I was 18, sitting in a cubicle in a drab office at the northern tip of Manhattan, transcribing interviews with people who had evacuated the World Trade Center on 9/11. It was 2003, late summer September in the city—a day like today, bathed in sun, not yet fall, still far away from the grey and early dark of winter.
I listened carefully to a middle-aged man who described in quiet, precise detail how he evacuated down a dark stairwell from his office in one of the towers because the elevator shafts were on fire, engulfed in burning jet fuel. I typed slowly, making sure I got the transcription right. I listened to the tape again. And again.
I’d never heard anything like it—and still haven’t. Another evacuee described a fireball exploding out of a bank of elevators in the World Trade Center lobby. I remember thinking that this kind of awful detail was missing from the instant, mass memorialization of 9/11 t…
