The 9-11 Journals

Introduction

I suppose in some ways I’m one of the near-miss stories in the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC). If I had gone to work at the time I’d planned the night before, I would either have been on the W train coming across the Manhattan Bridge, and thus watching it all happen, or on the local R train, which runs beneath Church Street, right in front of the WTC plaza, a few hundred yards from WTC 2. At about that time of the morning, if I’d been on the R, we would have been in the very near vicinity of the Cortlandt Street station, the uptown side of which lets out into one of the basements of the towers.

I don’t feel like a near-miss, not nearly as much as some of my other friends. I was still pottering around in my pj’s in Brooklyn when all of this took place. But while listening to all of this on the radio (I don’t have a TV and was glad enough of it after seeing the stills and streaming video on the net later), I kept thinking, write it down! But I couldn’t. It was too fresh, too immediate, too horrific, too unbelievable. I deeply admire the journalists reporting it as it happened, the reporters posting written accounts to the web in near real-time, but I’m not built that way, apparently.

Some of the early parts of the following were written after the fact because I was too shell-shocked to put much of anything into words, except e-mails and posts to one of the discussion lists to which I belong. I’ve never felt as though the list were a real community to me—we are too faceless and anonymous with our pen- and nicknames—but it was a great way to get news of people, keep in touch, and pass along information, and a great source of kindness despite our anonymity, and so I alternated between reading that, writing replies, listening to the radio, and crying. Oddly enough, as much as people denounce the Internet as a place of isolating anonymous communication, it was a godsend at this particular time. With most of the long-distance and cell phone lines inoperable or jammed, e-mail, discussion lists, and ICM chat rooms became a tremendously easy and reliable way to discover who was okay and who wasn’t, and to offer help and condolences. Although the news sites were difficult to get into, the reporting on them seemed far less sensationalistic and more measured, in retrospect, than the little bits of TV coverage I saw. Many of the people I heard from outside the city would never have been able to reach me otherwise, and vice versa. Five days afterwards, this was still true. I received something like 130 messages during that time, and sent out 83, at last count.

The Event, as someone on the list called it, is too enormous to grasp, the death toll too large to mourn, the disappearance of those two buildings and the following collapse of others around it too impossible to believe, the speed at which it all took place too fast to allow us time to grapple with it, let alone adjust. The problem with being a writer in times like these, even one who does not even dabble in journalism, is that one’s “recording angel“ never shuts off, no matter how much one would like it to. At times like these, I hate this part of myself, the part that can watch everything going on around me, no matter how awful, as well as my own reactions, and stow them away while thinking “Oh, that’ll make some great material later.” Nonetheless, that part of me is there, camera and tape rolling. Some kinder part of myself has blurred it a little, so there are gaps and glossed-over areas.

The public record will take care of recording the actual events themselves. I’ve tried to remember and record important things, significant things that I was thinking and doing and writing at the time. I know that if I don’t do this now, I’ll regret it later, difficult as I’m finding it both to remember what’s transpired, and much as I balk at putting it down.

Somewhere during the week, I took down my illustrated Bible, flipped to the page depicting Christ raising Lazarus, propped it up and lit an oil lamp in front of it. I found myself almost completely unable to pray, except to say “Thanks.” and “Help!” It was hard even to be with friends, though I was, and am, deeply grateful all of them survived unhurt.

What I wanted most to do in those early days was sleep, escape, be somewhere else—in another country, or preferably, another world where people did not hate each other enough to kill.

Instead, it’s Tuesday, September 11, 2001, daylight, a beautiful, cool, clear, blue-sky day, and since I can’t do anything that’s really useful, let me do what I can, what I do best.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

I usually leave for work at Allee King Rosen & Fleming at 9:30 on Tuesdays, but I was thinking of leaving at the usual time of 8:30 when the alarm went off at 7:35, still set for the day before. Instead of getting up, I lazed in bed, dozing, listening to 1010 WINS on the radio, and finally got out of bed to get ready at about 8:45. I had just walked into the bathroom when I heard the “Breaking News“ special bulletin alert and walked back out to turn up the radio on my stereo. On it was a woman reporting over the phone that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. She described a plane actually banking into the WTC, hitting in a fireball, and black smoke pouring out of several floors of the building. My first thought was that it was a small private plane, an accident, a pilot in trouble and out of control. Then she said it looked like a large plane, a passenger jet. I could feel my mind almost physically shying away from the idea that it was deliberate.

The phone rang in the middle of this and it was Kath, calling from DC, asking if I were all right. As we were on the phone, a second plane hit the second tower. At that moment it was clear, even to me, that it was no accident. I called Melinda at work and told her I wouldn’t be coming in because a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. She hadn’t yet heard. As I got off the phone, the first tower collapsed. I remember the woman on the radio saying, “Oh my God oh my God! The building just fell down!” I pictured it toppling over, imagined the devastation for blocks beneath it. I couldn’t really wrap my mind around the idea, but I suddenly realized I needed to call Mom and Dad to let them know I was okay. Dad sounded shaken and sad, and said he was watching it on the TV. I didn’t speak to Mom. Instead, I hung up and called my best friend, Melanie, right away, having heard that at least one of them was an American Airlines plane. Mel’s husband, Dave, who’s a pilot for American and often flies out of Logan, picked up the phone, and I said, “Thank God you were on the ground, buddy.” and burst into tears. Dave said, “Do you want to talk to my better half?” and I said “No, just tell her I’m okay.” and hung up, completely freaked. I hadn’t cried up to that point, but hearing Dave’s voice just broke me somehow.

As I kept listening and crying, more awful things kept happening. Even the radio announcer said something to the effect that we keep thinking it can’t worse and it just does. The Pentagon was hit by a third plane, a fourth down in Pennsylvania. I tried to call Marcia and Val on my cell phone and couldn’t get through.

I got online to see what was coming over the net and sent out the following e-mail to all my New York friends at 9:22, making a conscious decision to stay off my main phone, which was working only intermittently anyway:

Please let me know if you all are okay and weren’t near the World Trade Center this morning. I was still in Brooklyn at home. I sent out this e-mail to everyone else at 10:07: Just to let you all know that I’m okay and wasn’t near the World Trade Center this morning, thank God.

I called Jen in DC and told her what had happened, and checked to see if she was okay. She wondered why I sent her such a weird e-mail because she hadn’t heard about anything yet—hadn’t turned on her TV, read the headlines online at 8:30. By now, there was a fire on the Mall too. Later, I heard a truck bomb was found outside the Supreme Court building.

Wanting to see something, I went downstairs to my neighbors and sat with Larry and David in their living room watching the live coverage on their TV. The first building had already fallen, and still it didn’t occur to me that the second one would go, too.

And then it did.

I think the image of it crumbling so neatly as though it were being demolished, each floor pancaking one into the other, one thin corner strip of it hanging in the air, impossibly, then sliding slowly downward as though on a track, disappearing into dust, will stay with me for the rest of my life. It looked so impossible, and so majestic, the way building demolitions do—almost beautiful, but devastating. I just stood with my mouth open, hands over it, eyes wide.

I came upstairs then, knowing I couldn’t watch anymore, and left the door open, just wanting to know that someone was around and downstairs. Larry and David both came upstairs a couple of times to check on me. I was still crying, and Larry seemed really worried about me. He seemed horrified but calm, the way you’d expect a Vietnam vet to be. David, who’s younger and works in a hospital as an orderly, seemed far more shaken.

I called Emily, knowing that she was probably already on her way out to Nassau Community College in Long Island, and left a message on her voicemail, letting her know I was okay, and asking her to call or e-mail me when she got the chance.

Replies to my e-mails started to trickle in by 10:20. The first two came from a fellow New Yorker, Dvorah, a psychiatrist at NYU, and Brian Brown, an old friend from grad school now living in Seattle. Thank you so much for the note, Brian wrote. I am glad that you are safe, and delighted that you took a moment to let us all know. We woke up here to the news on NPR, and though it is far away geographically it is utterly surreal. “Surreal“ was a word that cropped up repeatedly throughout the day, as did the phrase “bad movie.” the latter somehow coupled inextricably with the name Bruce Willis.
Responses from the New York crowd were typically terse and stunned.

I just saw the world trade center collapse, I feel like I’m in the middle of a war zone. It’s a scene I’ll never forget, from Bill, watching from the roof of Bayard Advertising at 21st and Broadway.

Okay. Big love. We’re okay, from Peri, somewhere in Brooklyn.

Thank you for the news. It’s nerve wracking to think that we can’t get news... from Erica in Jersey.

Many answers from my New York friends trickled in agonizingly slowly. The first of the near-miss stories came from a former colleague at AKRF, at 11:20: I was at a doctor’s appointment in the Village. Hopped on an F-Train as fast as I could while everyone else stared at the buildings. Made it to 4th Avenue before they stopped service. S. & I are both home and safe. A friend of mine from work called to say she was okay, but my building looks like a shambles (7 WTC). This is very surreal. That word again. I called Marcia and Val once more, and finally got through to Val to learn that she and Marcia were okay, both at home in Queens. Val asked if I had enough water in case they dumped something in it. I only learned a few days later that the CDC had been scrambled to check for biohazards and biological weapons shortly after it was determined this was a terrorist attack.

I don’t remember eating anything, but I must have because there were dirty dishes in my sink later.
At 10:50, I wrote the following to Kath, under the subject line, “No Words.”

Jesus Babe, get home safe tonight and stay there, you and Lou. Are Kathy and Anne and Ro okay? Do you know? Jen’s all right. I watched the second tower go down with Larry downstairs and then I couldn’t watch anymore. I still can’t believe it. I can smell the smoke out here across the river. There are 50,000 people in those towers, at least half of them didn’t make it, I’m sure, though some woman on the 92nd floor of the second one made it out, so who knows? I haven’t heard from Kelly yet, but I’m glad she got downsized when she did and hope she wasn’t down there. There’s going to be hell to pay for this. I hope this doesn’t make us an uncivilized as the people who did it.

At 11:22 I sent out the following e-mail:

My main phone line seems to be out (big surprise) but my modem line is working and so is my cell phone, though it’s really hard to get through. I’ll probably be on-line for a while checking in with people here, but I’ll switch the phone lines over later. That number is [. . . ]. There’s no call-waiting on that line, so if it’s busy that means I’m on-line or on the phone. My cell phone number is [. . .] and my service is working but the lines are pretty jammed. E-mail’s the best way to reach me right now. The city’s locked down—bridges and tunnels and roadways closed—so I won’t be going anywhere for a while. It’s probably best to stay off the lines anyway for emergency purposes. For once, I’m glad I live in an undesirable neighborhood and don’t have a high-powered job. Please keep us all in your prayers and thoughts. Love, Ann

At 12:42, I got the following email from Kathleen O’Malley in DC:

Thanks for letting us know you are well. All of us here, Anne, Kathy, and Ro have been sent home because we’re all in government jobs near DC.

I know you’re having trouble getting through to folks, but if possible, can I ask you a favor? I can’t get through to my mother and my dad often works downtown, and my brother works on high iron and my sister-in-law is an EMT. Is there any hope you might be able to put a call in to my mother? Her number is [ . . .]? She won’t answer the phone but if you tell her you are calling for me “Kathleen“ and that you just want to let her know that Kathleen, Anne, and Rosemary are all home and fine in Maryland, and we’re worried about them, if she’s there she’ll pick up and maybe you can find out for me? If this is too much trouble, I’m also asking people on Venice Place [a Starsky & Hutch fanfic list that she moderates] to help me. We can’t get any call into NY at all.

I was lucky enough to get through to Kathy’s mom on the first try, and she picked up right away, when she heard I was calling for Kathy. Everyone in the family was accounted for and okay, and I e-mailed Kathy back. Great relief all around. I then decided I could do the same thing for other folks on the list I belong to, a Star Wars fanfic list with 1,000+ members, some of whom I know live in the metropolitan area. One person passed on my notice to someone else in Boston, but that person found her relative. Another list member, “Majilique.” who works at Fort Bragg, kept us informed of the current defcon status while frantically searching for her sister, who worked in the towers.

Things I remember from that day: dust and debris all over the Wall Street area, looking like Seattle after Mt. St. Helens erupted; John Montone of WINS saying over and over again in his broadcast how grateful he was to a doorman, who was probably now dead, who shooed him away from one of the WTC buildings only moments before the second building collapsed; the smell of electrical fires in the air; sneezing uncontrollably; the sound of Dave’s voice on the other end of the phone; the report that paper from the buildings had been blown as far away as Coney Island; someone saying they thought the shower of paper outside their window was the beginning of a tickertape parade; someone else saying it was as though all the file cabinets on every floor had been blown open, spewing their contents out the window; the horror in reporters’ voices when relaying that hundreds of police and firemen had been crushed in the collapse; Larry hugging me stiffly; trying to get into the Watchtower homepage to find out if any JW’s had been working in the WTC and if they’d gotten out, and realizing that every JW with internet access in the world was doing the same thing right now, something like a couple million of us, at a rough guess.

I spent most of the day online, crying, listening to the radio updates as they got worse and worse, checking for news from my fellow list members and trying to put out the fires of prejudice and hate there that occasionally cropped up. All I kept thinking was that 50,000 people work in those two buildings, not counting tourists, people there for meetings, people just passing through, people in the subways, in the shops, in the PATH trains. There was no possible way anyone at or above the fires got out, and no way of telling how many others did. It took me a while to find a way to comprehend that number. I kept trying to find the right size city I knew to compare it to: Ann Arbor? Traverse City? Grand Rapids?

Emily finally called me around 4:30. She’d been thrown off the train at Union Street in Brooklyn (she lives in Bayridge) and gone to Heather and Tim’s house in Park Slope. Tim, being a night bartender, was still asleep and wouldn’t answer the phone when people called. Emily woke him up. She’d gone to a bar at 9:30 in the morning to find somewhere to wash up, dust and debris blowing across the river and falling all over Park Slope. The car services were all busy, the trains not running. She finally got home when the trains started running again in early evening. Tim, she said, had been talking about going out with a baseball bat and finding somebody to rough up. She managed to dissuade him until Heather made it home. I was amazed she thought the markets would open on Wednesday. Here’s Em’s account of her experiences:

I was in Brooklyn when the whole thing happened, on the subway on my way to work, and when the subway stopped, everyone on it was stranded in downtown Brooklyn with no further transportation. I milled around for several hours in what retrospectively seems a state of confusion—for quite a while no one was clear about what was really going on. I saw that the WTC was on fire, but thought it was just a “normal“ fire until passersby with radios began to report more frightening things. Eventually I went into a bar (at 10 am or so) and had a beer and watched CNN for a bit. By this time ashes and burnt papers were falling on the streets & me, so I finally managed to wake a nightshift bartender friend and went over to his place to hang out until the trains started again. I did not really grasp what a big deal it all was until much later that day—my friend urged me to phone my family and let them know I was OK and I just kept saying, “But they know I don’t work in Manhattan!” I checked my voicemail and found messages from friends overseas trying to make sure I was OK, and was so puzzled as to how they could have heard about the problem. I am amazed at how efficiently my mind compartmentalized everything—there I am standing at crowded bus stops beside people who walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, all the phones out of service, ashes raining down on me, and I am thinking, “Now what is the best strategy for getting back to Bay Ridge? I suppose I should call in sick to work.” I just kept believing in normalcy until I was safely home. Still thought I was fine until I noticed that I couldn’t talk to anyone without arguing with them, that I had a dread of going to Manhattan, and that I jumped at loud noises.

Sometime around 6:00 in the evening, WTC 7 collapsed, having been on fire most of the day. While it wasn’t nearly as tall as the towers, it was 47 stories—not a small building. More rubble. At least people had been able to evacuate from it before it collapsed. A little while afterward, I wrote to Kath again, in part: As for being safe, well, remember the scene in The World According to Garp where the plane crashes into the house he’s thinking of buying, and he takes it because—what could happen now? I am toast from crying all day. It’s so horrible. I’m just selfish enough to be glad my loved ones are safe, and I grieve for those who aren’t.

By the end of the day, most everyone had checked in, either by phone or e-mail. The only people I hadn’t heard from were out-of-towners: Paul, who was in London, and Don, in Boston. I’d heard from people I hadn’t heard from in a long time, mostly old friends from grad school that I’d sort of lost touch with. Rob, in Detroit, now working for the Episcopal Archdiocese, responded with this: We’re having an immediately organized ecumenical prayer service at the Cathedral tonight. You’re all in our prayers. I wish I could reach my friend Paree in Washington DC, but thank you for reaching us first. Somehow, I’d managed to escape losing anyone near and dear to me. Unable to pray myself, I just sent up a heartfelt thanks.

I’m not sure what time I went to bed, but I didn’t sleep well. The smell from the fires kept me awake once the wind had shifted after dark. It’s the smell of electrical fires, acrid and harsh.

Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

I was up by nine, immediately turning the radio on to see what else had happened. The estimates for lost firefighters was about 250, plus 87 cops buried in the rubble of the collapse. For once, I wished the emergency teams hadn’t been so johnny-on-the-spot.
About 9:30, Kath Sanders wrote:

I’ve finally been able to have a couple of “real“ cries . . . I was in too much shock yesterday to do more than have some involuntary wet ones slide down my face. I’m so saddened, so very, very saddened by these events that can only lead to more loss of life. I’ve been praying for the whole world and for peace.

Like you, I’m glad that my friends are safe. As you know, Flamingo, Anne, Ro, myself, Lou, Missy, Ed, Mario, and my husband’s relatives and all my DC fan buds are safe. Of the NYC crew, I’m grateful you, Kelly, Glo, and—by extension—Jen are all uninjured.

