Annotation Tuesday! #2:

Of the countless 9/11 stories, “The Falling Man,” by Tom Junod (Esquire, September 2003), stayed with me more than any other. The story centers on an iconic photo … 
 

… of an unidentified World Trade Center employee dropping to his death. The photo ran once and then vanished in this country because it was considered too shocking to be seen. Junod reported and wrote the story behind the image and the public’s visceral reaction to it. His piece raised important questions about truth, choice and taboo, and forced us to reconsider our collective instinct to discard the falling man—and the many, many others like him—from the narrative of that day. 

p) “The Falling Man” ran exactly two years after the attacks. When and why did you decide you wanted to write about this photograph?

t) I decided to write about this photo on September 12, 2001. It was on Page 7 in the Times. I saw it, and felt like Giuliani watching the jumpers—“We’re in unknown territory.” And then the photo disappeared. It, and the whole subject of people jumping, became taboo. What’s not articulated in the story was how many people thought I shouldn’t do the story. Told me so. I started reporting this story in February 2003; finished writing it in July. People never stopped being disgusted by the idea until it was finally published. And even then, I had to answer accusations that I indulged in what Melissa Block called journalism’s worst instincts. I was lucky that the story answered for itself. It changed the terms of the debate, and now the taboo side of this has been forgotten.

p) I appreciated that you didn’t try to address Terrorism. So often, we feel obligated to include scope because that’s what we’ve been trained to do, when often a tight narrative perfectly conveys the same.

t) I loved working on this story because the photo itself offered a kind of discipline. I mean, it was literally focused before I even wrote a word. It was focused for me in the lens of Richard Drew.

p) I didn’t know about the documentary based upon “The Falling Man” until just the other day. I thought it was riveting and added another dimension or two to the issue. 

t) I liked the documentary, and was actually amazed, while watching it, that there was some unturned emotional space in me regarding the story. I mean, at the end, when they showed the Falling Man’s entire fall: I was shocked, and overwhelmed.

p) The photograph inspired other literary works, including the Don DeLillo novel Falling Man. In a NYT review of that novel, Frank Rich wrote: “Primal terror—‘the cellphones, the lost shoes, the handkerchiefs mashed in the faces of running men and women’—has to take precedence over politics, history and religion. ‘There is something in the sky,’ he wrote. ‘The writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space.’” With your story, which ran four years before DeLillo’s book was published, you seem to have come from a similar place—or is that imposing too grand a view on what you hoped to do? On All Things Considered, you told Blockthat you intended to “reclaim this man” with this story because he had effectively been rejected by society. How has the photo come to be seen? What is the right place to locate it, do you think, within anniversary coverage?

t) I think that the story did what it set out to do. It made it possible for people to discuss how men and women actually died on 9/11. There were a lot of comforting lies told about this subject. Virtually every family I spoke to was told by either the cops or the morgue that their loved one was found “on the stairs.” This made them think that their loved one was either on their way back up to help people or running back down in an effort to get home. (PS: I like my Falling Man better than I like DeLillo’s, which is abstract and heartless.)

**My notes follow with < denoting the passage/word in question; Tom’s responses in [[ALL CAPS.]] I’ll soon code this piece and the Kruse piece for easier reading, like the story scheduled to appear 8/30.

The Falling Man
Tom Junod
Esquire
September 2003

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. <such an interesting way of

putting it—“departs from”—given that he’s earthbound. Was this your original

lede? If not, what others did you consider?/pw [[NO OTHERS WERE CONSIDERED.

WHEN I WROTE THAT SENTENCE THE HAIR STOOD UP ON MY ARMS. I SAID OKAY,

IF I CAN KEEP WRITING SENTENCES LIKE THAT – IF I CAN FOLLOW THAT

ELECTRICITY, THAT PRICKLY HEAT – I’LL MAKE IT THROUGH.]] Although he has not

chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were

not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air.

He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear

intimidated by gravity’s divine <why “divine”?/pw [[BECAUSE IT’S A RELIGIOUS

STORY]] suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly

outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket,

or frock, is billowing <the passive voice totally works here because forces us to

stay in the moment/pw free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his

feet. <Overall, the descriptions suggest that you studied this photo almost

obsessively. (I know I did; I think we all did.) How many times do you think you

looked at it, and HOW did you look at it or come to look at it?

There’s the clinical examination—his pants are black, his knee is bent—but

the study also required some emotional analysis/pw  [[I LOOKED

AT THE PICTURE ABOUT 10 THOUSAND TIMES I GUESS – NO SHIT. AND I LOVED

WRITING ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT WAS ALWAYS THERE, ALMOST AS IF IT EXISTED

OUT OF TIME. I COULD LAVISH ALMOST UNLIMITED ATTENTION ON IT, AND

NOBODY WAS GOING TO STOP ME. THE OPPOSITE OF AN INTERVIEW, IN OTHER

WORDS. IT WAS LIKE AN ARTIFACT.]]  In all the other pictures, the people who did

what he did — who jumped — appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies

of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi,

and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail

and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain.

<How did you come by these descriptions, particularly the confusion on the

faces? Such unforgettable details./pw [[WELL, YOU LOOK AT ENOUGH OF THOSE

PICTURES, YOU SEE THAT NONE OF THEM ARE LIKE THE FALLING MAN. THE

ALMOST HOLY ACCEPTANCE OF FATE THAT THE ONE PHOTO SIGNIFIES IS NOT

THERE IN ANY OF THE OTHERS. SO I WAS DRAWING THAT CONTRAST.]] The man in

the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the

buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the

picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. <Maybe I’m over-

thinking it but this observation/construction hints at a larger timeline—

life before 9/11, life after 9/11; is that weird?/pw [[NO – BECAUSE AT THE PRICE

OF SOUNDING REALLY PRETENTIOUS HERE, THE STORY IS ABOUT THE CREATION

OF A NEW COUNTRY, ONE THAT’S FINALLY BEEN HIT, LIKE ALL THE REST. THAT

GOES FOR THE NEXT QUESTION, ABOUT THE FLAG, AS WELL.]]  Though oblivious to

the

geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new

flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. <It’s hard to know

how we arrive at metaphor but I’m wondering whether you can remember how

you arrived at this perfectly correct image of a flag. I like how you pushed the

image one step further with the juxtaposition of steel bars

(strength/indestructibility) and sunshine (innocence)./pw [[IT TOOK ME ABOUT A

DAY AND A HALF TO WRITE THE FIRST SECTION.  IT WASN’T WRITING REALLY; IT

WAS JUST THE APPLICATION OF PRESSURE. ALL THE SENTENCES WERE PRETTY

MUCH THERE; I DIDN’T HAVE TO THINK OF THEM TOO MUCH.]]  Some people who

look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see

something else — something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. 

There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with

the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a

spear, <visceral images of willful destruction/pw bent on attaining his own end. He

is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, <the choice you made here, to draw out the

detail, gives me a feel for the dwindling of time SO much more than if you’d

written 9:41:15 or, God forbid, 9:41; how did you get the precision of detail—did

Drew have a time stamp?/pw [[YES, I GOT THAT DETAIL FROM RICHARD]] the

moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics,

accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. <interested in the

reporting behind this detail and the 150-mph factoid that

follows/pw [[TALKED TO AN ENGINEER, IF I’M NOT MISTAKEN.]]  He will soon be

traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he

is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he

disappears. <there’s something alarmingly beautiful, if I may call it that, about this

last phrase and the idea of “his life outside the frame,” especially knowing, as we

all do, that within seconds his life ends. Stopping the section here is powerful

because it suggests continuity of action, sets up a mystery and moves us into the

story./pw [[THE FRAME, AS I’VE SUGGESTED, IS VERY IMPORTANT TO THE WRITING

OF THIS STORY. INSTANT STRUCTURE, RIGHT?]]

