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- - - - NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Other than the vast rubble of the World Trade Center complex, the dominating feature of Manhattan south of City Hall is a chalky gray dust. Juniper bushes behind the black iron gates of City Hall Park are coated in dust down to their roots. Dust lies two inches thick on stone lintels of buildings five blocks away. Every vinyl awning, every fire escape and pay phone, every facade of every building from sidewalk to roof top is streaked with dust. Mixed with water, stirred by the tramp of feet and passage of vehicles, the dust becomes a slippery paste that sticks to pant cuffs. In some cases dust was blown with such velocity that a window cracked open seven blocks north in Tribeca was enough to allow a layer of fine gray powder to coat a room from floor to ceiling. Some unfortunate residents of Battery Park City, two blocks to the southwest, returned to apartments drifted in dust. And then there's the dust inhaled deep into lungs of the rescue workers, leaving only a brown stain on the white masks covering their mouths. The dust trapped in gobs of mucus that spot the sidewalk. The messages scrawled in dust on empty storefronts and the panels of Con Ed trucks. One steamy afternoon I stopped on the sidewalk near the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway to scoop dust from a shattered shop window. Beside me, people lined up in the doorway to take pictures of the mannequins and stacks of blue jeans buried in six inches of dust and singed office documents. I filled two 35mm film canisters with the stuff. A few doors away three firemen sat on a stoop talking to a man scribbling notes in a reporter's pad. The firemen betrayed no expression except the obvious fatigue in their eyes and limbs. They spoke one at a time while the others lifted their scarred helmets to scratch the hair plastered to their heads. Passersby unimpressed or inured to the rubble stopped in their tracks to stare at the firemen as if they were celebrities. Some stopped to have their pictures taken with them. The firemen obliged with quick smiles, a heavy arm around the shoulder. I kneeled in the doorway to snap a shot of my own when a woman dressed in a black skirt and blouse blocked my view. She had long, straight blond hair, and although I couldn't see her face, the firemen cracked grins that suggested the presence of uncommon beauty. "How about a kiss," the woman said, adjusting her purse strap. "I think I would die," one fireman said, laughing and pulling at his mustache. "I haven't seen a woman in seventy-two hours," another said. He stood and brushed dust off his forearms. "These guys don't count." "I think I would just fall over dead right here." He winked. "My wife would kill me if I died." The woman stepped forward and kissed him lightly on the cheek. The other firemen immediately lined up behind their lucky colleague, pressing their fingers to their lips. "Right here, right here. This is where I want it." - - - - Over the next three weeks I made more than a dozen trips to the financial district, sometimes accompanied by a friend but mostly I went alone. I approached the rubble from all directions of the compass, on foot, by train, on the windy deck of a Staten Island Ferry boat. I never got closer than two blocks. I never experienced anything more than a person who had a subway token and a free afternoon. Once, a block south of City Hall, I saw Don King on the other side of the barricades, returning from a personal tour of the rubble. He wore a jean jacket studded with glittering rhinestones that spelled out "Only in America." He stopped to sign autographs for awestruck policemen and rescue workers then raised his hands above his head like a victorious boxer. People cheered. A day later, at the same location, an informal motorcade of NYPD motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles loaded with firemen passed the barricades, moving north. Lashed to the rack of the last ATV was an orange basket, the kind rescue helicopters lower into raging seas from a thin cable. The basket was wrapped in an American flag. Other than this brief moment, I didn't have a true sense of the work going on at the site: the search for bodies and the psychic and physical toll such a grim task exacts. My usual route started at the PATH station on the corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue. I walked east from there toward Union Square, then south to Canal Street. My old business card and driver's license got me through the first line of barricades. The walk took over an hour. By the time I joined the crowd gathered to witness and photograph the rubble from the HSBC Bank plaza, I was glazed in sweat and grit. Seeing the rubble of the World Trade Center complex for the first time tests