Down here, the Pentagon continues to burn. Authorities are not expecting to find any survivors in the damaged sections. Kathy’s [O’Malley] brother, a union steel worker, was deployed to the WTC cite to begin the process of dealing with all the steel girders down in the plaza. Another person Kathy knows (An in-law? Cousin?), a NYC ambulance driver, was out sick yesterday—thankfully, yet sadly, a good thing: seven of the ten ambulance crews in her company are missing, presumed dead in the collapse. Tonight I’ll forward a copy of a personal account from a member of Venice Place who worked in the Trade Center and escaped the carnage.

I love you, Flee. We’ll get through this. In addition to the horrific loss of life in New York and DC (how ironic that it should happen simultaneously to both our cities! Sharing grief as we share joys and successes . . . . ) I want you, my sensitive friend, to know that someone who loves you also understands that some quiet, inner part of you is also grieving for your beloved city. Seeing the city with you, by extension to have experienced the city through the lens of your love and enthusiasm—someone who has long had a love affair with New York—has always been a pleasure and an honor. We will have those times again, changed and different—certainly. But this cloud of pain will thin with time. New York City will heal itself. Until that day, I grieve with you and for you, and for everyone touched by this disaster.

Know that folks here love you.
Pax,
Kath

It was such a relief to have someone understand one of the major reasons this was hurting me so much—that New York is my home, in a way nowhere else I have every lived has been, and that I deeply love this city and the people who live here. Kath is one of my newer friends (we’ve only known each other a couple of years), but we’ve become very, very close in that short time, and her perceptiveness is one of the reasons why. The other major reason is that she is such a wonderful and giving person, the way all my closest friends are. I wrote back:

It’s amazing how people are pitching in here. Ironically, if the emergency services crews hadn’t been so quick to respond and so on the ball, so many of them would still be alive. Nobody expected those fucking towers to fall. They were designed to withstand the impact of a 707. It’s a bit like the Titanic all over again. Hubris doesn’t pay. I’m sorry so many people were hurt in the Pentagon, but there’s a part of me that feels it is just a little different, being a military installation. I know there were a lot of civilians working there, but there was nothing but in the WTC. Nobody chose to put themselves in danger the way one does when working for the military. I know civilians don’t think about that when they take an administrative assistant position for the military, but it’s part of the package.

Hmm, sounds like I’m getting pissed now, doesn’t it. And I don’t want you to think I’m heartless. I grieve for the people in DC too. It’s horrible all around. This just feels more horrible and more immediate, in the sheer size of it, if nothing else. We’ve lost an entire small city—50,000 people. It’s too large a number to really grasp. The number of people on the planes I can grasp and grieve and feel immediately, the number of people at the Pentagon (700?) I can grasp and mourn as individuals. But the numbers in the WTC are like saying Grand Rapids, Traverse City, or Ann Arbor is a hole in the ground.

This update is from my friend Laurie, who lives and works on the upper east side, at a boy’s school. Only one person in the school, a student, lost a parent. Thirteen people somehow connected to the school, either to faculty members or students, worked in the towers. Laurie says:

I went yesterday to the man I buy a cup of coffee from on the street corner near my school. I was curious if he was there. He is Arab, and I was not sure if he would come in. He was there as usual—only difference: He was not selling coffee to anyone. Just offering it free to firemen, police, rescue workers, etc. When he saw me, he gave me a big hug, and said “See you tomorrow—don’t be late—those kids are waiting for you! OH. And good haircut!”

Yup. This city will be JUST FINE!

Ann Galloway, my supervisor, called me about 10:30 from AKRF, wondering if I were okay. I’d forgotten completely about going in to work. The whole idea seemed completely absurd when I realized who it was, and that I’d forgotten, especially since Giuliani had asked non-essential personnel to stay home. Apparently, there were only about 12 people in the office anyway, four of them in the word processing department. Go figure. Since I don’t think the 55 Water Street project is going anywhere soon, or Battery Park City, I can’t say I’m real worried about meeting those deadlines. Ann said everyone in the office was okay, at least until I asked if we’d lost anyone—since so many of our clients have offices in the WTC—and was told that Kevin Reilly, who was a volunteer fireman, had been one of the first on the scene and crushed in the collapse. I’m sure most of the senior planners have lost colleagues and friends. I decided I might go in to work on Friday, if things were getting back to normal.
Predictably, feelings were running high everywhere by now, and jingoist rhetoric was spewing out across the net like swamp gas. There was a lot of flag waving, talk of war, revenge, of “getting them.” whoever “they“ were. I got a lot of “Prayers for America“ in my e-mail, as though it were the artificial division of nationality that died in the rubble, not people. Finally, testy and exhausted and disgusted, I fired this off to one of my cousins:

I appreciate the sentiment, but I won’t join you in a prayer for any country, including the one of which I am a citizen, because my loyalty is not to any human made government, but to God’s, and His “country“ encompasses all of us on this ball of dirt and water. I can pray that the government to which I pay taxes makes wise choices (though I have little hope of it) but it is not “my“ government, and the people in it are not my leaders. I am not a patriot and I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a theocratic nation. God is a uniter, not a divider, and I don’t believe he has any special mission for the US. We are not his chosen ones. My prayers are for peace and the working out of Jehovah’s will, not as I understand it, or in the time I want it to happen, but as He will, whatever that means for me and others.

That stopped some of the flood. The images that I did appreciate getting were memorial sites, and there were a lot of them around the world, and pictures of people mourning with us, not as one nationality or another, but as fellow humans. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” says Shylock. Indeed.
Spent the rest of the day just like Tuesday: listening to the radio, crying, and keeping up with the list, where things really started to get ugly. MJ sent a rather inflammatory essay that I’m sure did not reflect the views of most of the subscribers. I quote it at length here because I think it encompasses all of the nasty negative thoughts others elsewhere are probably having to varying degrees:

I apologize for both the length, the off topic and because some of my thoughts might offend some people on list. It is not my intention to offend or outrage anyone, but simply to share some spontaneous reflections on what happened yesterday.

Like most people when I first heard the news that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Centre, I assumed it was a tragic accident. Only moments later I was told that a second plane had crashed into the other tower. Still, there was a sense of unreality, as the scenes of a thousand bad movies, the kind you giggle and throw popcorn at the screen, unfolded before the world. Except that this was no movie, there was no happy ending, no Harrison, Arnie or Sly to save the day. Instead there was nothing but devastation, destruction and death. The stunned and sick expression in the eyes of the bewildered survivors.

Yet it is perhaps symptomatic of mine, and many others, strange love-hate relationship with America, American culture and people that after the first horror and shock had passed, a small nagging sense of, ’welcome to the rest of the world’ could not help but enter the back of my head. Is it right or fair? Probably not.

But the emotion is genuine and though you may disagree with its logic, to deny its reality is to play the ostrich. Many parts of the world have long been haunted by the spectre of terrorism, or forced to live with the devastating consequences of US foreign policy. Among many I’m sure there is a sense of the US finally getting what it deserves.

Except that no innocents deserve this. Something I know we will agree upon.

I watched the spontaneous outpouring of emotions, the fear and pain on the lists for the past day, and yet I cannot help but wonder why we light no candles for the refugees drowning in the sea, food for the sharks. Why we don’t flood the lists mourning the tens of thousands who starve to death beneath Africa’s merciless sun. Why there are no outbursts of outrage over the hundreds of thousands who die each year from AIDS. Are they no less innocent? Are their deaths not all the more terrible in that those deaths could be prevented?

Perhaps the truth, dark and uncomfortable as it may be, is that though we all pay lip service to the thought that all humans are equal, that every life is of equal worth, deep in our minds, in our hearts, we hold some lives more precious than others. Not just our own lives and those of our relatives and close friends, but also the lives of people living in certain countries. I—I hope so—but watching the reaction on the lists, listening to the reporters, Swedish, British and American, I wonder.

It struck me how shaken the reporters were as they spoke, repeating again and again phrases like ’evil’ and ’monsters.’ Yet, those same people have reported for years from the dark underbelly of our world, speaking with cool professionalism and detachment, careful to never take sides, to remain neutral. What is it about the tragedy in America that calls forth this unbridled emotion and partiality?

Scale? The ethnic massacres in Rwanda dwarf yesterday. Cruelty? The people who were injured and died in yesterday’s tragedy were not tortured, the women gang raped and their bellies sliced open, then left to die, like the victims of the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. Innocence? Were the people who died yesterday more innocent than those blasted apart when the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed only two years ago?

Shock? The phrase, “it cannot happen here“ was repeated again and again by shocked bystanders and reporters. This after all is the United States of America, the one remaining superpower. But why should we be shocked? Surely the 1993 WTC bombing, the Oklahoma disaster, even the Una-bomber, have eloquently illustrated the vulnerability of ’Fortress America’ to internal and external threats and discontent.

Or is the answer much simpler? The victims yesterday had names and faces. They were individuals whose lives we could all too easily identify with. They had gone to the same universities many of us attended, they worked in similar jobs, they lived in houses and neighbourhoods where we make our homes, and they lived parallel lives. They were real, in a way that the nameless, faceless victims of famine, starvation and war in Africa, Asia and the Middle East are not. They were real because they could so easily have been you or I.

I watched CNN, a supposedly international, but in reality an American news operator and my frustration and even anger grew. I listened to ABC and read American newspapers on-line and I became scared.

Implied or spoken openly, the impression left is that no one had ever suffered the way the victims had, that this was evil beyond imagination and that consequently this justified any action taken in retaliation. This attitude while understandable not only scared but also angered me. I watched in disbelief as a former high level American official spoke of the need to retaliate, and that ’collateral damage’ was acceptable. Collateral damage if someone wonders are the civilian and innocent casualties, e.g., dead, which result from a military strike. In other words: it is justified to kill non-US innocents in the name of dead US innocents.

I had friends who survived the US Embassy bombings in Nairobi, and listening to their tales, their anger at the US marines who prevented rescue efforts and personnel access to the dying and wounded because to do so, would mean crossing US territory bothered me greatly. I wondered, watching the coverage of the aftermath of the terrorist attack if those same marines would stop the people desperately trying to pull people from the wreckage of the World Trade Center or Pentagon. Surely the secrets kept inside the Pentagon must be of far greater importance than whatever had survived in the US embassy in Nairobi. Was it that those marines simply acknowledged openly what so many felt in their hearts; that an American life is worth more than a Kenyan one? That a terrorist attack striking the heart of the US is more terrible, than a bomb exploding in Africa?

I lived in Nairobi for many years and I still have friends and family there and the reactions of the survivors of the government and media there provided a fascinating counterpoint to the US reaction. The survivors did not scream for blind vengeance and swear bloody revenge, neither against the perpetrators, nor against the US for putting them in danger. Instead, many spoke of understanding what drove people to such desperate means, of a need to reach out and seek reconciliation that this terrible deed never be repeated.

I would never defend terrorists or attacks on innocents, and yet by striking out blindly, militarily, the US will accomplish little, not even cure the symptom of the evil they seek to eradicate. Too many desperate people have watched their lives torn apart by US trained troops, had families and close friends killed or tortured by US funded armies, descended into unspeakable poverty by US economic policy for a military strike, however successful to prevent their rage and need to strike back. Would these people be deterred by the creation of yet another martyr to US imperialism? I wish I could say yes, but more likely it will do little but harden their resolve.

If it turns out to be Osama Bin Laden, at the moment the favourite bogeyman of the US, and that the Talibans have indeed sheltered him, then the US will undoubtedly strike, and strike hard, all the might of the US armed forced pitted against one of the poorest and most primitive countries in the world, and the fugitive from justice they shelter. However, it is important to remember that the people who have suffered most, who have died in the highest number because of the Taliban, are not Americans but the Afghan people. They have lived for years in unimaginable fear, poverty and repression ever since the Taliban first rose to power. The women in Afghanistan are forbidden to work or even leave the house. Many widows with no male relatives to support them quietly starve to death locked inside their house by religious and cultural prejudices. Others are forced by desperate straits into leaving their country and embark on a perilous trip that only too often ends not in the new life they hoped for, but death.

Of course you might ask why, even knowing the truth of the atrocities the Taliban and by extension Osama Bin Laden perpetrated on the Afghan people, the US, who remember were the main economic and political sponsors of the Taliban in the decades before the end of the cold war, did nothing. Successive US administrations while paying lip service to the need of Afghan reform and supporting the starving people of Afghanistan have in reality done little.

Indeed, the new US administration under President Bush has declared publicly that they are withdrawing from some international forces and cooperation efforts. Some Americans, including the new president have argued that it is not the US responsibility to clean up other people’s mess. It is not. It is, however, the US responsibility to assist in solving situations, poverty, war, that they through their economic and foreign policy have created.

That, I’m sorry to say, certainly include Afghanistan.

The true tragedy is that it takes something like yesterday to push the US into action, their motive not responsibility for past actions, but in a righteous rage caused by the deaths of American lives and the destruction of American property.

Osama Bin Laden is a fanatic terrorist and should be neutralized or, to put it bluntly, killed, if not for this, then for past crimes. However, shouldn’t the number one priority at the moment be to find the real culprit? To determine the truth of who is behind this attack? It seems to me that the media and the ’expert’ commentators are all focused exclusively on Bin Laden and that attitude may very well allow the real criminals to escape capture and punishment.

Wanting revenge is a visceral reaction. If someone hurts us, we want to hurt back. This is an emotion embracing everyone from the four year old that kicks the chair he’s fallen off, to Secretary of State, Colin Powell when he speaks of striking back against those who’ve declared war against America. The challenge facing the US and us all then is to somehow reach beyond that first reaction and begin to think, to plan and not simply react blindly.

Immediately following this rant was a message from Majilique:

Last I talked to my other sister there was still no contact about Sly [Maj’s sister, Sylvester]. My mom, Sara, has been sadated [sic] due to high blood pressure, brother #4 has a raw ear from his cell phone and brother #3 is part of the rescue teams that’s going through the rubble. (Gods, if he finds her....)

It took me 45 minutes to get my son to school and myself to work. (less than four miles) Ft. Bragg is searching every car that is coming onto the post. I have three appointments on our books this mornig [sic] and I wonder if any of them will even show up.

I have heard rumours that there are cell phone calls coming from the rubble of the towers. There is always hope until the final word is said.

I’ll keep you updated.

I should say that normally Maj is a very coherent person and a fine writer, whose stories I’ve enjoyed whenever she’s posted them. I don’t know how she’s holding herself together. The night of the attack, we traded several messages back and forth, talking about fiction to distract her from the pain of not knowing where her sister was. I think she was shaking while typing some of them, because there are multiple repeated letters and frequent typos.

Other people had plenty of things to say, a few of them just as inflammatory and retaliatory in tone. Here’s what I wrote and posted:

Yes it’s true that we’ve been spared the unrest most of the world suffers from, and I’d be the last to say we haven’t been lucky, and haven’t taken our safety for granted. Too many of us never leave the country (our president included) to see how other people live and so come home to count our blessings. I’m no patriot, but I know I’m fortunate to enjoy a number of freedoms and a degree of safety other people don’t, and haven’t known for centuries.

Except that no innocents deserve this. Something I know we will agree upon.

Yes indeed, which is what would make our wholesale, indiscriminate retaliation just as barbaric.

I don’t know why you would assume that none of us are touched by these things just because we don’t talk about them on the list. I’m sure that among the 1,000+ people on this list, there are volunteers, healthcare workers, philanthropists to CARE, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, etc. People who really care don’t blow their own horns. The difference also is that so many of these things are on-going tragedies and have, unfortunately, acquired a sense of normalcy to them. I don’t mean that we’re inured to them, but that we already know they exist. As Bruce Cockburn says, “The trouble with normal is it only gets worse.” Like orgasm, nobody can sustain a high pitch of grief and anger forever. Many of us do a constant slow burn that doesn’t come out here. Please don’t underestimate the depth of feeling for other disasters and horrors just because this one is so fresh and immediate.

Nothing sets this tragedy apart except that it happened yesterday. Nothing makes it any different from the suicide bombers who appear regularly in Israel, or the constant shelling of Palestine. Horror is horror. People killing each other is horror. Perhaps the only thing that sets this apart is that we can bring these people to justice. It’s been notoriously difficult to bring the perpetrators of other horrors to justice because they are either harbored by people who agree with them, or have taken place in countries where we have no business stepping in and were not invited to.

This disaster is very different in many ways from the ones you mention. The first WTC bombing largely failed. There were casualties and damage, but business as usual very shortly after. Oklahoma was home-grown fanatics and probably more similar to this than not, but still not as well planned and expertly carried out. It was mostly dumb luck, not good planning. And the Una-bomber was just a nut who preyed on individuals rather than practicing what is, in effect, mass murder. And I think scale does have something to do with it. As I said to a friend in DC, I can grasp the number of people dead at the Pentagon. I can grasp the number dead on the planes. Those are people I can grieve for and count. I can’t count 50,000 people. I can’t imagine the space they would take up, except that there are small cities in the US of about that size. And the fact that it happened in the space of 20 minutes is shocking as well. Genocide takes longer.

But the real point is that there is no degree of horror. The taking of human lives by others is uniformly reprehensible and horrific. It is barbaric. No one’s trying to say this is more important than loss of life anywhere else. It’s just more recent, and for those of us here, more immediate. Not more important.

The sad truth is that we don’t have much control over what our leaders do except by haranguing them or voting them out of office, and at times like this, people will let fear rule them. The only thing we can do is individuals is what NYC’s mayor (whom I usually loathe) has urged: don’t express your anger. Don’t take it out on others. Don’t jump to conclusions. Focus on helping others, not condemning them. I don’t hold individuals responsible for what their leaders do. Collateral damage is never acceptable, but that doesn’t change the fact that I cannot stop it.

