A
Week in September
R.
D. Kushner
Wake up after only about 4.5 hours of sleep.
Immediately went downstairs and turned on the television; news. The smoke
is still rising from a pile debris infinitely smaller than those two massive
structures. The sun looks strangely beautiful off of the massive plume that
drifts deliriously skyward and through the imagination. Military planes thundering
overhead; when I hear them, I remember hearing the scream of a jet plane that
happened to be racing down Fifth Avenue as I got out of the shower yesterday;
in a nondescript apartment on Third Avenue, just moments before impact I stood
naked and alone. At my office, later in the day A___ remembers the Germans
flying overhead in Europe during World War II; and I wonder how long it will
be before I stop looking up in the sky, panicked.
I decide I’ll go to work. I really want to get
a New York times; seeing this in print will convert the dream sequence into
some semblance of reality. After my shower, I dress casually. Put on a freshly
pressed shirt and a pair of jeans. I decide to wear sneakers, and not sandals.
Funny. But I want to be able to run quickly from danger if I have to.
It’s a beautiful day. Not many cars on the streets.
At 23rd Street & 3rd Avenue, there are many police officers and uniformed
military personnel directing the vehicles with frantic hand gestures; vehicles
that usually obey the steady cadence of greens and reds are now asked to obey
a new set of instructions. Stop when the officer says stop, and go when the
soldier says go. It’s not clear which are more confused, the cars or the stoplights.
Peripatetic pedestrians flowing down the sidewalks, but not with the usual
rush hour velocity. Very few people in business attire. I cross the street.
The sun is warm; to notice the beauty of the day is to make a mockery of the
drifting smoke. It hangs in the air like a damp cloth and half the sky has
taken on its muted hues. It has to be 4 or 5 miles from here, but the size
of the plume makes you think that its only 5-10 blocks away. Scale. Like those
buildings: a-scalar.
I walk up Park Avenue. The chasm of the street
is almost silent. The blue sky smiles benevolently down the street which stretches
out like the nave of a giant church; I can almost imagine the sounds of my
feet echoing off the sheer walls of this massive, empty, roofless cathedral.
The winged statue on the pediment of Grand Central Station to the north has
the presence of a religious icon; the holy trinity is completed by the gleaming
spire of the Chrysler building and the lonely southern face of the Empire
State that stares downtown in awe.
When I arrive at the office I turn on my computer;
I want to tap into the digital ether to seek some information that might dry
up this flood of uncertainty. I check my phone messages. I Delete the voice
of B___, not knowing whether or not he's alive. He left the message on September
10th, 8:00 PM, from a small wooden desk on the 35th floor of WTC-2. I imagine
the cream colored walls and a stack of papers resting mindlessly on the corner
of his desk; a desk which sat lazily on a thin layer of carpet; a carpet spread
out across a concrete floor slab which was suspended in the air by a quantity
of bolted and riveted steel that defied the imagination. The color of the
carpet seems somehow more significant now; and that it is missing from my
memory renders his office in the World Trade Center less tangible. Perhaps
that is appropriate. My office was preparing to begin construction on an office
renovation for this client; the new carpet samples, selected meticulously
by the client, have been carefully documented and now sit in a nondescript
brown binder in my office that is like an unmarked grave. I awarded the contractor
bid for new work to R___ yesterday. And now the construction site is gone.
Gone.
My boss arrives at the office. Beard, glasses;
he lets me know that he had called the office yesterday wondering where I
was; hoping that I hadn’t set up a morning meeting at either of my projects
in the World Trade Center towers. It doesn’t occur to me until later that
it would have been infinitely more likely for me to have scheduled that unfortunate
meeting than to have been struck by the proverbial statistical bolt of lightning,
yesterday. He goes to his office and I sit down and make some phone calls.
I think I call M___ first. I call his cell phone; but not after I first make
a despondent call to his office number in WTC-1. I receive a busy signal from
that phone that used to be suspended 90 floors above the Earth; its monotonous
cadence and somber tone reflects my mourning. He answers his cell phone on
the 3rd ring. 3 rings and then I know. It’s him. Out of habit, he answers
very formally; just like he would if he was still at the office. But not exactly,
because if he was still at the office he would not have answered his phone.
I tell him who it is. I say immediately its great to hear his voice, I’m glad
he's okay. He says unselfishly, and immediately, “We are all okay.” I say
thank God. It slips out without my thinking. This disturbs me.
After our conversation I decide to go for a
walk. The city is strangely unfamiliar in its solitude. I walk up Park Avenue,
and then over to Madison at around 38th Street. Looking downtown from Madison,
to its abrupt terminus at 23rd Street. There are maybe 10 cars and a few buses.
