September 10, 2003

The Things I Gathered

I have a transparent blue Tupperware-style box, made by Sterilite. It's about 16" by 14" by 8", and it cost $5.99. I bought it in December of 2001 from the Spida general store up the street from my apartment in Astoria, Queens. Here are the things that are in it, now:

An unsigned paycheck. The week before September 11, I received a paycheck that my employer forgot to sign. We were going to meet at 9:30 AM on September 11 in front of 155 Broadway, which was about three blocks due East of the World Trade Center towers. Needless to say, we didn't manage to meet up that morning. I couldn't find him in the crush of people watching the towers burn, milling around, working their cellphones. Eventually, I hopped back on my bike and rode to my office building at about 9:45. I learned later that he took shelter in a building lobby when the first tower fell, and then hitched a ride across the Brooklyn bridge to reach home and family.

If I had not gone to meet him that morning, I would have taken my usual bike route, which crossed the West Side Highway at Liberty Street, directly in the shadow of the South tower. Only God knows what I would have seen on the asphalt there.

A burned piece of blank, 8 1/2 x 11 pale blue paper. When I reached my office building, I wasn't quite sure what to do. I knew by this time that we had been deliberately attacked--somehow, it wasn't as immediately obvious from the ground as it might have been on television. I stood for a while in the plaza of the HSBC building with my bicycle, in full view of the South tower. After a few moments, I realized that I was shuffling through piles of paper. It blew against my ankles and into my bicycle spokes, it mounded against curbs and benches. For a moment, I thought that it was the remains of some ticker-tape parade I didn't know about, pehaps held the previous day...when the World Series parades were held, people tossed all sorts of random paper out of their office windows, and the streets downtown had looked the same as they did that morning. Then I saw paper still swirling in the air, and my eyes followed the shimmering column up, and up, until I saw its source: the burning maw of the black hole in the South Tower. It was pouring out of the building as though driven by a fierce wind, a thick tornado of paperwork. I picked up a blue piece of paper from the ground at my feet, and saw that it had been flash-burned on all its edges. I tucked it into my bike's rack-pack: a memento, I thought, of the Great Trade Center Fire. At that point, my befuddled reaction was still, "That will take forever to fix." I've got the paper in a certificate frame, now, fastened down under plastic. I affixed a label to the back of the frame, as though it was an artifact in a museum. It reads,

Later, I heard someone on the television describing a mysterious shimmering cloud she had seen in the distance at the Pentagon after the plane had exploded there. She said that she suddenly realized that it was the shiny "aluminum skin of the aircraft," puffed into bits and flung into the air. But I knew that she was mistaken--it was a cloud of paper, white paper glittering in the sun as it poured from the burning office building.

A Progresso marinated Artichoke Heart jar 1/4 full of dust. I wasn't able to return to my office until two weeks later, and the air downtown was still stenched with burnt metal and ash. The Pile at Ground Zero still smoked. Everything was filthy: the windows of the buildings were grimed, the streets, though swept, were pale and gray, shop awnings and windowsills were still caked with inches' worth of the omnipresent remains of the towers. I scooped up a portion of these remains from the deep marble window ledges of Federal Hall, where George Washington was inaugurated as our first President. Interspersed with the dust is a curlicued piece of pink paper, with a row of small holes punched into it. It's from the edges of tractor-feed computer paper, used for printing out multiple copies of forms in some office that no longer exists.

Two days ago, as I walked along behind the wounded Deutsche Bank building, I caught a sudden, brief hint of the odor of that day. It stopped me cold, and I looked around, trying to source it. There is a building next to the Deutsche Bank, empty now, and I stood by its now-chained loading dock doors. The odor had come from inside of that building...perhaps trapped there, for two years, or perhaps it was just a mixture of new welding and old must, evocative enough to ring my memory like a bright brass bell.

When I got home, I pulled out my blue Sterilite box, carefully opened my artichoke-heart jar of dust, and cautiously sniffed: nothing. It was old dry gypsum powder, evoking no memory...no memory, at least, that could be prompted by scent alone.