Please don’t condemn so many for picking and choosing their battles. We care as much as we can, each of us.

Overall, the support on the list was overwhelmingly positive from people all over the world. Folks from Ecuador, Britain, Belgium, Germany, Japan and other countries wrote in to express sorrow and solidarity. There are always a few resentful hot-heads though, both here and abroad. A couple of the US members reacted with the predictable, knee-jerk “Love It or Leave It“ response and were immediately slapped down by an army brat who said her dad taught her that a citizen’s first duty is to criticize her country. One of the list members had nothing but resentment to add to the fire MJ started:

I applaud MJ for stating a very unpleasant truth—deaths hurt only if they touch us—as a person, as a nation or as a community! If others suffer during other times, [it] doesn’t count ONE BIT!

I have lived in the US for 8 years. The US were [sic] my home, too, although I am from Germany. However—it takes a LOT of GUTS to state something as thoughtful as MJ has done!

That does NOT diminish the deaths of thousands in DC or NYC!!!

I went to church today to pray for the dead and the living. I mourn with the US and its citizens.

Here’s what I wrote back: Please don’t presume to speak for me or others in this matter. Every time I hear about a car bomb, a war, a murder in my home city, it touches me. As John Donne said, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.” This was the death of people we are speaking of, who only happened by birth or choice to be a particular nationality. All life is precious.

Someone also posted a copy of the old 1973 Gordon Sinclair broadcast from CFRB titled “The Americans.” which, without being jingoist (especially since he was Canadian), has a lot of nice things to say about the States and the amount of aid we give to other countries, and how little we get back when the chips are down.

Gloriana, who is (I think) a Sri Lankan married to a Brit, dug up the full text of a Seamus Heaney poem at the request of another person on the list. As always, he amazes me, as a poet and as a compassionate person. The prose quotation is from the web site Gloriana took this from, but I don’t know what it is.

The halting and imperfect struggle to negotiate a way out of violence in Ireland, more recently in the Middle East, and in Kosovo, has its tentative breakthroughs and rays of hope. That’s Seamus Heaney’s subject in the chorus at the end of “The Cure at Troy.” Heaney’s translation of “The Philoctetes.” by Sophocles. Here are the lines:

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

At that point, there had been some debate on the list about whether we should be posting fiction to it or not. I wrote this back to Gloriana after her post of the poem:

Thanks for posting this. I think it was Wallace Stevens who said, referring to poetry, something like (forgive my memory) “Men die every day for lack of what is written there.” This could not possible be truer in the case of Seamus Heaney’s work and this poem in particular. As a list that includes a bunch of writers, I think it’s important we use our skills with words to comfort, remember, remind, and admonish. Whether we do it through personal OT [off-topic] posts, or fiction, seems immaterial. Do what we can, as we can, with what we have. Send stories, send personal notes of love, send good news to make us all happier, share the bad stuff to lessen the weight of it, just don’t send flames and hate mail. We got four big planeloads of that Tuesday.

Jen called me on her cell phone, on her way to give blood. Again, I was amazed she got through. Now, three days later, I don’t remember what we talked about. Most of that day and last week is just a blur to me, and it’s probably just as well.
Meanwhile, the true impact started to settle in. This from Laurie’s update to her friends outside the city:

This is now two cities. Uptown and Downtown. Here in Uptown, it is sad, but people are determined to keep life going. To try and find normal. And in many ways, we can succeed at that. But tonight, I spoke with a friend who lives downtown, on North Moore Street. She lives right “there.” Her home and her street are fine, but she is stuck at home with an injured leg (no connection to this tragedy). As I speak with her, she cannot speak of what she sees, hears, and smells outside her window.

“You can’t know.” she keeps saying. “This is two cities right now. Up there, you just can’t know. You just can’t know.”

“Up there“ is just four miles away.

Thursday, September 13, 2001

Flatiron District, Manhattan

Got up late, finally able to really sleep. Completely unconscious. It rained much of last night, starting just after nightfall with some pretty serious thunder and lightning. I wonder what the next highest buildings are down there, to draw the lightning down. All day Wednesday, Bayard’s switchboard was closed, referring people to the Long Island office. I couldn’t get through this morning until about noon, when I finally reached Lou at the switchboard, and then to George, who sounded very subdued, with good reason, I discovered later.This is from an e-mail I sent to a bunch of my friends Thursday night:

I went to work today at the ad agency, hoping to distract myself, and found that I was just exhausted and depressed. I’m not really looking forward to more stories on Monday, when I go back to AKRF.

As we were going over the bridge, people were glued to the windows, looking at what wasn’t there anymore. I managed to avoid the sight, at least until I got up to Broadway. I looked back from there, where you can usually see the upper halves of the towers, and there was only grey smog against the very blue sky we’ve been having. I can’t really grasp it yet, but the city looks smaller, somehow.
When I got out of the train this afternoon at Union Square, we were stopped by cops who had cordoned the area off because of a suspicious package. There have been 90 bomb threats since this started. Sirens are everywhere like I’ve never heard them. Traffic on the main avenues and cross streets—where traffic cops are stationed as a matter of policy—occasionally grinds to a halt to let emergency vehicles through. Cops are everywhere in the reflective vests and NYPD baseball caps they wear for raids, and on my way home I saw two (I assume) National Guardsmen in full combat fatigues humping backpacks at Union Square, where a slow drum was beating in some sort of quiet rally. Half the entrances in the subways are closed. There were two cops on the train itself—something you rarely see anymore.

The overall mood of the city is . . . weird. Equal parts angry, tense, grieving, defiant, exhausted, sad, frantic, stunned, patriotic. People are trying to get back to business as usual, some more successfully than others. People are eating outside in the acrid air at the sidewalk cafes, though the restaurants are very empty, when they’re open at all. And the conversation is always the same. We can’t stop talking about it. If there’s a radio on, it’s a call-in show or the news. Nobody wants music. In my neighborhood, the Puerto Rican flags have been swapped for American flags. Immigrants are suddenly aggressively, defiantly American, not [ethnic-background-of-your-choice]-American.

Where band flyers should be plastered on the walls of bus shelters and light poles are color print-outs bearing the likenesses of the missing, with the heading “HELP FIND THIS PERSON!” So many faces, all smiling, probably dead now.

Everyone at Bayard seems to be okay, but George Rodriguez nearly lost his pregnant wife who was working in the tower, and Micheli Yamka nearly lost her brother, who is a Port Authority cop/Fire Marshall for Newark Airport who was one of the first on the scene and was standing beside the cop who was killed by the falling body when it happened. I learned from yet another friend, Lily Recanati, whom I used to work with at AIP, that her son Maurice was also in the first building hit and got out only moments before it began to collapse. Mandy Josephs, one of the woman in my writing group, is biting her nails over her welder husband volunteering at the disaster site. Another friend, Tim, who’s a musician, was telling me he went last night to hang out with John Scofield while they were mixing his new album, just to get a breather, and found, suddenly, that music didn’t matter at all to him, for the first time in his life. Chris Costa’s cousin by marriage was on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. Chris thinks he was probably one of the guys who jumped the hijackers, mostly because he was a big guy and an ex-football player. Charlie Marcano has called up his old reserve unit to volunteer and was pleased they wanted him. This terrifies me more than anything. During the course of conversation, Steve Kur firmly declared he wanted war. I wanted to slap him, especially since, unlike Charlie, it won’t be his ass in the line of fire. Enough innocent people are dead.

In the middle of this, the office was buzzing with rumors that Whitney Houston was dead. She wasn’t. Go figure. Distraction, maybe?

I wish I had a useful skill to offer, besides handing out Gatorade, even if it were only shoveling. If I thought they’d let me do that, I’d go down and volunteer. I want to do something. The air is still acrid with the smell of electrical fires and there are people wearing dust masks all over the city. Picking up prescriptions in the drug store today, I heard 5 different people asking for them. The store was sold out. I wish I’d brought one of mine. I spent most of the day sneezing and my eyes are burning from the dust and smoke.

I must have looked fairly shell-shocked in the drug store because the sweet little Indian woman who took my prescriptions was using that kind of very gentle manner that nurses usually use when you hobble into the emergency room cradling your injuries. “Let me just see what we can do for you. Just wait right here. I’ll be back in just a minute.” The only thing that was missing was the endearment. I have to say I appreciated her kindness.

The grocery store at Union Square (below which everything was closed) was relatively bare, no deliveries making it over the bridges or tunnels, but I was able to stock up on veggies and staples. I’m going to buy a big bag of dog food tomorrow for the sniffer hounds and take that and some other stuff they’re requesting that I’ve got—alcohol swabs, dust masks, raingear—up to the volunteer center at Javits Center. Since I don’t have a useful skill and don’t give blood, I can at least do this. Screw work. This is far more important.

Apparently there was a lot of asbestos in the WTC, but it’s only getting into the air at the site, not downwind, according to the EPA. They’re using hazmat gear at the site. They don’t seem to be expecting biohazard problems, firstly because the bodies are so thoroughly buried, and secondly because we get our water from out of the city. There are six stories of basement and subbasement below the towers, and the land from those two holes is now sitting under the World Financial Center across the street—so we’re talking about thousands of tons of earth and two really big holes holding the debris.
We’re reopening down to Canal Street tomorrow, and the financial markets will be reopened on Monday. Everyone I know is safe, thank God, sincerely.

Friday, September 14, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Kelly Cutaia, who used to work for Deutchesbank in the WTC, said one of her co-workers/friends was found in the hospital today with a skull fracture. She’d been unconscious until today and without ID, and that was why nobody could find her. The first really excellent news I’ve heard in some time. I hope Majilique’s sister turns up that way. I’m almost afraid to look at the list. In the midst of all of this, the optometrist called and said my glasses were ready. I was somehow not in any huge hurry to pick them up. I’ve probably got a package sitting on my desk with a new velvet jacket in it, and I don’t care much.

Kelly’s another close-call story, as is her husband. She had a dentist’s appointment down there at 8:30, and her gym is in the building as well, but she broke her hand three days ago and canceled both appointments. Joe works across the street, and was coming up out of the Cortlandt Street N/R subway stop when the first plane hit. He wound up walking all the way to Grand Central from there, staggering through the dust-choked air with an oxygen tank and a blanket to get a train home to the Bronx.

Heard from Adrienne, and old friend from college, last night. She was finally able to get through on the phones from Pittsburgh. Her grandmother is dying in the midst of all of this, so she’s been spending a lot of time in church anyway. She’s been trying to keep her two little boys away from the TV just because it’s far too frightening for them. Frank, while tooling around in the Miata with the top down, ran into a guy with a truck who was on his way to NYC and had gotten lost. Apparently, Frank was a little hesitant to give the guy directions until he said that he was bringing in supplies. No way to tell unless you search the truck, but it’s not like he’d have gotten over the bridges anyway without that. Adrienne seemed relieved when I told her that.

Carole, my cousin in Traverse City, tells me via e-mail that she’s been trying to get through on the phone for days. Called Mom and Dad again. I’m going to try to get home for Dad’s surgery, but God knows if I can get a plane out of here, or if I want to fly. I’m going to try to take the train, I think, but I can’t get into Amtrak’s site to find out how close they go, or how much it is, or how long the trip is.

Made a huge pot of ratatouille with all the veggies I bought yesterday. Between that and sesame noodles, I should be fine for the rest of the week. On the other hand, cooking is at least productive and would keep me occupied. I should make bread, now that the weather’s cool enough to turn on the oven. Maybe focaccia to go with the ratatouille.

Heard on the radio that the management of Grand Central Station is tearing down the missing person flyers people post there. I can’t even say how angry that makes me.

Saturday, September 15, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Slept until noon, utterly exhausted. My ribs hurt from sneezing so much and my shoulders are tight and sore from tension. The air sure isn’t helping my costochondritis any. Packed up some stuff to take into the volunteer depots and discovered they’ve got all the supplies they need right now. I’ll leave the bag packed until they run out again. I’m sure the amount of donations will slow down in the weeks to come. It’s going to be a long haul, digging out and putting things back together. I’m both amazed at and proud of the city where I live. I’m not sure you would see this anywhere else: more volunteers than they can use, and supplies to overflowing. The Sally Army was asking for 100,000 square feet of warehouse space for the non-perishable goods that have been donated. Some of the food has been redistributed to homeless shelters. Folks are lining up for 7 hours to give blood. People are coming in from other places to volunteer, but it’s so hard to get into the city right now that I think most of the people volunteering are locals.

Kath forwarded this message on to me from one of our friends in Britain. This really touched me.

Dear US Folks,

Thought you’d like to know that here in the UK, people are as devastated as you Americans must be. The TV news programmes here are still broadcasting continuous updates and reviews of the east coast terrorist attacks and its aftermath. British flags fly at half-mast all over the country, as a gesture of respect and sorrow.

And in my city of Plymouth, the Mayflower steps (yes, from whence your Pilgrim Fathers set sail) are covered all over in flowers; single stems, bouquets and sprays laid there by locals who needed to find a way to express their sorrow and to share in your shock and grief.

This was truly an international crime, and we global villagers are rallying around our dear neighbours.

Love, SHaron

I finally turned the radio off and put on some classical music—the Victoria Requiem and the Monteverde 1610 Vespers, Bach’s complete organ music, Copeland’s Appalachian Spring—found that didn’t feel right, that I wanted something happier, and switched to Handel’s Water and Fireworks music, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Respighi’s Ancient Dances and Airs for Lutes (which is one of Dad’s favorites) and a couple of Hyperion’s samplers. That didn’t feel right either. Finally settled on shakuhachi flute, chanting monks, Philip Glass’s “Kundun.” and Peter Gabriel’s “Passion.” If I had more requiems I’d play those. Even this doesn’t seem right. Silence, somehow, seems more appropriate. I’m beginning to understand the remark, “It is barbarous to write a poem after Auschwitz.” Music seems wrong. Poems seem wrong.

I called Mel back today and got through on the first try. It seems to be easier to call out than call in. She says she keeps looking at Dave and saying, “I’m so glad you’re sitting there in that chair right now.” She also says that if she and Dave had moved to New Hampshire, as they’d been talking about and Mel balking at, Dave would probably have been flying the kinds of planes that took off from Logan and were hijacked (767s; he now flies F100s) and could easily have been the pilot or co-pilot. Mel says the gas stations in Oscoda kept jacking up the price every fifteen minutes as this was going on, and people were streaming into the stations with containers, including some guy with oil drums in the back of his pickup, until Gov. Engler got on the TV and told everyone it was the station owners and not the oil companies raising the price and that people who had gotten gouged should go back to the stations for a refund of the difference between the morning’s starting price and what they paid. One of the things that Giuliani said when this started was, “If you start raising prices, I’ll gouge your eyes out.” I think that got the message through. No one’s done it yet.

One of the last things Mel said to me before she hung up was “Make something beautiful from this. Make a poem.” I don’t know that I can. I was thinking about the other poems I’ve written about tragedies—“Universal Solvent.” about Pan Am 103, “Cthonic“ about the woman pushed in front of the subway train at 23rd Street; “Blue Door“ about Haiti, “Small Moon, Scudding Clouds“ about Nagasaki; “In the Marrow“ about the Challenger explosion—Christ, if I can make a poem about Nagasaki, why can’t I make one about this? Challenger was like this. I cried for days about it. But this, it seems to defy words. It defies music, it defies art. Like Auschwitz it is more than tragedy, but a vivid illustration of inhumanity, barbarism, bone-deep, supernatural Evil, like making prisoners dig their own graves, using civilian aircraft as air-to-ground missiles.

I intended to make focaccia today and never got around to it. Still glued, in shock, to the net and the radio.

Sunday, September 16, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Helicopters in my neighborhood last night, very close by. I don’t ever remember them sounding so much like angry hornets. Turned on the radio at 3:48 AM but didn’t hear anything that sounded like it might warrant choppers, except for an accident on the Gowanus Expressway at 38th Street (I’m six blocks away, at 44th). But then, everybody’s a little jumpy right now, with good reason.

I woke up around 9:30, and Victoria Rosen called me shortly thereafter. I’d missed seeing her Thursday morning at Bayard. She’s just back from four months in India last week. What a hell of a jolt to come back to. It was good to hear her voice, even as she confessed somewhat sheepishly to me that she went out and bought a TV when this happened. For Victoria—sweet, unworldly, spiritual Victoria—to buy a TV, even a little 13 inch one, is a big betrayal of her own values of non-materialism. I totally understand her need to see, though. I had the same impulse. But seeing it on the net is enough for me. Even Jen said she had to turn off CNN finally. She said today in an e-mail:

I spent three solid days compulsively watching CNN and weeping, and hence got very little work done... no matter, since science writing pretty much shut down last week along with everything else. Just seemed inappropriate to do anything except mourn, although I did give blood on Wednesday as planned. They asked many people to come back in future weeks—some of the burn victims from the Pentagon are in critical condition at the hospital and will need multiple transfusions over the next 6 weeks—but I stayed. Only took 1-1/2 hours.

Tried to call both Kath and Jen around three and found them both out. Wonder if there’s some big memorial service on that they both might have gone to.

The New York Times Magazine has the most astonishing cover—or will have, since there’s no magazine this week, and the one with the WTC coverage won’t come out until next week, but you can see it on the net at their site. Two artists have designed a temporary memorial called “Phantom Towers“ to be put in place once the rubble is cleared from the site. From the sublevels of the foundations they would shoot spotlights into the sky at night, making towers of light where the Twin Towers had been. The phrase they used to describe it struck me as just right: “Those towers are like ghost limbs, we can feel them even though they’re not there anymore.” I would love to see this built.

