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.
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