September 11 marks a dark anniversary: the day, 14 years ago, when terrorists brought down the World Trade Center towers, crashed into the Pentagon, and – but for a few brave passengers – would have flown yet another plane into yet another innocent target. The world still reels with the aftershocks of those attacks, from the seismic realignment of geopolitical energies to the quiet misery of families bearing the wounds of loss.
Those attacks were also the reason why, when we announced in 2011 that we were moving to Abu Dhabi, in “the Middle East”, even our most progressive-minded friends were taken aback. In the aftermath of 9/11, it had become commonplace for many in the West to conflate “Arab” with “terrorist”, although, as we pointed out to people, after Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people at the Murrah building in Oklahoma City with a lorry bomb, no one made a similar link between “terrorist” and “Christian”.
My friends’ warnings came rushing back about a month after we moved to Abu Dhabi, when a strange loud noise woke us up in the middle of the night. Staggering about in the darkness of our still unfamiliar apartment, we realised a garbled recording was playing in the corridor: “A fire has been reported in the building. Please stand by for further instructions.” So we waited. And waited. And waited, trying all the while not to think “what if …”
Then someone started banging on doors: smoke on lower floors, time to evacuate, don’t use the elevators. We scooped up phones, wallets and our sleeping children to begin the hike down from the 37th floor.
Somewhere around floor 24, I looked at my phone: 12:01. September 11, 2011.
Until that point, I hadn’t been afraid. Sweaty, tired, wishing we lived on 9th floor rather than 37th, but not afraid. But when I saw the date, “what if …” echoed more loudly in my tired brain: what if someone had decided to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by attacking NYU Abu Dhabi, in some twisted attempt to blow up an “American” symbol (despite the fact that many of NYUAD’s students are not US citizens)? My fearful “what if” illustrates another hateful legacy of 9/11: before the attacks, such a thought would never have occurred to me.
As we spiralled down the dim stairwells, I had sudden flash of how terrifying it must have been to stumble down 100 floors with the stairwells filling with smoke and the building beginning to shake.
We got to the bottom floor and tumbled outside. Building residents, many of them students, gathered across the car park in front of a mosque, whose green lamp gleamed through night air as thick and damp as tapioca. Students wearing everything from abayas to sweatpants larked about singing (someone had brought down a guitar), while others crouched over laptops, cramming for class. Maybe that’s what it means to be young: no fear (other than threats of a spot test).
Ultimately, we learnt that the emergency had been caused by a generator that malfunctioned, sparking and smoking enough to set off the alarms. Our forced march down 37 flights resulted only in sore muscles. It was an inconvenience, not a tragedy (and for the students whose classes were cancelled; a holiday).
There was no terrible finish to the “what if …” of our evacuation. But the anniversary of 9/11, coming not long after the end of the mourning period for the 45 UAE servicemen who died in Yemen, offers a stark reminder that “what if …” may have become “when…”, like a thin whisper of dread hovering at the edge of our lives.
To challenge that dread, I think about the scene in the aftermath of our evacuation, when we gathered in the plaza in the front of the mosque, and people from all over the city came to make sure everything was all right. It’s a different “what if” than we usually ask: what if we all found common ground? What would happen?
Deborah Lindsay Williams is programme head of literature and creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi