Sometimes a brief exchange with an unknown person marks you forever, not because it is profound but because it is uncommonly vivid. Over twenty years ago, I saw a man lying on the sidewalk at Broadway and 105th Street. I guessed that he was in his early sixties, but he may have been younger. Unshaven, filthy, and ragged, he lay on his side in an apparent stupor, clutching a bottle in a torn and wrinkled paper bag. As I walked past him, he suddenly propped himself up on his elbow and called out to me, “Hey, beautiful! Want to have dinner with me?” His question was so loud, so direct, I stopped. Looking down at the man at my feet, I said, “Thank you so much for the invitation, but I’m busy tonight.” Without a moment’s hesitation, he grinned up at me, lifted the bottle in a mock toast, and said, “Lunch?”
2003
9/11, or One Year Later
1
9/11 HAS BECOME INTERNATIONAL SHORTHAND FOR A CATA-strophic morning in the United States and the three thousand dead it left behind. The two numbers have entered the vocabulary of horror: the place names and ideological terms that are used to designate dozens, hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of victims — words like My Lai, Oklahoma City, the Disappeared in Argentina, Sarajevo, Cambodia, Collectivization, the Cultural Revolution, Auschwitz. 9/11 has also become a threshold and a way of telling time — before and after, pre and post. It has been used to signify the dawn of a new era, an economic fault line, the onset of war, the presence of evil in the world, and a loss of American innocence. But for us New Yorkers, whether we were far from the attacks or close to them, September 11 remains a more intimate memory. For weeks afterward, the first question we asked friends and neighbors whom we hadn’t seen since the attacks was: “Is your family all right? Did you lose anybody?”
The media question “How has life changed in the city since September 11?” is one that has been reiterated over and over in the press here and abroad, but it can’t be answered by passing over the day itself. There can be no before and no after, no talk of change, without our stories from that morning and the many mornings that followed, because even for those of us who were lucky and didn’t lose someone we loved, September 11 is finally a story of collective trauma and ongoing grief.
Twelve of the thirty firefighters from our local station house in Brooklyn died when the World Trade Center collapsed. Charlie, the owner of the liquor store only a few blocks from our house, a man who has helped me and my husband buy wine for years, lost his sister-in-law. She was a stewardess on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The terrorists slit her throat. Friends of ours who live on John Street were trapped inside their building as the towers fell, their windows shattering from the impact. With help from the police, they finally managed to get out, but as they left, they found themselves stepping over human body parts lying on the ground.
My sister Asti, who lives with her husband and daughter, Juliette, on White Street in Tribeca, was walking south toward P.S. 234, an elementary school only two blocks north of the World Trade Center. She had dropped Juliette off not long before but decided to go and get her after the first plane hit. Asti remembers wondering if she was overreacting. Then she heard the blast of the second plane as it crashed above her. She looked up, saw the gaping hole in the building looming above her, and started to run. By then people were streaming north. She heard someone say, “Oh my God, they’re jumping.” A woman near her vomited in the street.
My friend Larry, who works at The Wall Street Journal, the offices of which were directly across from the towers, escaped from the building and ran until he couldn’t run anymore. He stopped to catch his breath, turned, and saw people on fire, jumping from the windows. Hours later, he managed to make his way home across the Brooklyn Bridge. When his panicked wife, Mary, opened the door, she saw a ghost man, covered from head to foot with a fine white powder. After he withdrew from the hug she gave him, Mary noticed that her arms were bleeding from the tiny pieces of pulverized glass that were part of that milky dust.
2
Seeing isn’t always believing. Traumatic events are often accompanied by a form of disassociation. What is unfolding before your eyes seems unreal. Although I saw the damage done by the first plane from the window of our house in Brooklyn, I saw the second plane go into the second tower on television. The two pictures I hold in my mind are strangely mismatched. The first has a power that the second doesn’t. It has something to do with scale and something to do with un-mediated vision. The smoke rising from the familiar skyscraper through my window shocked me. The image on a twenty-one-inch television screen had an alien, almost hallucinatory quality that forced me to say as I watched, “This is true; this is real.” Asti, on the other hand, who witnessed the second crash, who heard and saw the horrific destruction only blocks from where she was standing, remained calm. It was only when she had put Juliette to bed that night and saw the plane cut into the building on television that she began to cry.
The problem of direct and mediated images is important to September 11 and its aftermath, not only because most of the world witnessed what happened on television but because the terrorists knew that they were staging a spectacular media event. They knew that in the time that elapsed between the first plane crash and the second television crews would have descended on the scene to record the horrifying image of an airliner entering the second tower and that the tape would be played and replayed for all the world to see, and they knew, too, that it would resemble nothing so much as a big-budget Hollywood disaster movie. A hackneyed fiction remade ad nauseam by the studios was manipulated by the terrorists into grotesque reality. At the same time, it must be said that it took very little imagination on the part of screenwriters to take actual events of terror and enlarge on them to fit the writers’ own notions of a thrilling spectacle. September 11 was not unimaginable. We could all imagine it. It’s the fact of it that annihilated the fantasy.
On September 12, I was traveling in a subway car during what is normally rush hour on my way to collect my fourteen-year-old daughter, Sophie, who had been stranded overnight on the Upper West Side near her school. There were only a few of us in that car — myself and five or six other silent, stunned passengers who had decided that a trip was necessary. Because the regular line had been damaged by the attacks, I left one train to find another and noticed a large poster for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie plastered to the wall in the station. A picture of the oversized actor was accompanied by a text — the gist of which was that a firefighter had lost his wife and child in a terrorist attack and was out for vengeance. It made me sick.
I was not alone. Immediately following the devastation in New York, Hollywood recanted. The New York Times carried articles in which studio powerhouses made dramatic statements about how everything had changed. A new era had dawned. A novelist and screenwriter declared on television that she would never write the same stories again. Sincerity charged back. Several periodicals pronounced “irony” dead. An acerbic, often cynical film reviewer for The New Yorker ended his column with a heartfelt statement about love. He seemed to mean it. My brother-in-law, a sculptor, reported a conversation that he had with fellow artists who said they were rethinking their work. For a brief time, photographs of firefighters and policemen replaced pictures of celebrities in the tabloids and on magazine covers. The news channels dropped commercials from their coverage, as if they knew that alternating film footage from the site, where rescue workers were digging for pieces of the dead, with ads for dishwashing liquid or an allergy drug would be unacceptable. But by now, this talk of a cultural sea change is mostly gone. Collateral Damage, the Schwarzenegger film, was withdrawn but later released, and now it has come and gone. The movie moguls backed away from their statements, arguing that they had been in shock and didn’t know what they were saying. Television commercials were reinstated long ago, and images of corpses lying in the fields or cities of other countries are cut short by pleas to rush into your nearest Ford dealer to save hundreds of dollars on a new SUV. As for irony, the word had been misused so often in the press before September 11, had been trumpeted far and wide as the tone of our age, as if it meant nothing more than a cold and cynical distance. Irony is always double. The juxtaposition between the declarations made immediately after 9/11 in the media, announcing a new earnest world, and the return to business as usual only months afterward might serve as a singular proof that the ironic point of view is sometimes the only legitimate way to interpret the reality we live in.