the limits of visual acuity and imagination. There's little that's identifiable on which to focus: a jagged steel splinter hanging from the corner of a nearby building, the scorched aluminum and steel facade rising almost ten stories from a heap of twisted girders, orange-helmeted rescue workers picking their way among peaks and valleys of broken concrete. In this manner the rubble presents many poignant vignettes for television reporters requiring a dramatic backdrop to illustrate their stories of courage and luck and sacrifice. Standing two blocks away doesn't afford a better perspective than those we see on television — only slices of wreckage between buildings. Even if every obstruction were removed in order to allow a panoramic view of the destruction, even if it was studied for months without the distraction of jackhammers, nothing important would be learned. It is all surface effect, an obscene magic trick. I spent hour upon hour gazing at the rubble, measuring it, cataloging its specific aspect. But I had to remind myself more than once that I was looking at a burial mound. - - - - I went to dinner with a friend who had lost someone in the attack. Not a close friend, she admitted, but someone she was getting to know. Their birthdays were close to each other. There were plans for a big party on September 12th to celebrate them both. My friend started to cry but caught herself. She asked me if I'd been to Union Square yet. I hadn't. I'd only recently returned to gather the last of my things in Jersey City. I was making last visits to friends and moving upstate. I hadn't been in Manhattan since before the attack. Union Square had become a memorial site, she said. People were posting pictures of the missing there. She wanted to find her friend among them, and I joined her. Union Square Park separates the bustling commercial grid of midtown north of 14th Street from the meandering rhythms of New York University and Greenwich Village to the south. Three subway lines intersect beneath the park. Young men and women thronged the wide concrete steps leading to the statue of George Washington astride his horse. Hundreds of candles, some in glass jars or fixed in puddles of wax, encircled the light poles, around which people had propped various signs praising rescue workers, denouncing war. The wire fencing that protects the lawn was plastered with paper, hundreds of sheets printed with the faces of the missing. Almost overnight, these papers were posted all over the city, on bus shelters, subway entrances, and light poles. Ignoring the city's public face becomes necessary to preserve a degree of sanity. Likewise, it's important to avoid meeting the eyes of others. But the white rectangles of paper could not be ignored. Union Square was a private photo album, open to all. The missing wore wedding dresses, gym shorts, funny ties. Their expressions were intimate. A cocked eyebrow or shy smile. Information not evident in the grainy photographs was printed or handwritten in the margins: 105 pounds. Appendectomy scar. Rose tattoo on hip. Brown eyes, blue eyes, hazel eyes. Last seen on 106th Floor, 87th floor, WTC 1. We miss you. We need you. Please call. Please come back. It was growing dark. We didn't know where to start, so we began walking along a sidewalk carpeted from one end of the park to the other in white butcher paper. People knelt on the paper and scribbled messages. People knelt before the wire fence and lit candles. Someone sat on a bench strumming a guitar, eyes closed, singing inaudibly. Another placed a fresh bouquet of flowers against the pedestal of a water fountain already heaped with flowers. We didn't find the face we were looking for. My friend told me that her friend's family came from the Midwest, and there were no relatives to post her picture. There were thousands of faces not represented on the fences and barricades and benches of Union Square Park. - - - - Low clouds occasionally dumped pellets of cold rain onto the empty streets of lower Manhattan during my first visit to the rubble. My friend and I stood in the false afternoon of emergency lights, trying to absorb what we were seeing. To orient myself I had to apply a mental map to the devastation. If that's the corner of Church and Liberty, then that's where 4 World Trade Center used to be, and so on. My mind veered toward the supernatural, the abstract. It was Hell. It was a monstrous movie set. Surely the terrible hand of some greater force was at work here. But of course nothing was at work beyond machines clawing at chunks of blackened concrete, orange cranes swinging over steaming debris, human chains of bone-tired rescue workers passing buckets of dust. It began to pour. We ran down Broadway toward Battery Park, stumbling over cables and ruined fire hoses snaking over the pavement. Rats scurried around piles of