Mark the anniversary with the TV off

Memories, which are never reliable to begin with, fade. Facts turn out not to be. Names are lost. Images blur.
On West 43rd Street, about halfway between Grand Central Terminal and Times Square, there was an office building surrounded by other office buildings. This one had a plaque near the door saying that it was once the headquarters of The New Yorker magazine. It still had the mechanical elevator installed by William Shawn, and literary tourists and the current tenants were shooed away from it.
On the sixth floor was a public relations firm operating out of a suite of offices whose windows overlooked West 43rd. In one of those offices were two of the firm’s young vice presidents, a P.R. euphemism for “employees.” I was one of them.
About the other one: He was heavy-set, perhaps five years older than me. He wore a white dress shirt every day but put on a tie only when he went to meet with clients. His shirts were, without fail, pit-stained. He had been a reporter for Dow Jones before switching to P.R. He had an irrational love of Rutgers football. He mumbled about “liberals.”
It’s positively strange that I remember all of this. I could go on and on about him. But don’t ask me his name; it’s gone. I have no idea and haven’t for years. This is what I mean: Memory is chaotic, sometimes cruel and often unreliable.
I lost no one on Sept. 11, 2001. I am far less qualified to consecrate or memorialize the day and its meaning than most, and I won’t try. But to tame the chaos of fading memories, I submit two of mine from that time and place. A year of working in public relations in 2001 had domesticated my journalist’s instincts, and I no longer carried around a notepad or a camera. So I missed out on the chance to record what I experienced.
That morning, my now nameless office mate, with great effort, managed to track down his wife. She was shaken but fine. All of our downtown clients, including those who worked in the World Trade Center towers, were OK.
At around 11 a.m., about the time the phones died, I stood up from my desk and looked out the window, down at West 43rd Street. It looked like the Verazzano on Marathon Sunday. My memory says thousands, but it was more likely hundreds of people. All dressed in business attire. All running for their lives. Full sprints, trying to get away from Grand Central Terminal, the fast elbowing past the slow.
After the second plane had hit, we started to hear the fighter jets buzzing overhead. From our conference room the skyscrapers and signage of Times Square were visible, and for an hour or so we sat alternately watching the news and staring at the back of the Conde Nast building, waiting for the flash of white that would end the world. Then Giuliani came on the TV and said the attack was over and the rest of us would be spared. Strangely, we believed him.
But those people running down West 43rd surely didn’t. Something happened in Grand Central Terminal that spooked them. Maybe it was an announcement, but more likely it was a rumor that led to the stampede. I never found out, and there was nothing about it on the news. I’ve never met anyone else who remembers it. So you’ve probably read about it here first, almost five years later.
Another memory: Against orders, I went to work the next morning. I walked out of Penn Station on Sept. 12, 2001, and stood on Sixth Avenue, in the middle of a ghost town. All the way up Sixth to Central Park, and all the way south as far as I could see, there were no people. No cars, taxis or buses. Perfect quiet. It wasn’t even like a movie, because at the movies you can tell yourself it’s only a movie.
Nowadays, I say it “looked PhotoShop-ed,” which is really an admission that I lack the vocabulary to convey the moment’s impact. It’s also a dodge, a distraction to cover the fact that my memory of the details has faded irrevocably. I don’t remember what side street I came up, or where on Sixth I was standing, or how I even got there. Did I take the subway? Was it even running that morning? I have no idea.
The point is, the pain of loss fades far more gradually than the memories. This anniversary will be marked by the television networks’ insistence on replaying the footage of the airplanes and talking heads telling us how to feel.
Turn off the TV. Instead, rely on your own experiences from that day, how you wept for your friends, your city and your country. That’s what’s real.