NEW YORK'As I write, my computer keyboard is covered with a fine dusting of white ash. I could clean it off, but feeling it on my fingertips as I try to communicate what I've seen and felt in the last week keeps me rooted in reality. For New Yorkers reality has become a delicate thing, like a thin sheet of ice over a quickly flowing river. One draws back from placing a firm foot on it. Trying to give words to what's going on here feels like a betrayal. From my fire-escape balcony in Brooklyn I can still see the massive plume of smoke rising from lower Manhattan. The Statue of Liberty looks small and confused out in the harbor.
I grew up in Madison and moved to New York City the year of the first World Trade Center bombing. Ever since I was about 10 years old I fantasized about living in New York. It was the center of everything, where everything happened first'a city of bridges and elegant skyscrapers and endless human commotion. Everything that excited me about it as a child still excites me today.
Sept. 11, I watched the two towers of the World Trade Center collapse one after another from the middle of Fifth Avenue, not quite a mile away. I had been on my way to work, and had disembarked from the subway to find both towers on fire. I witnessed it all standing in a crowd of cashiers, fry-cooks in greasy aprons, hairdressers, secretaries, executives, delivery guys looking out the doors of their trucks in disbelief and horror. People wept openly, pulled out their cell phones and tried to call home, but within minutes they had all stopped working. I remember the second tower's windows popping off like tiddlywinks right before it came down, how they formed a glittering cloud of confetti in the smoky air all around it.
I remember buying a liter of Poland Spring water next to a man with an expensive camera who was trying to buy film, but his hands were shaking so badly, he could barely get his money on the counter. I remember the end of Fifth Avenue turning into a solid wall of smoke, helicopters pounding overhead and sirens screaming through the city.
Like thousands of other New Yorkers, these images keep playing in my head like a broken tape loop. Even worse, everywhere we go are photographs of the thousands who disappeared, taped to telephone poles, subway kiosks, fences, buildings. The people who posted these photographs carefully include the person's name and description, as if we might chance to see him or her walking down the street and inform them their family is looking for them.
News of the attack has been replaced by news about the digging out. Downtown is under endless tons of still-smoking debris and not just the towers, but businesses in a five-block radius around them have become an ash-buried ruin. Nobody is allowed past the barricades without official business, so we have to look at it on TV and the only way we know what we're looking at is to see the street signs. A world of indescribable destruction'it could be Lebanon in 1982 except the twisted street sign tells us we're looking at Church and Courtland streets.
We are trying by degrees to re-establish some semblance of normalcy, but with a growing certainty that normal will never be normal again. In a city where people love to talk, silence has fallen like a thick blanket of snow. It penetrates every indoor and outdoor space'the subways, the drugstores, the space between the words we try to speak.
Some local artists tried to plumb its depths with a simple and beautiful art installation the day after the bombing. Two Armenians stayed up all night making a six-foot-tall papier-m??ch?? monument to those who died. They unrolled sheets of butcher paper on the plaza all around it and left markers with which people could write whatever they felt. I grabbed a marker, knelt down, and realized that I was utterly at a loss for words. People of all ages and nationalities clustered around the paper in droves, writing with shaking hands, with tears in their eyes. Illustrators drew on them, young graffiti artists made them into elaborate and beautiful tributes to the dead. The paper allowed us to keep the silence and still express ourselves. People wrote in Spanish, Italian, Chinese. These public writing spaces have been reproduced in Washington Square Park, Central Park, Prospect Park and in front of churches and schools. The paper and markers perform an amazing act of alchemy, extracting the scream out of our overwhelming silence.
One friend asked me a couple of days afterward if I'm ready to move back to Wisconsin yet. I can't say it didn't cross my mind. But to leave now would be, as my neighbor who moved here from Kentucky put it, disrespectful. All I can say is what I finally ended up writing on the butcher paper: I have never loved New York more than I do right now.
