by Gwen Cooper
Before going to Chelsea Piers, I had made one last effort to reach my cats on my own. I’d made it as far as the City Hall terminus of the 6 train, mere blocks from my apartment. Upon reaching the top of the station stairs, however, I had been stopped by soldiers asking for my photo ID. I tried showing them my Florida driver’s license in tandem with my checkbook, but had been unable to convince them to let me through. Reluctantly, I’d boarded the train once again and headed back uptown.
I found the ASPCA’s area easily enough once I reached Chelsea Piers, and signed in with my name and address at a desk in the front of the room. They had divided Lower Manhattan into zones, and would bring in groups of people divided by their specific locations. The weather had turned gray and sharply cold that morning; all my own heavier clothes were in my apartment along with my cats. The woman who took my name and address, noticing that I shivered in my thin T-shirt, directed me to another enormous room, filled with boxes of donated clothing. I selected an over-large flannel shirt and buttoned it over my T-shirt and jeans, topping it with a sturdy windbreaker. Nothing fit quite right, but at least it would keep me warm.
I returned to the waiting room and seated myself in a plastic chair, settling my backpack and shopping bag on the ground beside me. There were scores of other pet owners there, trading stories and rumors in grim, hushed voices. One man said he knew a guy who’d made it all the way to the front door of his building, only to find that the doormen had left and locked the main door to the building behind them. The man didn’t have a key to that front door—and who did, when you lived in a doorman building? He’d made it all that way and, in the end, hadn’t been able to get into his building after all.
I lived in a doorman building. With all the careful planning and foresight I’d attempted to employ, it had never occurred to me that, upon reaching my building, I might not be able to get through the front door. The anxiety already churning in my stomach increased threefold.
All of us were nervous; we didn’t know if we’d make it to our homes, or what we’d find once we got there. We distracted ourselves as best we could, trading photos of our pets and sharing anecdotes of their courage or cowardice, their likes and dislikes, the quirks that made them real and individual to us. “This is Gus, and this is Sophie,” one woman said, showing me a snapshot of two Border collie mixes. “Our kids are just crazy about them.” Her fond smile wobbled. “They’ve never been alone this long. I don’t know what our kids will do if they’re not okay.”
“Of course they will be,” I assured her. “Of course they’ll be fine.”
I showed her pictures of my own brood. Like most people, she marveled at Vashti’s beauty and laughed at tales of Scarlett’s sulky hauteur. “Poor thing,” she said pityingly when she came to Homer’s photo. “Poor little thing. He must be terrified.”
“He’s the toughest little guy you’ve ever seen,” I told her. “He once chased a burglar right out of my apartment.” I related the story of the break-in, and noticed that my audience was growing. “Pets can adapt to so much more than we give them credit for. This’ll be nothing for him.” People around me nodded, and I prayed as I said it that I was right.
The hours rolled by in pet-owner purgatory. From time to time, one of the women or men with the ASPCA would stand in the front of the room to announce that they were heading in to a specific set of blocks, and a small band of pet owners would excitedly move forward, driver’s licenses held at the ready. Sometimes, they would make announcements like, “Anybody we bring to a building, who goes into their building and comes out without a pet, will be taken straight to jail.” Apparently, some people were down there pretending they had pets so that the ASPCA could help them return to their apartments to retrieve laptop computers or business documents. “This is no joke, folks. We have police officers going in with us, and if you come out of your building without a pet you will go immediately to jail.”
After two hours, I was antsy beyond endurance. I was losing confidence that they would be able to smuggle me past the checkpoints without proper ID. The crowd in the room should have been thinning out, but it didn’t seem like it was. I couldn’t detect a pattern in the zones they were calling—if they were moving from north to south or east to west. All I knew was that they hadn’t called mine. The next zone they call will be mine, I kept telling myself. The next one will be me. Another hour passed, however, and it never was. Finally, unable to wait any longer and deciding that I might actually be better off on my own since I didn’t have New York ID, I decided there was nothing for me to do but try to go in myself.