That's all. In 15 blocks. 10 cars and 3 buses. This place is dead. Side streets
are empty. Both ways. As I walk uptown on Madison, I look left and right at
the cross streets; the island of Manhattan dissolves as my view sweeps the
full breadth of this geologic peninsula that was transformed into an angry
geometry by the will of human thought. Unimpeded by the usual swarms of activity,
I stare long enough that it becomes possible to imagine the way this place
looked before the imposition of the grid and its architectural conglomerations.
You can see blocks and blocks, and no cars, no people. I wander and meander.
End up on 42nd Street. I walk by Grand Central. Lots of police officers. No
one is rushing around as would be typical at this transportation hub. Looks
like tourists up here; there’s a big hotel nearby. They're stuck, I guess
they may as well see the city.
I meander over to Third Avenue, past Lexington.
Eventually I find a Daily News. I pickup a copy. On the cover is a similar
picture as the New York Post, but in color.
I’m thirsty and hungry. I decide I need something
to drink. I see a sign for a small nondescript café in the basement of a quiet
gray building. The sign out front indicates that they have all kinds of fresh
juices. I take the steps down, pause at a small landing, then step though
the door. The ceiling is low and heavy. I notice this right away. And the
place is really long; like a bowling alley. I ask the woman behind the counter
for a strawberry, banana, pineapple. She says "March." I look up
at the menu-board and see that drinks are named by the months of the year.
“Yes,” I say, “Thank you.” She is busy cleaning out the blender so I sit down
in a wicker chair, facing away from her... and open the daily news.
I flip through all the photos. The hand is what
I remember. A severed hand, with the skin pulled toward the wrist like the
way a straw wrapper folds up as you slide it down the straw without sliding
it off. All bunched up. A massive pulling. Stretching that removed the hand.
I think about the opposable thumb and what it must have been capable of. This
person. Shaking hands, writing memos. The hand has the index finger out. Pointing.
It’s centered in the photo. Black and white photo. Cut fingers. Bleeding.
A dead hand. I think that this is how bodies are going to be found. In pieces.
I think of the photos in the encyclopedia we had on the bookshelf in the house
I grew up in New Jersey. Photos of heavy machinery injuries. I was fascinated
that the body could simply come apart from forceful stretching and twisting.
I remember the ligaments and the tears and the pieces hanging. This I think
was the fate of most.
As I walk out, I look at the people walking
and think about the hand, and how they are so soft; the people. Soft. All
that falling debris and hard stuff and all those soft bodies. They didn't
have a chance. That hand.
I stop by the office. It’s around 2:00. Nothing
more to do. I walk home. You can smell smoke more thickly now; smells like
a combination of an electrical fire and a barbecue... sticks in your throat.
Like when there was that fire in my building a couple years ago... but that
was next door... this is 5 miles away. Fuck.
My sister and her friend A___ are at the apartment
when I get home. They want to go for a walk; they’ve heard that there is a
makeshift memorial being erected in Union Square. I leave the apartment without
having even sat down. We enter Union Square at the northwest, but cross to
the east side to get Falafel. The Falafel place is closed. Damn, my mouth
was watering, I love that place. The sign says “Middle Eastern Cuisine."
My sister wonders if they were afraid. These people are so nice, but maybe
they were afraid. I say that the businesses in this area of town feed on the
daily work crowd; and since the work crowd is pretty much absent today, maybe
that’s why they’re closed... but deep down, I think it was their fear... it’s
real. It’s understood.
The south part of the square, along 14th Street
is full of people. People are writing on long sheets of butcher paper taped
to the sidewalk. I’ll never forget the scene [or will I... will it soften?].
We read some of the other things that are written. My favorite is a 3 word
inscription: “Please No Ideology.” At some point, a white man with a shaved
head steps on some of the paper that was on the ground with people’s writing
on it. A girl asks him to show some respect. He was an asshole, he tells her,
“It’s only paper,” and walks on. I could have ruined him [with reasoning]...
but that attitude. Fuck. No way to get through. Not worth my energy.
Smoke. It billows up over our heads, up to the
north. Man. It’s still fucking burning.
We walk up past the NYU library. Man it’s quiet
here. There is a steel framed building under construction. All that steel.
Standing up. All that and more fell. Fell. Fell down. Crashed. On people.
This steel skeleton of a building being built looks so pretty. But... not
downtown. There it’s a danger. Potential gravity. Looming on stilts.
We walk home; the smell of smoke and acrid air
has been carried uptown again.
I open the window in my bedroom. The smell is horrible. I’ll sleep with the window closed. 5 miles away.