garbage bags. Industrial generators hummed inside huge trailers parked against the curb. We sheltered in the portico of One Exchange Plaza. I'd stood there a thousand times, smoking cigarettes and worrying the details of some half-baked new marketing scheme designed to pump life into our flagging business. That was less than six months ago, scenes that now felt quaint, irrelevant. The frozen escalator leading to Church Street was cordoned off, but I ventured down anyway, leaving my friend at the top of the stairs. Two National Guardsmen in woodland camouflage appeared from the gray drizzle. They scanned my bright yellow jacket for identification. "Are you working the site?" one of them asked. Rain dripped from the lip of his helmet onto his face. I shook my head, no. "Is that your girlfriend up there?" the other one said without taking his eyes off me. I nodded just to keep things simple. A flatbed semi rumbled past, hauling a police car and a rescue truck, both flattened to their door handles, shredded rubber flapping from their warped steel rims. We all turned to watch it roll by until it disappeared down a dark side street. The second soldier turned to me. "It's probably not a good idea for you to be wandering around down here, you know what I mean?" - - - - My daily walk to the rubble from Union Square took me past Hook & Ladder Company 3 on East 13th Street. It was typical of firehouses all over Manhattan. H&L # 3 lost twelve men — half its company — and all their trucks in the collapse of the towers. Snapshots of the missing firefighters were taped to a large piece of white cardboard standing on an easel inside the firehouse entrance. Black rubber jackets and helmets hung on hooks. Flowers of every type and description were propped against brick walls, wilting in jars on the concrete floor, heaped outside on the sidewalk. Residents from the neighborhood continued to deliver still more flowers. They stood silently before the easel, hands to their mouth. They knelt down to light candles. Burnt matches and spent votive containers littered the ground. The firemen on duty sat slumped on folding metal chairs in the firehouse entrance, chatting politely with passersby about their health and spirits. They were quick to praise the charity and goodwill of New Yorkers. Children received special attention from the firemen, who plied them with candy and soda and a hand ruffled in the hair. One fireman I spoke to at a midtown firehouse near Penn Station, a middle-aged man with a drooping mustache and kind, brown eyes, told me that he'd come all the way from Arizona when he heard the news. He seemed apologetic about this fact, as if he'd made the mistake of retiring too early after twenty-five years with the FDNY. "I needed to be here with the guys," he said, fingering a button on his dark blue uniform. The shirt didn't quite fit anymore. A white T-shirt peeked through the puckered fabric between the uniform's buttons. "I couldn't just sit around. We lost a lot of guys. A lot of good guys." I asked him how the fire department was going to recover from this, how many years was it going to take to rebuild the force to the pre-attack levels? He thought about this for a moment. "Two, three years," he said. "The biggest probie class I ever seen was one hundred fifty people. But there won't be that many this year. I heard this year's class — fifty of them already dropped out! They're scared. Everyone's scared." - - - - Flags, buttons and T-shirts emblazoned with patriotic messages were available on every corner. Souvenirs were sold from cardboard box tops laid on the sidewalk, flimsy card tables, or from vendors who could make change and pass you a flag glued to a wooden dowel with one hand. The center of commercial activity was Chinatown, where the price of postcards depicting the World Trade Center towers quadrupled to $1. Demand was so high that shop owners restocked their wire racks with new color photographs of old postcards. On Canal Street one vendor hawked T-shirts that he promised were hot from the printer and different than the hundreds of T-shirts that could be had only a few feet away. Price: $4 each, three for $10. Not everyone came to Chinatown looking for a good deal. Once I saw a beefy white man confront a Chinese woman half his size. "Blood money!" He pointed at a box of enamel flag pins and post cards. Frightened and confused, the woman looked around for an ally. "You're making money off death," the man shouted. "You know that? Death! It's not right!" I bought an orange T-shirt with an Old-West style poster printed on it, similar to the full-page centerfold published in the New York Post. A coy Osama bin Laden stared from the poster. Wanted Dead or Alive, it read. I stuffed the T-shirt into my camera bag and walked north into SoHo. On Prince Street, Harrison Ford stood on the