***** 

The photographer is no stranger to history; he knows it is something that happens

later. In the actual moment history is made, it is usually made in terror and confusion,

and so it is up to people like him — paid witnesses — to have the presence of mind to

attend to its manufacture. The photographer has that presence of mind and has had it

since he was a young man. When he was twenty-one years old, he was standing right

behind Bobby Kennedy when Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head. His jacket was

spattered with Kennedy’s blood, but he jumped on a table and shot pictures of

Kennedy’s open and ebbing eyes, and then of Ethel Kennedy crouching over her

husband and begging photographers — begging him — not to take pictures. <here

you immediately locate the photographer within a larger story + delay the

identification. A beginning writer might’ve started this section with “Richard Drew

is no stranger to history,” but naming him immediately would have shifted our

attention to what’s secondary: Richard Drew. Also, by telling us Drew

photographed the assassination of Bobby Kennedy you immediately give the WTC

image/source authority and offer us another bit of nuance: the historical marker

of Bobby Kennedy’s death + an earlier American tragedy./pw [[RICHARD WAS THE

FIRST PERSON I INTERVIEWED FOR THIS STORY. I REMEMBER WHEN HE TOLD ME

ABOUT BOBBY KENNEDY. BECAUSE OF COURSE I REMEMBERED THAT PHOTO AS

WELL. AND IT WAS JUST ONE OF THOSE “HOLY SHIT” MOMENTS – MANY WERE TO

FOLLOW.  BUT THAT WAS THE FIRST.]]

Richard Drew has never done that. Although he has preserved the jacket patterned

with Kennedy’s blood, he has never not taken a picture, never averted his eye. He

works for the Associated Press. He is a journalist. It is not up to him to reject the

images that fill his frame, because one never knows when history is made until one

makes it. It is not even up to him to distinguish if a body is alive or dead, because the

camera makes no such distinctions, and he is in the business of shooting bodies, as all

photographers are, unless they are Ansel Adams. <interesting move, dropping a little

wink into an otherwise sobering piece/pw Indeed, he was shooting bodies <three

things I love about this detail and the one that follows: 1) facile juxtaposition of

the living and the dead; 2) the details introduce another (more subtle) form of

objectification; 3) the revelation that these other bodies were not just living

bodies but bodies carrying life. Layers there./pw [[I THINK I STRUGGLED WITH

GRANGER ON THAT ONE – I WENT FURTHER WITH IT, AND IT WAS ONE OF THE FEW

CUTS.]] on the morning of September 11, 2001. On assignment for the AP, he was

shooting a maternity fashion show in Bryant Park, notable, he says, “because it

featured actual pregnant models.” He was fifty-four years old. He wore glasses. He was

sparse in the scalp, gray in the beard, hard in the head. <lovely; I like the shift in

cadence, the prepositional rhythm, and how it adds texture/pw In a lifetime of

taking pictures, he has found a way to be both mild-mannered and brusque, patient

and very, very quick. <deft characterization; I felt like I could see him/pw

[[RICHARD CAN BE AN ASSHOLE, IN THE BEST WAY, LIKE ANY GUY WHO’S HAD TO

PUSH HIS WAY TO THE FRONT OF CROWDS.  I WANTED TO COMMUNICATE IT,

WITHOUT SAYING IT.]]  He was doing what he always does at fashion shows —

“staking out real estate” — when a CNN cameraman with an earpiece <nice detail

about the earpiece—this is one of those instances where you pushed the

detail/observation (and therefore our understanding, knowing he was presumably

getting his info thru an earpiece) one step further/pw said that a plane had crashed

into the North Tower, and Drew’s editor rang his cell phone. He packed his equipment

into a bag and gambled on taking the subway downtown. Although it was still running,

he was the only one on it. <I love this sentence; it does so much work in so little

space/pw [[YEAH. YOU CAN SEE IT, YOU CAN FEEL IT: WHAT A RIDE.]] He got out at

the Chambers Street station and saw that both towers had been turned into

smokestacks. Staking out his real estate, he walked west, to where ambulances were

gathering, because rescue workers “usually won’t throw you out.” <I’m a fan of partial

quotes when they work well, which they do throughout this story. The partials

break up the scenes by dribbling in voice/humanity/point of view, and something

about partial quotes suggests breathlessness, even chaos, which sort of mirrors

the subject matter. How did you decide to use partials?/pw [[THAT’S PRETTY

MUCH ALL I DO USE. I’M NOT A BIG QUOTER.]] Then he heard people gasping. People

on the ground were gasping because people in the building were jumping. He started

shooting pictures through a 200mm lens. <Thank you for not telling us the camera

was a Nikon, or whatever. Why didn’t you?/pw [[NEVER THOUGHT TO. ONCE

AGAIN, THERE WAS A DISCIPLINE IMPOSED ON THIS STORY BY THE LENS

ITSELF.]] He was standing between a cop and an emergency technician, and each time

one of them cried, “There goes another,” his camera found a falling body <brilliant

shift to the objective/pw and followed it down for a nine- or twelve-shot sequence.

He shot ten or fifteen of them before he heard the rumbling of the South Tower and

witnessed, through the winnowing exclusivity of his lens, <rivets us to the scene

through Drew’s camera’s POV/pw its collapse. He was engulfed in a mobile ruin,

<wow; “mobile ruin” is exactly what it was; again, so much heavy lifting, so few

words/pw but he grabbed a mask from an ambulance and photographed the top of

the North Tower “exploding like a mushroom” and raining debris. He discovered that

there is such a thing as being too close, and, deciding that he had fulfilled his

professional obligations, Richard Drew joined the throng of ashen humanity heading

north, walking until he reached his office at Rockefeller Center.

There was no terror or confusion at the Associated Press. <love that you included this;

those guys are breaking-news badasses/pw There was, instead, that feeling of history

being manufactured; <this is your second use of some version of “manufacture”—

curious about how this idea came to you/pw [[WELL, WHEN I FIRST STARTED

REPORTING THIS STORY, GRANGER WAS AFRAID THAT IT WAS GOING TO BE A

“MEDIA STORY” – HE HATES MEDIA STORIES.  IT BECAME SOMETHING ELSE.  BUT IT

STILL HAS THE EARMARKS OF WHAT GRANGER DIDN’T WANT IT TO BE.  I MEAN,

IT’S A PIECE OF MEDIA CRITICISM AS MUCH AS IT’S “A STORY”; AND MOST PEOPLE,

WHEN THEY DESCRIBE IT, CALL IT AN ESSAY.  SO THAT MANUFACTURED THING

WAS JUST AN IDEA I HAD, I GUESS.]] although the office was as crowded as he’d ever

seen it, there was, instead, “the wonderful calm that comes into play when people are

really doing their jobs.” <basic question but how did you arrive at this

characterization of the scene—by asking RD what the office mood was like and

what happened next? How much time did you spend with him in reporting this

story? With whom did you spend the most amount of time for this story?/pw [[I

DID ONE INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD. THAT’S ALL. I SPENT MOST OF MY TIME WITH

ANDREW CHAIKIVSKY, WHO HELPED ME WITH THE REPORTING.  WE TALKED FOR

HOURS EVERY DAY.]]  So Drew did this: He inserted the disc from his digital camera

into his laptop and recognized, instantly, what only his camera had seen — something

iconic in the extended annihilation of a falling man. He didn’t look at any of the other

pictures in the sequence; he didn’t have to. “You learn in photo editing to look for the

frame,” he says. “You have to recognize it. That picture just jumped off the screen

because of its verticality and symmetry. It just had that look.” <with this quote you

pull back from the straight narrative and give us a view from a distance, and it

works. Also, this is a complete quote—interesting change. Intentional? Did you

worry that dropping in a future-POV quote would disrupt the narrative?/pw [[I

JUST WANTED TO CONVEY THAT RICHARD WAS A PROFESSIONAL AND KNEW

WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT. I MEAN, I LIKE TO BE A VENTRILOQUIST FOR

PEOPLE, ON REALLY BIG EMOTIONAL THINGS, BECAUSE RICHARD, FOR ALL HIS

ELOQUENCE, IS NEVER GOING TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING LIKE “MOBILE RUIN.”

