“Glass, steel, insulation. The rest I don’t want to think about.” He looked at his hands.
It hit me then, just what had been in those buildings. I shook my head; it was too hard to accept as fact. I had a quick flashback to a time, years ago, when I’d gone for a job interview in Tower One. I remembered the surreal sensation of being 79 floors above the ground. I‘d had moments of vertigo when the high winds had buffeted the tower and made it rock ever so slightly. I remembered the people bustling around in what had seemed like an eagle’s nest.
It was their ordinary day to day world. That had all changed. And what was in that dust? I pushed the thought from my mind.
A few people walked out of the bathroom, giving me an opening. I rushed in, suddenly anxious to wash the grayish dust from my face. A woman stood over one of the other sinks sobbing, working slowly at the dust. I saw what was ahead of me when I got to the sink. The dust had simply streaked in trails where she scrubbed. Soon, I made the same vain attempt and felt it cake up on my hands as the water touched it. Now that I wasn’t concentrating on saving myself from the subway, I noticed that I could feel it in my mouth, gritty and somewhat like sawdust. I thought again of the minister’s analysis of the make-up of the dust and I looked again at the sobbing woman, wondering if she had been thinking the same thing.
She caught my eye and smiled weakly through her tears. “It won’t come off will it, mister?”
“It will,” I said, the lie coming easily under the circumstances. I doubted it ever would. I knew what I’d be carrying with me for the rest of my life.
“I don’t know. Were you on the street?”
“No. In the subway.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh god! I’m glad I wasn’t trapped in there.”
“I’m glad too,” I answered a bit too brusquely. I didn’t want this conversation.
She walked over to me and took my hand as though we were the best of friends “I was on Rector Street and all of a sudden I heard this noise. Mister, you never heard a noise like that. I can’t even tell you what it was like. Sort of like the world cracking open. That’s what I thought was happening. And then, a little while later this big cloud came over and all of a sudden, I couldn’t see anything. My friends were all screaming and I thought it was all over. I thought I was going to die.”
Her eyes filled with tears and I had a hard time not turning away from her. As her grip tightened I watched helplessly, not knowing what comfort I could give her in the worst moment of her life.
*
I had spent ten minutes debating with Peter about whether we should walk out or wait. What was outside was something out of a science fiction movie: night in the middle of the day. In the end we waited until the dust began to settle and we saw enough light to make us bold. Our destination would be the Brooklyn Bridge. There Peter would head over the bridge toward the end of Long Island with a chance of making it back to Queens.
Outside there were a few people on the street. The haze still lingered but there was some life on Broadway. To my surprise I realized that we’d been across the street from One Wall Street the whole time. The whole area was one I knew like the back of my hand and, for a short while, I hadn’t known where I was.
We walked up to Wall and turned east. “I’m still going to try to make it across the Bridge,” Peter told me.
“You and a few thousand others.”
“I’m not staying here.”
We walked past an office building that had its doors open. Someone was standing outside giving out bottles of water for free. I marveled at the irony that those same bottles would have cost $1.75 at any other time. I took one and poured some water over my face.
“Come on inside. I’m going to call my wife,” Peter told me.
“I hope you can get through”.
The line for the phone was surprisingly short. Within a few minutes Peter was attempting to call his wife and finding that the phones didn’t work well, when they worked at all. After a few tries, he got through. He barely had enough time to tell his wife he was walking across the bridge. “She’s going to try to drive to meet me but I might have to get a bus,” he told me. “I’ll get there if I have to walk.
“You’ll make it, Peter, even if it takes a while. You’ll have a lot of company.” I pulled out a pen. “You have some paper?”
He looked out at the street where reams of paper were being swept around by the wind. “No,” he said.
I pulled an old card out of my wallet; it was from a plumbing contractor I’d met years ago. I wrote my address and phone number on the back. “If you don’t get anywhere come back across the bridge, you can make it to my house. I’ll be there sooner or later.”
He took the card and his face fell. “Thanks. I hope I don’t have to.”
“I don’t think you will. Just in case.”
He smiled.
We walked a few more blocks and then he waved good-bye at City Hall, just before he turned toward the Bridge and freedom from Manhattan. I lived uptown and had the luxury of knowing that all I had to do was walk for an hour or so and I’d be home.
*
“You’re crazy,” Barbara told me later. I’d just told her that I’d stopped for lunch in Chinatown on my way back to my apartment the day before. “You were stuck in the subway for half an hour with screaming people and dust and you stop for congee soup?”
That was about what happened. It seemed quite normal to me though I had to admit that maybe I’d been in full shock. “I wasn’t happy about what happened,” I said. “But that seemed the best thing to do. What do you think would have been better?”
She regarded me from her perch on my kitchen counter. She had an unconscious habit of taking the advantage of higher ground when she wanted to grill you about something. I’d pointed it out to her once and she’d gone ballistic. Lately I tended to avoid any subject that highlighted any of her vulnerabilities.