Later:

Turns out Kath was out buying bridesmaid’s shoes with her fellows, doing her part to keep the American economy running. Round about Friday, Kath came down with a sinus infection, due in part to crying uncontrollably as I’ve been doing, and to the stress. It’s been 4.5 months since the last one and I was really thinking she’d go for six if this hadn’t happened and thrown us all for a loop. I’m amazed I don’t have one. Even so, we talked, as we have been every day, for a long time.

Laurie was out shopping too, she proudly informed me when she called in the afternoon, doing her part to help the NYC economy. Of all the people I desperately wanted to talk to on Tuesday, Laurie was very high up the list. She grew up here and has lived here ever since, with the exception of the four years we spent together in college in Pittsburgh. We’ve been disaster junkies together, calling each other at the first sign of a plane crash or whatever, and are, I think deeply bonded in our love of the city. Little as either of us like Giuliani, we’ve been really happy of the way he’s handled the crisis. Now that the death toll looks like it’s going to be much lower than the 50,000 we all expected, she has an interesting take on it:

A fellow school principal and I have an interesting theory. We have called around to many of the local private schools. While certainly, many, many children in the city (and country?) are left without a parent, it is really extraordinary to discover how “well“ most of our schools have fared. By that, I mean almost everyone I called say “we have lost no parents.” or “we lost 1 parent.” One school lost 2 parents (not same child). When you consider that many of these schools have 500 -800 students (small, admittedly, but still) we think we know the reason. Especially when so many of the parents were down there, saw it happen as they were arriving at work around 8:45.

The parents tend to arrive later to work than many single people or couples without children. As so many of my parents have said to me, “I was late because I was dropping the kids off at school....”

Talked to my own folks again today, to make sure I knew where they were going to be, since Dad’s going down to Midland for more tests, pre-surgery. Mom, of course, just wants me to come home and stay home. I’ll be happy if I can just get there.

Still can’t get hold of Jen. Wonder where she is. It makes me unaccountably nervous, probably since I’ve been glued to my house, pretty much, since Tuesday. I dread going to work tomorrow. I’m emotionally exhausted, wrung out, shell-shocked, still weepy. I will be largely useless, and I don’t think we’ll have any work, anyway. Maybe I can do a little training of the new guy, Adam, and the refresher course. I’ll pick up my glasses, get my velvet jacket, turn in my timesheet and bolt. On one level, I know it’ll be good for me to get out of the house, but I don’t feel ready to face other people’s stories yet. And I know everyone will have one. I wonder if Peggy lost anyone. I wonder how many people at the office did. I wonder if Steve Holley is trapped in Paris (poor him!). Ack!

Later:

Made the mistake of reading the news sites again. This from the WINS page:
Among the grisly finds at the site were a pair of hands, bound together, found on a rooftop.
This, I hate to say, has the making of poetry. Grisly poetry, but poetry, along the lines of “In the Marrow.” Christ, what a muse I have. Siegfried Sassoon and I would have gotten along quite well, I’m afraid.

And speaking of poetry, Laurie just sent me this. I don’t know when she wrote it, but it’s a lovely piece. I’m glad someone else has done it. Perhaps that absolves me.

Skyline I am left open now.
Shrunken, suddenly.
Diminished.
My very skeleton is on
display,
open wide.
There is an open wound
where once there was skin.
My heart is still there,
but it is different now.
It has changed.
Into something harsh,
kilowatt blood.
A light that exposes me at all hours,
yet opens me to the world
without protection.
But the heart is there.
Still.
More exposed than ever.
Beating on into the wind
and the river’s night.

Monday, September 17, 2001

Kips Bay, Manhattan and Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Restless night. After dreaming of washing blood off myself and getting more and more of it on the shower curtain, I got myself up and went into work this morning. There are no R or N trains, only the J and M running through lower Brooklyn and then returning to their regular routes in Manhattan that skirt the eastern edge of the financial district. So there’s no way to reach the Whitehall-South Ferry, Rector Street, Cortlandt Street, or City Hall stops on the N or R, beyond walking. I caught the W train at 36th Street in Brooklyn and went across the Manhattan bridge (the Brooklyn Bridge is still closed), this time making myself look out at the skyline. Even with the smoke to mark the site, it took me a moment to realize that I was seeing the World Financial Center and the Winter Garden now, where they had been blocked by the towers before. It didn’t look like New York. On the other hand, those towers were so dominant that the other beautiful buildings down there, like the Woolworth and the new World Financial Center, come in to their own now. And that’s the ironic part of these towers falling down. As Laurie said yesterday, nobody in New York actually liked them. They were architecturally ugly, the worst of the box skyscrapers. But dammit, we didn’t choose to demolish them, either. Like it or not, they were what people thought of when they thought of New York.

There is still horror and devastation here, but it is a little surreal to see it confined to a single area of the city. Up where I work, and where I live, things seem pretty normal, if a little subdued. There’s less traffic than normal, and every now and then I find myself ambushed by a sudden sidewalk shrine full of flowers and candles. I walked by the Borders at 2nd Ave. & 31st Street today when I went to pick up my new glasses; their flagship store was in the WTC and there are candles and flowers up and down the sidewalk in front of it, wax melted in colorful pools on the concrete and dripping down the marble facing of the tiny decorative shelves cut in the facade. One of the windows was a display of nothing but books and calendars about New York. I bought the week’s New Yorker with its black on black cover of the shadow towers. Chilling and sad and eerie.

I’m glad now that I came in to work, though there’s little to do. It’s been distracting and heartening. I knew before that AKRF was a really wonderful, socially conscious company, and after catching up on the e-mails from last week, I have no doubt of their humanitarianism. Our business is environmental analysis and we do most of the Environmental Impact Statements for the major building projects that require them in and around the city. We also do hazardous materials analysis and remediation, which require site and field visits, so we have a lot of equipment hanging around. Unlike Bayard, where it was business as usual, AKRF sent supplies, personnel, blood, and a deep love of the city into the maelstrom last week. People who live in the city offered their apartments to co-workers who couldn’t get home to the boroughs. Peggy Rosenblatt, our HR director (she wears other hats, too) said, “just ask my doorman to give you the keys.” We sent the company SUV down to hotels to pick up sheets and towels for the rescue workers. We sent our own company hazmat supplies, and made GIS maps for the rescuers. People volunteered at the blood donor centers and manned phones at volunteer centers. We sent:

• 2 cases spring water
• 30 boxes plastic gloves (non-latex)
• 24 pair heavy-duty plastic work gloves (elbow length)
• 10 pair heavy duty cloth and leather work gloves
• 10 hard hats
• 10 half-face respirators
• 8 full-face respirators
• 3 respirator Bags
• 20 respirator cartridges
• 1 package respirator wipes
• 4 Ear-protection
• 9 Eye protection glasses
• 4 plastic drop cloths
• 8 eye washes
• 1 emergency soap wash
• 3 first aid kits

Keep in mind that this is a company with barely over 100 people in its four offices, and more like 75 in the New York office. When I asked people to tell me what they did and gave for the newsletter, many wrote back in reply but asked me not to mention their names, or were only “outed“ by someone else they had volunteered with.

We did lose some colleagues and clients at the Port Authority, and the emails were full of updates on people. Neal Stone and Chris Calvert are still combing the hospitals for a friend of theirs who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, a firm who had nearly everyone wiped out by the plane taking out their floor. Originally, they thought they had gotten a phone message from him that he was trapped under the rubble waiting to be rescued, but Neal said today they couldn’t confirm the message. It’s heartbreaking. I was a little freaked to discover that Kevin Reilly’s name has already been taken off the employee list—no doubt by our nefarious IT department. It doesn’t seem right, somehow, not yet.

On the flip side of that, our CEO, Debra Allee, is already arranging a company contribution to the Fireman’s Fund for widows & orphans in Kevin’s name, as his family requested, and encouraging all of us to as well by matching what we give. There is also talk of starting a scholarship fund for the victims that will keep giving after other relief funds have run out. I liked that the Marine Corps had done that for the children of the Pentagon victims and I think it’s a great idea. I’ll definitely contribute to both of these.

Taking care of its own employees, AKRF also paid everyone who was a regular full or part-time employee for any missed days last week, encouraged the staff to take part in the National Day of Morning, and bought lunch for the New York office on Friday.

On top of these heartening stories from work is one from Laurie about a boy in her school.

For those of you I have been writing to regularly, I mentioned that many of our students used a church hall this past weekend to make over 500 sandwiches for the rescue workers. A teacher’s husband, an orthopedic surgeon volunteering down there, delivered them. I also spoke of some of our younger students bringing in goods to our local precinct—all gratefully received. I heard that ONE STUDENT from our school also ran a lemonade stand this weekend. He worked for two straight days on his corner. This lad made (ready?) $4,000.00 for the Red Cross. (you read that correctly—four thousand) The cash was delivered by his mom.

Can I just say of New Yorkers what I said to my colleagues at AKRF? You ROCK!

Kath and I were talking tonight about the differences in the way DC and NYC have been handling their crises. I’m sure the politicians and folks are perfectly safe in DC, surrounded by the Secret Service and military, but no one seems to pay a bit of attention to the civilian population down there. Up here, we’re all taking very good care of each other, and the city government is really focused on providing services to its citizens. I think we’ve all learned to pull together because we’ve turned into a little city-state, a bit like Venice, and because so much of the rest of the country loathes us so much. Okay, that’s enough jingoism for tonight.

But when I speak to people outside the two cities, everyone else seems to be just going about their business as though everything were just like it always has been. And here I am sounding just like MJ. That’s terrible. People do get caught up in their own little lives until something like this comes along to jar them, immediately. Kath thinks it’s a lack of imagination in people, and I wonder if it’s not a desensitization to disaster by too many “Die Hard“ movies. Laurie and I have decided there are degrees of knowledge as well. She writes:

I also spoke with my friend, Nan, the woman who lives downtown. She was stunned when she a came to work today. “I had no idea“ she said. “that life was continuing so normally up here. I saw my first fruitstand in a week today. I see cars on the street. Hell, I see people. You must understand. Whatever you see on TV, whatever you think you understand, whatever pictures are imbedded in your mind-you cannot even begin to fathom what the reality is. It is nothing like what you are seeing. Nothing at all. Not in the slightest. TV makes it acceptable on small screens.” She lives two blocks away from where everything has been deserted. She speaks of how there is no dark at night because of the power of the search lights. She speaks of noise that continues throughout the night. A very quiet noise.

I’m starting to look at it like the ripples on a pond: in the epicenter, in the Financial district is the horror of Ground Zero. Uptown and in the boroughs is a slightly more distant sense of shock and horror and disbelief. In the burbs is the frisson of terror and the pain of grief. In other big cities is the sense of “Hey, that could happen here too.”

And in flyover land and the rural areas is . . . Jerry Falwell.

I haven’t read his nasty, petty, bigoted little condemnation, but here’s what my friend Erica wrote in response to it and sent to the NY Times, The LA Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and her local paper, the Newark Star Ledger:

Dear Reverend Falwell,
Apparently, I owe you and every other American an apology. But before I do that, let me tell you a little about myself. I am a librarian, I teach martial arts, I pay my taxes, support my local police force, and have never once in my life used illegal drugs or been convicted of a crime. I’m a good neighbor, a decent sister and daughter and, I hope, a good friend. Most of all, I am and always have been, extremely proud to be American.
I am also a lesbian, a pagan, a feminist, an abortion rights supporter, intellectual and ACLU member. It seems that by your standards, these characteristics completely wipe away any virtue I may have gained from the previous qualities—something I don’t quite understand.
I have never gone around blaming other people for my problems in life, I’m a hard worker—not a communist or even very politically active, although I am extremely socially active, supporting varied charities with donations of money and time. I try to volunteer as often as I can, helping out with things like charity walks, or First Night in my town. And never once in my whole life have I ever blamed the ills of this nation on ignorant, rabble-rousing fundamentalists. So, can you please explain to me why you see fit to dishonor the dead and blame them on me? In any case, I do apologize to the American public. I apparently have not been visible enough. In the future, I will endeavor to make sure that you, every one of you, know me as your neighbor, your coworker, your relative, your friend. And when I have done that, maybe we’ll never again have to bear the brunt of such tasteless vitriol, hatred and bigotry aimed in so inappropriate a direction.

Cheers, Erica

Coming from a very small town in Flyover Land myself, I know that all its residents are not like Falwell, but I also know, from having always felt like a freak there myself, that too many of them are. It angers me that we need to be so divisive, and that so many people can use God as an excuse to hate. Don’t they see that’s just what the Muslim terrorists they condemn do too? How are they any different?
To counterbalance this, I have a positive lawyer story, which almost seems like an oxymoron in itself, this one also from Laurie. She tells me that her ex-boyfriend Ira’s firm was in the process of closing on new office space for their firm when this all happened, and have donated it instead to a law firm that lost all of their office space. Donated it. Granted, I’m sure there’s a nice tax break in it, and fabulous PR, but still, what a great gesture.

I also learned from Laurie (because she’s the disaster junkie she is) that, compared to the 2.4 Richter scale earthquake we had in January that I did not even feel and didn’t know about, the WTC collapse was a mere 2.3. Others have said how silent and gentle it was. More than once I’ve heard the phrase, “terrible beauty“ applied to it.

And finally, a brief note from Majilique, who sounds a little hysterical:

Still no...........My God, they interviewed my brother, Peps. (True to our family his name wasn’t posted.) Gods, he looks so tired. Twenty hour shifts. He goes back to Sly and Annie’s place in Soho long enough to shower and get a few hours sleep. But he says he and the others won’t give up. That they feel further down under “The Pile“ (as they call it) there are metal pockets. That after the ’93 bombing the basement was shored up heavily. They’re really hopeful!

To bed, with the hope that I won’t be dreaming of blood tonight.

Tuesday, September 18, 2001

Kips Bay, Manhattan and Sunset Park, Brooklyn

A week. A week today. The bells of St. Patrick’s rang at 8:48 this morning. That’s what time the first plane hit 168 hours ago.

Woke up just a few minutes before that, after another restless night. I was dreaming of my old roommate, Virginia, who used to work at the Winter Garden when she first moved here, not long after I did. Mom asked about her when I talked to her Sunday. For some reason, Mom said, she kept thinking about her, I guess because she thought Virginia worked in Windows on the World and not the Winter Garden, and was still working there. A couple of days ago they interviewed the pastry chef at the Winter Garden—that’s the position Virginia held. Now she’s a social worker with the city, but I don’t know where she was at the time. Probably somewhere near City Hall, so she’s probably fine. I rather doubt she’s wondering about me, since we weren’t speaking to other by the time we graduated, or thereafter. Seems stupid and petty now, as it was.

The smoke was pretty bad when I went out this morning. The wind’s blowing in the direction of my neighborhood again, just as it did the first day. On the bridge today I couldn’t find the gap in the skyline and saw another building that looked totally unfamiliar to me. I don’t know how I could have looked at that skyline nearly every day for 15 years and not recognize the buildings. I feel a little like I’m living in a parallel universe just a tad different from the one I woke up in a week ago.

Oddly enough, I had a really fast commute—½ hour door to door because of train connections. The J and M trains are a couple of cars shorter than the N and R, due to the size of the platforms in Manhattan (a relic from the days when there were three competing subway companies rather than one overarching transportation authority), so that part of my commute is a little more crowded than usual, but I can’t complain because it’s only one stop. It’s a much more mixed crowd of people though because of the different neighborhoods the trains run through and into. Instead of being largely Hispanic and white yuppies, the passengers are white-collar Russians and Greeks and Italians, too.

Noticed a kid on the train—just some little smartass white skateboarder—with a tattoo that I at first thought was kind of cool: on the inside of his forearm, a circle with some funky looking city buildings, sort of like some of the buildings in the font L’il City, and another circle resting on that, smaller, which was a globe, and attached to that, a half circle, so the whole thing looked a bit like a Christmas ornament. Then I realized that across the inside of his wrist, in inch- high letters he had tattooed the word “HATE.” It was half covered by a thick leather watchband, but it sickened me. His face was kind of stolidly blank when I looked up into it, and I know he saw me looking at the tattoo on his wrist. I don’t know what his motivation or philosophy was, but I wanted to ask him if he were sorry he’d done that, now that he had seen what it could do.

Also on the train, I actually started thinking about a haiku about the towers. Sometime during the last week or so, when work was slow, the gang put up a Wall of Haiku about work, inspired no doubt by the faux Microsoft screen messages that have been making the rounds. I couldn’t remember how the syllable count goes though and it seems less and less likely to be written. The form, however, seems somehow appropriate. Laurie reminded me last night of the image of Dürer’s hands, as well. Lines are forming tentatively in my head.

Val called with the offer of a ticket to Laurie Anderson on Thursday night. She missed her choir rehearsal last week, for obvious reasons, and since she’s conducting, she can’t really miss another. Unusually, I didn’t even hesitate, even though I’ll be at Bayard. I’ve lost any sense of loyalty to them that I had after last week. I’ve also got more of a sense of seizing opportunities than before. Can’t imagine why. . . . Marcia’s going too.

Work, again, has been a godsend. I love the folks I work with here. It’s almost enough to make me go full-time. They’re funny and smart, and many of them are actors, so they’re wonderfully effusive and just irreverent enough to know when to make jokes and when not to. All day, my coworkers Allan, Adam, Melinda, and Ann have been plotting a surprise party for Steven, who had his flight to London canceled this week, where he’d planned to spend his birthday with his boyfriend. Tonight e’re taking him to dinner at the local Vietnamese restaurant.