I walked east from Chelsea Piers until I reached Seventh Avenue, then turned south. My backpack was on my back, and I clutched the large shopping bag containing the items too large to fit into the backpack. After three days of handling, the bag was coming apart, and I had to hold it in both arms to keep everything in place. I kept going until Seventh Avenue intersected with Houston Street and became Varick Street. There was a barricaded checkpoint guarded by three police officers—two young men, and one who looked a bit older. It was the first checkpoint I’d encountered that wasn’t monitored by military personnel, and I took this as a positive sign.
“ID, please,” the older officer said. I pulled out my Florida driver’s license along with the checkbook that bore my Manhattan address. The cop put them together and regarded them doubtfully. “We’re not supposed to let anybody in without ID.”
“Please,” I said desperately. “I just moved here—that’s why I don’t have a New York license yet. You can search me. You can strip-search me. You can truss me up like Hannibal Lecter and roll me in on a dolly. I just want to get back to my cats. Please, sir, please, please let me in.”
The three of them looked at each other. They were cops, not soldiers—and, unlike the soldiers, they were from here. This was their city. I was somebody in that city who needed help. They could tell at a glance, with all the instincts of a cop, that I wasn’t a threat.
Still, orders were orders.
“Please,” I said again. “They haven’t had food or water in days. They’ll die if I can’t get back to them. They’ll die without me. Please, sir—I promise I won’t hurt anybody. I just want to get to my cats. Please help me. All I need is someone to help me. I’ve been trying to get back to them for days and days. Please, sir, please help me—please let me in!”
I had been prepared, as circumstances dictated, to fake-cry as a way of gaining sympathy. There was nothing I wouldn’t stoop to at this point. But now I found, to my complete humiliation, that my crying wasn’t fake. I was sobbing—huge, racking, genuine sobs that took all the air from my body and doubled me over. I buried my face in the shopping bag I clutched, I dragged my sleeve across my face to clear my eyes, but the tears kept coming. My cats would die because I hadn’t changed my driver’s license. They would die over a driver’s license. It seemed like such a stupid, impossible thing, yet here was the reality of it.
The three cops stood there, looking at me a bit uncomfortably, until I had cried myself out. Finally, one of the younger ones spoke. There was a slight trace of a Hispanic accent in his voice as he said, “My wife is pretty crazy about our cats. She’d probably kill me if we didn’t let the girl in.”
I looked up hopefully. Was it going to happen? Had I really and finally succeeded?
“Here are pictures of my cats,” I said, scrambling around in my purse for my photos. I struggled to hold them up along with the shopping bag cradled in my arms. “That’s Scarlett, and that’s Vashti,” I pointed to each in turn, “and that’s my youngest, Homer.”
The three of them squinted and looked where I pointed. “The little one’s interesting looking, isn’t he?” said the older policeman.
“He’s blind.” I was pulling out all the stops. “Anything could have happened—if a window broke, he wouldn’t know not to jump out of it, and I live all the way up on the thirty-first floor. And he must be so terrified—he can’t see what’s going on. Can y
ou imagine what it must sound like down there, to such a little cat who’s blind?”
The older police officer heaved a deep sigh. “All right,” he said. He stepped away slightly from the opening between two barricades and waved me through. “Go on.”
“Oh, thank you!” I clutched his hand, pressing it between both of my own. “Thank you! Thank you!” I pivoted blindly to each of the three police officers and thanked them in turn. Then I readjusted the weight of my backpack and shopping bag, wiped the last of the tears from my cheeks, and stepped past the barricades.
“Vaya con dios,” the younger officer said as I passed. Go with God.
I stuck mainly to back streets as I made my way from the West Village down to the Financial District. I was afraid that if I used the main thoroughfares, I might encounter another checkpoint, somebody else demanding ID before allowing me to continue on my way.
It was something I needn’t have worried about. I walked for more than three miles, and that entire time I didn’t see or hear another living soul—not a car, not a person, not a bird in a tree. It felt eerie, almost post-apocalyptic, as if I were the only living human left in Manhattan. I had never seen or even heard of a completely deserted New York City street. No matter how late the hour or how quiet a neighborhood, there was always something or someone else—a woman walking a dog, a man delivering produce to a twenty-four-hour grocery story, lights in windows. You were never so far from a major thoroughfare as to be unable to hear cars whizzing by like comets in the distance.
