell us that people are getting injured trying to be evacuated.

Where would they take us? To some high school gym in New Jersey?

A fierce wind is still blowing the smoke away from the water’s edge, keeping the air clear. I am beginning to get sunburned. Naturally.

We can’t leave, Ron decides. Let’s go back to see if our building is still standing.

***

The dust is much deeper as we make our way back up Battery Place. We are completely alone. It looks like a dead city after a nuclear explosion. We pass our Subaru, parked in its habitual no-parking zone. It is so completely covered with ash that you can’t see the handicapped plate. Not that anyone is likely to be out giving tickets. Ahead of us, where the World Trade Center once was, is a heaving, roiling volcano of smoke.

Figure 3. Smoke on the Manhattan skyline after the Twin Towers fell. Liberty Court is immediately behind the Statue of Liberty, to the left. Detail of photo by Daniel Hulshizer; ©Associated Press.

Inside the building, the lobby phone is ringing constantly. Residents are frantically calling to ask the concierge to rescue the pets they locked in their apartments when they went to work this morning. Gus, our building supervisor, is standing behind the concierge’s desk, seeming remarkably together. He announces that it is recommended that Battery Park City be completely evacuated. A generator-driven emergency elevator will bring people down from their apartments.

It looks as if everyone is leaving. Ron and I sit in armchairs in the lobby.

Frankly, he says to me, I think for me personally, the safest thing is to go back up to the twenty-third floor. Why don’t we just stay in our apartment and wait to see what happens?

I agree. At home, Ron will be less at risk because he’ll be in known territory. Also, we can take care of Pearl. We watch people leave, wondering if we’ll be allowed to stay.

At some point an elderly woman speaks to me. She is sitting in an electric scooter, waiting to be picked up. Don’t cry, she says.

What? I go over to her and take the gnarled hand she holds up to me.

She grasps mine tightly. You look like you’re going to cry. Don’t cry. It’ll be all right. I’m eight-four years old.

I guess you’ve already gotten through a lot of hard things.

Yes, but never anything like this.

I stand there for several minutes, holding her hand. Grateful that somebody has reached out to me, yet strangely embarrassed that my anguish shows in my face. I mean, I was raised to keep up appearances. Keep a stiff upper lip.

The super comes over to see how we are. Ron explains what we want to do. Gus agrees. He treats us as if we are reasonable human beings, making the best decision for our particular circumstances. We can stay in the building. He has the staff take us back up to our apartment.

When we liberate Pearl from her bathroom, she strolls out, totally nonchalant. Ron picks up his watch from the bedside table. It is about three PM. We are both surprised it is so late. We’ve been out in the chaos since around 9:30—more than five hours. Our sense of time is shot, he comments.

The large window that framed the burning towers is now black, opaque from the smoke outside. I can almost imagine a wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz (but which sister? The Witch of the East or the Witch of the West? A perfect question for today) riding her bicycle/broomstick past Ron’s window in the darkness. What in fact is blowing toward us through the smoke, around and up, coming into view when they’re within a foot or two of the glass, are thousands of whirling pieces of white office paper.

The electricity is off, but both our phone lines are still working. We find seventeen messages on our voice mail, including a number of calls from friends in England and France.

No message from Malcolm.

We’ve received multiple offers to put us up—Bob and Rosaire, Lis and Marty, Cameron, Phil and Dorothy, Dave in a worst-case scenario, and even one from a woman I hardly know.

Don’t worry about calling, Rosaire’s message says. If you need to, just come.

Then the phones cut off. Our only remaining contact with the outside world is Ron’s little portable radio. It has always been a crummy radio, bad reception, lots of static. We’d discussed throwing it away. Now we’re glad we didn’t.

Ron is white and shaky. I just want to sit at my desk and try to calm down. He pushes a pencil between the stiff fingers of his right hand and its paralyzed thumb, then, moving his whole hand from the elbow, he writes down a list of brief impressions, using the muscles that are still strong enough to form clumsy letters.

Figure 4. Ron’s notes on September 11, 2001. Photo ©Julia Frey, 2001.

On the single sheet of lined paper, Ron wrote:

Boom followed by bang

thundering roar [illegible, scratched out]

panic over fall potential

glistening panes floating

boiling black smoke

red transparence

gunned motor boom

splash of flame

racing black billows down streets

fear can’t breathe

tidal wave of smoke

ten stories of wall [illegible: flat?] on ground

fleeing crowds running

looking down into smoking hell pit

ten or fifteen gone

jagged wall parts standing at lunatic angles

meat under table cloths

agonized I-beams

powdery soot / beige snow,

paper in air, on ground

2 inches powder under foot

gargantuan building parts in street

vision = shadowy outlines

waiting for second Tower

quick shake and crumble

sudden chute

***

We still have running water, but it might go any time. I fill my bathtub, hoping the stopper won’t leak. In Ron’s bathroom I strip down, shaking my clothes off into the shower before putting them in with the dirty laundry. My black pants and T-shirt are thick with dust. We are both totally beige with it: shoes and sandals, arms, backpack, hair and eyebrows. We look like we’ve been lost in a Sahara sandstorm. Blessedly, there is still hot water in the pipes. Under the shower I wash the grit out of my hair and off my feet and arms. Then Ron gets in with me and I wash his hair for him while he showers. Being clean somehow makes the rest more bearable.

By now the wind is blowing some of the heavy smoke eastwards, revealing for the first time the unimaginable scene below us: thirteen square city blocks are a raging apocalypse, with one enormous jagged wall still rising out of the firestorm, its windows empty, surrounded by masses of gigantic collapsed beams, chaotic as fallen trees from a hurricane. Next to us, 90 West Street, my beloved wedding cake building with its lacy white tilework, is burning out of control. And over everything, the graceful blizzard of white paper, swirling in the sky, gliding across West Street to land in the dust. All the notes, letters, and documents from all those offices, floating down like huge snowflakes.

The back desk calls on the intercom. They warn us we might have to be evacuated if the wedding cake collapses and the Marriott Hotel catches fire. I