NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 -- Despite the red belt of flames encircling the middle of the World Trade Center and the plumes of black smoke that descended on downtown like a blanket of death, many New Yorkers stood in silence on their rooftops this brilliant, sunny morning, questioning whether they were dreaming. Then in a moment New York's skyline -- and lifestyle -- forever changed. No roar. No sirens. Just a collective gasp from the tenants gathered atop my girlfriend's five-storey apartment at 234 West 14th Street, and on practically every rooftop in Manhattan.

Remarkably, the collapse of the Twin Towers looked like a staged TV event, the demolition of a mothballed building.

***

Thirty minutes later, I walked around the corner to Saint Vincent's Medical Center, the hospital that treated most of the casualties following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, where hundreds of New Yorkers -- who all too often get a bum rap as rude and self-absorbed --lined up to give their blood. Most people in the queue that stretched up Seventh Avenue and around the corner of Thirteenth Street appeared to be in a state of shock. "At first I thought it was a joke," said one man in the line, hurriedly filling out a blood donation form. Behind him, an eyewitness to the calamity added: "I thought the pilot of the plane must have had a heart attack... God only knows how this is going to end."

For some, shock had changed into anger about as fast as the ambulances and police cars racing down Seventh Avenue. "Any form of warfare will be acceptable after this," seethed Sarah Allender, a college student majoring in politics.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I understand that violence begets violence, but we should do what we did the last time people attacked our land: drop a nuclear bomb. That would be the ultimate message."

Ms Allender neglected to mention just where to deliver such a message. Gaza? Afghanistan? America's heartland?

Meanwhile, a bearded homeless man in a Beatles T-shirt, holding a bottle of beer wrapped in the Village Voice, managed to look on the bright side of things. "Today, I'm able to drink my beer without getting a ticket. Normally they treat me like a terrorist. This is the real terrorism today."

Indeed. On the roped-off sidewalk in front of Saint Vincent's emergency room, scores of empty gurneys waited for victims. Street traffic was stopped in all directions, except for emergency vehicles, which today included a city bus. It had been comandeered to transport dazed emergency workers, many of whom wore white paper dust masks. And a burly construction worker, tears in his eyes, climbed on a blue police barricade to scan the crowd, hoping to catch sight of his missing brother, a banker who worked across the street from where the Twin Towers used to stand.

I bumped into my former doctor, David Feldman, who was about to return to his emergency station. "Tell the people that everything is running smoothly," said Feldman, who neverthleless admitted that the ER was already packed, and that patients were spilling out into other wards of the hospital. "The first wave of people were not that badly hurt -- smoke inhalation. But we're starting to get people who were dug in with debris on top of them."

"They are doing the same thing in my country," lamented Naima El Haddad, a Moroccan woman who emigrated to Brooklyn 12 years ago. She had come to Saint Vincent's to visit her husband, who is dying from lung cancer and on a respirator. She looked frightened and vulnerable, visibly trembling. She worried that Muslims in America, be they from Africa, Pakistan or the Middle East, might suffer for the sins of those who kill in the name of her religion. "I hope they don't put us all in a lot," she said,

Ms El Haddad then produced a minature pink Koran from her handbag. "In my husband's room I said a prayer for the dead so they can get to God clean and safe and nice."

Her friend, Layla Abdul, originally from Egypt, fretted less about a potential backlash. "New York," she said confidently, "is bigger than that. America is bigger than that."

A pair of priests walked by. Father Roger Fawcett, who peeled surgical gloves off his hands, prepared to take a break at a frozen yogurt shop with Father Robert, an Orthodox priest in a black cassock. They had just helped unload the first wave of patients arriving at St. Vincent's Emergency Room. Apparently, there was nothing much they could do for the moment while the triage team "separated the dead from the wounded and the wonded from the walking wounded." "We're here to anoint the dying," said Father Fawcett. "But the heavy part of the work will start later, providing counselling to the bereaved families" Trite or not, I asked them "Is there a God?"

"Oh yes," Father Fawcett said smiling "He's in the faces, in the hands, in the feet of the doctors here. This is where God is."

***

That night I again climb to the roof, the tar beach as we call it in New York City, somehow praying that I'll awaken from a bad dream. Yet a giant ball of gray smoke still hovers where I once danced at Windows On The World, the famed ballroom crowning the World Trade Center. A realisation of the magnitude of this horror is just beginning to settle in. There is no World Trade Center. Then I hear a jet in the distance, and I don't know whether I'm reassured or scared out of my wits.