I looked at her, carefully, for the first time in years. I guess that my experiences in the subway had knocked the complacency from me and my perceptions were a little heightened. She pinned me with her gaze, her long, almost perfect legs swinging back and forth in time to some inner music that only she heard. Barbara was striking, but not quite beautiful. Her eyes were too close together, though fashionably large, while her forehead was a bit too high. It had occurred to me that she was aware of both these flaws but I’d never been cruel enough to point them out, despite her penchant for letting me know what was wrong with me whenever she saw fit.
Barbara, above all else, strove for the illusion that she could and should be perfect.
We’d been dating for three years, an unspoken agreement since the quaint ritual of dating was far too “pre Gloria Steinem” for her. Despite her studied emancipation I also knew she wanted a commitment from me but would never have allowed herself enough vulnerability to admit it. I was happy with the way things were and satisfied with my all-consuming workaholic lifestyle; she was an excellent accoutrement to that lifestyle. Shallow. That certainly described both of us. But at least I was honest with myself.
She’d spent a good bit of the last three years hinting about how she wanted me to move in with her. I’d considered it once for a short time, the way you consider skydiving as something you need to try once before you die . It occurred to me occasionally that she’d want more than she was getting in the long run, but I didn’t consider that a serious problem.
I stared out the window of my apartment, trying to distract myself from the steady drone of news from the television. With the falling of the towers, New York had ceased to be a place where people lived. Now it was a happening, a symbol, a bunch of sound bites. To my mind, that was the greatest indignity of the situation. I didn’t want to be a newsworthy freak in a ruined city; I wanted to be a normal person with a life.
I’d done my best to ignore it all and be a stoic New Yorker, but that turned out not to be so easy. I wasn’t able to go back to work; my office was too close to Ground Zero and the
City was limiting any kind of travel below 14th Street. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it would be a week and a half before Crabtree and Dain would reopen its doors. There was also an invasion of the media; I saw hundreds of small transmitter trucks that had come from every corner of the nation. They’d parked wherever they could find space, mostly on the westernmost avenues just above 14th Street. I saw them everywhere, their mics extended, trying to siphon off a little of the blood that was everywhere and send it home.
Like many New Yorkers I resented the media’s presence, most especially in the face of what was to be the most eerie and heart-rending by-product of the disaster: the posters. Everywhere you went you saw 8.5x11 handouts with pictures. They were on phone booths, the sides of buildings, car windshields, and shop windows. The dominant theme was Have you seen this person. Each of these lost souls had been in or around the Trade Center when it went down. My first few encounters with these paper pleas left me staring. Each of these people had hundreds of personal connections and each one, I knew, was likely to be gone forever. For the media vultures, all of these small sad photocopied cries in the dark were simply sound bites of a new story that wouldn’t quit.
Out the window everything seemed normal. That far north all we got was the smell from Ground Zero that occasionally wafted our way when the wind blew uptown. I stared downward, realizing that everyone I saw knew at least someone who knew someone who’d lost a friend or a loved one in the towers. For some reason I wanted to be out there and away from the sterile pabulum that the news was feeding me.
“I want to take a walk,” I told Barbara.
She stared at me questioningly. I saw her eyes stray back to the television. For some of us, it had become a lifeline to something. It was as though watching the coverage of the search for survivors allowed each of us to accomplish something; to fix things. For me it was slightly ghoulish. “What’s outside?” she asked.
“The world. Reality. That,” I said, pointing at the TV,” is a rehashing of the same shit. It’s become unreal.”
She stared at the TV sadly. “Let’s be alive,” I said, trying to get her attention. “That’s what counts.”
In the end she went with me, though grudgingly. We made our way southward toward Union Square Park. Like everyone else around us, we paused to read almost every handout. I was appalled to realize that I was recognizing almost all of them as ones I’d seen before. Certain of them had planted themselves in my mind’s eye; the young pretty girl with the Italian last name who seemed like someone I might have known; the happy looking Latino man whose family missed him; the elegant older man who’d obviously been a power broker in one of the investment firms in the Trade Center.
That day the park was a totally different animal. The first thing I noticed was that there were more people there than I’d ever seen. The second thing was that the fences had been trampled and people were sitting on the sacred young grass that was usually off limits. Like naughty children, a hundred people had violated the rules we’d all lived by.
“Oh God,” Barbara whispered at my back. I turned and followed her gaze to one of the many statues nearby. A stone man rode a stone horse, his sword raised in defiance. I had passed him a thousand times but, this time, beneath him, were what looked like a hundred small memorials. Pictures crowded each other for space. On the ground in front of each of them was a candle. Candle wax was everywhere, flowing in pools around small shrines dedicated to people whose lives had been ended pointlessly. Interspersed with the photos were small messages with personal thoughts about war and terrorism and death.
We spent a half an hour in the park; I was starting to feel overloaded by all the misery. “This is depressing. I think I’ve had enough,” I told Barbara.
