I thought I'd stayed away too long, that if I once knew how to be in Manhattan, the time had passed.
But after leaving JFK and weaving through Queens in a taxi vying for speed points, I find my footing again in a city that reeks of a zillion past lives plus my own. And from this point on, I'm so far on the other side of estrangement I'm at home again: I enter my favorite diner, order a bagel with a smear, smile when I'm called sweetheart by a waiter I recognize.
I have always been both thrilled and repelled by the constant, buzzing life of this city; in awe of its tolerant sidewalks that bind millions together while, at the same time, bias keeps them apart. And while the names of certain neighborhoods have changed, their effect on me is the same.
Here's what I see: the rumors that the city is cleaner and "safer" than a decade ago are true. Parks are alive again with people from the neighborhood instead of the indigent, not a prostitute to be seen even in Times Square. What became of all the disadvantaged is the question no one wants to answer. I'm guessing they've been squeezed north of 115th Street where tourist maps halt as if the city falls into the Hudson north of Central Park. But that's another story and I've returned to relish rather than scrutinize. Mostly because I don't want to be guilt ridden the entire time, carrying around the burden of remorse when everyone else on the street seems to be handling history just fine.
After staring at red, blue and green veins of subway line, it takes me awhile to remember it's the A train, north to south, that runs to the site of the World Trade Center.
Everyone describes the site, so I won't, except to say that it is as hollow as they write. And because there isn't anything new to say about the 16 acres of grave I stare into, I add only this: while it is one thing to hear about this site, or view it via satellite from the seemingly safer northwest corner of our country, it is quite another to stand here with a bird's-eye view of cataclysm..
Consider how charming Seattle would seem, with its bungalows and trees and a multitude of polite rules for giving everyone space, contrasted to this island crowd-together where it's possible to enter the subway in the Upper East Side fantasy of wealth and exit, minutes later, in the burned-out wreckage of the Bronx..
Today, what I know is this: the Pacific Northwest has unwound me in many ways, buffered me from such devastating landscapes, and in no way was I prepared for the brutalness of this vacuity, for what people could do to people, callow as this may sound.
I suppose what I feel is shock, how it makes its way in unmercifully. Because I'm so stupefied by what has been wrought here that I manage it only by closing my eyes and reopening them between taking the longest gasps I've ever sucked in. This is when September 11th becomes entirely real for me.
And when I finally wrest my eyes, I realize how many others are here, too, with emotions that are just now passing from astonishment to weariness, lips quivering as we stare.
I should explain that I'm not proud of how I flirt with a security guard - this tall, jovial man with the accent and attitude of a person born to the boroughs, this man who wears a gold cross studded with diamonds around his clean-shaven neck, this man who looks like an uncle or cousin of mine with a tinsel of gray in Italian-black hair so that I can look easily into the mirror of him - in order to get him to tawk. I know coquetry has no place in the presence of such ruin. But in a lifetime, mine anyway, one is seldom privy to such a firsthand account of something so significant, and I can't resist trying to gain something intimate of it for myself. Cheeky, I know, but it worked.
This is when things get really uncomfortable. For a married woman, anyway.
After 10 icy minutes of guilty confession (mine) and admonishment (his), he softens and tells me that, yeah lady, all of the debris was trucked to Staten Island and placed on top of the largest landfill in the world. That his nephew helped sift through the rubble. And that his accent is Bronx, not Brooklyn as I'd guessed, and then he puts me in my place by saying lady, you're da one wit da akcent.
Frankly, I don't have the will to write on. Neither do I have the knowhow. No clue how to immortalize or to make a tribute out of this sketch. I can't preserve mayhem in words. Nor can I imagine what will become of a site, or how our nation will choose to commemorate a void that, to my eyes, seems fully whole as is.[[In-content Ad]]