BUT I’M NEVER GOING TO COME UP WITH THIS KIND OF SHOPTALK, EITHER.]]

He sent the image to the AP’s server. The next morning, it appeared on page seven of

The New York Times. It appeared in hundreds of newspapers, all over the country, all

over the world. The man inside the frame — the Falling Man — was not identified. 

*****

They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after

the fire started. <Now back to the towers—did you know from the beginning that

you wanted this to be your Section 3? How did the overall structure evolve as you

worked this story?/pw [[THE STRUCTURE OF THIS STORY EVOLVED OUT OF

NECESSITY, AND SO IT WAS FAIRLY STRAIGHTFORWARD. EVERYTHING IN THIS

STORY COMES IN THE ORDER IN WHICH I REPORTED IT, BECAUSE THIS IS THE

ONLY STORY I HAVE EVER WRITTEN SUCCESSFULLY WITHOUT FINISHING MY

REPORTING FIRST. WE WERE REPORTING IT THROUGH THE LAST DAY, THE LAST

HOUR. SO THE PICTURE COMES FIRST BECAUSE I HAD THE PICTURE. RICHARD

CAME SECOND BECAUSE AFTER THE PHOTO I HAD RICHARD. AND ON AND ON. I

WROTE THIS STORY STRAIGHT THROUGH THREE TIMES: BUT THE FIRST TIME I

WROTE I TOLD GRANGER THAT ONLY THE FIRST THIRD WAS ACTUALLY DONE; THE

SECOND TIME I WROTE I TOLD GRANGER THAT ONLY THE FIRST TWO THIRDS

WERE DONE; AND THEN I HANDED IN THE FINAL THIRD.  BUT EACH TIME THERE

WAS A DRAFT, BEGINNING TO END. IT’S JUST THAT I KNEW, AND MY EDITOR KNEW,

THAT THE STORY WAS LITERALLY AN EVOLVING ONE; THE STUFF THAT I WROTE

WITHOUT THE REPORTING TO BACK IT UP WAS DISPENSABLE. BUT NOTHING THAT

I HAD THE REPORTING ON WAS DISPENSABLE; ONCE THE REPORTING WAS THERE I

FELT LIKE I WAS SCRATCHING EVERY SENTENCE IN STONE.]] They kept jumping until

the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through

windows they broke themselves. <the calm voice here underscores the drama with 

such a small, skillful move; “later, through windows they broke themselves” is, to

me, horrifying, and hinges on the word “later”/pw They jumped to escape the

smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they

jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all

four sides of the building, <interesting detail—how’d you get it?/pw [[FILM, I

THINK]] and from all floors above and around the building’s fatal wound. <same

question/pw [[SAME ANSWER. ALSO TALKED TO GUYS FROM THE TIMES WHO HAD

DONE A STUDY OF THE SUBJECT.]] They jumped from the offices of Marsh &

McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-

trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th

floors — the top. <these details move us from the (powerfully) vague to the

specific and therefore “into” the lives of the jumpers by suggesting what they did

for a living/pw For more than an hour and a half, <good God; I’ve read this story

100 times and am just now absorbing the fact that the jumping went on for an

hour and a half; observation?/pw [[PEOPLE STARTED JUMPING RIGHT AFTER THE

WOUND WAS OPENED AND KEPT JUMPING TILL THE BUILDING COLLAPSED. THAT’S

AN HOUR AND A HALF.]]  they streamed from the building, one after another,

consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another

individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump <how did you arrive at this

idea? So haunting/pw [[I LOOKED AT EVERY AVAILABLE PICTURE OF JUMPERS. I

MEAN, EVERY ONE.]] himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows

people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of

three plummeting people, evenly spaced. <The reporting required for this piece

would have been troubling to say the least. How much did you decide you needed,

or wanted, to see, and where did you find the material, especially given how much

of it was vanishing—how deeply did you feel you needed to immerse yourself in

the specifics in order to convey something beyond the sensational fact of the

jumping? I know you knew you had a responsibility to not simply deliver a

recitation of the awful and the obvious. Also, I’ve always wondered how this piece

affected you as a writer/person./pw [[WELL, YOU COULD FIND PICTURES.

THEY WEREN’T EASY TO FIND; BUT THEY WERE THERE. AS FOR HOW IT AFFECTED

ME: YOU KNOW, YOU BECOME OBSESSED. AND YOU ARRIVE AT A TONE THAT’S

BOTH UNSPARING AND WOUNDING – I MEAN, I WANTED EVERY SENTENCE TO

DEAL A BLOW, AND AT THE SAME TIME I DIDN’T WANT TO EXTEND THE SUFFERING

OF PEOPLE WHO HAD LOST LOVED ONES. SO YOU FIND THIS ODD LITTLE ZONE,

AND YOU STAY IN IT, AND YOU LOSE SOMETHING OF YOURSELF BUT WHAT’S LOST

IS THERE ON THE PAGE.]]  Indeed, there were reports <nice unforced attribution/pw

that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the

drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were

all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an

approximate count of ten seconds. <amazing, horrendous detail; what was the

source?/pw [[I HAD A VIDEO OF ONE COMPLETE FALL. I COUNTED.]] They were all,

obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, one

prays, in soul. One hit a fireman on the ground and killed him; the fireman’s body was

anointed by Father Mychal Judge, whose own death, shortly thereafter, was embraced

as an example of martyrdom after the photograph — the redemptive tableau — of

firefighters carrying his body from the rubble made its way around the world.

From the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people jumping from the upper floors of

the World Trade Center resisted redemption. They were called “jumpers” or “the

jumpers,” as though they represented a new lemminglike class. The trial that hundreds

endured in the building and then in the air became its own kind of trial for the

thousands watching them from the ground. No one ever got used to it; no one who

saw it wished to see it again, although, of course, many saw it again. Each jumper, no

matter how many there were, brought fresh horror, elicited shock, tested the spirit,

struck a lasting blow. Those tumbling through the air remained, by all accounts, eerily

silent; <source?/pw [[RICHARD; WITNESSES.]] those on the ground screamed. It was

the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police

commissioner, “We’re in uncharted waters now.” It was the sight of the jumpers that

prompted a woman to wail, “God! Save their souls! They’re jumping! Oh, please God!

Save their souls!” <chilling, both the Giuliani quote and that of the unnamed

woman; sourcing?/pw [[OH, THAT WAS FROM A PUBLISHED ACCOUNT. AND THE

GOD SAVE THEIR SOULS, I THINK, WAS FROM AN ON THE GROUND VIDEO. BUT IT

MIGHT HAVE BEEN A PUBLISHED ACCOUNT.]] it was, at last, the sight of the jumpers

that provided the corrective to those who insisted on saying that what they were

witnessing was “like a movie,” for this was an ending as unimaginable as it was

unbearable: Americans responding to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the

world with acts of heroism, with acts of sacrifice, with acts of generosity, with acts of

martyrdom, and, by terrible necessity, with one prolonged act of — if these words can

be applied to mass murder — mass suicide. <Were you the first to use the term

“mass suicide” or do you know? For me it feels absolutely right, and it works in

this passage because of the care you took with the buildup/context—in other

words you didn’t just go in cold with a melodramatic pronouncement about mass

suicide. What kind of feedback, if any, did you get about this characterization?/pw

[[THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO SWORE NEVER TO FORGIVE ME FOR THAT ONE. AND

THAT WAS THE ONE THING I WROTE THAT KNOCKED THE WIND OUT OF ME AFTER

I WROTE IT. WE TALKED ABOUT IT FOR A LONG TIME AT THE MAGAZINE, BEFORE

DECIDING TO GO WITH IT.]] 

***** 

In most American newspapers, the photograph that Richard Drew took of the Falling

Man ran once and never again. Papers all over the country, from the Fort Worth Star-

Telegram to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to The Denver Post, were forced to

defend themselves against charges <how did you identify the photo’s publishers?

