Letter from Chinatown
Equitorial Mike sent this into the Gotham office today. We offer it, unedited.
I live in Downtown Manhattan. Chinatown, specifically, on the other side of the (narrow) island but as far down as the WTC. Pretty much every day, at least once and usually multiple times, Laura and/or I would round the corner of Henry Street, and the WTC was there.
And, no shit, no matter what my mood there was a moment where the freakin' Sinatra would start playing and I was shooting a downtown scene with Scorsese. So that's gone. And, you're right, that absence may, from time to time, be forgotten, but I suspect that as long as I live here and walk down my street, the absence is gonna scream out -- ironically, from a sometimes very pretty sky, from behind nice buildings in their own right. I feel like one thing that has, at least temporarily, been lost is the ability to mourn small losses (like am I really seriously getting choked up here over my freaking view!?!) in the deluge of suffering without feeling inadequate, selfish, unfeeling, dumb.
Laura had jogged right by the buildings about ten minutes before the first plane crashed. I'm not sure she fully yet realizes everything that that means. How (as she often does) she could have chosen an ultimately more perilous route, or just left to run ten minutes later. How her more than average (entirely admirable) curiosity and empathy and courage might have held her on the scene; how easily we could have lost her. But she did come back. We went out to watch the first building burn. It seemed an isolated catastrophe. Later, I was telling my mother on the phone (in Ireland) that she was going to see coverage of a plane hitting a WTC tower, but to not worry, we were fine, when the second plane hit. I still didn't feel in peril, and even, I know this will sound weird, headed out to find a way to work.
I had the incredibly dubious honor of seeing the first building collapse. I might as well have seen it on TV (I *did* see the second one fall, though only 1/2 mile away, on television), 'cause there was no understanding at that point as to what the images I was seeing meant. No possible understanding of how many people had just died. No understanding really of what that meant for all the architecture and infrastructure below and around it. Even as I saw the building fall, my mental image of the downtown around it was as a region mercifully spared further damage ("Like, it came straight down, didn't it?" I should have my head examined). I heard someone saying something about the Pentagon being bombed, and thought they were full of shit. For almost twenty minutes, some of which were spent hurrying home to assure Laura I was OK and to see that she was OK (she had threatened to try to get closer to check it out), and some of which was spent watching the aforementioned television, for almost twenty minutes we pondered how odd it was going to be to have only one tower.
About fifteen minutes after the second fall I remembered that (a) Aaron Schnore worked at the World Financial Center (next door, basically, and a huge building complex in its own right which is pretty much not going to make it) but that (b) maybe Tuesday was the day he was flying to Germany. Aaron is fine, but possibly only because he took his daughter to school before setting off for downtown.
And basically right now I live in a police state, and I don't mind at all (I never saw that coming). I have to show i.d. to go home, and having friends down is against the law. The last two days have been an 8-mile round trip walk to work, sometimes through the asbestos cloud (luckily the gods of the wind spared Chinatown most of that, at least visibly). And I'm basically doing all of these things that would in ordinary times seem like the most horrible of inconveniences, and I know that I'm amongst the luckiest people in the world. You've seen the stories. You know that there is too much, that we will never see orhear every story, that it is every kind of loss imaginable. And this is all before our war gets under way, under the command of people I'd really rather not be in command right now.
I'm trying hard not to be provincial. I know that there are more people dead at the Pentagon than were killed in Oklahoma City. I know that the plane in Pennsylvania (not terribly far from where most of my extended family lives) was full of heroism and ended in a noble human effort that doesn't bring those people back to their loved ones. I know that people all over America can basically feel the nukes coming. It's a sad fucking mess is what it is. For me, the oddest thing is the way the news, or even the talk of the people on the street, switch from discussions of world-wide fear and loathing to local devastation and back as if it is all the same thing. How do I think about 5,000 dead people lying in a pile so close to my house on one hand and contemplate the fear of every other thinking human on this planet with the other?
I have lost no one directly, but co-workers have (probably, I mean --officially we're "still holding out hope"), and it seems next to impossible that someone I know, at least a little bit, has not died. Maybe some cop I used to resent being in my field of vision (I'm so pro-cop right now I'm scaring myself a little bit). Maybe people I dealt with at previous jobs. And I'll quite probably never know.
The numbers are difficult to fathom.
I feel socially inept, and don't know when that will go away. When is it OK to crack a joke again? When is it OK to do so in a public space? Is the person on the subway next to me over this, or very very far from over this? Why do I long to hear the usual garbage about sports and the weather and garbage news about sexual impropriety of the rich and powerful? And how much art, how many movies, how many shows, how many photographs, are going to have those fucking towers in them and break our hearts again?
Our phone is out for probably a week or so more, but we do have electricity, unlike a lot of downtown. We may do odd things in the next couple of days; maybe say something we immediately realize was a dumb thing to say under these circumstances, maybe start crying in the middle of a mindless comedy. But I think we're fundamentally undamaged. The bastards who did this can't have our lives. Not all of them. And they can't have this city.
-K.
Posted by B T at September 14, 2001 02:52 PM