Crazy Sorrow

by Vince Passaro

  You’re going to have to say something soon, Nate said. You can’t just keep looking at me with that expression on your face.

  What expression on my face? George said.

  Dead. It’s a dead expression. Casting call for the zombie movie—that expression.

  Okay, George said. He was looking down. Then up at his son, then down again.

  Yes, it’s sad, he said. It’s beyond sad. I’m afraid if I talk about it too much, or at all, I’ll come apart and you’ll have to hold me up and hail a cab and pour me in it. Really, you don’t need that.

  There, that was better, Nate said. You won’t come apart. You never come apart.

  That’s what you think, George said.

  They stepped into the elevator. The door closed, they started down.

  Anyway, George said. Thank you.

  You’re welcome, Nate said. So now we have a cat.

  You’d never know it, he’s not making a sound.

  I think he knows, Nate said.

  They got a cab.

  Anyway, yes, now we have a cat, George said. I’m going to have to get shots.

  He tipped the cat box a little and looked in it. Tears started to drop down onto his shirtfront, his lap.

  Hi, cat, he said. Jesus fucking Christ.

  27

  Grief was like carrying a stone, it bent you; it bent you double, pressing down on your shoulders, and it filled you inside, a grief-stone within you, something you’d swallowed or something hardening in your gut, a pain of petrification. He could never have imagined it: he’d had plenty to grieve over, his father, his mother, his marriage perhaps, but he’d never allowed himself to grieve, he went on instead, numb and more numb. Here, it overwhelmed him, there was no putting it off. Not after watching the fire from the jagged matte black hole, not after the smoke and dust and paper peppered the air, not after standing on the street corner ready to fold himself up and die as the building she was in folded itself up and died.

  Fall passed to winter passed to early spring. All of it mild—God’s little favor. Arthur was getting an award from the Press Photography Association, he’d invited George. For photographs taken on September 11, 2001, and in the days thereafter… Arthur Townes. Awards that May. Arthur had asked for Louis to introduce him, an odd choice and not a member of the society of professional photographers but a celebrity now and politically burnishing so they said yes and they got Louis. George bought a table and filled it with various eager souls from Brown, including a couple of photography enthusiasts; and Nate. Nate was a high school sophomore who owned his own tux. This made George strangely proud. He wondered if Arthur actually owned a tux, or had to buy one for the event. Or god forbid rent one.

  Louis said, I met Arthur when I was writing and editing for the Columbia Daily Spectator—there was some sparse applause here and Louis looked up with surprise and a genial smirk—we’re in the house, I see, he said. Anyway. Arthur’s work always startled me. He had a funny habit back then, he’d hand you a pile of seven or eight work prints and he would never put the best ones first. Never. It was a test. He wanted to know if you knew what you were doing with a picture. Like are you a part of this sacred enterprise or just some godless interloper? I went out a few times back in those days with my camera and I said, oh I’m going to take pictures like Arthur’s pictures! It’ll be swell!! Of course they looked like shit. Pardon my language. I have no idea what makes a photographer like Arthur such a good photographer. I couldn’t figure it out then, and now, well, I’m more self-absorbed and not as smart as I was then, so forget it. But I think photography, like writing, requires just a huge amount of practice and a huge amount of failure. To withstand all that failure! It’s biblical, really, but of course I’m obsessed with the Bible as you know so don’t listen to me. But you look at Arthur—

  Louis waved his arm toward Arthur down the dais. Look at him!

  People laughed, Arthur laughed.

  That’s an artist, people.

  Louis looked back at him.

  Like all artists, he said, you’re a mess. But you’re beautiful.

  He turned back to the audience. Because that’s what it takes. Which is everything. Every single thing you have has to go into the pit. That’s all I can tell you. Arthur is an artist and I don’t think he has spent many moments on this earth not being an artist. You can see the stone-hard determination in him the first second you meet him. And the lunacy. I did. And now you can! Ladies and gentleman, without further nonsense or palaver, I give you Arthur Augustine Rutherford Townes.

  They applauded. Some stood, not all. Arthur was not, in the end, that popular. He was a pain in the ass and he hadn’t always done the right things to have a good career. Failed marriages, strange projects and obsessions, a kind of physical failure of a man, like a weary shopkeeper from a century back. But they applauded. They liked Louis, after all.