I’m looking forward to being somewhere with people I like, laughing, eating and having a good time. It doesn’t mean I’m done mourning, or that I don’t care about the dead and the missing who are mostly likely dead. I’m not sure what it means, except that I know that if I get any sadder, or give into it much more, and sadness will engulf me and that will mean a small victory for the people who did this. I keep hearing Robert Heinlein’s line from Number of the Beast: “The cowards never started and the weak died on the way.” We have to keep going, because life is—not to be trite—a journey.

And we are still mourning. Jennifer DeMerrit, one of the editors, just found out today that a friend of a friend had been among the identified dead. It was a guy she said she’d just seen around at parties and liked, not someone she was close to, but even saying it, she started to choke up, and got us both crying. Then I called Betsi Nemeth, just to ask if she were in a document I was working on for her, and she sounded as shell-shocked as I still feel. The first thing I asked was if everyone she knew—except Kevin, of course—were okay. Finally I asked how she was, asked her if she needed a hug. A moment of silence, and then she said, “Hugs aren’t what I need right now. I need my city back.” And that, of course, got me, because I love this city so much. I said something inane like, “we’re not going to get it back the way it was, so we have to make sure we get it back better.” We both hung up crying.

Still, today felt almost—I hesitate to say it—normal. We got work in, we laughed a lot, we were talking more easily about other things. There’s still an edge of hysteria in the laughter, and still a sense that we’re distracting ourselves, but routine is reasserting itself. Nobody’s going to forget this soon, but we’re plunging on. One interesting thing that more than one person today remarked on, all separately, was that nobody’s telling any jokes about it yet. Oddly enough, every person also cited the Challenger disaster as the benchmark.

I went to the card store at lunch, to buy votive candles and, like seemingly everyone else in the place, postcards of the WTC. The one I wound up with, as there were very few, was a night view from under the Brooklyn Bridge, with one of the towers just touching the edge of the bridge. They don’t look as imposing or overwhelming from this angle, but they are clearly much taller than anything around them. I also bought two cards with quotations on them, simple squares in black and white: “Never never never give up.” (Winston Churchill) and “Nothing is worth more than this day.” Goethe).

Later:

Well, dinner was, dare I say it, fun. Nobody, including me, drank too much, but we did get merry. I’d forgotten how much fun it can be to be with drama people. It’s nice not to have to do anything but laugh, and be a good audience. Our end of the table wound up in a political discussion that was interesting because it wound up being as much about the philosophy of power and political theory as it did about the immediate problem. Heartened by the fact that nobody, for once, wanted to see anybody but the perps dead.

Firetrucks rolled by and stopped and backed up the wrong way on one-way streets and made a general confused mess of things in the middle of dinner and I could hear the panic in Melinda’s voice. Funny how quickly it spreads through a group when one person gets it. I didn’t see anything to panic about and yet she got my heart thumping too. But at least it was nothing, apparently, except some lost firemen from out of town who are manning the stations while our guys are digging out their fellows, rather hopelessly now.

This morning, even Rudy started talking like there was every possibility this was a search and recover, not a search and rescue operation. We’re now doing what the Russian Navy is/has been doing with the Kursk. I wonder if there was even anyone left to SOS. One fireman said there are no big pieces of concrete; it’s all dust. And because he said that, I had the Kansas song from my high school days, “Dust in the Wind.” in my head all day, until Melinda played U2’s newish song, “Beautiful Day.”

Coming across the bridge tonight it seemed to me that most everything but a few buildings were lit up and occupied, and seemed to have people staying late in them. The AT&T building with the big bell on the side the old Ma Bell logo) looked as though it were only lit with emergency lights in the stairwells. And of course, in the middle of it, is a big, black gap, making the city seem so much darker.

Kath tells me that Kathy O’Malley’s ironworker brother got hurt on the site today: big gash on his leg. His wife, who’s an EMT, saw him at the aid station, where there was some hotshot plastic surgeon originally in town for a conference and staying on to volunteer. EMT wife says she can’t believe (in typically inappropriate-to-civilians language) how “beautiful“ the stitching looks. Must have been really good, too, because they patched him up and sent him back to work.

According to Kathy’s brother, they can hear the cops’ ammunition going off in the fires nderneath the rubble, and the occasional boom of a car blowing up. The lower two levels are now flooded.
Whoever is still down there alive, if there’s anyone, is caught between fire and water. The image I immediately saw was Balin’s troop of Dwarves in the mines of Moria, caught between the Balrog and the Orcs. Orcs seem like a really appropriate metaphor for the perps.

Finally, a piece of good news from Beth Hlabse on the list:

Hey all! Great news from my mom. Her second friend who works at the Pentagon has finally turned up. He’s alive and well and wasn’t even there!!!! He was on holiday in France and was stuck at the airport there. He was on a barging trip and some people there took him and his family into their home so they could watch it all on TV. He was to have left Paris on Wednesday morning but didn’t get out until yesterday and had no access to e-mail. If he had been at work at the Pentagon, he would have been in the first ring that got hit and undoubtedly would not be with us.

A cheerful note to end on, for a change, especially when I am staggering-tired. Looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. Hope I sleep better than I have been.

Wednesday, September 19, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Kips Bay, Manhattan

Well, so much for that. Not a good night. The worst yet, in fact. Despite being really exhausted, I haven’t been able to sleep. It’s almost 4:30 AM now and I’ve been tossing and turning for hours. Too hot, too cold. Legs jumpy. Starting at loud sounds. First it was the bunch of guys sitting on our stoop until two in the morning or 2:30, though they were talking quietly. Then it was the loudest cart of empty bottles that I’ve ever heard rattling up the street (it’s recycling day). I finally dropped off around 3:30 and the first dream I had that sleep cycle was a nightmare:

I’ve been up all night copy editing some huge manuscript for Robert Conway and am dog tired, but have gotten a few hours of sleep and am thinking about going out for breakfast. As with most dreams, I’m living in some impossible place that is a combination of my real neighborhood, St. Mark’s Place, Jen Ouellette’s neighborhood in DC, and the dream neighborhood in Manhattan with the cool little cafes that I visit now and then. Standing on the street corner waiting for the light, I run into Jennifer DeMerrit and Melinda, who are going into work. The three of us cross the street and walk along the sidewalk and I ask them if they want to go to breakfast with me. Melinda says sure, Jennifer says no and goes her own way. Walking along together, we end up on different levels of the sidewalk, with me above her. At one point she stops and says, “Come down here. I have the worst feeling about this spot.” as though something evil and deadly has happened on it. She’s standing on a patch of white gravel. I jump down from the upper sidewalk, about 4 feet, and the moment my feet touch the gravel, a shock travels up my spine, sort of like the shock you get in your legs when you hit the ground too hard. But it’s so strong that it goes through my whole body. I wake up with it running up my spine like an electric current and adrenalin making my heart pound.

I’ve never felt anything like this before. Now I can’t get my breath back and it’s a little scary. I thought I was handling this okay, and obviously I’m not. It just took a while for it to get to this point. I’m too close to the dream too, to think about the symbolism yet.

And this is a lovely thing to focus on instead of thinking about why I can’t sleep and am having nightmares all of a sudden. The cats fighting outside just made me jump. I don’t like my startle reactions at all. Sadly, some Xanax sounds really good right now. And I’m sure the shaking of the house isn’t helping either, and you can really feel it in the corner my bed’s in. I’ve lived here for 15 years and it’s never bothered me. Time for a little Google search on Post Traumatic Stress, I think.

Later:

What a day. Only last Tuesday was this bad, I think. I’m exhausted and sad and have been crying a lot today. On my way out, I met Alex, a Puerto Rican Vietnam vet with two kids who rides a chopped Harley in motorcycle gang garb on the weekends, sitting on our stoop in the shade reading the paper. His nephew was on the 67th floor and just barely got out. Another neighbor also just barely got out, and a third didn’t come home. She worked on the 98th floor. But all of Alex’s family are okay. Last night there were candles outside on people’s gates. Somebody’s fire escape is draped in red, white, and blue lights, like Christmas. Amparo and her family are flying both the American and Columbian flags.

Meanwhile, Livy writes me the following cheery note:

Just a thought... In the aftermath of this attack, so many things are happening in the US that many of the details are falling by the wayside. A few bits and snatches that I’ve read or caught on CNN and other broadcasts:

• Broadening of wiretapping and other surveillance laws. Most of these would practically eliminate the laws altogether, or render them sterile WRT the average person.
• Requirement of a national ID card. Not for newbies only, it would be carried by all US citizens. No tatement as to whether political affiliation would be necessary.
• Broadening of the War Powers Act. (For Bush???)

Just wondered if you’d heard of this “revolutionary” stuff. I’ve even heard debates (among nurses, etc.) that all terrorists should be listed and deported. Mind you, Greenpeace is listed as a terrorist group, as are many religious organizations (I’m sure the Muslims have just joined that list), and many scholars with “strange, bizarre and anti-American ideas (whatever the heck those are!)”.

The mood isn’t dangerous, but I’m fascinated at how quickly a single event can alter a person’s perception of the world. It’s amazing how many are willing to give up personal freedoms for the sake of safety, and while I agree with some of it, very few seem able to see how history repeats itself... Gee, aren’t I just the cheeriest person???

And with air travel so safe (!), how about planning a trip to Morocco? I still want to go there, and now I’ve got a guy from work whose background is in that area (he’s half Pakistani, half Arab) who wants to go along, we’ll have male escort. It’s still at least two years away, and who knows? Maybe by then, things’ll be so bad, we’ll all be in camps... HUH?

Liv
“The avalanche has already begun; it’s too late for the pebbles to vote.”
Ambassador Kosh

I worry about the loss of our civil liberties too, and see it happening already. The trouble with giving them up to the government is that the government doesn’t tend to give them back unless you fight for them in the courts.

I didn’t get into work until 1:00, and found everybody gone to lunch when I arrived. Not that I blame them, but I felt a little deserted, irrationally. Work was slow but steady, which was good. At least it kept me occupied. Neal Stone called, sounding angry and hopeless and scared, and still his wonderful sarcastic self. I guess they’ve given up hope of finding their friend. It’s so hard without a body though. Even Kevin Reilly is still listed as missing.

Later in the day, I made the mistake of going to one of the group shrink sessions AKRF was offering, and cried through most of it. Yvonne Brown kept patting my back the whole time, as she patted everyone’s. What a gentle soul she is, really upset by talk of war and more killing. It was probably really good for most people, but it was hard to see my friends grieving and angry and scared.

Hard to see Dennis Mincieli, one of the nicest, kindest people I know—like Lou Sanders in miniature—choke up and turn bitter and angry. It was hard to see Betsi admitting to being afraid, wanting to move away from the city, unsure of herself in her own Astoria neighborhood, worried about the impact on the multiethnic population. “People are just searching each others faces now,” she said.

It was terrible to see poor Shabana, a Muslim Canadian engineer (who’s appeared in the Smithsonian Magazine in an article on synesthesia), suddenly having to grapple with the reality of prejudice for the first time in her life. And all Weixong—who’s from China by way of Canada—kept asking through his tears was, “Why do people do this? Why do they hate the US so much?”

People choked up that I never expected to choke up: Carol, Dennis, Ed, Linh. At lunch, I was putting up pictures from the net of the memorials all over the world, and Linh walked in holding her lunch, took one look at Jerry’s pictures—a time-lapse of fire-collision-explosion-collapse-collapse-eruption-of-dust taken from his Jersey apartment—pinned up above them, and walked out again. Linh’s Vietnamese-American, smart, funny, committed, kind, like most of the people I work with at AKRF, and she seemed deeply ashamed to admit that she’s suspicious of many of the cab drivers and others she sees on the streets in Curry Hill. (We have a number of cab companies and many Indian restaurants here, as well as a few Halal grocers and many Muslims.)

I was saddened to realize I understood exactly what she was saying: how could these people come here and live, and enjoy an open society for many years, and still hate us this much? That’s one of the things that boggles me too. We’re all struggling not to hate, not to be suspicious, not to be angry.

Even Debra Allee, our fearless leader, seemed subdued and at a loss. She got stuck in Kansas City, en route I think to California, and had to give a scheduled court deposition. It took her days to get back here; Dennis had to pick her up in Columbus, Ohio, which was apparently as close to home as she could get.

Dennis said they had the chance to leave the city for the weekend afterwards but “we stayed. ’m a New Yorker and this is my city,” he said. He watched all of it from the roof of their apartment on West Street, about a mile away. No wonder he’s angry. Apparently something weird happened on a flight to Syracuse a couple of weeks back that he’s just reported to the FBI, though he wouldn’t elaborate. Debra’s daughter Ann has an apartment farther downtown that they tried to get into over the weekend and were unable to.

Emilie was angry and admitted to being on kind of a roller coaster. One of the things she said really cheered me too, somehow, about all the flag waving that she finds really irritating (even Dennis went out and bought one). She said, “I appreciate other people’s right to fly the flag, but I also appreciate my right to burn it, and I don’t want to lose that.” bless her radical little soul. I wonder sometimes if she and Alison Bechtel aren’t secretly friends. Em’s definitely a dyke to watch out for.

I’m not the only one having bad dreams or trouble sleeping. We’re all moody, irritable, weepy, exhausted. Sandy Tyler’s having nightmares too. So are Val and Marcia, and Betsi.

Back upstairs, Peggy and I hugged each other. She’d said and the meeting that some time ago a friend of hers had sent her two little inspirational magnets for her fridge, both Winston Churchill quotations, the first, “When you are going through hell, just keep going.” and the second, “Never never never give up.” When we hugged, she realized I had the second quote hanging on my bulletin board at my desk and we both laughed because I’d just bought it yesterday.

I was really touched because one of the thing she’d also said at the meeting was, “A while ago when I was really in need of some comfort in my life, Ann Kottner said something very important to me: Just keep going and ’Act as if.’“ I was touched that something I said made some kind of difference, and that she was kind enough to say it in public, too. And I guess the lesson from this is that we give when we can and take when we need to. And the “act as if.” lesson is something I need to remember and try to put into practice too.

In an amazing story which I’m not certain is true, but which comes from Kathy O’Malley’s brother, who’s working on the site, apparently some guy on the 105th floor of one of the towers got himself wedged into a massive piece of concrete and rode the sucker down in the collapse. He didn’t get up and walk away, but he’s in one piece with his spine intact and likely to live through the experience. All I could think of was Bevan riding the crest of the avalanche. Apocryphal or not, it’s a hell of a good story. And with all the weird shit that’s happened, like finding one of the hijacker’s passports a couple of blocks away, I don’t know why this wouldn’t.

Kath tells, me, however, that Kathy O’s very old aunt, who lives near the disaster site on Church Street, has had a massive stroke, probably from the stress, poor love.

And Laurie again on an upbeat note, provides this:

My friend, Sandy, was allowed back into his apartment, briefly, with his wife. They and their seven year old twin boys have been shuttling between in-laws. The guards only let them in for ten minutes, but to use his words, “we had our worst fears and our greatest hopes, and the reality exceeded our greatest hopes.” All windows were intact, the hamster and goldfish were still alive, and as far as debris, he said it was “like we had been away for about three months—dust, but just a slight layer.”

As a newspaper account reads today: “It feels like completely different city down here. It’s a war zone. There are military checkpoints and you have to carry ID. There’s no food. No mail. No power. On TV they tell us to go on, tell us life is normal. But there’s no way.”

Sandy agrees, but just knowing his home will be OK, helps SO MUCH! He is truly cheerful. As he pointed out, as they grabbed things, the guards watched, because, after all, it is still a crime scene, but they are lucky. Nothing was flown into their apartment, including things which are too horrible to mention. Some of his neighbors are not as lucky.

He tells a funny tale: “The first thing my wife did was grab all the photo albums. The first thing I did was grab all documents, passports, checkbooks, etc. Then we grabbed the pets, and out we ran. We only had ten minutes. As we got to the stairway, and the guard was congratulating us on how efficient we had been in our allotted ten minutes, we looked at each other in horror. WE FORGOT CLOTHES! The guard let us back in for four minutes, trying not to chuckle too loudly!”

People have been extraordinary. One man tells a tale of how strangers on the street gave him socks. Another tells a tale of how his local eyeglass store, gave him free contacts. I know someone who, without even thinking about it, met someone on the street who was unable to get home that first night, and “without even thinking twice, I had her come home with me. I now have a new friend.

I tell you-this is one cool city!

I did my part too. I did my civic duty on Saturday. In order to help our crippled economy, and on orders from the Mayor—I shopped. Seems like it was all I could do for this noble town!

Outside I hear a lot of blustering machismo from the thugs in the hood. If it gets any louder or any worse, I’m calling the cops. We don’t need that shit. None of us.

I hope I can sleep tonight, dreamlessly.

Thursday, September 20, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Took a look at the site on the flyer I saw in Union Square last night: NYC Stories. They have the “riding the avalanche” story posted as an urban legend, but nobody’s confirmed it either way yet. I hope it’s true. We all hope it’s true.

Slept much better last night, with earplugs in half the night, but I still feel exhausted. I’d like to sleep for days. Hope I don’t nod off at Laurie Anderson tonight. That’d be so embarrassing.

Yesterday, one of my cousins sent me a cartoon that’s making its way around the net. It’s a map of the region around Afghanistan and the country itself has been turned into a large body of water called Lake America. This really pissed me off, especially after the last note I sent her asking her not to send me jingoistic crap. This is what I sent back:

Please don’t send me stuff like this right now—or ever for that matter. After the rain tonight, we have Lake Trade Towers in lower Manhattan, and this doesn’t seem at all amusing or right to me. Maybe it’s hard for people outside the city to grasp, but we are no longer immune to having the shit bombed out of us, and I live in one of the primary war zones, something that’s been brought home to me very vividly. I used to joke, flippantly, as smart-ass kids will, when the Cold War was on and urtsmith was an active base, that it was better to be the news than see it. Well, careful what you wish for, I’ve discovered. I don’t really want anybody else dead right now, except for the perps. I certainly do not want all of Afghanistan turned into a wasteland. I don’t hate these people. I con’t want vengeance. I want justice. They are two very, very different animals, and they are the dividing line between civilization and barbarism.