sidewalk, shielding his eyes from the sun and gritting his teeth. A young man stood at his shoulder, pointing out where the towers used to rise above the rooftops. At their feet someone had spray painted in blue an artful stencil of Osama bin Laden's face along with the words: Wanted Dead, Not Alive. - - - - The scene at Union Square transformed from day to day. All vestiges of the impromptu memorial had been wiped away, leaving ridges of melted wax and dead flowers. The faces of the missing were gone save for a few stubborn sheets of paper that had been duct-taped. In their place were hundreds of bulletins: announcements for meeting times and places, appeals to God and religious conviction, demands to end a war that did not yet exist. A group of enthusiastic kids, surrounded by a larger group of onlookers, drummed on white plastic buckets while singing an up-tempo version of Tom Petty's "Free Falling." Nearby a Buddhist monk wrapped in an orange robe sat cross-legged on the concrete, smiling and clapping his hands. Sitting next to him a woman dressed up as the Statue of Liberty — bright green robe, pointed foam crown, green face paint — nodded and tapped a tabla with her green hands. On the plaza facing 14th Street various sculptures of the World Trade Center towers had been erected. One sculpture stood over six feet tall, constructed of novelty license plates bolted to a frame and painted silver. Another was made of chicken wire and wood, with slots at the top where you could drop a handwritten message, to whom it wasn't clear. The first tower sculpture that appeared, a shapeless white plaster pillar with a stick rising crookedly from its peak, required more of the imagination. If you had questions about its meaning or design, however, the sculptor was on hand to answer them. He moved through the crowd handing out business cards. Those who weren't participating in heated conversations with strangers, holding hands in prayer circles, or arranging new rings of candles, recorded each other with video cameras and microphones. Conspiracy theorists and cabalists drew the biggest crowds. One man had taken the PATH train from Jersey City to make himself heard and have his picture taken. Keen on attracting the attention of journalists, he carried a homemade sign linking the attacks to the Chinese government. I was speaking with him about the China connection when he brushed me aside to grab a Dutch television producer by the sleeve of his suit coat. "Since 1962 they've been training terrorists in the Gobi Desert," the conspiracy theorist said. He removed the wet butt of a cigar from his lips. The Dutch man waited politely for the rest of the analysis. "And every day they execute 191 people." The Dutch man exchanged words with his assistant. He smiled at the conspiracy theorist, excused himself, and walked away. The conspiracy theorist returned his attention to me. "Remember that. 191 people a day." On the far edge of the park near 4th Avenue, away from the commotion, a tall woman with frosted blonde hair held a tissue to her face and stared at a picture of a handsome young man. The picture was a color photocopy in a plastic sleeve, attached to the wire fence with masking tape. The woman wiped her eyes, pinched the masking tape to make sure it was tight, then stood back and began crying again. She said a few words in German to a young woman, her daughter perhaps, with long auburn hair and freckles. In the young woman's hand was a red foam heart. She stared at the picture and squeezed the heart but did not cry. "Did you know him?" I asked. "He was my boyfriend," the young woman said. I told her I was sorry, that he had a sweet smile and seemed like a nice person. She thanked me. She walked up to the fence and tried to push the foam heart between the wire mesh next to her boyfriend's picture, but it fell through the other side out of reach. "Oh no!" the mother cried. The young woman didn't move. She seemed unprepared for this possibility. I offered to help and managed to pull the heart through the wire mesh. Together, mother and daughter tried to secure it to the fence again. They tore strip after strip of masking tape from the role, determined to make the heart stay in place. In another corner of the park a group of students from The School of the Bible, in Tyler, Texas, stood behind tables with red signs that said, "Prayer Station." They saw the awful events unfolding on television and figured people were hurting and in need of solace. God wanted them in New York, they said. After two days of prayer they raised $11,000 for thirty-seven plane tickets. Their entire class was now wandering the streets in red T-shirts, offering what comfort they could. A pleasant, round-faced young man greeted me and asked if there was something he could do for me. His voice had a soft twang. I asked him what people were