Sinister: a letter from new york

I used to be a journalist, more or less getting paid to watch things an tell people about them. Old habits die hard. It was another diamond day, light so bright you can barely look into it, barely see into it. It gets that way, the southern exposure does, where the light comes up from that end of the island. The Towers were down there; you could see them from almost every point of the East and West Villages. There weren’t any other high rises all the way down to the tip, and they were that tall. As I lie here, we had to close the windows as the wind was coming up from the south. It smells like ozone mixed with burned rubber and chalk dust. It’s the same haze that has been hanging around the end of the island for two days, and finally, the wind shifted and its come North. They’ve started counting and it was 800, then 3700, then 4700…and you realize it’s people too, you’re breathing people. All the ambulances and police cars and busses and military vehicles and fire trucks coming up Avenue A, trailing dust…its not just dust anymore. I can close my eyes and stand right on the corner of Liberty and Church, facing the sunset. To my left, up the block at 77 Trinity Place is the bridge over Church Street to the old Trinity Church, there since the Revolution. That’s where Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton are buried. Directly to my left is the Burger King I used to go for snacks and sit on the second floor and watch the traffic heading for the Tunnel. Next to that is the small fire station where the firemen hang out and play tricks with unsuspecting passersby, like tieing a thread to a five-dollar bill and then jerking it away from anyone bending to pick it up. Funny guys. Everyone in the city is walking around like they are stoned, like on top quality grass. And even weirder, they look you in the eye, and smile, and wave, and say, Hello, Are you ok? A candlelight vigil in Washington Square last night was very beautiful, hardly a breeze to disturb the flames, old folk songs by Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, songs I hadn’t heard in decades. Prayer service at St. Marks Church…flyers tacked up on walls everywhere around, pictures of the missing, praise for the cops and firefighters…cordons at 14th Street, Houston and Canal—Canal being the deadline: can’t even go past with an ID. I was there, with my wife and some friends, Saturday night, perfect evening. Another of those free summer shows on the plaza, the Twyla Tharp dance company, doing a piece to a Mozart clarinet concerto and then The Sinatra Suite. Twyla spoke to the crowd at intermission, to answer Q&A about her role in dancing and choreographing "HAIR", mocking some guy who thought the Mozart piece was "hokey", and then she talked about the dance, about motion. And she said something like: When you sit here in this great plaza, under these magnificent towers, and think that everything, even these towers, are in motion, you see the dance in everything. And everybody looked up, and you could see a star right there, and my friend Rick said, that’s the Pole Star. And then the Sinatra Suite came on, and it was sentimental and melancholic and utterly entrancing. "Give me one more for my baby/and one more for the road…" Right at the corner of 14th and Avenue A, a local artist named Chico—he’s been doing murals here for 15 years—threw up a memorial on the side of the dry cleaners. A spray can vision of the apocalypse and the numbers "911". (That also means "emergency" here in the states, the number you dial when in trouble.) There must be 500 candles out there, in votive glass containers, at least ten times what there was when he did the Princess Diana one. And there’s more every hour, and flowers. The guardsmen from the Humvee got down to look at it. My wife called me from the office and said that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I turned on the tube and ran up to the roof. Looking south from 12th Street, it was on fire, a long black plume in a direct line of sight over the steeple of the Ukrainian Church, the one with that cantilevered double-cross, green—probably copper gone bad. Then the other tower burst into flames. Couldn’t see the plane. By the time my wife got back home and we and we made our way through the crowds carrying water bottles in plastic bags to the Beth Israel Med Center on 16th and 2nd, the line was around the block, all the way around the block. A guy stood in the street and shouted: THIS IS A LINE ONLY FOR MAKING AN APPOINTMENT FOR BLOOD DONORS. YOU WILL NEED TO FILL OUT THIS FORM AND THEY WILL GIVE YOU AN APPOINTMENT TIME. IF YOU HAVE A BLOOD DONOR CARD, PLEASE GO TO THE HEAD OF THE LINE. ALSO, IF YOU HAVE ANY MEDICAL SKILLS OR TRAUMA SKILLS OR GRIEF COUNSELLING, PLEASE GO TO THE HEAD OF THE LINE. IF YOU WANT TO GIVE BLOOD IMMEDIATELY, THERE IS A TEMPORARY CENTER BEING SET UP AT 67TH AND 1ST BUT WE AREN’T SURE IF THEY WILL BE ABLE TO TAKE YOU IMMEDIATELY AS WE ARE OUT OF DONOR BAGS. That’s when we ran into Katherine. Her husband Barry came up shortly with two forms saying, I had to go to the copy shop around the corner and make my own, but they’ll be coming around with more later. No one seemed to mind. The sound of F-16s flying over are very unique, unlike any other jet I’ve ever heard, searing, scorching. And every time they do, spontaneous applause. The discussion spreads to the strange questions on the form, odd diseases no one has ever heard of. In the silence, Katherine says, I know I won’t be able to give blood today, but I have to do something. I said, You are doing something, you’re doing the one thing that all New Yorkers do best, probably better than anyone else on the planet: You wait in lines. Ran into Ellie when we rounded the corner, she was complaining that, This is emergency preparedness?, gesturing to the solid, unmoving wall of cars and busses along 2nd Avenue. Shortly thereafter, the man came around again, much more hoarse, and said: THIS FACILITY IS NO LONGER ACCEPTING ANY MORE APPOINTMENT FORMS. PLEASE GO TO ANY OF THE OTHER FACILITIES…holding up the forms, an unopened orange juice carton clutched in the center of them. We couldn’t get any newspapers yesterday; they weren’t being delivered in Manhattan. Funny how you miss things like that, as if you weren’t seeing everything on TV. The only paper delivered downtown, oddly, was the downtown’s own Village Voice, the freebie. It was the standard weekly, prepared over the weekend, but the cover and one full page story. Headline: THE BASTARDS! And a shot of the plane hitting tower one. Can’t remember how many articles its had condemning the police and supporting leftist revolutionary guerillas, and now, it seems there are no atheists in foxholes. And people were grabbing them up as fast as the bales could be untied. The face masks are very popular all over. There are three types: the medical/surgical kind that is a blueish cotton cloth with white backing material that wraps over the ears; the styrofoam micropore cup kind; and the white, rubber band-seal kind used by construction workers. I saw at least one painted with an American flag. Took the Mayor’s advice and went out to dinner at the sushi restaurant. With us, there were only four people in there, at 7pm on a Thursday night. The woman at the next table asked if we knew if the George Washington Bridge would be open tomorrow. She was supposed to fly to Michigan on Sunday, but decided to drive it instead. Going to see her sister and family seemed, to her, like something she shouldn’t put off, couldn’t. We talked about Michigan and sang the commercial jingle for the Kroger's grocery store, and laughed. I’ve lived in this city for almost 23 years, been through more World Series celebrations than I can remember, a Millenium party, John Lennon’s death, the Tompkin’s Square Riots, Wigstocks…and this is the first time I think I understand what it means to say: I’m a New Yorker. And I'm not a religious man either. But prayers can hurt at all, and, if Pascal's bet is right (probably Gordon knows better than me), they might help. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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