She stared at me strangely; it seemed she’d been in mid-rant and I’d cut her off, having stopped listening to her quite a while before. I’d been through enough arguments with here to know that it was something her father had done all through her childhood and that it was crime in her eyes. She walked stiffly behind me as we made our way west, back to my apartment. I found myself trying to think of excuses to get rid of her, but nothing plausible came to mind. As we passed the entrance to the subway, I saw a carefully hand-lettered sign hanging from one of the park walls:
If peace were our only option, we’d all be speaking either Japanese or German.
I laughed, treasuring the cleverness of the writer, though I might not have agreed a hundred per cent with the pat philosophy. Barbara studied me quizzically but I found I didn’t care to share the joke with her.
*
That night I watched the news; a bad idea considering I was doing my best to put everything out of my mind. I’d managed to gain a certain sense of stability with the help of some single malt scotch.
As I watched I began to get annoyed. I had already gotten tired of seeing still another shot of the towers falling, the interviews with the families hoping to hear from their loved ones. As time went by it had come to seem like someone had to cover the story until it played itself out. The coverage was repetitive, the analysis vague and speculative.
There was one story that was conspicuous for its lack of connection to the towers. A car had been found on a side road in Rockland County, empty of passengers. It had been registered to a Sally Brodman who recently had been involved in a custody battle with her husband. Skid marks seemed to indicate that the car had been forced to a stop. There was no evidence of what happened to Sally and her daughter Taylor, except that the numbers 4, 5, and 1, separated by dashes, had been written in what looked like blood on the left rear door of the car. Her husband was being questioned though no suspects had been officially named.
It had just the right eerie ring to bring my hard won sense of calm crashing down on me. It seemed like the perfect post 9/11 creepiness. More than I wanted to think about just then. I went and made myself another drink.
*
“You have to come out drinking. It's Saturday night. Stop being an asshole.”
Dennis was my best friend and the only one who could have shaken me loose from my self-imposed exile. Since my walk in the park with Barbara, I’d avoided her and everyone else. I felt something like a virulent flu growing in my insides; though it wasn’t physical, it felt just about as bad. I suppose I could have taken an easy out and called it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. A diagnosis makes everything easier.
After a couple of weeks of my not calling him, Dennis decided that he’d had enough. He worked on me for ten minutes on the phone before I saw the wisdom of his words: I wasn’t being me and I wasn’t being healthy; only getting back on the horse would help. I wasn’t sure that I believed him, but I wanted to. So I went a few blocks over to the “Isle” as we called it. I had always felt a strange pride in going there; it was a real New Yorker’s bar, unknown by most of the yuppie swarm, old, and in its own low-life way, exclusive.
The ceilings were genuine old New York tin, the floors tiled and the booths separated by glass partitions. There was nothing interesting around it worth speaking of, inhabiting, as it did, a block of warehouses and wholesale businesses. It probably had looked much the same since it was built.
I was keenly aware of the churning in my guts that had been my constant companion for the last few days as I made my way down the floor between the bar and the booths. I found Dennis and another man in conversation halfway along the bar itself. Dennis smiled. “I saved you a stool, dude.”
He signaled the bartender. “I thought that drinking together would help you remember what you do for fun.”
I snorted, and then nodded at our bartender. Colm was a typical New York Irish bartender; half friend and half server. After a couple of years of coming to the Isle, we’d established a good rhythm. Colm poured with a free hand, charged us almost nothing, we gave him ridiculously generous tips and everyone was happy. I had even availed myself of his services as temporary therapist on a couple of nights when Barbara was too much for me to handle.
“I don’t have any choice but to believe it,” I told him.
“Mike was down there when it happened,” Dennis told anyone who happened to be listening.
“Oh shit!” Colm commiserated. “I’m sorry, man. My brother-in-law was down there and he told me it was horrible.
I felt some eyes boring into me. “It was. But right now I’d like a drink.”
“Certainly, Mike. What’re you having?”
I looked up at the rack to see if it was there and Colm smiled. “We just got some in. I kept it under the bar for you.” He reached down and lifted up a greenish bottle, the seal still over the cork.
Dennis grunted. “Not that again, Mike.”
Colm held it under his nose. “When I was little the old folks by the coast still would burn this stuff to heat their houses. This brings back memories.”
“It brings back my lunch,” Dennis mumbled.
Colm poured me a stiff one, making a show of it. There’s nothing like being treated like you’re special in an Irish bar; for a moment I forgot what was eating at me.
“What did they burn?” Dennis asked. “Whiskey?”
“No. This is a single malt from the Isle of Islay. They burn peat moss to give it its special flavor.”
He read the label. “La Phrug?” he said, butchering the name. “Sounds French.”
“It’s Laphroaig, like boy.”
Colm poured my drink and I raised my glass. “To New York,” was all I could think of at first. “Liver ho!” I added, to Dennis in particular.
“Yeah,” said a man down the bar who I’d never seen before. “To the ones who died”. A few other glasses were raised and the toast completed.
“Oh god!” Dennis screamed, holding up his glass and studying it. “This is awful.”
“What’s liver ho mean?” someone asked.
Colm snorted. “It’s their own language. No one knows what it means. They won’t say.”
The Railroad Page 4