saying, what they were concerned about. "The biggest thing people want to know is why'd this happen. Why would God do this to us?" He went on to explain that God had nothing to do with the attacks. God gave us the freedom to choose between good and evil. There wasn't any evidence in the scriptures that God was the author of evil, or that He intended any evil for man. "That's a pretty liberal view of things," I said, glad that it didn't all come down to Satan. "I mean, at least Jerry Falwell is blaming gays and feminists." The young man laughed and shook his head. I asked him what he thought God was doing right now, in the aftermath. "Wow, that's a tough one," he said. "What's God doing now? Well, I think God is grieving with those who are hurting, desiring that they would come back into relationship with Him. That's where hope is established. God loves us. That's what we're created for, to love our neighbors and to love God." "It's like what our school director always says," said a young woman who'd been listening. "God takes lemons and he makes lemon meringue pie or lemonade out of it. I get that sense from people, Christians and non-Christians. God is at work here." Later, while I waited on the stifling subway platform, I thought about this. I liked the view of God presented by the bible college students. God was a loving friend, the kind who never disapproved of your stupid choices but was there when they backfired on you. He cried when you cried, rejoiced when you were happy. He was always there and missed you when you were gone. He made lemonade out of lemons. - - - - On my last night in New York I had dinner with a group of friends from work. We'd all been laid off months before the attack. We met at a restaurant near NYU Hospital on the east side because it was close to where Sydney, our former boss, lived. She was pregnant for the first time, with twins no less. I had an affection for Sydney that went beyond our working relationship. She reminded me of my sisters: independent and loyal but sentimental at the same time. Hard working, smart, no bullshit women. It wasn't a surprise she was the first among us to be laid off. We talked about what we'd all done with our summer. We tried to come up with baby names. We didn't talk about the attacks until I asked if anyone had heard from our old company. Some of the web developers took the same train to the World Trade Center as I did. They were punctual, which meant they would've been coming through the concourse below the towers at the time of the attacks. Twice I'd tried to visit the offices at 61 Broadway, three blocks from the rubble. The first time the building was closed — no plumbing. The second time I was allowed upstairs to retrieve 'essential items.' The offices were locked. The hallways and offices deserted. The carpets and walls gave off a smoky electrical odor. After my allotted fifteen minutes were up, I left. Later I tried to call the switchboard but no one picked up the phone. No one at the table had any news to report either. Sydney's husband, Andy, finally arrived. An orthopedic surgeon, he'd been working late. "Damn," he said, pulling out his chair. He sat down and slapped the heel of his hand against his forehead. "Forgot the cigars again." "We should be buying you the cigars," I said. "Twins? Congratulations!" He didn't seem to understand me. "I mean cigars for the rescue workers. I was going to pick up a box of cigars and bring them down there tomorrow." Andy glanced at his menu. "They've got more food than they know what to do with. What they really want is cigars." The World Trade Center rubble had been burning for three weeks. Smoke hung in the hazy air over the city. You couldn't get away from it, not even in Jersey City, more than a mile away. At times it gave me a headache. "You'd think with all the smoke the last thing they'd want is a big fat stogie," I said. "No, they're to cover up the smell," Andy said. He ordered dinner and handed the menu to the waiter. "The bodies. They can't stand the awful smell." After he'd eaten Andy passed around paper printouts of Sydney's latest sonogram. They looked like Rorschach blots. He pointed out hands and vertebrae in the blurred gray images, and they took on a sudden clarity. I held them up to the light. The pictures were the best things I'd seen in long time. When it came time to go we all stood outside on the street, poised to leave in our separate directions. We exchanged hugs and promises to see each other again soon, maybe after Christmas. We would have a New Year's blowout. We would get drunk and we would dance. I wrapped my arms around Sydney's shoulders and gave her a big hug. "Bet you're going to miss New York," she said. "Probably," I said. "Yes and no." - - - - I braced myself against a pole on the PATH train and waited for the air conditioning to start up. It was