Last Call on 9/11

We all experience time differently. For some, time is linear, and the conveyor belt of new people and experiences pushes aside events and friends of the past. We often say these people “live in the present”. But for some, including me, events that happened decades ago appear in my mind as if they were yesterday.

It feels like yesterday I disembarked a flight at LaGuardia Airport in New York to arrive for a new job, but it was 2003. I had never even visited the city before.

“Do you have any other questions?” My manager asked the next morning after walking me through HR documents, compliance videos, and showing me where the cafeteria was. 

One question had been burning in my mind since I stepped off the plane at LaGuardia. I wanted to know what happened on 9/11, what it felt like, were people scared? I wanted to know.

But it wasn’t the right time. 

“No,” I said. “No further questions.” 

There is a particular loneliness in the first week at a new job. The people around you having conversations you aren’t included in. Giggling over jokes and people you don’t know. You want them to like you. But you know if they catch a whiff of neediness, you could be put in a box marked Not Cool like that kid in high school. So, I spent my first week in a state of hyper-vigilance, smiling at exactly the right moments, remembering names, volunteering for the tedious tasks no one else wanted, looking like I was grateful to be there, but not too grateful. The performance was nerve-wracking.

Busy at work, I didn’t have time to visit Lower Manhattan and the 9/11 site still being cleaned up. I was also learning my way around and getting used to all the new terminology used here.  My office was in “Midtown”, miles away from Downtown where the towers stood. Most cities in America have labeled their city centers “downtown”, borrowing the term that had been used in New York, but in Manhattan the center of gravity had moved north to around 42nd Street decades ago.  So I was commuting to work “midtown”.

Stacy sat three desks over. She had a silly laugh that made you feel welcome, made you understand that to her this job wasn’t that big of a deal, just something to be managed, and she was the first person who asked if I wanted to grab coffee.

“Just so you know,” she said, stirring her latte, “we don’t really talk about it anymore. September 11th. It’s been two years. People are trying to move forward. Best not to bring it up.”

She gave me a lot of other advice, which was useful in the city. The right way to ask for things here. The way to carry yourself on the street. The importance of never talking about religion, race, or politics in the office. I was young and soaked up her advice.

We worked for a stockbroker, selling futures & options (this story was originally going to be about a ‘Last Call’ for a Call Option). 

After settling in at the office, I got busy contacting the firm’s customers and counterparties. Wall Street runs on relationships. The city is full of restaurants designed for business lunches and dinners— steakhouses serving 1lb ribeyes “black and blue”, sushi restaurants with chefs who sounded famous; the server always came armed with one menu for food and another fancy menu bound in leather for drinks. The subtle calculus of who ordered the wine and picked up the check signaled who needed whom more. 

The next day, when business came up, one would call the person they had dinner with the night before. It paid to know everyone. Also, we all hopped from firm to firm every year like migratory birds. Today’s competitor was tomorrow’s colleague.

As a balm for my loneliness in a new city, I accepted every dinner and drinks invite. And because I was still young enough to drink with the determination of a university student trying to prove themselves. 

After 6 p.m., half of Wall Street went home to Connecticut or Long Island, and the other half stayed in Manhattan until the bars closed. I gravitated toward the latter crowd. They were easier to understand.

One Friday evening, I found myself with a group of people from another firm at Connolley’s, one of those Irish places with dark wood and no windows and the permanent smell of spilled beer soaked into the floorboards. We had pushed two tables together and covered them with pint glasses. The conversation had settled into a comfortable rhythm of men who had nowhere else to go, decided they liked each other just enough to get drunk together.

I don’t know what made me do it. Maybe it was the third pint, or the way the room seemed to pulse with something close to friendship that I hadn’t felt in months. The words left my mouth before I could stop them.

“What’s it like here?” I asked the table in general. “During 9/11.”

The Americans glanced away, at their phones, at the television above the bar, at the bottom of their glasses. I immediately wanted to change the subject, but the silence was too awkward. Someone cleared their throat.

And then said, “Martin was in the World Trade Center.”

Martin sat at the end of the table, a compact man with ginger hair and a ruddy complexion. At the mention of his name, his eyes jumped. 

He had a story to tell and had been waiting for someone to ask.

