The plague of darkness

A first-person account of the tragedy as it unfolded on that terrible day in 2001.

By ROBBY BERMAN
September 11 photo 521 (photo credit: Robby Berman)
September 11 photo 521
(photo credit: Robby Berman)
It’s Tuesday morning and I jump into a cab, camera in hand, to interview and photograph a midtown executive for a Jerusalem Post fluff piece. The radio reports two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center, and another one has slammed into the Pentagon. The cabbie and I laugh in disbelief.
I show up to my interview only to find it has been canceled and the building evacuated.
I grab whispers from the crowd: “One of the towers has collapsed.... The government is evacuating the White House.” I head downtown, knowing I can’t go home and watch these world-altering events unfold on a 12-inch screen.
Taxis refuse to head south, and the subways are out. I’m jogging down Seventh Avenue when a red 1952 Chevy convertible – top down with two beautiful women in the front seat – slows to a roll. Silently the driver indicates “get in” with a flick of her head, confirming that I’ve just been thrust into a Hollywood movie. I jump over the backseat door (as I have always wanted to do) as the driver guns the Chevy, racing toward the remaining tower in the distance that is puffing smoke like a locomotive. I lean forward: “Are you guys Thelma and Louise?” They turn to me and smile.
I hop out at SoHo and hoof it to about five blocks away from ground zero, getting there right when the second tower collapses.
The streets are more or less empty of people. I’m stopped by a frenzied cop: “Too dangerous... even rescue workers aren’t going in,” he says while looking up at the sky. The sky above us is filled with white smoke, but across the street, almost as if respecting the police officer’s authority, hangs a thick, ominous black fog.
I stand there gazing into the smoke, feeling helpless. I need to do something. That need, combined with my addiction to adrenalin and my childish dislike for authority, makes it clear: I’m going in.
The officer turns his head for but a moment, and I dart down the subway steps into the eerily empty World Trade Center and Chambers Street station. All alone I hop the turnstile and run the length of the powdery platform, the sound of my boots pounding the pavement, echoing through the trainless tunnel. I come up a block past the policeman into ground zero.
I’m outside, 10:30 in the morning, and it is night. The sky is black and the ground is white, not unlike the Magritte paintings hanging in the Met.
The air is thick with soot and the acrid smell of burning fuel, scorching my nostrils. My eyes sting, as airborne debris cuts into them.
Every few seconds I hear explosions, which reverberate from building to building, denying me my right to know whence they come.
They seem to come in regular intervals, as if they have a rhythm of their own.
I hear a blast directly above my head. I look up and snap a picture of the debris that rains down upon me – almost like I’m trying to freeze it in space as well as capture it on film.
I walk aimlessly through the snowing fog, unable to see street signs. The flames from burning cars lick the sides of skyscrapers, illuminating the ground before me. I don’t see any injured people. I raise my camera with both hands and take pictures of the devastation with a dust-covered lens and the wrong speed film. I neglect to compose my shots and steady my body as I squeeze the button.
I walk on, seeing no one. Not a fireman. Not a policeman. Not a survivor. My feet crunch on the white pulverized concrete. Millions upon millions of papers lie strewn upon the streets, on cars and in trees: reams of financial deals and wire transfers and stock swaps and business resumés and dismissal notices. From a hundred flights up, papers continue to fall, gently rocking back and forth as they float to the ground, oblivious to the violence that has propelled them on their journey.
Some papers lie flat, while others are partially buried; their triangular corners jutting out from the white dust form a miniature snowcapped mountain range. The burning in my eyes grows greater, and I force myself to constantly blink, hoping the flying ash will not undo my six-month-old laser surgery. I walk slowly, unsure of where or why I am walking.
A car explodes 10 meters in front of me; I snap my camera right back at it.
I notice my arms and legs are completely white. A walking pillar of salt that perhaps, like Lot’s wife, should not gaze upon a city being destroyed.
Above the explosions and the crackle of the fires, I hear it. Silence. There is no cry for help.
There is no moaning. The streets are empty of human visage and voice. There are no analysts rushing to work or investment bankers booking deals. There are no vendors hawking hot dogs. No Polish immigrants polishing shoes. I am utterly alone, and the silence is scaring me.
