An NYU student reflects on the Sept. 11 attacks

The image of thousands of pieces of paper fluttering against a gorgeous blue sky is the first thing Susan Tansil remembers about Tuesday morning, Sept. 11.

She and her roommates had just emerged on the street after leaving their 21st-floor apartment four blocks from the World Trade Center. On the shuttle bus to New York University, Tansil sat in a backward-facing seat. She could see people on the street pointing toward the World Trade Center. There appeared to be a fire on an upper floor. While the bus was caught in traffic, she looked up and saw a fireball erupt from the second tower.

The 20-year-old immediately called her parents, Linda and John Tansil, on her cell phone. They were at a St. Louis hospital where her father had just had cancer surgery. Getting through took 10 minutes.

She didn't know what had happened. She did know it was bad.

"I just saw thousands of people die," she told them.

That realization gave her the strangest feeling she has ever known. "That is so shocking," she said. "Death is such a personal thing."

Later, when she realized that thousands of people trapped in the towers were trying to call the people they loved, too, she felt guilty for using her cell phone.

Every New Yorker who survived Sept. 11 has a story. Tansil, a 1999 Cape Central graduate, must have told hers dozens of times during her Christmas break stay back home in Cape Girardeau. It has a beginning -- the sky full of paper -- and ends when the listener runs out of questions. She seems not to have finished processing this brutal moment in world history. She doubts anybody has.

"I think it has changed people in ways we don't even know yet," she says.

Not knowing

For much of that day, she, like many in Manhattan, didn't know as much as the rest of the world did about what really had occurred at the World Trade Center's twin towers. They were too close. Thinking a bomb might have exploded, she continued on to class. Then her roommate, Erica, told her the two towers were gone.

To Tansil, who is majoring in urban design and architecture at NYU, that reality was incomprehensible.

In St. Louis, Linda Tansil watched the towers crumble on TV not knowing how far away from them her daughter might be. But she no longer could get through to the cell phone and spent an anxious day until Susan phoned again from a friend's house that night.

Tansil and her roommates then began taking "baby steps" based on survival instincts.

"I knew we couldn't go home that night," she says. She was one of many thousands in Manhattan who instantly became homeless that day.

In the days right after the attacks, living in New York was unnerving, she said, especially with the government issuing repeated warnings. No one knew what else the terrorists might have planned for the city. "There were nightmares and anxiety," she said. "I couldn't sleep through the night."

Noisy Manhattan was quieter than anybody knew it could be. In the city famous for rudeness, Tansil saw an anguished woman who was getting tragic news over a pay phone being embraced and consoled by the stranger who was next in line.

Suddenly, everything was free -- subways, movies and pay phones. People carefully watched the jet planes they used to ignore. The fires that burned for weeks at ground zero sometimes could be smelled half a mile away. People wore particle masks. Her parents wanted to talk to her every day. Her e-mail inbox was filled with messages from people she hadn't heard from in a long time.

'Apocalypse clothes'

Through all the hours of waiting Sept. 11 to find out what had happened, the days of wearing the same clothes -- her "apocalypse clothes" -- because she was not allowed to return to her apartment, the week camping out with her roommates at the house of her boyfriend's parents, the other weeks living in a Midtown hotel room, the vigil at St. Vincent's Church where the wounded were to be brought but weren't because there were no wounded, only dead, Tansil never became emotional. That didn't happen until she and her roommates were allowed to move back into their apartment a few weeks after the disaster.

"I cried when I went back home," she said. "I saw the site for the first time. Only in that moment I felt the how-dare-they? anger. ... They were tears of anger, frustration, disbelief and shock."

She used to tell people she lived four blocks from the World Trade Center. "I can't do that anymore," she says solemnly.

The passage of months has made New York feel safe to Susan again. Mayor Rudolph Guiliani is a hero to her even though their politics differ. "He has proven his character," she says.

New York feels as if it's back to normal. Its always-proud inhabitants are prouder than ever.

But she doubts people anywhere would have reacted differently than New Yorkers did. "Frankly, from my point of view, nobody would have broken down," she says.

After she graduates in 2003, Tansil plans to spend a year living and working in New York City before enrolling in medical school.

New Yorkers now have a stronger bond than ever, she says.

"We have all become more neurotic."

She doesn't think the city should jump at offers to rebuild the towers, especially not taller ones as has been proposed. She thinks the time has not yet come to form an opinion about what to do at the site.

"It seems to me we don't need to do more now," she said. "We have earned respect by showing our grace in the face of disaster."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

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