  Arthur waited at the podium. Clearly uncomfortable, physically too aware of his body, until he settled down. He hand-checked his jacket front, shirt, bow tie. George could see the hand move, that he wanted to check his fly too but thought it best not to. The applause settled.

  He said thank you. Then he said: Photographs are not memory, John Berger said. Read Berger, everyone should read Berger, uh huh. Doesn’t matter what book, they’re all good. Anyway, Berger said that photographs have in contemporary times begun to replace memory. He was responding to Sontag, who was getting at something similar in a much more complicated way, which of course, right, it being Sontag. Photographs replaced memory. But I think they started as part of memory, an assistance to memory—memory wants time to stop but can’t make it stop, it’s a constant struggle and we always get things wrong, remember wrong—but then we had pictures. So now I think he’s right. We all of us have a few frozen images in our minds about that day, about September 11, and they signify. Someone says 9/11, and if you didn’t lose anyone that day, what stands in your mind in response is one of these images. Some of those images I made and I’m grateful for that, grateful I was alive and could be there. Yes. And my Nikon kept working in all that dust, thank you, Nikon.

  Some scattered applause in the house.

  Pronounced Nee-kohn in Japanese by the way. I sent the camera and two lenses off to them for repair and cleaning after, and at my request they took all the dust that came out of these things and put it in a double baggie and sent it back with the camera.

  He reached into his pocket and held up the small bag, about a cigarette’s width along the bottom of the bag, pale gray dust and particles of darker shades.

  Here, he said. For the reliquary. It’s safer there than with the EPA, I’ll venture you that, because the EPA is burying that stuff as fast as it can and claiming all’s well.

  A bit more applause. He smiled at them, rubbed his nose.

  Anyway, the thing is, right, no plain image can evoke all of what it felt like, all of what happened there. The sound of falling bodies… you know. The enormous roar. Enormous. Roar. It felt bigger than the air when the towers came down. I kept imagining after the South Tower fell the sounds of thousands of people screaming: it was as if I could hear it. And after that it never let up, uh huh, never let up! A kind of tinnitus of horror. Uh huh. Yes. This is what the mind does in such places: no photograph can do that for you. Or to you. Film or video can’t do it. Only the mind, only the human imagination, stirred by the facts. I kept working, kept looking and shooting not because I had some heroic impulse to photograph, I mean, right? What did it matter at that point, right? But because if I didn’t keep working I’d go insane. Uh huh. Insane, yes. I mean, think of all that death. Think of it. Of course in certain less fortunate places they have to deal with that scale of death not once in a lifetime, as we hope is true for us—they have to think of it every day or every week. I can’t imagine what that does to you. That our country is often the cause, or even just the supplier, of such death should make us weep. Uh huh, yes, right. Weep.

  He paused there. Took a moment
to collect himself. There was no applause for this.

  Anyway, he said. Then the second tower came down. I had to move north, uptown, right? Yes, uh huh, away from it, we all did, yes. Running up the road. Yes. The air was poisonous and thick, right, I mean we still don’t know, right? And I’m sure, right, the bureaucrats will never allow us to know, sure, of course, what was in the air then. And in the months after. But my god the police and firefighters and EMS people, these incredible women and men, they kept going south. Kept going into it. I didn’t see one hanging back, not one, and I was looking, I wanted to see that. I took a lot of pictures of them. They ended up looking like World War I soldiers in the fogs and mists of the French woods. Right? Like Dulce et decorum est, right? Of course what could they do? But they went. They didn’t know yet, so they went. Listen, these people are not saints. I’m a black man, I can testify with total confidence, these people are not saints. Not even close. But they went. And whoever could come, came. And whoever could help, helped. For days, for weeks, toxins and soot, whoever could help helped. That’s my city.

  Here the applause started.

  The ironworkers, he said. Huge men. They came in and the soles of their boots were melting, every day. I mean you’ve read this, you know. And they stopped and took their helmets off for every body, for every part of a body. Hundreds of guys. Stopped. Waiting. Heads bare. With fire beneath their feet.

  More applause.

  I have pictures, I can tell you, I have pictures. Standing still until they carried the body out. So that’s my city. And no matter what, I will always love it. Always.

