II: Living in the Penumbra
(originally an email to Chicago-based friends on
Thursday, 9/13/01)
Nobody went to work in Manhattan Wednesday. We sat home glued to the TV until, edgy, Rob jumped up and said, "Let's go out. I just have to go somewhere." We did some errands, including a trip to Barnes and Noble for a book we'd been meaning to pick up. It was Saturday full...but quieter. As if people were there for no reason, trying to distract themselves and failing.
You could hear every word the cashiers said, all through the store. And when we went to pay for our purchases, the line to process credit cards was down (do Visa/MC get processed downtown? is there anybody there anymore?)--they just asked to see ID and assumed people were good for it.
Thursday we went to work. We stopped at the Quik-Stop by the train for a newspaper (we couldn't get a paper Wednesday--they were all gone in minutes). Outside the door, a fireman heaped his gear, hat perched on top, as he and two colleagues went in for coffee. I'm not normally one to offer benediction to strangers--in a normal world, it seems kind of obnoxious; but this isn't a normal world--but I couldn't walk by without speaking. After a nervous "Hi, guys," I offered, "God bless." As we walked a few steps behind them up to the train, the senior of the three was explaining how to protect the eyes from the dust of the pulverized buildings once they arrived.
A couple months ago, three firefighters died here in an explosion at a hardware store in Astoria, Queens. The city slowed down to remember them. When a crowd of firefighters rode the train to their funeral, the conductor made an announcement on behalf of the passengers and crew of condolence, thanks for what they do, and begged them all to be safe. The dead men's pictures are still posted in various places--banks, stores--and there have been any number of charitable funds and events to raise money to support their families. Just to show you how this city feels about its firefighters.
There are maybe a hundred times as many firefighters lost this week as died in the Astoria fire. As a result, firehouses in the city have become places of pilgrimage--mounds of flowers outside, people bringing food inside. At HarperCollins, the company has set up bulletin boards for employees to place their notes, poems, pictures, anything they want to send to the firefighters, cops, and their families, and the company will take them down and deliver them periodically. The library promotions department made lunches for the firefighters at the firehouse on 44th. A colleague said he and his wife went to their Brooklyn firehouse Wednesday just to say thank you. (Brooklyn is, by the way, covered in ash blown from the disaster. Last night the wind changed and you could smell the smoke in Queens.)
Homes of the missing are sites of pilgrimage, too. We're lucky; as far as we know so far, no one on our street was in or near WTC. I keep hearing colleagues talk about candlelight vigils in front of the homes of missing neighbors. Meantime, the city is papered with photos of the lost, adult milk-carton photos: Have you seen my brother, wife, mother, uncle, who was last heard from on whichever floor of one of the towers? You can't help thinking, as we hear how even the steel of the building was reduced to dust by the fire and impact, that there will never be a body for many of these families to bury. To dust you shall return.
And it's not over. Thursday was a day of rolling bomb threats in Midtown. Every few minutes there would be a sudden sea of people outside a building that had been evacuated. Sure, we know that it's mostly fucking idiots with telephones, taking advantage of our anxiety. We also know that all it would take is one real bomb exploding in one of these buildings to shatter our fragile resolve to go on as usual.
When I left the house Thursday morning, I seriously considered leaving a note on the table with instructions for friends and family should we not arrive home. Each good-bye is invested with a lot more awareness of the tenuousness of life, that anything could happen and you might not see this person or place again. When I left Rob at his office to walk the couple blocks farther to mine, he said, "You'll be okay? You want me to walk you there?" On Monday it would have been an unthinkably ridiculous question. On Thursday it seemed utterly normal.
They tested the fire alarms in our office building; when the PA came on to say that, the "May I have your attention please" made most of us jump out of our skins. At lunch in a diner (Time Warner had been evacuated, so why not meet for lunch?), I caught sudden sight of a mural of the twin towers, and it startled me. When I reacted with "Oh my god" and pointing, Rob just about hit the ceiling thinking I had seen something on a TV or through a window, another building turned to dust.
No, just a ghost.
My anonymous building ("mine" in the sense that I go there two days a week), a secondary location for Harper and populated mostly by other tenants that nobody's ever heard of, wouldn't be a likely target for threat. But in the afternoon, we were told that the building would close at 5 PM and we were all to be out by then. We were to swipe our key cards at the door to account for ourselves (normally a key card is only used to gain entrance if you're coming in the back way on our floor, rather than through reception), and the follow-up email said someone would walk the floors to make sure we were out. Our department head went to see the publisher to learn what this was about, and came back saying it was just that people were stressed and they wanted them to be able to go home. But that didn't explain swiping the key cards and checking for stragglers.
Another ghost tapping one's shoulder.
We're not going in today. George W is coming to town, and after he surveys the damage downtown, he's rumored to be coming to midtown and that will just foul everything up. On the one hand, a lot of people think he should have been here sooner, should have responded to the human tragedy with his presence. And brought an army of help with him. On the other, today's visit is just going to divert police from more necessary jobs for his security. (As it is, the police on a mostly empty Times Square Thursday were from Ramapo, up in Westchester County.) I will probably spend much of the day in front of the television, because I can't seem to be finished with this unless I know every last detail, as it happens. Rob will work, and find other things to do; he's been trying to escape that constant barrage.
Is it over? Of course not. Especially if the U.S. manages to find and kill Bin Laden. He will become a martyr to the cause, and his fanatical followers, spread around the world, will step up. I don't even understand, really, what exactly their beef with the U.S. is, or why taking down the World Trade Center was such a particular objective for so many years. Officials keep saying we are at war, but this is nothing like a war, except in that people have died horribly, and more probably will. Wars pit nations against nations; enemies are known, we know where the front is, and who to fight. This one's not that easy.
V: Coming of
Age in an Imperfect World