But now there was nothing but silence. Smoke and silence.
The sky was still gray, and it seemed to grow grayer as I approached Ground Zero, the smoke intensifying until my throat stung and my eyes watered. My arms and back ached almost beyond my physical capacity to stand it. Once, I tripped over a crack in the pavement and dropped the shopping bag I carried. The sound of it hitting the ground rang out and echoed from the walls of buildings like cannon fire and I jumped, even though I knew where the sound had come from. The silence of the streets had felt unnatural until something broke it—and then the sound was even more out of place.
Ash had settled onto everything, and grew thicker the farther south I went. The green leaves of trees and bushes and the once festive awnings of boutiques and cafés were caked a uniform gray-white. Even the mannequins inside display windows were coated so thickly that they were indistinguishable from the clothes they modeled.
After an hour or so, I reached Ground Zero itself and rejoined the world of noise and other people. I could hear the groans of trucks and men, the metallic chatter of walkie-talkies and the barking of police dogs. I had seen pictures of the rubble on TV and in newspapers, but it had still been impossible to imagine how enormous the devastation was, the acres and acres of fallen, heaped-up metal and concrete. The thing was still belching smoke and occasional flames. Tiny specks of men, their faces black with soot and drenched in sweat, dotted the ruin as they looked for survivors.
I didn’t look at it for very long; it felt disrespectful, somehow. And there were other places I had to be.
My anxiety grew as I turned the corner onto the block where I lived. What if, like the man I’d heard about back at the ASPCA relief center, I’d come all this way only to find that my building was locked and empty? To my utter joy and relief, however, the front door of my building was open when I reached it—and there in the lobby were Tom, my doorman, and Kevin, my building super. I’d had countless interactions with each of them, of the semi-friendly/semi-professional variety, but now I was so happy to see them, I dropped my shopping bag and threw myself into their arms. “You’re here!” I cried as they each wrapped me in bear hugs. “I can’t believe you’re really here!”
“We never left,” Kevin said. I knew Kevin had an enormous family—something like eight kids and twelve dogs and Lord-alone-knew-how-many cats—all the way up in Queens. “If we’d left, we might not have been able to get back in.”
“You are so not wrong about that.” I couldn’t stop grinning.
“We still don’t have phones, electricity, or water,” Kevin said, “so I can’t recommend you stay here. We’re on the same power grid as the stock exchange, though, so we should be back up in a couple of days.”
“And the building itself?” My voice was anxious as I asked this question. “Were any windows …?”
Kevin’s face softened. He knew all about Homer—he was the one who had supervised the installation of the childproof guards on my windows that kept them from opening wide enough for a small, blind cat to wriggle his way through. “No broken windows,” he said gently. “Homer and your other cats should be fine.”
“We were just doing a sweep for pets,” Tom added, swinging his arm around to indicate the pet carriers of all sizes, each containing a dog or cat, scattered throughout the lobby. “People have been trickling back in to get them.”
“Well, I’m here now.” I reached into the side pocket of my backpack to pull out my flashlight. I flicked it on and off once, to make sure it was working. “Just point me in the direction of the stairwell.”
“Do you need any help?” Tom regarded me with concern. “That’s a lot of stuff you’re carrying.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured him. “You guys worry about the other pets whose people haven’t gotten back yet.”
The stairwell of my apartment building was an interior one, windowless and entirely encased in concrete. Without any electricity, even from an emergency generator, it was completely black. The sole illumination came from the pale, round pool cast by my flashlight.
I was so eager to get back to my cats that I hated myself for having to stop and rest as I climbed up thirty-one floors. My arms, thighs, and back ached beneath the weight of the things I carried, and I was drenched in sweat. By the time I reached the thirteenth floor, I was panting so hard that I had to sit and catch my breath. My gasps echoed loudly in the cement stairwell as I unscrewed the cap of the small bottle of water Tom had pressed into my hand. I sipped from it sparingly; I didn’t want to drink too deeply and end up with a cramp that would slow me down further.