  Here they stood up. Applauding.

  He gestured them to quiet. He wasn’t finished. He thanked them. He thanked them again. Then he asked them for five minutes’ silence.

  Five minutes, he said, when everyone was down and quiet again. Not one short minute but five full ones. Okay, right, it’s going to be very uncomfortable. I’m just warning you. I’ll stand here and keep time. Little Casio but it works. Yes. Five minutes in a public place like this is an immense amount of time, absolutely, yes, but this, this was immense, right? That’s actually all I’m trying to say, it was really frigging immense, excuse my language, and anyone who was down there when two of the tallest buildings in the world came down in jet fuel flames will tell you it’s impossible to describe how immense it was. No they cannot. So we need to be immense back. Right? I’m not asking anyone to pray who doesn’t pray, I mean that’s silly, right? But close your eyes—let your minds wander. I don’t care where, or to what—you know, nice shoes or feet—

  Some people laughed at this, who knew his work. He smiled out at them.

  Yeah, he said. Or whatever.

  More laughs.

  Okay. We’re all going to close our eyes. Five minutes. Just let go of time and expectations. Starting… now.

  He had warned the waitstaff ahead of time. All the table staff stood against the back wall. There were the hundred clinks of crockery being put down, of forks, knives on plates. Then silence. It went on forever. It was painful. People were writhing, some of them, or so it felt to George, who kept his head down at first, then lifted it and looked around. Arthur’s head was down too, but George saw the watch on the podium. His head down he still kept a slitted eye on the room and on the time, he peeked from beneath his brow. George got him, at this moment, Louis was right, he was an artist, and he wanted to make these people feel something, to take them beyond where they’d willingly go without him, and he was controlling the moment and the place with a Casio watch. Tonight, five minutes was his art. Down to two minutes. Coughing of course. Coughing every few seconds, then none, then it would start again. A number of the men had begun checking their expensive watches before the three-minute mark and more of them after, as they approached four. George saw them. He also saw bodies, body after body after body, plummeting like heavy sacks or whirly babies through the air, and he imagined the sound, he hadn’t been close enough but he imagined it, the sound of bodies hitting the hard ground: just like Jeffrey Goldstein all those years back. A hard thump with a bit of squish like a mark of punctuation, a comma or an apostrophe. The sound would be hideous. Awful. Every time he saw this in his mind’s eye and heard it in his imagination, he felt something break. Four and a half minutes. He wanted to shout out to the squirming room that it was almost over. Then finally it was.

  That was very hard, Arthur finally said. Thank you.

  People were looking up. Hard to read their faces. Some, a few, with tears. Dabbing with their napkins.

  Our souls are immense too, he said. That’s why. More immense than we know. I mean, yes, I bet. It’s what my father would have said. Yes. So three hundred souls here, offering that silence, difficult, yes, but it might do some good. You never know. Thanks again.

  He waved oddly, like Nixon, George instantly thought, and went back to his seat. Again they rose, and they all rose. It embarrassed Arthur; he looked as if he wished that they hadn’t and that he was anywhere else but there, being applauded. So he rose too and clapped back at them. When he sat again, they all sat too. So that was okay.

  * * *

  HOW LIKE PEARL Harbor it was, had been, as signifier, as unifier, yet how unlike. George’s father’s generation; Arthur’s too. George knew that Arthur’s Methodist father had been chaplain on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. George’s father had been sent to England and there he stayed, a clerk, filing the paperwork after D-Day. Pearl Harbor. December seventh… a date… which will live… in infamy. It changed everything. But it had become clear to George at some point in his youth, listening to them all, that for those who were not maimed or killed or psychologically destroyed; or who did not have a loved one maimed or killed or psychologically destroyed—for many, in other words—it changed things for the better. These were the best days of their lives, during the war and in the years just after. It not only effectively ended the Depression and brought back jobs, it blasted their world with meaning and that meaning would last most of the rest of their lives. As they aged, they missed it. That’s why they reacted so badly to the rebellions later, of their children. Couldn’t those children see what American Life was all about? It was about the just rewards for putting on a uniform and saving the fucking world. A naïve notion, but they all believed it as deeply as they believed in their own hands and feet. That the Soviets might have saved a little more of the world than the U.S. had, that dropping two nuclear weapons to make sure the war ended before the Soviets could march into Manchuria, that didn’t save much of the world; and commencing a forty-five-year war of nerves and guns and lost lives, largely the lives of people darker of skin than Europeans and white Americans, for some ephemeral geopolitical idea about influence and markets, might not have saved anything at all, might have destroyed quite a bit in fact, but that they didn’t think about. It was a glorious thing, that war, if you didn’t die in it, if you didn’t get your leg shot off, or have your soul destroyed. It gave them a vision of themselves that sustained them.