Later:

Work at Bayard was brutal, but they did at least come through with the check. Ted Hamil, who writes them, is such a good guy. Yesterday was as busy a day as they come, and it’s been like that for months now, with only a few slow days here and there. Traffic and checking were amazingly subdued, even Joe Cozzi, who usually blurts out whatever comes into his head, including utterly mangled snatches of 70’s and 80’s songs in an equally mangled voice, was more or less silent today. No tasteless jokes, amazingly few un-PC ethnic slurs from Danny, not much teasing from Tim, just a brief outburst of drooling over D’Angelo from Yolanda, in which I joined wholeheartedly.

Paula was moving like molasses, uncharacteristically, and George was in the foulest mood I’ve ever seen, which he at least had the grace not to take out on anybody, and I barely got out of my chair for seven hours. My stomach hurt most of the day. I’m beginning to wonder if my ulcer is coming back.

When I did go out, it was pouring, as it did all day. I can only imagine how difficult that makes things for the S&R people, with everything muddy underfoot and the air steamy in their heavy uniforms. By the time I left at 7:00 PM, a thick fog had settled in, shrouding the top of the Chrysler Building. It was one of those nights when I wouldn’t have been able to see the WTC anyway, even the lights, probably. Everything was truncated, decapitated.

Once I’d escaped—and tonight it felt like escape—I first went to the downtown side of the train, either so distracted I wasn’t thinking right, or instinctively heading home, I’m not sure which. Times Square was eerily subdued, when I finally got there. Granted, it was raining and I haven’t been up to 42nd Street in a long time—not much at all since the Disneyfication—but there really weren’t many people out, though the lights were all as bright as usual, glimmering in the puddles in the street. With all the construction and scaffolding up there, it looks a bit like the Blade Runner set in the rain, if only there’d been more people. And everyone who was there worked in the area. The tourists have fled, despite Disney.

I met up with Jennifer DeMerrit almost immediately, and we made awkward small talk until Marcia showed up. It was good to see her again. She’d been planning to go on a trip in October with her aunt to Moscow, St. Petersberg, and Stockholm, but has canceled it now. Her aunt, however, is still going, brave soul. I don’t blame Marcia for deciding not to go, but I don’t know that I would have canceled either. It’s awfully close in time, (scheduled to leave on October 10th) but on the other hand, if you let horrible things keep you from doing anything, in this world we’d all be housebound agoraphobics. It’s such a great opportunity on the one hand, and such a risk, at the moment, on the other—not the flying so much as the location. I don’t know that I’d want to be in Russia right now.

I’m of two minds about going anywhere. Part of me would really like to be anywhere else right now, and another part of me doesn’t want to leave the city at all because it feels disloyal, like leaving a friend in the lurch. I’m relieved I don’t have to run home for Dad’s surgery, though I do need to go home and see them sometime. Just not Right Now.

The Laurie Anderson show, “Life on a String.” was . . . interesting, and I don’t mean that as a mealy-mouthed critique. I just don’t quite know how to describe it. I don’t know whether she tailored much of it last minute, but if she didn’t, she’s either strangely prescient or has a much darker mind than I do. The show, I thought, was loaded with images you could easily apply to the loss of the attack.

She did, in fact, open by dedicating the music to the “opportunity we all now have to examine the events of the last few weeks and react to them with commitment and compassion.” Parts of the show were funny, parts were sad, parts seemed trite to me, even though her use of cliche is very intentional, but overall, it was very, very beautiful. I’ve only heard “O Superman“ once, so I can’t say if she recast it, but I think she did. One piece in particular was a near-perfect verbal and musical description of, oh, Tribeca and the meatpacking district in particular, and what Soho used to be like, giving it that definite Blade Runnerish atmosphere that I’ve always loved, and that you only get in fall or spring in the rain, late at night, when the manholes are hissing up steam and nearly everyone but you is in bed.

Her electric violin’s got beautiful tone, even when she’s making it squawk and bark and jar. The opening, which reminded me of Alasdair Fraser at his most melancholy, had me in tears because it was so beautifully played, that something could be that beautiful in the midst of all this horror.

All around, it was a Blade Runnerish sort of day. On the train on the way home, I finally got a seat next to the window, facing backwards, which offers the best view of the city as you leave it. I almost wish I hadn’t. As we passed over one of the north-south avenues, I saw smoke and steam rolling up it from the site, and sensed the huge absence of the towers in the darkness. But it wasn’t even a complete darkness. In the void where the towers used to be is an inverted bowl of light, the glow of banks of halogen spotlights and neon torches that outlines everything around it in silhouette. I had thought before that the lights were on again in most of downtown, but I saw tonight that several buildings, including the Woolworth building, are still utterly dark, without even emergency lights in the stairwells. They were just dark hulks against that glow, with steam from the rain hitting the smoldering ruins of the towers roiling up from the site around them. The man sitting behind me had the same reaction I did, murmuring “Oh my God.” very softly. A scene from Dante, or Milton, by way of Ridley Scott.

The word for today on Anu Garg’s Word of the Day e-mail, was annus mirabilis. I can only think that John Dryden must have experienced something like this.

Friday, September 21, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn; Union Square, Manhattan; Flatiron District, Manhattan.
“…a million morons reading a million poems”

And after that, what kind of sleep can I expect?

Tossed and turned most of the night, woke up feeling drugged at about 11. E-mail has tapered off greatly, for which I’m alternately thankful and bereft. Kath sent me a really lovely one, which I’d seen before in various permutations about a Marine killed in Vietnam who carried through his life a slip of paper on which his 4th grade classmates had listed all the wonderful things they thought about him, written as part of an exercise. It ends this way:

The density of people in society is so thick that we forget that life will end one day. And we don’t know when that one day will be. So please, tell the people you love and care for that they are special and important. Tell them, before it is too late. . . .

I didn’t really want to go out to day, or even get up, but I had a bunch of things to do. In some ways, I’m glad I had things to get me out of the house, because I’m not sure I wouldn’t have just stayed in bed all day. Maybe that’s part of the reason I haven’t stopped writing this yet; it gets me out of bed. In truth, by 1:30, I was so anxious to get out that I left early. The time just seems to disappear lately. One moment it’s noon, the next it’s an hour and a half later, and I’ve done nothing. So I blew out of the house, no makeup, in sweats, anxious and frazzled. Michelle Levy was back at AKRF when I got in. She’d been in Chicago all week. The
first thing she did was alert me that there was a march for peace from Union Square to Grand Central, and much as I would have liked to go, I don’t have the energy right now.

Same goes for volunteering. I’ve begun to feel like I’m the one who really needs help at the moment. I’ve decided that if I don’t start sleeping and feeling better by Monday, I’m going to call one of the people whose numbers Christine left me and get a mental tune-up, some coping
mechanisms, and maybe some drugs, just to tide me over. I sure don’t feel in much shape to help anybody out, though I’d like to, and I’ve got the perfect opportunity:

Turns out a company we work with lost their office space when No. 7 toppled; everyone got out, but they have nothing of their business left: no files, no records, no equipment, no furniture, no nothing but manpower. So in a weird piece of serendipity, they’ve acquired new space in 902 Broadway—the building Bayard’s in. It didn’t register with me at first when Chaz mentioned this. Then it suddenly dawned on me that he’d said they were moving to 20th and Broadway and could I help them clean and redecorate their new place Saturday or Sunday?

It clicked suddenly because yesterday on the way out, the elevator had stopped at nearly every floor, whether someone had called it or not, including no. 7, where it opened on a completely unfinished space covered with drop cloths, and one lone person in a suit at a makeshift desk, working, with his
head in his hands. It was such a spooky sight, and yet only a moment, so I’d forgotten it until then. But it turns out the folks we know are moving to the 20th floor, and only got the space today. This must be going on all over the city. How weird that I should know the building though.

After picking up my stuff at AKRF, I headed over to Starbucks to finish up the work for the writing group, and was sort of eavesdropping on the conversation behind me. Successful-White-Businessman-in-a-Suit, who lives on Bleecker Street right across from the No. 6 stop, was saying to his buddy that, “New York is a picture of the world in miniature. We’ve got all colors, all religions, all economic classes, all backgrounds living together in one small place and we all pretty much get along with each other.”
which is true. We squabble and argue and do hurtful things to each other sometimes, but we all pretty much get along, because we have to, to make the city work, and because most people are more interested in their own lives than in others. It’s only when we start minding each others business that we seem to get into trouble, other than the just plain criminal type. It was heartening to hear someone else express the same sentiments I’ve thought for a long time, especially someone who spends his weekends in the
Hamptons.

I got the following e-mail and discussion from Emily today, under the subject line, “Poetry changes nothing, but . . .”:

I write to call your attention to the poetry webzine Can We Have Our Ball Back? It is now featuring a special edition of poems a propos or responding to the WTC disaster. Many are quite good poems. I find them somehow comforting and encouraging to read.

To which her friend Chris Adams replied:

Emily—

Thanks a lot.

However, I disagree somewhat with the “poetry changes nothing“ bit. It changes minds—or at least, has the potential to, don’tcha think? And the genesis of all the shit that went down last week was in someone’s mind, so...I dunno. I’m imagining one of those “million monkeys at a million typewriter” scenarios...or “a million morons reading a million poems” or something...sooner or later, it hits critical mass, and a great work is created, or discovered, a mind is changed, the results maybe even having some lasting social effect ... erm ... unnhhhh ... am I making any sense here?

Probably not. I guess what I’m attempting to say with my usual mixture of bewilderment and inarticulacy is maybe it’s a good idea to treat every action—thought, even—as having lasting effect, producing concentric reverberations that resonate through the cosmos. (I know it sounds like new age bullshit, but I still think it’s a great notion—the idea being that we never know how far our actions, how ever slight, tip the scales of consciousness.) One of those ancient oriental poets, Han Shan or Li Po, can’t remember which, expressed it like this:

Drinking a glass of green tea
I stopped the war.

Emily has kindly provided the reading material. To accompany it, a big round of green tea for everyone—my treat.
Over/Out
—Chris

I’m totally with Chris on this. So I ranted at Kath about it on the phone tonight. Poor Lou was getting it in stereo. And poor Kath’s been getting a hell of a lot of unloading from me. Despite this, both she and Lou were asking me to come down and stay with them, and Lou offered to come up and get me if I couldn’t get down there. I think I’m going down next weekend. I need a change of scene. It’s not that I feel unsafe, but I just need to be somewhere different right now, with friends who get it.

Saturday, September 22, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Slept pretty well last night. Still a little restless, but got up about 11 feeling like I’d actually gotten some rest. Amazing how that changes one’s whole perspective, getting enough sleep.

I’m catching up on my e-mail and my writing, and again I’m amazed at the community so many of the e-mail lists offer for people, in the midst of facelessness, and a freedom to express all opinions along the continuum of humanity.

For instance, there's the Word a Day list I mentioned earlier. It's run by Anu Garg, and Indian living in Cleveland (I think he teaches at Case Western Reserve). Who knew that the Smithsonian article on him would be so prophetic? In it, he’s quoted as saying, “I have a dream where society will replace guns with dictionaries.” This week, in the weekly newsletter, he posted reactions from all over the world, running the entire spectrum from sympathetic and apologetic to scornful and hateful. People from Vietnam, Iran, India, Argentina, New Zealand, Yugoslavia, Lebanon. These two, in particular, got to me:

From: Julie/Alex Hudson (ajson24@aol.com)
Subject: Re: united

Here in Cleveland, there is a large Muslim population. There have been racial remarks and aggressive attacks. Many business people fear for their shops. In our efforts for “united“ we heard about this incident.

A small boy, named Osama, was afraid to go to school. He stayed home for two days—Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday evening, his second grade classmates called him on the phone saying, “Do not be afraid to come to school. We will protect you and not let others hurt you“.

Bless the adults who guided the seven year olds and helped them find a way to express their caring.

And this one:

From: Mona (mannooch@hotmail.com)
Subject: New York

Dear humans,

I am a human too, specifically a Lebanese Muslim 22 year old girl. I saw what happened in New York, and I am not happy for you. Although I am not sad as well, but I can know exactly how you are feeling right now, just because we went through a number of disasters (a very large number indeed). The only thing I liked about this crisis is that finally the Americans are going through what we went through for years, but still you didn’t feel the same, because most of those who died are businessmen, they are not children, not families. what you are mostly sad about is seeing a famous and financially important quantity of cement and iron crushing down. During Israeli attacks we lost a lot of innocent people, a lot of our friends, a lot of mothers, a lot of people we love. Maybe you saw how Palestinians were celebrating after what happened, but you didn’t see a father holding his headless daughter, you didn’t see a child who was crying hysterically while seeing his mother and sisters shot, you didn’t see homes broken down over one happy family. All these persons were innocent. It’s just time to begin thinking that these are humans, and the irony is that you are humans too.

May you have my deepest condolences and I hope this will end pretty soon.

And finally, Anu’s signature:

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

-Thomas Jefferson, author, architect, and third U.S. president (1743-1826)

I wrote back to Mona, in a long letter I’m not going to quote, because it sounds like every other letter I wrote trying to disabuse people of their misconception that Americans and their government are the same thing; that we care more about our own tragedies than others; that we care more about things than people. It’s probably spitting in the wind; people believe what they want to believe, but I can’t not try. I wonder if I’ll hear from her? Lots of other people must have written to her, too, hopefully not nasty hateful messages. That’s the last thing we need right now.

Finally went to look at the Can We Have Our Ball Back? site that Emily recommended, as well. Jim Behrle, a friend of Emily’s, is
the editor, and has rounded up an interesting selection of poets and poems, including Robert Creeley. I think I like Jim’s even better than Creeley’s. I’m still glad that others have been able to write poetry in the aftermath of this.

Kath said last night that she’s thinks I’ve got some splinter of something in me that needs to come out before I can heal from this, and that I might have to heal around it before it works its way out. Maybe this will help.

I’ve spent entirely too much time at this today, but at least I’m caught up now, and I did manage to make some cinnamon barley soup this afternoon, even if I didn’t get my kitchen clean. Cooking is such a soothing occupation. I do, however, feel better than I have in quite a while, since this happened, except for a persistent stomach ache and low-grade nausea. It feels less like an ulcer, now that I think about it, than just a general sickness, soul sickness perhaps.

Sunday, September 23, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Long talk with Em yesterday, and no phone call to Kath, which felt weird, but I’m sure is fine. Slept badly again last night, with strange and very vivid dreams of being kidnapped. What woke me up in the middle of the night was the smell of fire on the wind again, which had shifted. I started writing haiku in my head to get back to sleep, but I don’t remember any of them.

Bad news this morning on the list from Majilique:

At 1:17 am, 9-23-01, the body of Sylvester Ann Hotly was removed from the rubble of the once mighty Tower 2 of the World Trade Center. From the brief inspection, I’m told she suffered both legs and her right arm broken.

Annie and I both speculate (and strongly feel) that she survived this horrific nightmare until just recently. Comparing notes, we found that both of us were awakened early Wednesday morning, at the same time, by the strange coincidence of our cell phones going off with messages in the “mail box“. There was nothing there but air, like an open line.

Yesterday, I was able to buy Time and Newsweek magazines. The photographs inside finally gave me a better perspective, compared to what has been shown of the tv, of what The Pile looked like. It’s frightening as hell!

Thank you to everyone who wrote me on and off list with their warm thoughts, hopes and prayers. They kept me strong through all of this. The nightmare has finally ended for my family, but not for so many others are as fortunate to have closure. Please continue with your prayers for them.

And here’s the drum I heard in Union Square the other night (from the WINS home page):

At the entrance to the park a lone Buddhist nun keeps an all-day vigil before a sea of candles. She chants her mournful prayer and beats her mournful drum, over and over, like a heartbeat.

Her name is Sister Ichikawa. She belongs to a small Japanese sect that dedicates its life to praying for peace in places of horror. A few years ago, she chanted the same prayer at Auschwitz.

I sent Em this journal yesterday and she seems to have plowed through the whole thing in one swell foop, then sent me an email response, which I quote in part:

I really like the issue of what The Event is supposed to be called—it is a real nomenclature problem. I keep hearing “the events of last week.” “recent events.” and of course the MTA announcement of “due to an ongoing investigation in Manhattan.” I hear myself saying “bombing” even though there wasn’t a bomb per se. “The Attack” sounds almost medical, and sensational. There doesn’t seem to be a good name for what happened, particularly locally, because still the local situation to me seems separate from the banner headlines on CNN of “Attack on America” or “America at War”. We need a name. I like The Explosions, as it conveys action without necessarily agency, and works on many levels, but it also sounds like a band that might have opened for The Jam. Again, the whole Pentagon thing is entirely off my radar except that I know it happened, but I have no particular feeling about or interest in it, other than the “oh how awful” one feels for newspaper accounts of disasters. (I am clearly such a heartless American that I not only don’t worry about foreign countries; I don’t even worry about other states.)

I also really felt for the ongoing “ends vs. means” debate in the political emails [edited from this version]; I had the same argument with Heather in the bar the other night. . . . One thing that . . . freaked me . . . was [Tim’s] anger that someone walking by the house was whistling—he thought it was criminal and unAmerican to whistle at a time like this!! It reminded me of an old Catholic superstition thing—that little girls used to be told not to whistle because it makes the Blessed Mother cry to hear girls whistle. (Weeping over unladylike behavior, I suppose.)

