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.

Comments

[Martina Frei]

hey I came across your blog on my resurch about 9/11 volunteers that I do for my school paper.I was wondering if you would be able to answere me a few questions.
Thanks already