Richard Drew photo-credit search? Lexis/Nexis? Basic web search?/pw [[I THINK

IT WAS THE AP.]] that they exploited a man’s death, stripped him of his dignity,

invaded his privacy, turned tragedy into leering pornography. <thank you for not

quoting from some of those letters and for trusting us to instinctively get it; why

did you decide to collapse detail here rather than quoting?/pw [[BY THIS TIME THE

TONE WAS DICTATING THE STORY TO ME. I READ THAT SENTENCE NOW –

EXPLOITED, STRIPPED, INVADED, TURNED – AND KNOW THAT IT IS BEYOND ME AS

A CONSCIOUS AGENT.]] Most letters of complaint stated the obvious: that someone

seeing the picture had to know who it was. Still, even as Drew’s photograph became at

once iconic and impermissible, its subject remained unnamed. An editor at the Toronto

Globe and Mail assigned a reporter named Peter Cheney to solve the mystery. Cheney

at first despaired of his task; the entire city, after all, was wallpapered with Kinkoed

flyers advertising the faces of the missing and the lost and the dead. Then he applied

himself, sending the digital photograph to a shop that clarified and enhanced it. <did

you see the enhanced version?/pw [[OUR ENHANCED VERSION NEVER WORKED.

THINK CHENEY WAS BULLSHITTING ABOUT THIS NOW, AS WELL. THAT KIND OF

TECHNOLOGY JUST WASN’T AVAILABLE AT THE TIME.]]  Now information emerged: It

appeared to him that the man was most likely not black but dark-skinned, probably

Latino. He wore a goatee. And the white shirt billowing from his black pants was not a

shirt but rather appeared to be a tunic of some sort, the kind of jacket a restaurant

worker wears. Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the North Tower, lost

seventy-nine of its employees on September 11, as well as ninety-one of its patrons. It

was likely that the Falling Man numbered among them. But which one was he? Over

dinner, Cheney spent an evening discussing this question with friends, then said

goodnight and walked through Times Square. It was after midnight, eight days after

the attacks. The missing posters were still everywhere, but Cheney was able to focus

on one that seemed to present itself to him — a poster portraying a man who worked

at Windows as a pastry chef, who was dressed in a white tunic, who wore a goatee,

who was Latino. His name was Norberto Hernandez. He lived in Queens. Cheney took

the enhanced print of the Richard Drew photograph to the family, in particular to

Norberto Hernandez’s brother Tino and sister Milagros. They said yes, that was

Norberto. Milagros had watched footage of the people jumping on that terrible

morning, before the television stations stopped showing it. She had seen one of the

jumpers distinguished by the grace of his fall — by his resemblance to an Olympic

diver — and surmised that he had to be her brother. Now she saw, and she knew. All

that remained was for Peter Cheney <a couple of times in this piece you shift from

someone’s surname to the full name—it’s almost like a bass note but I imagine

you had practical reasons too. In this case moving back to the full name puts us in

Milagros’ POV and we see Cheney as a character from a different angle. Had you

simply used “Cheney” we’d have been seeing the character from your POV. Did

you shift for that reason or for cadence or both or for some other reason

entirely?/pw [[CADENCE, PROBABLY. I USE FULL NAMES A LOT. (THOUGH NEVER

MIDDLE NAMES, WHICH FOR SOME REASON NEVER FAILS TO SOUND CORNY.

SPORTS COLUMN STUFF.)]] to confirm the identification with Norberto’s wife and his

three daughters. They did not want to talk to him, especially after Norberto’s remains

were found and identified by the stamp of his DNA — a torso, an arm. So he went to

the funeral. He brought his print of Drew’s photograph with him and showed it to

Jacqueline Hernandez, the oldest of Norberto’s three daughters. She looked briefly at

the picture, then at Cheney, and ordered him to leave.

What Cheney remembers her saying, in her anger, in her offended grief: “That piece of

shit is not my father.” <what a plot twist + deft/compelling way to end this section,

drawing us further into the mystery./pw 

***** 

The resistance to the image — to the images — started early, started immediately,

started on the ground. <”started” = effective repetition/pw [[A SENTENCE THAT

WOULD NORMALLY BE BEYOND ME]] A mother whispering to her distraught child a

consoling lie: “Maybe they’re just birds, honey.” <amazing detail; source?/pw [[I

THINK I READ IT IN A BLOG ABOUT WATCHING THE JUMPERS.]] Bill Feehan, second

in command at the fire department, chasing a bystander who was panning the jumpers

with his video camera, demanding that he turn it off, bellowing, “Don’t you have any

human decency?” <again, amazing double-whammy of detail; source?/pw

[[PUBLISHED ACCOUNT, MAYBE, OR VID.]] before dying himself when the building

came down. In the most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world,

the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo

— the only images from which Americans were proud to avert their eyes. All over the

world, people saw the human stream debouch from the top of the North Tower, but

here in the United States, we saw these images only until the networks decided not to

allow such a harrowing view, out of respect for the families of those so publicly dying.

At CNN, the footage was shown live, before people working in the newsroom knew

what was happening; then, after what Walter Isaacson, who was then chairman of the

network’s news bureau, calls “agonized discussions” <again I’m struck by how

effective the partial quotes are and how so very often less is more/pw> with the

“standards guy,” it was shown only if people in it were blurred and unidentifiable; then

it was not shown at all.

And so it went. In 9/11, the documentary extracted from videotape shot by French

brothers Jules and Gedeon Naudet, the filmmakers included a sonic sampling of the

booming, rattling explosions the jumpers made upon impact but edited out the most

disturbing thing about the sounds: the sheer frequency with which they occurred.

<this is one of those details that my eye either missed or refused to see until

now, on the thousandth read/pw In Rudy, the docudrama starring James Woods in

the role of Mayor Giuliani, archival footage of the jumpers was first included, then cut

out. In Here Is New York, an extensive exhibition of 9/11 images culled from the work

of photographers both amateur and professional, there was, in the section titled

“Victims,” but one picture of the jumpers, taken at a respectful distance; attached to it,

on the Here Is New York Website, a visitor offers this commentary: “This image is what

made me glad for censuring [sic] in the endless pursuant media coverage.” More and

more, the jumpers — and their images — were relegated to the Internet underbelly,

where they became the provenance of the shock sites that also traffic in the autopsy

photos of Nicole Brown Simpson and the videotape of Daniel Pearl’s execution, and

where it is impossible to look at them without attendant feelings of shame and guilt. In

a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most

disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers’

experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best

forgotten. <The collected evidence adds weight at just the right moment, I think.

For me, this is one of the most riveting grafs of the whole piece, and I’m not sure

why. I’m struggling to articulate something about us as trained arbiters of

newsworthiness working against a human compulsion to both witness known

horror and to shield others from it and, supposedly, taste. The towers contained—

obscured—most of what was happening. The only visible humanness was the

stream of escapees at the base of the buildings and the other stream, from above.

To decide that the images were too private and shocking to show, and then to

systematically remove them from the day’s narrative, underscored their awfulness,

which somehow gave them more power. Not sure I’m making sense./pw [[SURE,

YOU’RE MAKING SENSE. BUT IT’S A COMPLICATED ISSUE. WHAT’S INTERESTING OF

COURSE ARE THE PICTURES THAT WERE SELECTED TO SYMBOIZE THE MOMENT –

MYCHAL JUDGE, ETC. THEY WERE VERY TRADITIONAL. FALLING MAN WAS NEW

TERRITORY.]]


It was no sideshow. The two most reputable estimates of the number of

people who jumped to their deaths were prepared by The New York Times and USA

Today. They differed dramatically. The Times, admittedly conservative, decided to

count only what its reporters actually saw in the footage they collected, and it arrived

at a figure of fifty. USA Today, whose editors used eyewitness accounts and forensic

evidence in addition to what they found on video, came to the conclusion that at least

two hundred people died by jumping — a count that the newspaper said authorities

did not dispute. Both are intolerable estimates of human loss, but if the number

provided by USA Today is accurate, then between 7 and 8 percent of those who died in

New York City on September 11, 2001, died by jumping out of the buildings; it means

that if we consider only the North Tower, where the vast majority of jumpers came

from, the ratio is more like one in six.

