You could be among the dead. There’d never be shame in that. You could be among the lucky ones, standing one moment at the copy machine, thinking about lunch or sex or how you have to drive all the way to Rhode Island to see your in-laws this weekend—WHAM!, you’re pulverized out of existence. Now you’re a beloved memory. You’re perfect. You’re a face in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series of memorials in the paper, a sainted name projected onto the walls and rafters of Madison Square Garden during a performance by U2.
You could be among the survivors. Not among we survivors, who’d watched the towers fall on television. But those who’d scrambled out of the ash and debris, ties flailing over their shoulders, personal effects abandoned, heels snapping off. Those who’d gone down 82 floors in the smoke and the darkness just before the floors had gone down, too. They’d been suddenly conscripted in a one-day war. We were the folks back home.
You could also be a rescuer. Official or not. Anyone could walk past the barriers at 14th Street and volunteer for service. You got a shovel. A face mask, maybe. You could dig through the rubble all day, come back and do it all over again the next. The point was to find someone alive. No one did. But as long as there you were digging, you were alright. Many who did proclaimed that they had no choice, that the disaster site exerted a stronger pull than their families or their jobs or any kind of self-concern. Such duty was obviously hazardous, possibly suicidal. (The maw at Ground Zero was smoldering with bones and hair, with glass, paper, rubber, steel, plaster and asbestos; with nylon, vinyl and formaldehyde; with polypropylene, polystyrene and a thousand more of man’s creations; the disintegrated elements of city. The smell of death and poison, sickly-sweet and acrid, hung over the island for weeks.) Who did this kind of work? Not us. Not me. We weren’t among the dead or wounded, the survivors, nor the saviors.
Still we tried so hard to rise to the event. By talking about it, thinking about it. Writing about it. We took some idiotic pride in having been here, in being New Yorkers, in being able to say, yeah, I saw the planes come in, or I know someone who saw the planes come in, or better yet I know someone who died. Well, don’t know them maybe. A friend of my ex’s brother. Didn’t matter who. Someone. Anyone would do. We’d take anything we could. Gimme gimme gimme. I’ll take it. Did you see the wall of tributes in Grand Central? I sure did. So poignant. It was a thing you could say at a bar next time, or at a party. And then we felt foolish, ashamed even, for this pride. In our darker, honest moments we realized none of this had anything to do with us at all. We wished to be implicated. We were not.
Maybe this was a test. Not by design but anyway. The event that determined once and for all who we were. And we were the consumers. The watchers of TV. We were just like everybody else.
Oh no. Way more than that. Two hundred thousand.
There were a few things that people like us could do. We could give blood, everybody said. My sister and I dutifully presented ourselves at the nearest donation center. A line of like minded souls stretched out the door and around the corner of 67th Street and Second. Inside, perplexed staff members scrambled to manage the influx. We were turned away. Plus: no one needed blood.
So here we were, some coworkers and I, traipsing down Chelsea on a sunny weekday. Kevin towed a Radio Flyer filled with provisions we’d earnestly assembled and purchased at a Duane Reade. Boxes of PowerBars, a case of Gatorade, Bounty paper towels, Advil, Slim Jims, M&Ms and Visine. We were told they needed Visine most of all.
Many years later I passed the Memorial by chance, on my way to a bar downtown. I wasn’t even thinking about it, didn’t remember it was there. And there it was. I had to look. The scene was quiet, inconspicuous. A few people along the railing, no more than you’d see in any little square. I approached the wall with no idea what I was about to see. The ground opened up into a vast, square space and opened up again into a smaller one into the void. Water poured down and down again from every side into the middle. It brought to mind a scene in a sci-fi movie on a barren planet, or maybe Earth post-apocalypse. A structure built outside of time by a civilization not our own. You were scared the hero might fall in.