III: Becoming
It has been six days. Mayor Giuliani--who has shone in the crisis, making people forget his scandal-sheet divorce and his arbiter-of-morality attack on museums; many of us have become, with our actions, better people than we were before, although it's not a tradeoff any of us would have chosen to make--has asked us to come back, to be in the city and live our lives, those who still have them, to show that we will not be crushed.
I choose my shoes in the morning for practicality: if I have to walk across the 59th Street bridge, or flee a bombed train station, they will serve. I'm not the only one: there are a lot more sensible shoes around.
The next task is to try to think like a terrorist: which places and times are likely targets, ones we might want to avoid? I take a late, post-morning-rush train. Others must have come to the same conclusion: it's packed to bursting and arrives in Penn station next to another one just as full. Police cluster in the station, shifting weight, looking aimless. At Ground Zero there is presumably endless work, but here, the task is to wait around.
As we walk toward Times Square there are lots of sirens. There are always sirens in the city, but today they stand out, stark. A sheriff's police car leads two vans down Seventh Avenue; the van's occupants wear jackets lettered FEMA.
The tourists that normally clutter Times Square, their video cameras taking in the Blade Runner barrage of media images--they're not here. Not very many people are. The shops are all open, the usual souvenirs joined by T-shirts commemorating the horrific event--photos of the burning towers captioned "The Day Lady Liberty Cried" or "We Will Not Forget." I can't imagine wearing such an image, buying such a souvenir of tragedy. But is it any stranger than the special issue of Time, full of photos of the disaster, that I've squirrelled away?
As I look into those Times Square shops, I notice, maybe for the first time, that their proprietors are often dark of complexion, people maybe from the Asian or Indian world that has suddenly become the center of our universe. (Tell the truth: before September 11th, could you have found Afghanistan on an unmarked map? Would you have known what countries it bordered? If asked to name some countries beginning with A, would it even have made your list?) Who are the people from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, and their neighboring countries in this city? They drive cabs, some of them, some run these Times Square shops, and some operate the food carts that are finally returning to the streets, their sugar-smoke scent of roasting nuts or the sharpness of Middle Eastern spices lingering in the air. Flags have sprung up on these carts, in these shops, on taxi aerials--how many are there out of genuine swelling of patriotism for their adopted country (or perhaps this is their native country--not all immigrants arrived in this generation), and how many are protective coloring for dark skin to hide behind in a white world of unchanneled anger at this atrocity?
On Sixth Avenue, a reporter from Mexican television gets my attention and asks a provocatively-phrased question about the American imperative of leaping to war. I stop, because it's suddenly important to me, what with the government's repetition that "we are at war" and the angry scrawled signs around town, that I say to some small portion of the outside world that I am just as frightened of a rash reaction as I am of more terror attacks. I tell the reporter that I think it's important that we choose our targets cautiously, that we not react out of hate and fear and bigotry, that we not become what we have beheld and kill innocents for their nationality or their beliefs. These attacks can't go unanswered, but there's already been enough collateral damage.
I stop at the coffee cart at Sixth and 55th. There will be help, in some form, for devastated downtown businesses, but what about these small proprietors who have lost a week of trade. Sal's Coffee needs my business a hell of a lot more than Starbucks does. "How you doing?" I ask Sal. "It's tough, this first day back," he says, and I wonder from his expression whether he lost someone, or if he's just feeling it as a tear in the fabric of the world, as I am. "Take care," I say.
The people who lost family in the World Trade towers, often after a last phone call of reassurance or terror or farewell, who now wander clinging to an almost mystical faith in the existence of "pockets" in the crush of rubble; the ones who saw horrific things as they escaped, the splattered aftermath of a snapped elevator cable or a fellow human being sliced by falling debris, or looked up to see immediately above them what the rest of us have only seen from a distance, people tumbling through the sky; or the rescue workers sifting through the wreckage finding fragments more often than bodies--how do these people survive, go on, remember even to breathe? If this is how shaken and shattered I feel, I can't begin to imagine the effort of spirit, the immense will it must take these others, the ones who have been touched--punched and kicked and stabbed in the heart--by this disaster, just to keep themselves alive.
The faces of the lost look out from every wall, every lightpost, more in the city, more frequent the farther downtown you go, but they are out on Long Island too, miles and miles removed: one on the window of Starbucks in Rockville Centre, more at Max's Grille a few doors down. And for every all-American Jim or Bill there is a dark-eyed Rajesh or a Vladimir. If anyone thinks this act struck only at a targeted segment of humanity, the faces tell you otherwise.
Lisa, Susan, Sniha, Bill, Roger.
The litany of the lost.
V: Coming of
Age in an Imperfect World