Crazy Sorrow

by Vince Passaro

  He was worried for his camera: he’d bought two years prior a refurbished F4, an auto-everything camera and was shooting with it the 28–105mm AF lens. He had a manual-focus 20mm with him and would use it. He had twenty or so rolls of Kodak 400 color print film and he knew it wasn’t nearly enough. The F4 loaded automatically: if he could get it out of the goddamned dust. Wasn’t there a Calumet down here somewhere? Maybe they’d let him in and give him a can of Dust-Off and some more film…

  He never found the Calumet.

  But god bless Nikon, the camera still worked. He took some shots out the windows including one of a man bent over, one arm slung over his head trudging northward in the storm of destruction like some old-time blizzard shot you’d see in the archives. He had a contact at the Washington Post he wanted to call to say he’d have the pictures but he knew there’d be no service down here, land or cell. He’d have to get himself uptown to a landline before too long—though if he left he would not get back in. In the end he just walked into the offices of the Times and the New Yorker and gave them pictures. It worked out.

  In the bank no one spoke. Some, he could see as his eyes adjusted to the light, were quietly crying, or had been. Others just stared into space; that expression on their faces, like Bobby Kennedy’s in the picture of him at JFK’s funeral, a blank mask, no one home, whoever lived there had moved away—far, far away. He would see this expression on people all day. Stunned into silence.

  * * *

  PEOPLE WANTED NUMBERS. How many? The mayor that night, normally to George’s view a vicious and small-minded man, a definite prosecutor and an old-school Catholic priest rolled into one, with similar sexual peccadillos it turned out later, somehow found within himself one evening of grace and responded: Whatever the number is, it will be more than we can bear.

  This was the difference between cities and nations. People outside the city, Americans, responded with love of country that turned within hours to hysteria and ignorance and militarism and destruction; conspicuous flag-flying, which always, in George’s lifetime, signified the desire that Americans go somewhere distant and kill large numbers of brown-skinned people. This time would be no different: the president threatened and the jets flew within days.

  New Yorkers, though, responded with affection and grief for their city and, for as long as such was permitted in the general clamor for war, they created a community of the most loving and generous kind, an expression of a civic personality like nothing George had seen or could have imagined. He didn’t hear a word about revenge, retribution, patriotism. This terrible event had happened: in many ways they all knew, but didn’t say, that it had been inevitable, that they’d all at one time or another expected something like it, though not on that scale; that American foreign policy, like Malcolm X’s famous chickens, had come home to roost. He heard kindness, he heard help, he heard encouragement with emphasis on the actual root word, courage. People reached out for one another in extraordinary ways.

  * * *

  THE FIRE BURNS as the novel taught it how… Beneath the rubble the fires burned for weeks, while men clambered around the surface looking for survivors. In the early days the steelworkers were going through a pair of boots every day, the bottoms melting down from the heat beneath their feet. Sometimes, and with less frequency each day, a set of two sharp whistles would go up and people called from all sides Quiet! Quiet! and everyone would stop—a thousand men some days would stop—the machines would stop, everything, and the deepest, always-shocking silence befell them; most of the men would remove their headgear, their helmets, and wait, while another body or part of a body was carried out on a stretcher. Every time.

  No one George knew had been deeper in it than Arthur, not just that day but for weeks after—and whenever Arthur thought about it later he would lose his shit, yes, break down. But while he was there—he put in ten days or so done up to look like one of the workers, shooting with a borrowed Leica he could keep under his shirt—he shot the pictures. He shot the pictures of the men carrying out the stretchers, of the men above him high atop the mangled peaks of the rubble, silhouetted against the magnesium-white light of the construction kliegs and ghostly in the dust. They looked like astronauts and soldiers and Spanish Conquistadors.

  * * *

  THERE WAS NO describing the smell downtown in those weeks, poisoned, sharp, vicious, it felt so tangible you thought you could cut it up into acrid squares and wrap it in butcher paper.

  Yet George wanted it. Brown was providing coffee, tea, and food to the workers, so George was able to get himself onto a list of volunteers doing overnights three times a week at St. Paul’s Chapel, which was their respite center. He didn’t wish to leave this place. That smell was his, it was his pain, it made real as the eerie white light made real the dream of the towers falling, shown over and over, falling, falling, falling.

  St. Paul’s was just north of the site, which everyone now called Ground Zero though he would not; a rage was building in him at the comfort people were taking in all things military. Even those who disliked it hardly dared whisper against it. Patriotism was all, the Correct American Response, but he could not share in it. He could not understand a culture, a society, a country, that had so opposed war twenty-five years ago and so loved it now. He had never seen a flag enthusiast who was against war, who did not in fact approve of killing, the browner and more distant the victim, the higher the rate of approval. Anger was spreading in him like a virus and making him sick.