  This, though. This. This attack and the infinite spreading endless war against ghosts that was sure to follow, this drained meaning right out of the world. It exposed the rot and cobwebs and vacant spaces they’d all been walking above, on a latticework of broken planks, for two decades, gingerly moving about while never mentioning that the floor beneath them was disappearing, then was gone. It made Sex in the City look like the product of a mental disorder, when before it had only seemed the product of a moral disorder. A week after the attack Susan Sontag had written in the New Yorker that the widespread reaction, indeed the required creed—that the terrorists were cowards and that we were blameless—was purely delusional, ahistorical, ignorant; the statement was brief and almost innocuous in its plain logic and to George’s lasting amazement every well-meaning liberal from Maine to DC and NY to LA then condemned her. Not that it mattered, except to her (seeing the butter on her bread drying up, she recanted); what a woman, some half-European called Sontag, wrote in the
New Yorker didn’t much penetrate the red states and the red states, red signifying blood and meat and flushed pre-heart-attack Caucasian faces, were in charge now. And the country would fight and fight and fight for years to come—anybody sensible, it seemed to George, could already see it. What the fuck were we going to do, had anyone ever been able to do, in Afghanistan? Against the mountain tribes? Or in Iraq and Iran? Everyone would get rich off the guns. Truckloads of cash—billions—vaporizing in-country. And the military contractors. Fighting on, because somehow if the U.S. were able to kill enough of the people who hated it then everyone else would revert to loving it, and the country could magically return to the conditions that obtained when the world did not despise and ridicule it. Redemption through bombing and assassination.

  And now it was our turn to taste the smoke and the rubble.

  28

  It was not that beauty had been drained from the earth: that was false; George could see it for false in front of his eyes. That entire autumn, in fact, had been the most stunning of his lifetime, a kind of balm to the wounded. The situation felt much more as if something had been drained directly from him. Personally. Not merely from his spirit but from his body. From his own relationship with himself as a body, a corporeal being. Some hope in the future of his body as an instrument of force and pleasure and meaning in the world. As an active agent. Pointless. It all felt pointless. And it hurt. Grief hurts physically, a kind of low-grade ache that flared at odd times like a volcano flame. Each day he proceeded quietly, feeling tired, doing what he did without conviction. Some measure-taking of the vividness of experience was gone. He had been drained. So beauty no longer meant, fully, beauty. Beauty meant beauty minus something. Beauty meant .71322 beauty and the rest was charcoal gray. Some diminishment of efficacy and effect. He walked through his days as if he weighed more. But he was working out almost daily: weights, floor, three or four miles on the treadmill. He remained his thick white self but he was a hard thick white self. This was not depression such as he had known off and on in his twenties. This was a rock inside him. Wind blew paper in the street. He saw it and later he could close his eyes and see it again, see it before sleep: the grit and old leaves churning and the paper flying above it, an unholy white bird. Brown & Co. stores every few blocks but often he’d be out and wanting coffee and not be near enough to one, he’d have to take a cab unless he had time for a ten-minute walk out of his way. How could this be, when it had not been so before? Are we closing stores? Am I wandering into exotic neighborhoods? No. And a rage would rise up then: rage, not mere anger. He wanted to put his fist through the glass corner windows of the Middle Eastern bakery/sandwich place on 23rd and Park Avenue South. Where he could not buy a coffee. Buying a coffee from the other places was no longer an option. He could, quite literally, be photographed doing so and the company would lose two percent of its market capitalization in a week. He met a woman at the gym. She could read him as rich. He knew this. More paper blew in the streets. How she tried to please him. Finally he told her: 9/11. Goodbye.