Turns out also that I’d completely misread her subject header in the “Can We Have Our Ball Back?” forward. She explains:

I also completely agree with thoroughly anti-academic Chris’s statements. My message header was supposed to be a quote, though it turns out I unfortunately and hastily misquoted, from Auden’s elegy for Yeats:

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

I love the last line of this: A way of happening, a mouth. That’s one of the many things poetry is, indeed. Em continues in her message:

I wish I had some good documentation on the way Arabs disappeared for a few days, just got off the streets. They are back on the streets now in Bay Ridge, so that is good. However, I ran out of cigarettes and milk about 1:30 this morning, and hesitated to go out to the all-night deli 5 blocks away, where before this I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Eventually I went anyway, without incident, plenty of people on the streets going to nightclubs and bars, which is actually good to see.

I would also like to see more about the overplay of “God Bless America” and its ilk, as ubiquitous as a McDonald’s ad. It is funny that as the country strives for some kind of cultural response, the corporatization of our culture is ever more laid bare. All our national symbols (flags and whatnot) have been appropriated, and the whole war thing seems in some way a promotional campaign for HBO’s latest Band of Brothers series, or Tom Brokaw’s latest book, or Tom Hanks saving Private Ryan again. Everything interwoven. Sometimes the collages of red white blue just remind me of car dealers’ sales flyers. Is Chevrolet the heartbeat of America? I forget. A panicked country shuts down its national monuments and also Disneyland.

Heard a guy on the TV today predicting how Americans will react to war. He said that 20 year olds are geared up and anxious to prove that their generation is the equal in courage and can-doism to the WW2 generation. (Which makes them the WW3 generation?) However, the talking head went on, there are real potential problems in those who were formerly known as Generation X, those in their 30s now, since they have been conditioned to skepticism by the 1970s and do not trust the government. He said this like it was a bad thing.

Fight the power,
Em

I signed my own note back to her “Yours, digging out my Question Authority button.”

Also got this note from Marcia, on a subject which I hadn’t thought about at all, and which saddens me almost as much as the loss of life. It must be especially painful for her, being a painter, and having worked closely with Louise Nevelson:

It’s reassuring that the arts haven’t been forgotten or given short shrift over the past week or so. In fact, on CNN today, they mentioned the more than $10 million of artwork that was also destroyed in the WTC disaster; works by Louise Nevelson, Lichtenstein, Juan Miro, Alexander Calder, to name a few.

Of course, I do not presume to minimize the unconscionable loss of life, but we also lost part of our spirit in those artworks. Let us not forget to reclaim and augment that necessary part of all our lives by continuing to expand, communicate, and share our individual (and of course group) artistic endeavors.

The thought of the Lichtensteins, Miros, and Calders, especially the latter—those big, beautiful, leggy pieces of whimsey—crushed and mangled or incinerated beneath the rubble is almost as bad as the thought of Maj’s sister in the same state. Art has its own life, Kath and I were just saying this morning, once you let it go, and it becomes part of so many people’s lives by itself. It’s another kind of bereavement, losing beauty this way.

Em was telling me about a book wherein the researcher had analyzed the accounts of torture people gave to Amnesty International and put forth the theory that one of the things that “breaks” people psychologically is that, most of the time, everyday household implements are used in torture and that this turns people’s own concept of reality against them, in part because they are reminded of the event each time they encounter those objects and that this then breaks down normality for them. Nothing is normal anymore. It literally deconstructs their world for them. I bring this up because I feel like that’s what’s happened now, with the terrorists using our own domestic aircraft against us, living among us on our own soil, in our own society. Reality is warped now. I can’t get the Bruce Cockburn phrase out of my head: The trouble with normal is it only gets worse.

On a lighter note, Kath dropped a plot bunny in my ear this morning that seems to have grabbed me, so I’m going to write a piece of fluff to get my mind off of this journal, which needs to wind down, as we get back to normal, whatever that is now.

Monday, September 24, 2001

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

Needed another day to get my head together, so I decided to stay home today. Going to go up to the grocery store and pick up a few things, and look for some cheap clothes too. The Dow is up 339 points, the NASDAQ up 73 at noon. It would be deeply ironic and a little sick if this turned into a huge boost to the economy.

Talked to Rob last night, who’s settling nicely into his new job as communications director for the Episcopal Archdiocese in Detroit. As always, he made me laugh a lot last night, as no one else does. It felt really good, too. I’ve needed it.

This journal is starting to feel unnecessary now, which is a good thing, I suppose. I’m getting interested in fiction and poetry again, in writing, in getting back to normal. In some ways that seems really wrong, and in others it seems absolutely necessary. The news has gone back to its normal patterns, not running the loops of the attacks all the time, just news-weather-sports and stupid commercials. The only difference I can hear is that there are more commercials for insurance companies with information on how to contact them if you’re a policy holder.

It’s cool and damp and cloudy today, sultry and brooding, the first not very sunny day we’ve had aside from the two days of downpours. The weather has, in some ways, made this an all the more horrible experience just by being so beautiful. One thing I haven’t mentioned here before is how compulsive I’ve been about opening all the blinds every day to let the light in. Usually I don’t care one way or the other, or keep the them closed in the summer when it’s hot. Every day, whether I’ve been staying home or not, I’ve opened the blinds first thing out of bed, not to see out, but to have light outside to combat the darkness inside me.

I’ve been terrified all along that this would plunge me into another depression, and for a few days I thought it had, but I think I’ve managed to fight it off now.

Up on Fifth Avenue here in Brooklyn, everything looks the same: Latinas strutting their stuff and the homeboys drooling over them; Muslim women in chadors, pushing baby carriages; Chinese people filling their bags with veggies for dinner, the few stray white NYU students buying hangars in the grocery store.
Flags everywhere.

Later:

Here’s the first of the personal repercussions: Cathy just called me from South Carolina. She’s lost her job in the wake of the WTC catastrophe, almost a week to the moment after it. She’s talking about catching a ride up here with a friend and I hope she does. It would be really good to see her.

Gruhn e-mails me this, by way of something lighter:

Yesterday, in the theatre district, I watched and heard the following interaction which made me giggle and know life is slowly returning to normal.

A man was looking over a variety of patriotic paraphernalia being sold on a street table. (These are now all over the city) The man began to question the prices and why certain buttons were more expensive than others, etc. He was definitely interested in haggling a little. The vendor began to get a tad peeved, and said in exasperation—“HEY! BUDDY! Come ON! This (pointing to all the stuff) is AMERICA!

The man responded at once, and even louder—“HEY! BUDDY! THIS IS NEW YORK!

It certainly is.

Six Months Later

Jacob’s Ladder

At 6:55 PM on March 11, 2002, 88 powerful spotlights were aimed skyward from
the site of the Twin Towers and switched on in the early evening’s darkness
to commemorate the fallen, both flesh and stone, in a temporary and ephemeral
monument.

Look! Six months later
on a cold, almost-spring night
when the air holds breath like smoke,
two lances of light hurl themselves heavenward,
up and up
taller than the buildings whose absence they mark,
rising as those too too solid bodies fell,
converging finally to smash themselves as one
against the high and misty confines of earth.

“You can’t see anything from here,”
the woman beside me on the corner says.
I turn to show her, shake her

As I am shaken, weeping
as I walk through the park

seeing that light
behind where the Flatiron’s prow cleaves way from way,
But she has already turned away, unseeing.

Still the light rises regardless, scattering itself against the field of stars,
Warning, plea, gravemarker all at once.
I arrive home and find it looming where not long ago
the exclamatory comet hung like the omen
our ancestors thought it was.
I wonder if we have come that far, no matter
our light hides greater ones from our night gaze.
Who sees it out there? And what?
—two lights stabbing upward, joining finally, filled with souls and memory
a sign, a message:

Look what’s happened here.
Help us—we are lost and stupid and proud,
and we cannot climb out of our own darkness.

Help us. Make us see.

© Lee Kottner 2002
This poem appears in Stories From the Ruins

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

In the Shadow of Giants

One year ago today, I was frantically e-mailing and calling people I love to make sure they knew I was okay and that they were okay too.

In the meanwhile, it’s become clear that our national security agencies are a joke. Not only do they passively not communicate with one another, they actively refuse to share information. They’re also sorely lacking in analytical thinkers and linguists. (Guess why? Fewer liberal arts grads! Duh!)

We’ve had a domestic terrorist copycat sending around envelopes of “weapons-grade” anthrax spores that have killed a couple of people. We’ve bombed what little was left of Afghanistan, allegedly chasing al Qaeda out of their refuge there, but not actually killing anybody important. (The one truly good thing to come out of that was the freeing of Afghanistan’s women from imprisonment, starvation, slavery, and human rights abuses under the Taliban.) Doing so, we’ve alienated much of the Arab world, that which wasn’t already alienated.

We’ve also had to endure simplistic and ridiculous Cold War rhetoric from Dubya, who has named an Axis of Evil, reminiscent of both the Axis powers of World War II (but not so clear-cut) and Ronald Reagan’s comic book Evil Empire. We now have, or will shortly have, an Office of Homeland Security. Heil Dubya! No, wait—wrong century. Welcome to Amerika.

On top of all this, the economy has gone down the toilet. A coupl of months after the attacks, Bayard let me go because there were just no ads. Nobody was hiring, many of the dot.coms were dot.gone, lots of folks out of jobs. I’m getting by with AKRF okay, but I’m out of health insurance right now (and
had to cough up $112 for a month’s supply of Claritan), since Aetna dropped the International Women Writers Group because they didn’t fit the insurance company definition of a “group.” How, I’m not sure. Even if they'd kept us on, the premiums had jumped from $250/month when I started two years ago to more than $400/month this year. Must be all that 9/11 trauma and PTSD counseling costs they're getting hit with.

I’m really a little afraid for the city, we’re so much in the hole. I’d hate to see it slip back to what it was in the 70’s and 80’s. I might have to leave, then. Although, oddly enough, a survey says that more people want to stay here now than did during the boom 90’s when crime was so bad. Drive-bys scare us, but terrorists don’t. Yay us!

The week leading up to the memorial services at Ground Zero, where all nearly 3,000 names of the dead were read, one by one, has been a media circus of mind-numbing proportions. I’ve done my best not to look at any of it. I’ve been increasingly jumpy and apprehensive the closer the anniversary’s gotten, and came down with a cold last week, in part because I think I was stressing more than I realized. Last night, finally, I had a little meltdown, and I’ve been iredeemably sad all day.

I know I’m not the only one. Mel called me last night to let me know Dave was home and wouldn’t be flying today, which made me feel better, and she sounded pretty subdued too. Around midnight last night, I sent out a copy of “Jacob’s Ladder“ to most of my friends on e-mail. I’ve only gotten a few responses, which doesn’t surprise me, considering I gave everybody the out of not reading it. One from Elizabeth, which I quote in full, as it seems rather heartening:

Thank you for the poem. You must explain to me, as I have not seen very much about Ground Zero—did they have searchlights there? I have to say that this anniversary seems to [have] affected the young thugs I teach. They are more moved and touched than by the minute’s silence we hold for Armistice day in November for the millions who died in the World Wars. We were all told to hold a minute’s silence in class today at 1.46 our time. The kids kept reminding me. It seemed somehow one good thing from all the horror that our young people who seem so desensitised to violence and so blase about the plight of others were keen to show their respect and support to those who died and to those who continue to suffer from the consequences.

Would that it had changed the world as we were told it would. If anything these events seem to have made people more entrenched. We in the UK are even closer allies with you in the US and the hardline Muslim fundamentalists are just as, if not more, filled with hate for the ways of the West. When will we learn what the legacy of hate is?

I shall think of you with your public readings—how astonishing that sounds. To have a voice and something worth saying to the world—now that is something you have to stop the madness. I in the meantime will return to trying to educate the great unwashed, the philistines and barbarians of the East Midlands!

My love to you—glad to know you are still safe and well and the muse is still with you.

Elizabeth

Paul says this in his email, pretty much summing up how I’ve been all day.

Flee,

…didn’t think I’d be as emotional today as I am! I “lost it” several times in the car this morning - on my way to work. The second moment of silence, a tribute to the second fallen tower, really got to me! Like you, I’d like to put it behind me, but can’t. There were too many people that died to ever forget about 9-11!

…hope all is well!

Love,

Paul

And Steven, at work today, managed to voice the thing I’d been thinking all day, how you want to say “Happy 9/11” just to acknowledge it, but obviously that’s just not right. What do you say? “Unhappy 9/11”?

But I nearly had the real meltdown on the train on the way home tonight. Canal Street, W Train: Young guy, early 20’s, blond, in great shape, full of life and the certain immortality of that age, gets on with a beautiful and very expensive mountain bike. As we’re going over the bridge, I notice he’s wearing a Fire Department T-shirt. Not only a Fire Department T-shirt, but one that says “1st class 2002—In the Shadow of Giants.”

Gah.

Saturday, September 14, 2002

I Spy

They've caught Mohammed Atta’s old roommate, the alleged 20th hijacker who supposedly helped plan the attack. Atta’s become the one-man focus of fear and hatred in the past year. You never hear about the other hijackers, just him.

At the same time, there’s been an alleged terrorist cell busted up in Buffalo. Five American-born men, accused of giving material support to terrorists, whatever that means. I can’t help wondering if the men Dennis saw on the plane on his way up to Syracuse, the ones he was so vehement about reporting to the FBI, were part of it. Hearing about it made me remember how angry he was, when we were all sitting around talking the week after, at work, and how amazed and rather frightened I was by the transformation in him.

Yesterday, three medical students were stopped on their way to Miami, after a woman in Georgia overhead them in a cafe making jokes about 9/11. Two of them were naturalized citizens, all of them of Eastern or Middle Eastern background. Part of me wonders if that would have happened up here, or only in the South, as though bigotry doesn’t exist up here. It was an almost knee-jerk reaction to hearing a southern female voice describing what she’d heard the men say. What do you call that? Meta-bigotry?

I feel sorry for the men who were picked up, especially in the south. I don’t imagine they got a very nice reception. Or at least not the kind of reception that the nice white people who work at AKRF have gotten from the local cops and FBI when picked up for photographing, say, power plants, or waterworks for the Con Edison and Catskill Watershed projects, i.e., the “Sorry, we're just doing our job”
wink-wink nudge-nudge “we know you’re not really a terrorist” apology. I remember how glad we were that it wasn’t Mohammed who’d been doing the photographing. We might never have gotten him out again, Ph.D. or not, considering he’s from Egypt. Or Cathy’s sweet, sweet friend Rusi, from India. Or quiet, harmless, kind Adnan, from Pakistan, whom Marcia started calling Dadnan when his first child was born here.

The scariest part of this, for me, was hearing people in Times Square interviewed about whether they'd do the same thing this woman in Georgia did. Would they turn in someone who was making “suspicious comments”?

Every one of them said yes.

I hate this. I freakin’ hate this. It’s disgusting and evil to go around suspecting other people of wrongdoing simply because of their color and nationality. We never learn to stop doing it.

Sunday, September 15, 2002

Grand Reopening

All the subway stations that were demolished, destroyed, or damaged by 9/11 are reopening today, except for the 1 & 9 and A & C World Trade Center stops, which are now merely stretches of covered tunnel running beneath the site. This means the N & R Cortlandt Street station will be open when I go to work tomorrow, which is going to be really strange and a little eerie. I almost want to get off there and see what it looks like. I might be able to stand it now.

I’m still amazed at how quickly we’ve cleaned up. Such a contrast between this crime scene and mess the narcs left behind when they tossed the apartment downstairs. Our door still doesn’t close right.

I wonder if they’ll take down the flags?

Monday, September 16, 2002

Seeing Daylight

It’s creepy seeing sunlight at the top of the exit stairs in the downtown Cortlandt Street station. The exit is truncated, with two stairways leading onto the street, where it used to be a long hallway leading into the shopping mall basement of the south tower. Now it’s the edge of a big hole in the ground.

The flags are gone.

Wednesday, September 18, 2002

Look Away

Apparently there’s a statue at Rockefeller Center that was originally intended as a memorial but has caused so much trauma that it’s now covered and in the process of being removed. I haven’t seen it, but even hearing it described on the radio, I don’t know quite what to think. I don’t like art censorship, or censorship of almost any kind, for that matter, although I understand the need for discretion in certain situations involving national security. I don’t always agree with who gets to decide the criteria in that case, or on the decisions they make, but I do understand that it’s a tough call.

Censorship of art is entirely another matter. It’s just wrong. The whole Robert Mapplethorpe debacle in Cincinnati? Shameful. Nobody held a gun to anyone’s head and made them look at those photographs if they didn’t want to. Same with our esteemed ex-mayor Giuliani trying to cut off the Brooklyn Musuem’s funds for showing art that might offend Catholics. I mean, I think the Pope can probably take it. And if it really torques God, He doesn't need Rudy’s help to do something about it.

I think part of the purpose of art is to challenge us to think about things differently, which means it isn’t always pretty, nor should it be—like the sculpture called “Nuclear War Head” I saw in the Chicago Institute of Arts that was simply an oversized, terra cotta head, mildly representational, pocked and burned and ravaged, toothless, bleeding, ulcerated, ugly and deeply powerful. The statue in Rockefeller Center sounds something like that: a representational life-size figure of a naked woman, falling from one of the towers head first, at the moment of impact.

I cannot imagine anything more horrific, more tasteless, more emblematic of what we went through, more shocking, more outrageous, more true.

