Emergency Events

Yesterday, a little before 2p.m., we felt the ground shaking on the 32nd floor of our building near Madison Square Garden. Our building sways in the wind a lot and we can sometimes feel subways under us, but this was different. The water in our glasses quivered. The blinds clanked against the windows. Doors yawned open. I've been in earthquakes before (having been born and raised on the West Coast) but I've never been in an earthquake while in a skyscraper, so that wasn't my immediate thought. My immediate thought was (funny in retrospect, I guess), The building is crumbling. I guess I wasn't the only one. Suddenly, everyone had come out of their offices in panic and were asking each other what was going on. Then there were swarms headed to the elevators. Nobody had any idea what was happening, but we all had 9/11 in our minds. Hundreds had come out into the lobby of the building. We poured out onto the streets and started walking away from the building, staring back at the skyscraper, watching for something. The streets were full of other people and we soon overheard that we weren't the only building that felt "it." There was talk of an explosion, but then slowly, the rumor turned into earthquake, and shortly thereafter, it was confirmed: a measly 5.8 in Virgina. Still, most people were too shaken to go back into the building.

This got me thinking of other emergency events I've been in. The one that always comes to mind is a time when I was visiting relatives in Iran and there was a bomb raiding. It was in the mid-1980's during the Iran/Iraq war. I was at my cousin's apartment, playing with them for the day while my mom went shopping in the bazaar with my grandmother. I was in my youngest cousin's bedroom constructing a mini city out of several blankets and pillows. I was still in elementary school. My cousin, who is four years younger than me, suddenly perked up and said, "Listen!" I asked her what it was. "It's the bomb siren!" I said there was no way. Then, whatever she heard got louder and turned on in our neighborhood and it was inevitable--the slow, high-pitched drone. The prick of fear and panic crawled up my spine. I had never been in a bombing before. I had never been in an emergency before. "Girls, come here!" my aunt screamed from the living room. We ran to the living room. "Get away from the windows!" she screamed, ushering us into her arms. My aunt's mother was elderly and was sitting right next to a window in the kitchen, peeling a cucumber. "Maman, get away from the window!" my aunt begged, throwing her body on top of us kids to protect us. I peeked out from under my aunt and caught a sliver of the elderly lady sitting at the table in the kitchen, not missing a beat on her cucumber peeling. All the while, the bomb siren kept wailing. The old woman didn't look up from her task, saying in Farsi, "Fuck it. If they're going to kill us, getting away from the window isn't going to help." My aunt started crying and screamed for her mother to join us against the wall away from the window. I could feel my aunt's sweat. I could hear her breathing, holding us tightly. And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the bomb siren ended. It was a false alarm. No Iraqi bombs were going to fall. The planes that flew over had just been spies. We hadn't even needed to go to the basement. My aunt slowly let go of her grip on us and stood up. Me and my cousin unwound ourselves from our fetal positions on the floor and raised our heads, blinking. Then my aunt's mother looked up and said, "Does anyone want any cucumber? I've peeled a few."