And yet if one calls the New York Medical Examiner’s Office to learn its own estimate of

how many people might have jumped, one does not get an answer but an admonition:

“We don’t like to say they jumped. They didn’t jump. Nobody jumped. They were forced

out, or blown out.” <some editors might have asked you to attribute this quote—

I’m glad you didn’t. How did you make the call not to? Lack of attribution is

particularly tough to justify in magazine narrative; attribution so often depends

upon the topic, the reporter, the writer, the publication, yet it’s a conversation

worth having again and again, I think/pw [[THE WOMAN’S NAME – SHE WAS

ESSENTIALLY A BUREAUCRAT OF DEATH – WOULD HAVE BEEN DISTRACTING. ALSO,

I WANTED HER TO STAND FOR THE WHOLE, RATHER THAN SIMPLY VOICE A

PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW]] And if one Googles the words “how many jumped on

9/11,” one falls into some blogger’s trap, slugged “Go Away, No Jumpers Here,” where

the bait is one’s own need to know: “I’ve got at least three entries in my referrer logs

that show someone is doing a search on Google for ‘how many people jumped from

WTC.’ My September 11 post had made mention of that terrible occurance [sic], so now

any pervert looking for that will get my site’s URL. I’m disgusted. I tried, but cannot

find any reason someone would want to know something like that…. Whatever. If that’s

why you’re here — you’re busted. Now go away.” <another strong section kicker; the

accumulated facts and contrasting tensions suggests a sort of stunning chaos as

well as—I want to use the word denial./pw [[WELL, IT’S THAT INTERNET VOICE

WE’VE COME TO KNOW SO WELL, AND EITHER LOVE OR LOATHE. I READ THAT

QUOTE AND STILL DETEST THE PERSON WHO WROTE IT.]]  

*****

Eric Fischl did not go away. Neither did he turn away or avert his eyes. A year before

September 11, he had taken photographs of a model tumbling around on the floor of a

studio. He had thought of using the photographs as the basis of a sculpture. Now,

though, he had lost a friend who had been trapped on the 106th floor of the North

Tower. Now, as he worked on his sculpture, he sought to express the extremity of his

feelings by making a monument to what he calls the “extremity of choice” faced by the

people who jumped. He worked nine months on the larger-than-life bronze he called

Tumbling Woman, and as he transformed a woman tumbling on the floor into a woman

tumbling through eternity, he succeeded in transfiguring the very local horror of the

jumpers into something universal — in redeeming an image many regarded as

irredeemable. Indeed, Tumbling Woman was perhaps the redemptive image of 9/11 —

and yet it was not merely resisted; it was rejected. The day after Tumbling Woman was

exhibited in New York’s Rockefeller Center, Andrea Peyser of the New York Post

denounced it in a column titled “Shameful Art Attack,” in which she argued that Fischl

had no right to ambush grieving New Yorkers with the very distillation of their own

sadness…in which she essentially argued the right to look away. Because it was based

on a model rolling on the floor, the statue was treated as an evocation of impact — as

a portrayal of literal, rather than figurative, violence.

“I was trying to say something about the way we all feel,” Fischl says, “but people

thought I was trying to say something about the way they feel — that I was trying to

take away something only they possessed. They thought that I was trying to say

something about the people they lost. ‘That image is not my father. You don’t even

know my father. How dare you try telling me how I feel about my father?’ ” Fischl

wound up apologizing — “I was ashamed to have added to anybody’s pain” — but it

didn’t matter.

Jerry Speyer, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art who runs Rockefeller Center,

ended the exhibition of Tumbling Woman after a week. “I pleaded with him not to do

it,” Fischl says. “I thought that if we could wait it out, other voices would pipe up and

carry the day. He said, ‘You don’t understand. I’m getting bomb threats.’ I said, ‘People

who just lost loved ones to terrorism are not going to bomb somebody.’ He said, ‘I

can’t take that chance.’ ” <this short section is such an interesting, unexpected

addition—did you remember the Fischl sculpture/reaction or did it surface

organically in your reporting? You could have cut these three grafs without

damaging the story (were there discussions about whether it belonged?) but I, for

one, liked learning of this other human impulse, the one that requires us to make

sense of pain./pw [[THE FISCHL STUFF IS THE LEAST NECESSARY STUFF IN THE

STORY. IT WAS PART OF AN EFFORT TO SPREAD THE STORY OUT, SPREAD IT

AROUND, SAY THAT THE CENSORING OF THE FALLING MAN PHOTO WAS A

CULTURE-WIDE PHENOMENON. IT WORKS. BUT IT ALMOST GOT CUT. OH, AND I

PICKED IT BECAUSE I WAS PREPARING THIS STORY IN MY MIND TWO YEARS

BEFORE I GOT THE CHANCE TO WRITE IT. I WAS CLUED INTO ALL CASES OF 911 

CENSORSHIP.]]

***  

Photographs lie. Even great photographs. Especially great photographs. The Falling

Man in Richard Drew’s picture fell in the manner suggested by the photograph for only

a fraction of a second, and then kept falling. The photograph functioned as a study of

doomed verticality, a fantasia of straight lines, with a human being slivered at the

center, like a spike. <amazing sentence w/weirdly contrasting words/images;

you’re talking about photo composition without talking about photo composition.

How’d you arrive at “fantasia”? /pw [[LUCK; THE GODS. I ALSO LOVE THE WORD

“SPIKE.” YOU CAN’T GO WRONG WITH IT.]] In truth, however, the Falling Man fell with

neither the precision of an arrow nor the grace of an Olympic diver. He fell like

everyone else, like all the other jumpers — trying to hold on to the life he was leaving,

which is to say that he fell desperately, inelegantly. In Drew’s famous photograph, his

humanity is in accord with the lines of the buildings. In the rest of the sequence — the

eleven outtakes — his humanity stands apart. He is not augmented by aesthetics; he is

merely human, and his humanity, startled and in some cases horizontal, obliterates

everything else in the frame. 

In the complete sequence of photographs, truth is subordinate to the facts that emerge

slowly, pitilessly, frame by frame. In the sequence, the Falling Man shows his face

<this verb—did you use it as a way to empower the man or to shift the focus off

of us, the witnesses or …?/pw [[IT’S A SIMPLE DESCRIPTION, REALLY. IF YOU LOOK

AT THE SERIES OF IMAGES, IT’S HARD TO AVOID; THERE ARE TWO PHOTOS WHERE

HE’S LOOKING AT YOU AND YOU’RE LOOKING AT HIM. IT’S A FAR MORE

VOYEURISTIC AND UNCOMFORTABLE EXPERIENCE THAN THE EXPERIENCE OF

LOOKING AT THE PUBLISHED FALLING MAN PHOTO, IN WHICH HE SEEMS SELF-

CONTAINED.]] to the camera in the two frames before the published one, and after

that there is an unveiling, nearly an unpeeling, as the force generated by the fall rips

the white jacket off his back. The facts that emerge from the entire sequence suggest

that the Toronto reporter, Peter Cheney, got some things right in his effort to solve the

mystery presented by Drew’s published photo. The Falling Man has a dark cast to his

skin and wears a goatee. He is probably a food-service worker. He seems lanky, with

the length and narrowness of his face — like that of a medieval Christ

<religion/spirituality figures strongly in this piece; how did this comparison come

to you?/pw [[I’M A CATHOLIC, LAPSED BUT WITH A LIFETIME OF MEDIEVAL

REFERENCE ALIVE IN MY IMAGINATION.]] possibly accentuated by the push of the

wind and the pull of gravity. But seventy-nine people died on the morning of

September 11 after going to work at Windows on the World. Another twenty-one died

while in the employ of Forte Food, a catering service that fed the traders at Cantor

Fitzgerald. Many of the dead were Latino, or light-skinned black men, or Indian, or

Arab. Many had dark hair cut short. Many had mustaches and goatees. Indeed, to

anyone trying to figure out the identity of the Falling Man, the few salient

characteristics that can be discerned in the original series of photographs raise as

many possibilities as they exclude. There is, however, one fact that is decisive.