Part of me wants the statue removed pronto. Part of me thinks the artist got it just right. Part of me thinks he was nucking futs to make something like that. Part of me wants to see it. I read at least two essays during the anniversary week about people jumping from the towers. One of them focused on exactly the same man I did in my poem, “Each Step is a Fall, Arrested.” That’s a powerful, awful moment.

Should people passing through that public space have to look at it every day? Probably not. But we saw it once and couldn’t look away. Now we can. Better to have that choice, and remember when we didn’t.

Saturday, September 21, 2002

Look Away, Part 2

Finally found a picture of the offending statue to get a look at it. It’s by Eric Fischl, called Tumbling Woman. I’m having a hard time finding anything offensive about it, at least from the pictures. Perhaps it’s one of those pieces that’s context sensitive. From this angle, the woman doesn’t even look like she’s falling, necessarily. It’s too graceful, too neat. I can’t see the expression on the face, which might really be the problem, but it doesn’t remind me of people jumping from the towers at all, especially since she’s nude. But it’s really the attitude of the body that doesn’t work for me in that respect.

Which is not to say I don’t think it’s a successful piece, or good art. But it leaves me indifferent. Funny. I wonder what I’m missing, what other people are seeing that’s so upsetting.

What an anticlimax.

Two Years Later

Wait a minute, I have to get my flameproof gear on here . . . I'm about to write something really inflammatory, so be forewarned.

We got some very good news recently: There are 40 fewer people on the list of World Trade Center casualties than we thought. That's excellent. The number is still incomprehensible—2,752—but at least it's 40 fewer than we thought it was. Any reduction is miraculous, considering how many people were in the towers when they were hit and how many more rushed in to save those unable to rush out. The total is a little less than the number of people who will fit on two 10-car subway trains. Two rush-hour trains of the dead. About a third of the population of the podunk town I grew up in.

I follow the 9/11 tidbits in the news kind of obsessively, as I imagine most New Yorkers do. I check the Times every day, and for my job, I look at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.'s (LMDC) site to see what's happening today with the World Trade Center site. It's not surprising that there's contention over the final design of the site, with so many competing interests down there. First off, the site's owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The buildings were leased to Larry Silverstein, who's still trying to collect the insurance money on them, as soon as the cheapskate insurance companies will fork over for two separate attacks, one on each building (their belief is that it was one attack and they only owe for one building; go figure). That's where most of the money for the new buildings is coming from. But there's also federal money coming in for the permanent PATH station to replace the temporary one that's there now, and for the new Fulton Street Transit Center that will link the PATH and all the subway lines near there, and for the repair and finishing of the section of Route 9A/West Street behind the towers that was damaged when they fell.

So you have the Port Authority, the Metropolitan Transit Authority/NYCT, NYSDOT, the feds, Larry Silverstein, the Governor, the Mayor, a council of business people affected by 9/11, architects, civic organizations, ordinary residents, developers, green building organizations—and the families of the victims. I've been writing about this train wreck of organizations and competing interests for work, which is how I know this stuff and I have to say it's amazing that it's gotten as far as it has with so many cooks stirring the soup. This seems to be due in part to the amazing powers of mediation being practiced by the folks at LMDC (for whom I do not work, in the interests of disclosure). They're doing an incredible amount of public outreach, of the kind never seen before for any kind of project in the city, as well as coordinating between all these agencies and the interests of the ordinary citizens who live down there.

What amazes me (here it comes) is how much power the families of the victims are wielding in what goes where on the 16 acres of what used to be the World Trade Center plaza. They've basically dictated that nothing will be built in the footprints of the towers themselves, including the existing PATH tracks that run beneath what used to be the south tower, regardless of expense. The footprints of those two buildings are basically being treated as grave sites, although they have been stripped and excavated almost to the bedrock and anything that might have been vaguely recognizable as human remains was carted off to Fresh Kills to be sifted through, and then returned to next of kin, if possible, or buried there. So if there are any remains that aren't ash or organic molecules, they're in Fresh Kills, across the bay, or trapped in the the ductwork of adjacent buildings, or blown across the river or in the lungs of thousands of people who worked there in the aftermath.

To qualify how harsh this sounds, let me say that I understand these people are grieving and that I can't possibly understand their depth of feeling, because I didn't lose anyone. I acknowledge that. I'll also be the first to admit that I have a complete lack of sentimentality when it comes to the remains of loved ones. When the spirit of life is gone from the body, so is whatever made that person who they were. What's left is a collection of organic chemicals best used for fertilizer or as organ donations, where possible. I'm sentimental about what they've left in objects, things they've said to me, my own memories, not about the bone house itself. That's not them, anymore, as far as I'm concerned.

But given that, those footprints are still not the final resting place of those people. If it's anywhere, it's Fresh Kills, where there's going to be a beautiful memorial mound built, as the landfill is transformed into a nature preserve (that's another ironic story altogether). Working around their requests isn't a hardship, for the most part, and Libeskind's done a beautiful job of it. I'm sure whoever wins the memorial competition will, too. It only becomes a problem when you get to moving the PATH train tracks or figuring out how to accommodate all those visitors and their buses, and where to find enough land to make the site pay for itself without having it become so incredibly dense with retail and commercial space that it's worse than it was before. Then it starts to seem . . . well, like there's a bit of "big fish in small pond" going on.

To give this a slightly different perspective, too, I'll bring up the African Burial Ground. This was ten years in the making, and while it did finally involve the abandonment of the building plans for the site, there were actual, physical human remains involved, not just an empty space. I would argue that the footprints are being treated very differently than these actual burial grounds. They are, at best, symbolic, and are being treated as literal graves. This seems really conterproductive to me as well as counterintuitive.

In some ways, this goes back to some of the issues I wrote about in "Owning 9/11": does proximity to the event grant one special rights to interpret it? As I said there, yes and no. There's no denying that the more intimate one's experience with the event was, the more sharply felt it's got to be, and the more unchallengable that personal experience becomes for people who were more distant from it. In a sense, the people inside that event own it. But that doesn't make any other experience of it less legitimate. But what kind of power does that "first right" of interpretation give people?

First, there's the question of whether being the victim's families gives these people the "first right" or not. I'm certainly not saying it doesn't give them a special status. It does. Their loved ones were innocent victims of a horrendous act of war. What they're doing is speaking for people who can't speak for themselves.

I guess what I'm really asking is should the victim's families, in light of the facts that (a) they, by definition, weren't there on site when 9/11 was happening, and (b) that the site itself contains only minuscule amounts of, if any, actual human remains have so much say in what happens to the site? 9/11 affected everyone in the country, to varying degrees. How do we decide who gets to say how that site is treated?

I don't have any answers for this, it's just a question I've been mulling over while watching the negotiations and finagling and back and forthing. The site is a giant turf war of competing interests and I don't know how anything will ever get worked out there. If you're interested in following it, here are a few good places to look:

Gotham Gazette's Rebuilding NYC
The Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York
Imagine New York
New York New Visions
Rebuild Downtown Our Town (R.DOT)
Green Ground Zero

Remembering, Three Years Later

The first time the memorial lights appeared:

Jacob’s Ladder

Look! Six months later
on a cold, almost-spring night
when the air holds breath like smoke,
two lances of light hurl themselves heavenward,
up and up
taller than the buildings whose absence they mark,
rising as those too too solid bodies fell,
converging finally to smash themselves as one
against the high and misty confines of earth.

“You can’t see anything from here,”
the woman beside me on the corner says.

I turn to show her, shake her

As I am shaken, weeping
as I walk through the park

seeing that light
behind where the Flatiron’s prow cleaves way from way,
But she has already turned away, unseeing.

Still the light rises regardless, scattering itself against the field of stars,
Warning, plea, gravemarker all at once.
I arrive home and find it looming where not long ago
the exclamatory comet hung like the omen
our ancestors thought it was.
I wonder if we have come that far, no matter
our light hides greater ones from our night gaze.
Who sees it out there? And what?
—two lights stabbing upward, joining finally, filled with souls and memory
a sign, a message:

Look what’s happened here.
Help us—we are lost and stupid and proud,
and we cannot climb out of our own darkness.

Help us. Make us see.

This will be the last time anyone but construction workers has access to the slurry wall and lowest foundations of the original towers until the new memorial is finished in 2009. The remains of anyone killed in the attacks have been atomized by physics or turned to smoke in the chemistry of fire three years ago, but the symbolism of place endures. Those of us in the city when it happened breathed that smoke and the fine debris and carry a tiny part of those people who perished with us in our own chemistry.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Requiescant In Pace.

Four Years Later

On High

A flock of white birds
wheeling against a grey sky
calls for towers—
not the flat brick rooftops of Bronx projects
on view from my window,
their cisterns like prison blockhouses.
In that concerted, graceful turning
I see a London skyline
daggered with steeples,
and somewhere a man watching, too, like me,
across the ages: Pepys at his diary pages
perhaps, following the motion
of mourning doves through his window, or
contemplating the smoke of the Great Fire
that brought down Old St. Paul’s soaring spire.

Here in this new city named and renamed
for two in the old world,
migrating birds lost their way
and their lives among our towers,
confused by the glass, the lights at night,
the sheer height and wind shear
and their own reflections.
Another fire toppled those pillars too,
brought to them on wings
meant for other destinations.
In their own intercontinental flights, the birds
pass lightly through that empty space now
without memory of what once hindered them,
while on the ground, we squabble and peck
about what to build in the towers’ place
to raise us high enough to meet
the same uplifting wind.

–In remembrance, New York City, 2005

Reflecting, Five Years Later

Five years. I can hardly believe it's been that long. And I wonder at the same time why that seems such a significant marker. Because it's half a decade? It's funny how we give certain spans of time importance over others. Six months. A year. Five years. Ten. Twenty. Twenty-five. And the leap to 50, to 75, to the century mark, when all of us who lived to see this will be, despite miraculous medical advances, dead, most likely, and this will be just another moment in history, rather than a significant moment in our personal history, a "where were you when . . .?" moment.

I can't bring myself to call this an anniversary. Anniversaries should be for happy occasions in my mind. Calling it that strips the event of its portentousness, its horror, its sadness. Yet there's no other word in English for it. And because it's five years, there are reminders everywhere, more than usual, coupled with a new bickering about interpretation and what, exactly, happened, and I find myself remembering and thinking more than I really want to, and sitting in tears at what comes back. In those five years, I thought I'd moved past it, because God knows I've had enough else going on in my life since then, that's been equally uncontrollable. But, I suspect that, like many New Yorkers who were here that day, it's much closer to the surface than we expected, even after all this time and all this change.

Five years ago, I still lived in Brooklyn. Five years ago, we had no Axis of Evil. Five years ago, Kath and I were still fast friends. Five years ago we still had civil rights. Five years ago, I had a different job. Five years ago torture wasn't an official U.S. policy. Five years ago, Peri was still married to a nice man and struggling artist who hadn't seen a flaming fuselage and dead bodies. Five years ago, only the phobic were afraid to fly. Five years ago I still had parents. Five years ago citizens weren't disappearing as though they lived under a fascist dictator. Five years ago I'd never made a book by hand. Five years ago, we weren't at war. Five years ago, it was all so ordinary for us here, in New York, in this country. Five years ago. Five years.

So little time, so much change.

None Untouched

Some of us it broke,
the ones who were already fragile,
or who thought themselves
the center, and could not hold
in this new and sudden vortex.
Some were made the center
by character and action
or unwittingly by chance
and bore it with a fierce grace.
Some it brought a moment of clarity
wrapped in smoke and ash.
Some it plunged into darkness,
or made their own lurking night starless, moonless,
unnavigable.
Some, who’d known war, it brought
memory,
and to those who hadn’t,
revelation.
Some rose to the occasion,
some fell
never to rise again.
Many slates were wiped clean.
Some lost love, and a few gained only fear
and a new shrillness.
Some seized the opportunity
for power and acquisition
disguising it as vision, while
many of us, wandering, inhaled the dust of demolition
and cremation,
leaving more than lungs scarred,
and the memory of a hot electric stench
that will never mean anything else.

Just this one event
to tumble everything we thought we were
into everything we truly were
before, making us
what we are now,
after.

–September 7, 2006, NYC
© Lee Kottner, 2006

Requiescat in pace.

"Be the change you want to see in the world."
–Mahatma Gandhi

Year Six

I'm doing two things today, both significant: I'm going shopping for a cocktail dress for a friend's wedding and afterwards, I'm going up to the New-York Historical Society to see Here is New York: Remembering 9/11. If it seems disrespectful to go shopping on a day like this, so be it. The thing about death is that life goes on around it, no matter how much we would like the world to stop and howl with us. I'm not saying that we should forget, but that we should let go and move on. It's starting to become like the widow who flings herself onto the coffin and won't let go. It was a shocking murder of over three thousand people, but no more shocking a murder than the more than half a million Iraqis who've died since the war started.

That said, I give you this:

Nothing Epic

The City rebuilds itself on its own ashes,
like Troy on Troy,
this burned-out hulk where cop and fireman died
herding the innocents
no different from the charcoal plain
left beneath centuries more of new habitation in Anatolia.
Except—
without a Homer to name their names,
call their metaphorical attributes,
and send them in perpetuity
to the smoking site
with their doomed engines of salvation,
who will know them fifty, a hundred years hence?
Already we forget the names—if we ever knew them—
of the soldiers new-fallen in Assyria's ashes
by the waters of Babylon,
the half-million citizens
dead of our retribution
against a false enemy.

No bells toll
so read the names,
but read them all: Agamemnon, Father Mike, Hector,
the footsoldiers, Spartans, Amazons,
Greka, Moreno, Jimenez (dead in Akkadia),
the cops, the firemen, the EMTs,
the lawyers, brokers, office workers,
Helen and Cassandra,
the busboys, janitors, CEOs, salesmen, and after,
the volunteers, rescuers, dismantlers
still choking on the dust and ash.

All that’s missing is the gods
and even they forget
or don’t care.

© Lee Kottner 2007

Depraved Indifference

If you lived in or were visiting New York City during 9/11, you need to read this article, "The 9/11 Cover-Up," in Discover right now. This is especially true if if you were downtown or in Brooklyn at the time or have lived below Canal Street since then. It will explain why you've got a cough, why you haven't felt the same since then, and probably why you're going to get seriously sick in the future. It's also the most perfect example I can think of for why everyone should know a little biology, a little chemistry, just enough to know that breathing particulate matter of any sort is not healthy, whether it's in cigarette smoke or demolition dust. It would be nice, too, if we had some vague idea of the materials used in our everyday world as well. Better living through chemistry and all that.

I don't like to be a know-it-all, but even if I hadn't been working for an environmental consulting firm at the time, I do know enough science that my first thoughts about the air down there would still have been the same: it's not safe and it's not going to be for a long time, or without a professional hazardous waste clean-up. Not when everything in both buildings was pulverized so finely that very little organic remains were found, and burned so hot that it evaporated and aerosolized. When buildings of that size turn to dust and are thrown high into the air, blanketing an entire area and getting into ductwork and HVAC systems, then never properly cleaned, how can that be healthy?

More importantly, why would you believe anyone who told you it was? How can you look at this picture of what the Twin Towers became as they fell down and think that opaque, billowing mess was safe to breathe? Or that what it left behind was harmless? As they did with Katrina, the government failed to do its job in a truly negligent manner, one that smacks of depraved indifference.

The big question is why the EPA, Christy Todd Whitman, and Rudy Giuliani lied about it. Why did the EPA do such a slip-shod analysis? Why did the White House suppress what information they had about the conditions and make it all seem all right? Was it simply not to give Osama the satisfaction of know exactly how much damage his operatives had done? Did Bush et al think that was never going to come out? Or did they think it wouldn't come out until their terms were over and it didn't matter anymore?

And people wonder why I'm such a cynic.

Year Seven: One Good Eye

Seven years after two jetliners hit the Twin Towers, people are still dying from it.

In one go, almost 3,000 people died there in the towers and the planes that hit them, incinerated, blown apart, crushed, choked or leaping to their deaths to avoid the flames. Forty died in a downed plane in Pennsylvania. At the Pentagon, 189 on the ground and in the hijacked plane died. The total doesn't include the many rescue workers who are dying now of respiratory illnesses incurred after they were assured by their own government that the air was safe to breathe. Who knows how many more of them, and the local residents, will develop future illnesses attributable to those lies?

And how was this act answered? Not with diplomacy, with self-examination, with the thoughtful remedies of civilization. No, it was answered with more violence springing out of lies and deceit connecting a regime our government didn't like with this atrocity to provide an excuse to invade another country which had shown us no aggression and which was, essentially, unarmed.

The events of 9/11 and what they led to have now killed approximately 100,000 people, including 87-94,000 Iraqi civilians at last count (although some sources place it as high as 151,000), 4,155 US casualties in Iraq, 584 US military personnel in Afghanistan, and a total of 690 non-US coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. This doesn't even take into account the thousands wounded in the conflict on both sides. (If you'd like a visual representation of just the US numbers, click here.)

The US has been directly responsible for more than three times the number of deaths Osama bin Laden caused. It's also responsible for the violation of its own founding principles, for slashing the civil rights of its own citizens, of starting us down the slippery slope toward a police state and for the rape and pillage of another country. Our so-called leaders, whether you believe they were rightfully elected or not, have sanctioned the war crimes of torture and indefinite incarceration and led us into a war that will take us years to get out of, and which has stirred up more ill-will toward the US than almost anything we've done. There is more blood on US hands from 9/11 than on the people who planned the terrorist attacks.

How is that ever going to fix anything? Have any of these actions really made us better? Or safer? And aren't we bigger than mere power hunger? Than opportunism? Than petty vengeance?

Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." I'm not sure we still have even one good eye left.