A splotch of melted metal. For a year afterwards, Liberty Park--a small park with some trees, benches and chess tables, between Broadway and Church streets--was fenced off, and filled with mobile construction offices and equipment. Many months after the towers fell, I saw large pieces of twisted structural steel through a hole in the green-wrapped fence. The debris was tucked away in one corner of the park, near the bronze man that used to sit on a now-vanished bench, forever checking his briefcase. The statue had been uprooted, and someone had put a gasmask on him, tucked an American flag into his patinaed briefcase, and perched him behind a mobile office. The girders next to him were sheared and malformed, and the half-inch rivets that had once connected them to their fellows were bent and protruding. Using my camera as an alibi--"I was just taking photos of the statue, officer!"--I slipped through the hole in the fence one afternoon, intending to grab one of those rivets. But it was not, as it appeared to be, laying free on the girder. It had merely been bent at a right angle, and was still firmly attached. On the ground beneath the girder was a gobbet of metal about the size of three flattened marbles. It was puffed full of bubbles, as though it had flown through the air while molten. I pocketed that instead.

Photographs. I took many pictures of the area around my office, including the view of Ground Zero from the 39th floor of my office. Someday, I will scan them, and share them.

A block of stamps. In 2002, the Post Office issued a stamp bearing the now-famous image of the three firemen raising the American flag against a backdrop of wreckage. The net proceeds of the stamp sales were transfered to FEMA, and were intended to provide assistance to the families of the emergency personnel who were killed or disabled in the line of duty as a result of the attacks. I bought a full block of twenty, and I keep them neat and safe in a Priority Mail envelope.

A subway map. I put this in the blue plastic box because it still has the words World Trade Center printed in downtown Manhattan. The new ones don't.

Postcards. A dozen or so postcards of the Financial District, the way that it was, plus one of the twin towers rebuilt as a giant hand giving the bird to bin Laden. The guy who cut my hair gave that one to me. It was titled, "New York City 2005."

I don't think we're going to make that particular deadline.

A sticker and a refrigerator magnet. "United We Stand" and "United We Stand in Remembrance Sept. 11, 2001" respectively.

Two video tapes. One is of "9/11," the CBS program that aired on March 10, 2002. The other is an edition of Nightline from March 12, 2002. I don't use a VCR anymore, but they'll stay in the box.

New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers. I bought this book at the remaindered bookstore up the street in Astoria, and threw it in the box without really looking at it. It's full of large, full-color pictures of disaster. I knew I'd want it, someday, if only to show some young person and say, "I was there that day, and here's what it looked like."

Newspapers and magazines. There wasn't a New York Times to be had in the city on September 12. My therapist received the September 12 Philadelphia Inquirer at his house in Cape May, which he later gave to me. Eventually I collected issues of the Daily News, Newsday, and the New York Times from that week, plus a couple of Greek-language dailies from my neighborhood in Queens. There are also Special Double Issues of Newsweek, and copies of of U.S. News & World Reports, People, and the Economist.

Several newspaper headlines stand out. "IT'S WAR" and "ACT OF WAR" from the Daily News and the New York Post. Many people still haven't grasped that.

From the September 14 New York Post: "New York's tragic face." The front page photo is of a young woman, her face a painful mask of grief. It's the kind of face many people wore for so many months. That expression feels like all of your facial muscles are being savagely pulled down towards the ground by heavy weights, or by strong, tiny demons. It's an expression that happens to you. I know because I wore that face a few times as well, although never with such cause as the woman on the Post's front page. She's clutching a flyer that reads, "Missing from 2 World Trade Center 104th fl.," and bears a picture of one James Andrew O'Grady...a boyfriend, perhaps, or a relative.

When Pea and I cycled into the city on the night of September 12, we passed by Bellevue hospital on First Avenue on the way back to Queens. The walls, the streetlight posts the telephone kiosks--even the news vans--were covered with the faces of the missing, flyer after flyer of husbands, wives, lovers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters. So many. An endless white patchwork of photocopies and color printouts.

It broke our hearts.

That's what the box is all about, I think. Tomorrow, I will be home at Peapod Manor, and I will put up some new bookshelves, and I will grill something out on the deck. But upstairs, in my office, will be that blue plastic box...full of grief, and death.

Unlike so many others, I can close that box, and tuck it away, or even ignore it, for as long as I want.

I'm a fortunate man. Tomorow, I will remember those who were not so fortunate. Who didn't escape. Those who went inside, instead of running out. Those whose loved ones never came home again. Those whose lives were ended or forever scarred on an ordinary, cloudless, blue-sky morning two years ago.

Remember.

---

[Deb at must be nice writes about grief, and the things the lost leave behind when they go...]