Whoever the Falling Man may be, he was wearing a bright-orange shirt under his white

top. It is the one inarguable fact that the brute force of the fall reveals. No one can

know if the tunic or shirt, open at the back, is being pulled away from him, or if the

fall is simply tearing the white fabric to pieces. But anyone can see he is wearing an

orange shirt. If they saw these pictures, members of his family would be able to see

that he is wearing an orange shirt. They might even be able to remember if he owned

an orange shirt, if he was the kind of guy who would own an orange shirt, if he wore

an orange shirt to work that morning. Surely they would; surely someone would

remember what he was wearing when he went to work on the last morning of his life….

But now the Falling Man is falling through more than the blank blue sky. He is falling

through the vast spaces of memory and picking up speed. <I like that you held back

on this information till now. Was that always the plan or did you break this out

during revisions?/pw [[I THINK I ANSWER THIS QUESTION ABOVE. I PUT THE

STORY TOGETHER AS THE REPORTING CAME IN. IT WAS FINISHED IN STAGES.]]

***** 

Neil Levin, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, had

breakfast at Windows on the World, on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center’s

North Tower, on the morning of September 11. He never came home. His wife, Christy

Ferer, won’t talk about any of the particulars of his death. She works for New York

mayor Mike Bloomberg as the liaison between the mayor’s office and the 9/11 families

and has poured the energy aroused by her grief into her work, which, before the first

anniversary of the attack, called for her to visit television executives and ask them not

to use the most disturbing footage — including the footage of the jumpers — in their

memorial broadcasts. She is a close friend of Eric Fischl’s, as was her husband, so when

the artist asked, she agreed to take a look at Tumbling Woman. It, in her words, “hit

me in the gut,” but she felt that Fischl had the right to create and exhibit it. Now she’s

come to the conclusion that the controversy may have been largely a matter of timing.

<exactly/pw [[SHE HATED THIS STORY. STILL HATES ME, I THINK.]]  Maybe it was

just too soon to show something like that. After all, not long before her husband died,

she traveled with him to Auschwitz, where piles of confiscated eyeglasses and

extracted tooth fillings are on exhibit. “They can show that now,” she says. “But that

was a long time ago. They couldn’t show things like that then….”

In fact, they did, at least in photographic form, and the pictures that came out of the

death camps of Europe were treated as essential acts of witness/pw [[I WAS

READING A BOOK OF SUSAN SONTAG’S, REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS, WHILE I

WAS REPORTING THIS STORY. IT INFLUENCED ME A GREAT DEAL.]] without

particular regard to the sensitivities of those who appeared in them or the surviving

families of the dead. They were shown, as Richard Drew’s photographs of the freshly

assassinated Robert Kennedy were shown. They were shown, as the photographs of

Ethel Kennedy pleading with photographers not to take photographs were shown. They

were shown as the photograph of the little Vietnamese girl running naked after a

napalm attack was shown. They were shown as the photograph of Father Mychal Judge,

graphically and unmistakably dead, was shown, and accepted as a kind of testament.

They were shown as everything is shown, for, like the lens of a camera, history is a

force that does not discriminate. What distinguishes the pictures of the jumpers from

the pictures that have come before is that we — we Americans — are being asked to

discriminate on their behalf. What distinguishes them, historically, is that we, as

patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at them. Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds

of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we <by “we” are you talking

about the news media or all Americans?/pw [[ALL AMERICANS. I NEVER PRETEND

TO SPEAK FOR THE NEWS MEDIA.]] somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their

deaths unworthy of witness — because we have somehow deemed the act of witness,

in this one regard, unworthy of us.

***** 

Catherine Hernandez never saw the photo the reporter carried under his arm at her

father’s funeral. Neither did her mother, Eulogia. Her sister Jacqueline did, and her

outrage assured that the reporter left — was forcibly evicted — before he did any

more damage. But the picture has followed Catherine and Eulogia and the entire

Hernandez family. There was nothing more important to Norberto Hernandez than

family. His motto: “Together Forever.” But the Hernandezes are not together anymore.

The picture split them. Those who knew, right away, that the picture was not Norberto

— his wife and his daughters — have become estranged from those who pondered the

possibility that it was him for the benefit of a reporter’s notepad. With Norberto alive,

the extended family all lived in the same neighborhood in Queens. Now Eulogia and her

daughters have moved to a house on Long Island because Tatiana — who is now

sixteen and who bears a resemblance to Norberto Hernandez: the wide face, the dark

brows, the thick dark lips, thinly smiling — kept seeing visions of her father in the

house and kept hearing the whispered suggestions that he died by jumping out a

window. <again, I have to admire the restraint here. Did you have details about

Tatiana’s visions and decided not to use them or did you even take the

questioning there?/pw [[SHE WAS A FREAKED OUT YOUNG GIRL, HEAVILY

INFLUENCED BY CATHOLICISM. I LET HER SPEAK, AND USED WHAT SHE GAVE ME.]] 

He could not have died by jumping out a window.

All over the world, people who read Peter Cheney’s story believe that Norberto died by

jumping out a window. People have written poems about Norberto jumping out a

window. People have called the Hernandezes with offers of money — either charity or

payment for interviews — because they read about Norberto jumping out a window.

But he couldn’t have jumped out a window, his family knows, because he wouldn’t have

jumped out a window: not Papi. <here you use “jumping out a window” five times

w/in four sentences, almost echoing the repeated act of jumping. Is that why you

used repetition? Couldn’t have been just for the sake of emphasis or cadence, or

was it?/pw [[NO, IT WAS AN EFFORT TO SPEAK FOR THE HERNANDEZES, TO GET

INSIDE WHAT THEY WERE THINKING. IT WAS THEIR PHRASE. AND SO IT ECHOED

THEIR CONTEMPT FOR THE ACT, AND FOR ANYONE WHO MIGHT HAVE DONE IT.

THEY WANTED THEIR FATHER’S END TO BE HEROIC; THERE WAS NOTHING LESS

HEROIC TO THEM THAN “JUMPING OUT THE WINDOW.”]] “He was trying to come

home,” Catherine says one morning, <the switch to present tense totally works;

what prompted the change?/pw [[I DO THAT A LOT IN MY STORIES; I TRY TO DO

WHAT COMES NATURALLY, IN REGARD TO TENSE.]]  in a living room primarily

decorated with framed photographs of her father. “He was trying to come home to us,

and he knew he wasn’t going to make it by jumping out a window.” She is a lovely,

dark-skinned, brown-eyed girl, twenty-two years old, dressed in a T-shirt and sweats

and sandals. She is sitting on a couch next to her mother, who is caramel-colored,

with coppery hair tied close to her scalp, and who is wearing a cotton dress checked

with the color of the sky. <evoking that legendarily clear sky/pw Eulogia speaks half

the time in determined English, and then, when she gets frustrated with the rate of

revelation, pours rapid-fire Spanish into the ear of her daughter, who translates. “My

mother says she knows that when he died, he was thinking about us. She says that she

could see him thinking about us. I know that sounds strange, but she knew him. They

were together since they were fifteen.” The Norberto Hernandez Eulogia knew would

not have been deterred by smoke or by fire in his effort to come home to her. The

Norberto Hernandez she knew would have endured any pain before he jumped out of a

window. When the Norberto Hernandez she knew died, his eyes were fixed on what he

saw in his heart — the faces of his wife and his daughters — and not on the terrible

beauty of an empty sky.

How well did she know him? “I dressed him,” Eulogia says in English, a smile appearing

on her face at the same time as a shiny coat of tears. “Every morning. That morning, I

remember. He wore Old Navy underwear. Green. He wore black socks. He wore blue

pants: jeans. He wore a Casio watch. He wore an Old Navy shirt. Blue. With checks.”

What did he wear after she drove him, as she always did, to the subway station and

watched him wave to her as he disappeared down the stairs? “He changed clothes at

the restaurant,” says Catherine, who worked with her father at Windows on the World.