After a few minutes, I continued my ascent. I had to stop again to catch my breath at the twentieth floor and at the twenty-eighth floor. My legs were starting to shake by then, but I was only three floors away—there was no point in resting any further. When the sign that said 31 swam before my eyes, I almost wept for the second time that day—this time in gratitude.
My fingers had stiffened around the shopping bag, and I fumbled with my keys as I inserted them into the lock of the door to my apartment. I had expected the smell of smoke to hit me in the face when I opened the door, and so it did, but overwhelming even that was the putrid smell of the litter box that hadn’t been cleaned since Monday night. My heart tore. Poor things, I thought. Having to live with that all week!
I had been almost afraid to enter the apartment, unsure of what I might find. But a quick peek through the front door confirmed that everything was intact, unharmed, and exactly where I had left it Tuesday morning. The only difference was that there wasn’t so much as a crumb left in the cats’ food dish. The water bowl was dry as a bone.
Scarlett and Vashti were huddled together miserably on the bed, but their heads flew up as I entered. Homer was standing in front of the windows. His body was held with an alert, tense readiness, as if he’d been pacing before he’d heard the key hit the lock. His nose was in the air and his ears zipped around. Who is that? Who’s there?
I carefully set down my bag and backpack, not wanting to frighten them further with any loud or unnecessary noise. “Kitties,” I murmured hoarsely. “I’m here.”
Upon hearing my voice, Homer responded with a piercing Mew! He covered the distance between us in two bounds and leapt at me, hurling himself at the center of my chest with a force that almost knocked me down. I sank to the floor to prevent any mishaps, and Homer burrowed his head into my chest and shoulder as hard as he could.
“Homer-
Bear!” I said. At the sound of his name, Homer rubbed his whole face vigorously against my cheeks and resumed his cries of Mew! Mew! Mew! Beneath them I heard rich, singsong purring, the way he’d purred as a kitten when he’d realized I would be there every morning when he woke up. “I’m so sorry, little boy,” I said. The tears Homer couldn’t see in my eyes were audible in my voice. “I’m so sorry it took me so long.”
Vashti approached almost shyly, as if she respected the intensity of Homer’s joy and didn’t want to intrude on it. She put her two front paws on my leg and squeaked tentatively, and I drew her into my arms as well. Only Scarlett remained aloof. She looked at me balefully through narrowed eyes, then turned her face away. Well, look who finally decided to show up. But even she relented after a moment. I guess you probably came back as soon as you could. She, too, crawled into my lap, for once not swatting impatiently at the other two as she jockeyed for position.
“I will never leave you alone this long again,” I told them. “I will never, never let anything bad happen to you, and I will never leave you alone this long again.” I pried Homer from my chest and held him in front of me, as if I wanted to be sure he understood what I was saying, even though he couldn’t—not really.
Yet I felt sure he knew. Somehow, he always did.
“I promise,” I said. “I promise you.”
The next morning, from Philadelphia, I mailed Garrett a check for the equivalent of a full week of pet-sitting. I mailed another check to the ASPCA.
21 • None So Blind
I shall never all my days be as good a man as he was.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
MY FRIENDS IN MIAMI WERE UNITED IN THEIR OPINION THAT I SHOULD move back in the wake of September 11. There was no question that life in New York became as hard as I could have anticipated back before I’d moved, when I’d posed myself worst-case hypotheticals. The stench of smoke and ruin from Ground Zero lingered for months; to this day, I associate the smell of things burning with my first autumn in New York. It bothered Homer especially, and it was months before he stopped wandering around the apartment, complaining fretfully about something he couldn’t quite identify but that created a constant, low-level anxiety. The clamor of dump trucks and helicopters was constant, and this made Homer jumpy as well. The high point of Homer’s day had always been the early part of the evening, when I would return from work. Now he was so ecstatic every time I reentered the apartment—even if I’d gone no farther than the grocery store across the street—that it was several minutes before I could detach him from me long enough to put down my purse and hang up my coat.