  He could not take in that she was gone. Could not apprehend it. Or he could understand that she was gone, that he wouldn’t see her again, that his grief would entail split-second memories, flash images, followed by suppression and pain; what he could not internalize was that she was gone in there, in that.

  The hole—not a hole actually but an unimaginable topography of rubble—was like an alien landing site: planetary-strength white light radiated from it—metal halide lights of such size and density he could not believe the world had ever seen such before, glowing across town to Wall Street and westward out into the river, allowing the dredging of the steel and glass and concrete piles, peppered with tissue and bone of twenty-eight hundred humans, to go on night and day. The metalworkers employed in this physically, psychologically, and morally toxic task received food, massage, rest, clothes, podiatry, acupuncture, and other nonmedical doctoring and bodily comforts, even psychotherapy, at the chapel, which had almost been hit as the towers fell and as the surrounding buildings burned, but which had survived and so remained the oldest building in Manhattan, where George Washington had once sermonized. Even having put in time on his high school football and wrestling teams, George had never seen gathered a group of men so enormous as the metalworkers brought in from around the country to work at the Trade Center site. Not one had smaller than a fifty-inch chest and many exceeded that by a dozen or more inches. They ranged in height from five feet six or seven to perhaps six feet, but not much more. Height was not an advantage for them. The church had stacks of clothes, sweatpants and sweatshirts and the like, they were coming in by the truckload from around the country, sized from normal small to normal extra-large and if you had doubled the extra-large size you might have been able to fit a few of the men, who walked around where the clothes were stored, in the upper galleries of the chapel, held up the shirts, and laughed. Useful and in demand were the Timberland boots, provided by the company: again, multiple truckloads. In the early weeks, too, meals were coming in four times a day in vans from the Union Square Café, Café Daniel, and other high-end restaurants. The whiteness of the light in the streets around was made even whiter by the dust in the air, a permanent white smoke hovering two stories or three or four stories above the pavement. He helped unload the food, chatted with the other volunteers, he was in a state of mind such that ten minutes after speaking to someone he could no longer remember the person he’d been talking to or what had been said; he twice, in the span of an hour, introduced himself to the same woman�
�a thin, practical woman in charge of the late meal that the men came in for at eleven p.m.—and just barely stopped himself from doing it a third time.

  I’m sorry, he said. I’m in a daze.

  Did you lose someone?

  He’d not answered this question before. It hadn’t been put to him directly—not did you know someone or is your family okay but Did You Lose Someone?—and the answer made bile rise in his throat.

  Yes, he said.

  I’m sorry, she said. There are so many. So terribly many.

  Yes, he said. Yes.

  Death had undone them. He was a full-grown man; even, in some circles, an important man, a man with authority and responsibility; he did not wish to weep here at the chapel of St. Paul. He wanted to work and then walk, since he had the authorization, not otherwise to be gained, to walk around.

  I’m from Brown and Company, he said. We do the coffee and tea.

  Oh, she said, perking up. Thank you.

  We’re working on doing some more on other fronts.

  Now he was on stable ground, now he was talking the company, now he was talking business, he could function. He was existing in ten percent of himself; the rest was a stunned, beaten prisoner, the prison itself having suddenly descended all around him, leaving him to stand before a cracked graffiti wall of injuries and grief.

  Certain moments you know right then will change everything; other moments slip by you and you realize later, there it was, that was it. Over and over it comes back to you. This was both—a first.

  * * *

  IN THE DAYS after, once the subways opened again, but for the farthest downtown stations, which wouldn’t be opened for months or even, in the case of Cortlandt Street, years, with the lines all switched around for reasons no layman ever understood, so that the F was the D and the N was the Q and nothing was what it was supposed to be, a city rearranged as if it had been spilled and too hurriedly restacked—in these shredded days, you could go to Times Square station and see the tiled columns covered, completely, with flyers, overlapping, double- and triple-layered, mid-shin to overhead, masking-taped appeals seeking the lost, the unaccounted for, the not yet legally dead. Estella Dominguez Stuart—worked at Windows on the World—last seen 8:10 a.m. Sept 11 2001—any information please call… And gathered on the concrete around the columns at first a few candles and flowers and soon enough scores of them and other trinkets and small treasures, a primitive culture’s strange gifts to the gods who’d struck down with fury and fire the two mountains at the bottom of the village, an act of unimaginable destruction. Staring at him day after day were all the photocopied faces. Smiling mostly, snapshots at family occasions. Some of the signs were done with graphics software and some were in a desperate scrawl.