“He was a pastry chef, so he wore white pants, or chef’s pants — you know, black-

and-white check. He wore a white jacket. Under that, he had to wear a white T-shirt.”

What about an orange shirt? “No,” Eulogia says. “My husband did not have an orange

shirt.” <I love hearing their voices here/pw [[ALWAYS A CHALLENGE IN A STORY AS

HEAVILY “NARRATED” AS THIS ONE.]]

There are pictures. There are pictures of the Falling Man as he fell. Do they want to see

them? Catherine says no, on her mother’s behalf — “My mother should not see” — but

then, when she steps outside and sits down on the steps of the front porch, she says,

“Please — show me. Hurry. Before my mother comes.” When she sees the twelve-frame

sequence, she lets out a gasping, muted call for her mother, but Eulogia is already over

her shoulder, reaching for the pictures. She looks at them one after another, and then

her face fixes itself into an expression of triumph and scorn. “That is not my husband,”

she says, handing the photographs back. “You see? Only I know Norberto.” She reaches

for the photographs again, and then, after studying them, shakes her head with a

vehement finality. “The man in this picture is a black man.” She asks for copies of the

pictures so that she can show them to the people who believed that Norberto jumped

out a window, <wow, wow/pw while Catherine sits on the step with her palm spread

over her heart. “They said my father was going to hell because he jumped,” she says.

“On the Internet. They said my father was taken to hell with the devil. I don’t know

what I would have done if it was him. I would have had a nervous breakdown, I guess.

They would have found me in a mental ward somewhere….”

Her mother is standing at the front door, about to go back inside her house. Her face

has already lost its belligerent pride and has turned once again into a mask of

composed, almost wistful sadness. “Please,” she says as she closes the door in a stain

of morning sunlight. “Please clear my husband’s name.”

A phone rings in Connecticut. A woman answers. A man on the other end is looking to

identify a photo that ran in The New York Times on September 12, 2001. “Tell me what

the photo looks like,” she says. It’s a famous picture, the man says — the famous

picture of a man falling. “Is it the one called ‘Swan Dive’ on Rotten.com? the woman

asks. It may be, the man says. “Yes, that might have been my son,” the woman says.

She lost both her sons on September 11. They worked together at Cantor Fitzgerald.

They worked on the equities desk. They worked back-to-back. No, the man on the

phone says, the man in the photograph is probably a food-service worker. He’s

wearing a white jacket. He’s upside down. “Then that’s not my son,” she says. “My son

was wearing a dark shirt and khaki pants.”

She knows what he was wearing because of her determination to know what happened

to her sons on that day — because of her determination to look and to see. <again,

this polarizing notion of witnessing/pw [[READ THE SONTAG BOOK; IT’S SHORT,

AND VERY GOOD.]] She did not start with that determination. She stopped reading the

newspaper after September 11, stopped watching TV. Then, on New Year’s Eve, she

picked up a copy of The New York Times and saw, in a year-end review, a picture of

Cantor Fitzgerald employees crowding the edge of the cliff formed by a dying building.

<how did you arrive at this haunting image?/pw [[I DIDN’T; THE STORY GAVE IT

TO ME.]]  In the posture — the attitude — of one of them, she thought she recognized

the habits of her son. So she called the photographer and asked him to enlarge and

clarify the picture. Demanded that he do it. And then she knew, or knew as much as it

was possible to know. Both of her sons were in the picture. One was standing in the

window, almost brazenly. The other was sitting inside. She does not need to say what

may have happened next. <even as someone without children the particular

brutality of this situation could keep me up at night; what was it like, talking to

this woman? Was she forthcoming? Did she need to talk about what she saw—

what she needed to see? It’s interesting that you name neither her nor her sons—

how did you make that choice? And I’d be interested to know why you third-

personed yourself here as “the man on the phone” and how you feel that aided the

narrative./pw [[SHE ASKED NOT TO BE NAMED. AND BY THIS TIME, THERE WAS NO

WAY I WAS GOING TO INTRODUCE A FIRST-PERSON ELEMENT. BUT SHE, LIKE THE

HERNANDEZES, WAS DESPERATE FOR THE TRUTH. IT WAS JUST A DIFFERENT KIND

OF DESPERATION. THE HERNANDEZES WANTED NOT TO KNOW SOMETHING; THEY

WANTED TO KNOW WHAT THEIR HUSBAND AND FATHER DIDN’T DO. THE WOMAN

IN CONNECTICUT WANTED TO KNOW WHAT HER SON DID. THE HERNANDEZES

DIDN’T WANT TO BE LIED ABOUT; THE WOMAN DIDN’T WANT TO BE LIED TO.]] 

“The thing I hold was that both of my sons were together,” <ugh; unbearable/pw she

says, her instantaneous tears lifting her voice an octave. “But I sometimes wonder how

long they knew. They’re puzzled, they’re uncertain, they’re scared — but when did they

know? When did the moment come when they lost hope? Maybe it came so quick….”

The man on the phone does not ask if she thinks her sons jumped. <here again, an

undercurrent of tension: to look or not to look, to show or not to show, to ask or

not to ask, to be (if I could go this far) or not to be; had you intended to ask or

did you make the call knowing you wouldn’t take the conversation to that

level?/pw [[NO, IT WAS JUST A MATTER OF MERCY. SHE’D GIVEN ME SO MUCH

MORE THAN I EXPECTED. I COULDN’T BRING MYSELF TO ASK THE QUESTION.]] He

does not have it in him, and anyway, she has given him an answer.

The Hernandezes looked at the decision to jump as a betrayal of love — as something

Norberto was being accused of. The woman in Connecticut looks at the decision to

jump as a loss of hope — as an absence that we, the living, now have to live with. She

chooses to live with it by looking, by seeing, by trying to know — by making an act of

private witness. She could have chosen to keep her eyes closed. And so now the man

on the phone asks the question that he called to ask in the first place: Did she make

the right choice?

“I made the only choice I could have made,” the woman answers. “I could never have

made the choice not to know.”

Catherine Hernandez thought she knew who the Falling Man was as soon as she saw

the series of pictures, but she wouldn’t say his name. “He had a sister who was with

him that morning,” she said, “and he told his mother that he would take care of her. He

would never have left her alone by jumping.” She did say, however, that the man was

Indian, so it was easy to figure out that his name was Sean Singh. But Sean was too

small to be the Falling Man. He was clean-shaven. He worked at Windows on the World

in the audiovisual department, so he probably would have been wearing a shirt and tie

instead of a white chef’s coat. None of the former Windows employees who were

interviewed believe the Falling Man looks anything like Sean Singh. <how did your

reporting connect these dots? The lead presumably started with Catherine—then

what did you do? what sources of information did you use?/pw [[WE HAD

PICTURES OF EVERYBODY WHO WORKED AT WINDOWS. AND THE GUY WHO RAN IT

WAS VERY HELPFUL; HE ACTUALLY SAT IN A ROOM AND LOOKED AT ALL THE

SLIDES WITH ANDREW.]]

Besides, he had a sister. He never would have left her alone.

A manager at Windows looked at the pictures once and said the Falling Man was Wilder

Gomez. Then a few days later he studied them closely and changed his mind. Wrong

hair. Wrong clothes. Wrong body type. It was the same with Charlie Mauro. It was the

same with Junior Jimenez. Junior worked in the kitchen and would have been wearing

checked pants. Charlie worked in purchasing and had no cause to wear a white jacket.

Besides, Charlie was a very large man. The Falling Man appears fairly stout in Richard

Drew’s published photo but almost elongated in the rest of the sequence.

The rest of the kitchen workers were, like Norberto Hernandez, eliminated from

consideration by their outfits. The banquet servers may have been wearing white and

black, but no one remembered any banquet server who looked anything like the Falling

Man.

Forte Food was the other food-service company that lost people on September 11,

2001. But all of its male employees worked in the kitchen, which means that they wore

either checked or white pants. And nobody would have been allowed to wear an orange

shirt under the white serving coat.

But someone who used to work for Forte remembers a guy who used to come around

and get food for the Cantor executives. Black guy. Tall, with a mustache and a goatee.