The snowing debris continues to fall. It feels like what I imagine to be a nuclear winter.
More cars begin to burn, and now they are all around me. I feel trapped. No fall-back position.
I am no longer confronting the danger, it envelopes me. Suddenly it is black all around me. A Hebrew phrase pops into my head: hoshech mitzrayim (the plague of darkness in Egypt). I pop my flash just to get a little visibility, when suddenly I see a vision of my brother-in-law, standing at the lectern of the synagogue I attended as a child, eulogizing me in his Brooklyn accent: “Robby... was a schmuck. What did he go there for?” I know it is time for me to leave.
I quickly look to the blackened sky, seeking hints of daylight. I walk toward the light. After a few blocks, I emerge from the haze. After a few more deserted streets, I see firemen and policemen and doctors. A paramedic flushes my eyes with saline, and I walk 115 blocks to my house to sleep... to ponder.
THE NEXT day I bring my pictures to a photo agency.
“These shots are the best I’ve seen, but they’re yesterday’s news,” says the photo editor in an accusatory tone. “Yesterday, I would have given you $30,000 for them; today I’ll give you $3,000.”
The cars are not yet cold, but the pictures are. “Get me ‘walking-wounded’ and people crying,” demands the woman I don’t work for.
I head back downtown and strike up a conversation with a fireman who is walking to ground zero. I hide my camera, and his company helps me past police barriers. I photograph the destruction and tired firefighters and fire hoses and puddles of water and billows of smoke. I photograph policemen and police dogs and civilian volunteers and cheering crowds and empty ambulances.
I borrow my brother-in-law Raanan’s bicycle and whiz around the city in a state of hyperawareness, my eyes darting from left to right and back again. I photograph firehouses and flowers and American flags and candle-lit vigils and memorial ceremonies and blood centers.
I photograph emergency vehicles and bulldozers and newspaper lines and Con-Ed workers and Red Cross workers and military men and monks and priests and rabbis.
I take my pictures and peddle them to AP and Reuters and Getty Images and Corbis Sygma and The New York Times and the Daily News. The photo editor from Life magazine puts her arm around me: “You’ve got a great eye, but the next time a tragedy happens, try to take more horizontal shots. We like doing double truck layouts.”
That night I calculate my earnings. I’m amazed that simply squeezing a button can bring me thousands upon thousands of dollars.
As a journalist, an article may take me a week to write and fetch me only 250 bucks. My phone rings: “Can you get me some night shots? The flood lamps for the night shift are giving off an eerie glow.” But I am spent, and I decline.
Lying lazily on my couch, I look at my pictures for the last time before I close my eyelids. I slowly realize that one of the burning cars is sitting in the middle of an intersection, while all the other burning cars were parked. Was there someone inside? I should have checked.
I begin to wonder about my sense of morality, my decency or lack thereof. For a few painful minutes, I ponder just how wrong, if at all, it is for me to make money from these pictures. I have to pay rent, I say to myself, and if I had seen someone to help, I would have helped them. But just to cover my bases, I decide to give a percentage of my profits to a victim fund and leave the gray areas of morality for wealthier people than me to contemplate. With that decision, I slip into a deep sleep.
THE NEXT day, the third day “after,” a photo editor calls: “What do you have for me today? When are you coming in?” I bike downtown, to what is now a closed military zone. Workers from the department of transportation are milling about. I find a shovel and a helmet and put them on. My costume allows me into ground zero, but as soon as I unfurl my camera a policeman asks to see my DOT license. They briskly and abruptly escort me off the premises.
I bike around downtown looking for something to shoot, looking for something, anything, to bring as a sacrificial offering to the photo editor gods. They keeping asking for more, like the insatiable plant in The Little Shop of Horrors, always needing more and more blood. And I am Seymour.
I pass a fire station that has nine firefighters missing. A crowd gathers, laying wreaths. I jump off my bike and shove my lens into the face of a crying woman. “What are you doing?” mutters a fireman. Without snapping the button I slowly lower the camera, his question slowly sinking in. “What am I doing?” I say softly.
I quietly walk away, never, it turns out, to shoot again.