Marti explained that in 2001, he worked at Euro Brokers, on the 80th floor of the World Trade Center. “The 80th floor”, he said again for emphasis. He sat at his desk when the first plane hit the other building. He felt it more than heard it. A shudder ran through the steel frame of the building.

A few minutes later, an announcement came over the PA system: Remain at your desks. Do not evacuate. The situation is contained in the other building. 

But looking at the smoke pouring out of the other building, something felt wrong. He stood up, told his colleagues he was leaving, and walked to the stairwell.

“You don’t know what eighty floors is until you’re walking down them,” Martin said as if trying to make me understand. He sipped his pint. “You think, twenty floors, I could run down. Eighty takes time. And then the stairwell—” He paused, swallowed. “Started to fill up with people. It was narrow, only two people wide. And people began to get stuck.” There were older people, heavy people, people in heels who couldn’t manage moving downward for countless floors. There was a woman being carried by two strangers. There was a crush of bodies, to where one could barely move, but he kept moving, squeezing through.

Martin wanted to help them. He saw an older man, maybe sixty, gripping the railing, his chest heaving. But Martin thought of his wife, his children. In the crush of hundreds of people, the raw logic of survival said he needed to prioritize himself and his own family.

“I told myself I’d send someone back up,” he said. “I told myself I’d get to the bottom and find an emergency worker and tell them about the woman on the forty-third floor. But I just kept going. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other.”

He reached the lobby—chaotic, full of smoke and dust and shouting—and pushed through the revolving doors onto the street. He jogged two blocks, maybe three, when he felt the ground shake again. He turned around. The tower he had just left was collapsing into itself. Everyone left inside was dead. A tower of dust came at him, and he stood there listening to the roar before he started running again.

Five minutes. He’d been out five minutes, max.

“I wish I could have helped them.” He finally took a drink, a long one. “But I needed to think about my family.”

“You did the right thing. You couldn’t have helped everyone,” I said.

No one spoke. Martin finished his pint and stood up, suddenly self-conscious, suddenly aware that he’d said too much. “Let’s get another round.” Someone else brought up the Knicks, and everyone smiled, happy to talk about something else. Maybe they all had stories they didn’t want to tell.

The next year, in the leafy suburbs of New York, where the city feels like another world, I had a friend named Jimmy. He was older, in his forties, and covered customers in Westchester, where the pace was slower and the clients played golf on the weekend. We would meet for drinks at a bar in Rye, and he would tell me stories about the city.

One night, as the waitress brought us another IPA, he told me about Cantor Fitzgerald.

“You know, we have open mics,” Jimmy said. “You know, for trading. Everyone on the floor can hear everyone else.” He glanced at me seriously. “On that morning, 9/11, after the plane hit, the guys at Cantor Fitz got on the mic. They told us they knew they were going to die. They couldn’t get out, and there was smoke everywhere.”

He stopped. The diner hummed around us, the fluorescent lights buzzing like insects.

“They left the mic open,” Jimmy repeated. “Everyone could hear them. I couldn’t listen, but some of the guys talked to them until the end.” Tears welled up in Jimmy’s eyes.

I went home that night with Jimmy’s story sitting in my chest. I thought about Martin, walking down eighty floors past people who would die in the collapse. I thought about the old man on the forty-third floor, and how he died. I thought about Stacy, telling me not to talk about it, about how she could see the smoke from across the river in New Jersey that day and knew people in her neighborhood who lost family members, and I understood for the first time that her warning wasn’t cruelty. Some stories are too heavy for casual conversation. Some wounds don’t heal.

That was twenty-three years ago. I moved to another city, and I’ve lost touch with everyone I knew there. Work relationships are fleeting. The last time I spoke to Jimmy and Martin was over a drink that lasted until a “last call” somewhere in the city.  

Soon, this era will pass entirely. The news programs have already shortened their 9/11 memorial segments; someday they will disappear altogether. Young people entering the Freedom Tower at One World Trade Center will look up at the glass and steel and see only a tall building. Everything that happens today will have its last call and fade into tomorrow. And maybe that’s how it should be: to make space for the living to keep living, and to fill the void with new voices.

Author's note: While I did not live through 9/11 in New York myself, this is based on the real stories of people I met there, retold as accurately as possible.