Wore a chef’s coat, open, with a loud shirt underneath.

Nobody at Cantor remembers anyone like that.

Of course, the only way to find out the identity of the Falling Man is to call the families

of anyone who might be the Falling Man and ask what they know about their son’s or

husband’s or father’s last day on earth. Ask if he went to work wearing an orange shirt.

But should those calls be made? Should those questions be asked? Would they only

heap pain upon the already anguished? Would they be regarded as an insult to the

memory of the dead, the way the Hernandez family regarded the imputation that

Norberto Hernandez was the Falling Man? Or would they be regarded as steps to some

act of redemptive witness?

Jonathan Briley worked at Windows on the World. Some of his coworkers, when they

saw Richard Drew’s photographs, thought he might be the Falling Man. He was a light-

skinned black man. He was over six five. He was forty-three. He had a mustache and a

goatee and close-cropped hair. He had a wife named Hillary.

Jonathan Briley’s father is a preacher, a man who has devoted his whole life to serving

the Lord. After September 11, he gathered his family together to ask God to tell him

where his son was. No: He demanded it. He used these words: “Lord, I demand to know

where my son is.” For three hours straight, he prayed in his deep voice, until he spent

the grace he had accumulated over a lifetime in the insistence of his appeal.

The next day, the FBI called. They’d found his son’s body. It was, miraculously, intact.

The preacher’s youngest son, Timothy, went to identify his brother. He recognized him

by his shoes: He was wearing black high-tops. Timothy removed one of them and took

it home and put it in his garage, as a kind of memorial.

Timothy knew all about the Falling Man. He is a cop in Mount Vernon, New York, and in

the week after his brother died, someone had left a September 12 newspaper open in

the locker room. He saw the photograph of the Falling Man and, in anger, he refused to

look at it again. But he couldn’t throw it away. Instead, he stuffed it in the bottom of

his locker, where — like the black shoe in his garage — it became permanent.

Jonathan’s sister Gwendolyn knew about the Falling Man, too. She saw the picture the

day it was published. She knew that Jonathan had asthma, and in the smoke and the

heat would have done anything just to breathe….

The both of them, Timothy and Gwendolyn, knew what Jonathan wore to work on most

days. He wore a white shirt and black pants, along with the high-top black shoes.

Timothy also knew what Jonathan sometimes wore under his shirt: an orange T-shirt.

Jonathan wore that orange T-shirt everywhere. He wore that shirt all the time. He wore

it so often that Timothy used to make fun of him: When are you gonna get rid of that

orange T-shirt, Slim?

But when Timothy identified his brother’s body, none of his clothes were recognizable

except the black shoes. And when Jonathan went to work on the morning of September

11, 2001, he’d left early and kissed his wife goodbye while she was still sleeping. She

never saw the clothes he was wearing. After she learned that he was dead, she packed

his clothes away and never inventoried what specific articles of clothing might be

missing.

Is Jonathan Briley the Falling Man? He might be. But maybe he didn’t jump from the

window as a betrayal of love or because he lost hope. Maybe he jumped to fulfill the

terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family. Maybe he didn’t

jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God.

Oh, no. You have to fall. <OK, from the first mention of Jonathan Briley to now I’ve

been in the thrall of (a) the possibility that we’ve found our guy and (b) the

family’s actions upon learning that Jonathan was missing. I admire the

care/brevity of this passage, and the fact that you decline to answer some of the

more disturbing questions we, being humans, might have, such as how it would

be physically possible for a body to remain intact under such conditions. But the

thing is: it doesn’t matter. So my q’ton is how this passage evolved in terms of the

withholding of detail.Also, did you include “maybe he didn’t jump at all” as a

salve to the family, or to us all?/pw [[FOR A LOT OF REASONS, I HAVE LITTLE

DOUBT THAT IT WAS JONATHAN. BUT THEN, PETER CHENEY IS STILL CONVINCED

THAT THE FALLING MAN IS NORBERTO HERNANDEZ. AND I DIDN’T WANT TO DO

TO THE BRILEYS WHAT PETER DID TO THE HERNANDEZES. SO ALL THE RESTRAINT

HERE IS TO GIVE THE FAMILY AN OUT. AND THEN OF COURSE, IT SERVES MY

PURPOSES, BECAUSE IT ALLOWS ME TO VAULT INTO SOME KIND OF

SYMBOLIC/RELIGIOUS DIMENSION. AS DID THE EXPLICITLY SYMBOLIC AND

RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE USED BY JONATHAN’S FATHER.]] 

Yes, Jonathan Briley might be the Falling Man. But the only certainty we have is the

certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11,

2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the

sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the

world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous

photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside

its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we

have not yet seen. <such a good analogy—can you walk me thru the thought

process of arriving at the unmarked grave/unknown soldier? I also appreciate the

fact that you didn’t spell out the terms of the “war whose end we have not yet

seen”—if those terms can be spelled out at all./pw [[I THOUGHT OF THE

UNMARKED GRAVE – THE IDEA OF BEING BURIED IN PLAIN SIGHT – EARLY ON.

THAT KIND OF STUFF – STRETCHING THE STORY THEMATICALLY — COMES EASY

TO ME. THE OTHER STUFF – TELLING A STORY, ALLOWING A STORY TO HAPPEN

WITHOUT COMMENTING ON WHAT IT ALL MEANS – IS MUCH HARDER. THIS STORY

FOR SOME REASON IS A MODEL OF ECONOMY AND RESTRAINT. I WISH I COULD

SAY THAT FOR ALL MY STORIES.]]  Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him,

and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The

picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown

soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

That we have known who the Falling Man is all along. <This is such a tough story

that it seems crass/wrong to compliment kickers or explore the choices you made

in the reporting/writing, but this is, I think, how we learn to work with/make

sense of difficult material. Did this macro ending present itself from the

beginning and you wrote toward it? Or did you reroute yourself a few times, and if

so how? The lack of solid resolution allowed you to end as you did, but a lesser

writer/thinker might have tried going micro./pw [[I WAS WRITING THIS STORY

THROUGH THE LAST DAY OF CLOSING. I WAS WRITING IT AS IT WAS BEING EDITED

INTO FINAL FORM. WE DIDN’T LEARN ABOUT JONATHAN BRILEY’S ORANGE SHIRT

UNTIL A NIGHT OR MAYBE TWO NIGHTS BEFORE IT WAS SHIPPED. WE HAD NO

ROOM AT ALL. BUT STILL, THE EDITING PROCESS REIGNS SUPREME; I’D WRITTEN

THREE MORE PARAGRAPHS AFTER THE WORDS “THAT WE HAVE KNOWN WHO THE

FALLING MAN IS ALL ALONG.” THEY STRETCHED FOR MEANING, EXPLAINED WHAT I

WAS TRYING TO GET AT. BUT THE STORY WAS READ BEFORE IT WAS SHIPPED BY

EDITOR PETER GRIFFIN, AND HE SUGGESTED THAT WE END WHERE IT ENDS. AND

OF COURSE HE WAS ABSOLUTELY RIGHT.]]

*** 

p) A decade has passed since this story ran. What, if anything, would you do differently with the piece if you had it to do over again, and why?

t) I wouldn’t do anything different. Not a word, really. I can’t say that about many of the pieces I’ve written—indeed, only three: This, “The Abortionist,” and “My Father’s Fashion Tips.”  

p) Are you still in touch with any of the people who appeared in this story and if so, how so?

t) Eric Fischl, to a degree. And I know that Andrew called Gwendolyn Briley after her dad died. Which reminds me: I can’t tell you how important Andrew’s contribution to this story was. I first contacted Jonathan’s father; and I think that I made the first call to his brother. But Andrew handled all the interviews with Gwendolyn, and did the face to face with Jonathan’s brother. The story couldn’t have been written without him, because I would have been scrambling to report instead of just letting the writing just happen—instead of letting it rise, like a prayer.

p) Has the falling man ever been positively identified?

t) He’s positively identified here.

*** 

Annotation Tuesday! #1: Michael Kruse & the missing woman

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