May 29, 2003

This place is haunted.

There are the obvious twin phantoms, of course, forming that vacuity in the truncated skyline that once topped out at at 1,100 feet or so. You can see them most clearly from the river approach. The three surviving cousins, topped by a pyramid, a dome, and a ziggurat, together form a visual arc that now sails off into the shallow sky instead of inclining steeply up the gray faces of the towers. The eye seeks resolution, and finds none.

Once off the dock and on the esplanade, a host of smaller spirits awaits. These are presences, rather than absences. Heavily armed police in squads of three, four and five. The too-new glass of the Wintergarden atrium. The four new American flags atop each corner of 4 World Financial Center. The new, dark red pedestrian walkway connecting the domed and pyramid-topped buildings. The old walkway over West Street, still bearing on its dull aluminum skin the innumerable pocks and scars of cascading debris, amputated and patched with plywood where it once angled to connect to Tower Two. The sidewalk beneath it holds the chipped impressions of tumbling steel.

And over there, swathed in black windblown fabric, stands the hulking revenant of the abandoned Deutschebank building. Vast swaths of plywood are visible beneath its shroud, and on colder days it vents plumes of steam high above, almost as though it still burns. The street behind it has been completely excavated, fifty feet deep or more, as utility crews continue to rebuild downtown infrastructure. Here on the corner is the shell of "Ten House," housing FDNY Engine 10 and Ladder 10. It's being gutted for renovation. A heart and the word "YOU" remain on the half-open firehouse door, created with pieces of black tape.

It's full of ghosts down here...ghosts of presence, of absence, of memory. I usually avoid the worst of the lot, over by the Pit itself. Each morning I shun the old dull aluminum pedestrian walkway, crossing West Street at a traffic light a few blocks South. The old walkway offers wide-windowed views, suitable for visitors' photographs. It connects to a path on the other side that skirts the edge of the Pit and is walled by scribbled sentiments and tacked-up makeshift memorials.

However, the total effect is impossible to avoid. Every blocked-off street, every extra policeman, every missing tree in the park, every roughly-patched bit of pavement and every newly-installed barricade conspire to create the overwhelming sense, the inescapable, creeping sensation. Even if you've spent two years in a cave with stoppered ears and your hands over your eyes, you'd know: something happened here.

This, in turn, spurs on my imagination, and some days I spend my fifteen-minute walk from the water's edge to my office thinking of nothing but the interiors of aircraft, full of slowly tumbling bodies wreathed in flame, of pilots, dead and bled-out, of smoking moon canyons eight stories wide and three stories tall, 900 feet above the ground.

And I think: you fucking assholes.

For me, this place will always be haunted, and I'm among the least of those affected, having lost no one, sustained no injury, lacking the eternal moment of I'm going to die certainty experienced by my co-worker who watched a tower tumbling towards her. It's not even the souls of the dead, still hovering there, horrified in the sky, that affects me at my core. It's something worse, I think...having to do with the nature of the human animal, the endless, repeated idiocy of murder for spectacle, murder for cause, murder for personal righteousness' sake. It hangs over this place like a pall, a covering for the tomb: humans did this.

I find that knowledge incredible only because I am such a sheltered, first-world person, a doughy white man of privilege. I'm sure that inhabitants of Rwanda or Bosnia would have no trouble absorbing it. The fact that such depravity is unique here doesn't make it unique in the world. Over the course of human history it's not even unusual. But--selfish as I am these days--that knowledge doesn't help me. It doesn't shorten the eternity between one heartbeat and the next when--as often happens in a large building--there's a distant boom or bang, and I wait to see if it's just someone working on building machinery, or if the windows are going to explode inward, if the floor is going to heave up and then drop me out into the May sky, if this orderly space of cubicles and water coolers, office doors and computers, is going to turn into some unrecognizable maelstrom of fire, wreckage, and pieces of the dead.

I'm sure that at some point such moments will be memories, too. For quite awhile I avoided them altogether. Recently, though, they've increased...unexpectedly, I should add. Twenty months on, I've suddenly got more jitters and vivid imaginings than I did twelve, or even six months after the events. I'm sure there's some psychological explanation, and that I'm well within some normalized curve of trauma response.

Writing about it seems to banish it, to some extent. I feel better now, at the end of these paragraphs, than I did at their beginning. Yesterday, as I walked to the ferry dock at the end of the day, the squall that Pea had told me about on the phone two hours before finally reached New York. It took as long to travel from my house to Manhattan as I do. The wind kicked up, and the air took on the tang of incipient rain. I've got a peculiar affinity for windy days, so I opened my jacket a bit, and left my umbrella in my bag as the first big spatters hit me. I walked through the bluster, and felt great portions of fear and anxiety slough off me with each gust, with each burst of thunder rolling up and down the river.

I don't know why wind and storm work on my head that way, but they do, and I'm glad.