  After a few days and into the next week he had felt compelled to find her family. He knew so little. This was the atomization: they had loved each other like ions, or like particles that attract but don’t join. They ended up in a kind of orbit around each other. He didn’t know their first names; he couldn’t remember the town they were in. Somewhere in Pennsylvania. He and Anna had hardly talked about their families; he talked about boats, she about books, politics, work a little bit, almost nothing personal, except perhaps her brother and his music collection. Which filled specially-made low shelves that ran the length of her living room—something like fifteen hundred vinyl albums. The Goffs. But, the town, the town. Finally it came back: Hershey. She was embarrassed by it. The chocolate town. But back in the day she was embarrassed because everyone used to say Hershey highway. This almost bent him over, the Hershey highway. An explosion of erotic imagery in his brain and the near-tangible presence of her essential shyness, her vulnerability. Boom, like a bomb. Oh my god, it took him this long to learn how to love somebody, love somebody really and deeply and painfully, and now it was being carved out of his flesh like some enormous tumor hacked out with a hunting knife. This hurt was the collapsed star of all his hurt, all the hurt he’d never allowed himself to feel, come back to say, no matter how many years you wait, we’re here, we don’t die on our own; you have to find a way to kill us.

  * * *

  AND THEN: HOW long should death really take? Anna had no will that George knew of. She had him, she had a small group of close friends, three or four; what other lesser friends, ex-boyfriends, other connections she might have had, George didn’t know. Back in Pennsylvania, she had parents she didn’t have much to do with. She had a minimal mortgage. Her expenses had been low, she had banked over two hundred thousand dollars in the twenty-two months since she’d taken this job, the job that killed her. A life insurance policy equal to her draw was part of her benefits package. So the parents were going to come into more than half a million plus her apartment and the equity she had in that, certainly another four or five hundred thousand. And beneath the gravity required by the situation and beneath their actual sadness, George could see their secret excitement. All they needed was the death certificate. How long it would take, no one knew. Eventually, at the suggestion of a lawyer George had hired, they filed affidavits from everyone they could find—leading with George and including even the building super, who’d seen her leave for work that morning—attesting that she had a job where she had a job; that she’d gone in that morning, early as usual; and that she hadn’t been heard from since. Her beloved cat had been alone. She’d left two unwashed dishes in the sink.

  How eerie it was in the first days to go back to her apartment. He’d spent many nights there with a sense of safety and happiness and freedom he’d not felt before, not for any prolonged period; now it was harrowing. He’d been going to feed the cat and water the plants. Enough already—he would have to take the cat.

  I need you to come with me, he told Nate, and Nate came, not a word of reluctance or complaint. As he was nearing fifteen, this was notable. He’d been nothing but cooperation since the towers fell. In the apartment the usually aloof cat came to them immediately; Nate bent and stroked him. He’s hungry, Nate said. Gordo. For Gordito. Fat Boy. The Fat One. None of these his original name but the ones he’d grown into, earned. They fed the cat and let him eat, wandering around the apartment, which gave every sign of being the well-lived-in home of someone who on leaving that last morning had not doubted for a moment that she’d be coming home again at end of day. Mail on the table, clothes on the chair. Two glasses and a bowl in the sink which George had refused to touch, as if it were an art installation, not reality, not actual dishes. He watched Nate wash them; this moved him. George wasn’t ready to look through—invade, rifle—the files, her papers, for official documents. Her mortgage for instance. Her birth certificate. Her insurance information. The company she worked for, one of the sucker fish to Morgan, not much of it left, he was betting, did they even have another office? Jesus, when you considered the details, these deaths were complicated and there were almost three thousand of them. Nate squatted and was going through the albums. Wow, he kept saying. Wow.

  You can probably have them, George said.

  Nate turned to look at him. Really? he said.

  I don’t think the parents were ever interested in them.

  Some of them are worth real money, Nate said. The whole collection, who knows.

  Then I’ll pay them, George said. He didn’t say it would make him feel better to have this connection to her, across him to Nate, like a bridge. Something like family has.

  When the cat had eaten enough for the moment and walked away Nate washed the water dish and food dish and George dried them, packed them in a grocery bag with all the cat food she’d kept in the cabinet over the stove.

  Get a bag and help me with the litter box, he said to Nate. Nate held the bag, George emptied the litter. Packed up the massive litter supply—it was like farm seed, in a big sack—ran water in the tub over the litter box, dried and packed that too in a blue IKEA bag. Nate had found the cat’s travel box and was sitting beside it on the couch with the cat in his lap, purring and crinkling its eyes.r />
  That cat has never been this friendly, George said. To anyone. Except her.

  I wonder if he knows, Nate said.

  The cat went quietly into its box. George was expecting a fight: the lack of it, again, moved him. They waited for the elevator to go down: George with all the bags and Nate with the cat.

  That was sad, Nate said.

  George just looked at him, then looked away.