late but the car was full of tired, sweating passengers. Some people with seats closed their eyes. Others stared at the floor. At the 9th Street stop a conversation between three men flared into an argument. "I am an American citizen," one of them said, jabbing his finger into his chest. "No one can tell me that I am not." The other two men crossed their arms or looked away and said something that only made the first man angrier. "You cannot tell me. You cannot. I am an American citizen!" He leaned into the faces of the men, hand gripping the steel rail, and almost fell into their laps when the train screeched around a curve somewhere under the Hudson River. The rest of the train was alert now, trying to gauge the threat. An old woman shifted a shopping bag on her lap. A man rattled the pages of his newspaper. A young mother pulled her baby's stroller closer to her seat. "People have sensitive feelings," declared a man's voice behind me. All heads turned in my direction. The man seemed to take this as an invitation. "People have sensitive feelings," he said, louder this time. The fellow who'd been arguing his citizenship stopped to look, his finger still pointing in accusation at the other men. "Always the negative, never the positive. I'm sick of hearing always the negative," the man said. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. He wasn't drunk. Crazy perhaps, but not drunk. "Why can't people be positive?" I say crazy, but he was probably as sane as anyone on the train. So much of my time in New York was spent in public, shared face to face with strangers on packed subway cars, elevators, park benches. Personal space was a rare commodity, jealously guarded by all. The lack of it created a kind of tunnel vision in people, or sometimes feelings of loneliness in the middle of a street streaming with pedestrians. But in rare moments the shields came down all at once, a ditente of sorts, and I was hit by the realization that I was in on one grand joke that had no punch line: I had no privacy, but people were willing to help me maintain the illusion, and vice versa. We had a contract. The man behind me wasn't crazy, he was a goof. He was like family — every train had its weird uncle. The rest of us exchanged glances, knowing smiles. We shook our heads and shrugged. We muttered words our neighbors couldn't hear but understood anyway. "HO-boken," the conductor's voice rang out. "HO-mosexual," said the crazy man. A kid leaning on his bike snorted and turned his head, his shoulders shaking. Two goateed men who'd gotten on at Christopher Street glared at the crazy man and moved toward the door. The train pulled into the Hoboken station and the two men hustled off holding hands. The crazy man watched them leave and walked to the front where the argument had been taking place. "People have sensitive feelings," he said, addressing the whole car. Then, as if there were any debate, he put his hands on his chest and said, "I have sensitive feelings." He looked around the car. No one was going to argue with him. The crazy man left to try his material on the car in front of us. I found an empty seat and sat down as the doors clattered shut. The train jerked out of the station toward Jersey City. I tried to catch the eye of the kid with the bike, but his face, like the others, had reverted to its default, expressionless. The train rocked on its tracks. I closed my eyes. My thoughts drifted to what Sydney had said in departing. Would I miss New York? I'd felt ambivalent about leaving before the attacks, for the usual reasons. I was relieved to leave behind the cost, the intensity, the hundred different possibilities that attended even the simplest of actions, like crossing the street. But I'd miss that distorted sense of being at the center of the universe. None of that seemed important now. It was all noise and flash. Now I was just full of sorrow. I thought about the people who died on September 11th. I wondered how many times I'd shared a subway car with them, or stood next to them on a platform far below the towers. How many times did I step on their toes, read their discarded newspapers? Laugh with them at a crazy man? They might have been strangers, but I could feel their loss as surely as I could feel the promise of something new and good when I hugged Sydney earlier that evening. I tried to imagine how different the city would be in a few months. Sydney's twins will be born. They will have names. They will have faces. Most of the rubble will probably be cleared away to Staten Island, the dust washed into the harbor. More people will get the final bad news about their loved ones, and, then, some relief maybe. But that's only the beginning of things, just the obvious things that must happen in order to glimpse a future no one can predict.
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