The Grill, East Hampton’s answer to the village pub, is packed with people watching live broadcasts of firefighters and other rescuers searching for even one miracle. It is two days after the fall. A woman, a citizen of another place, asks why no international crews are working “the pile.”
In a long-winded answer, the patron on the next stool proves but does not admit that we are a prideful people. “Because we can handle it. Those boys are heroes. They are our boys,” he says. The pride stems not from watching rescuers do the unimaginable, but from the feeling that in the face of the unimaginable they embody the grit and character, the very essence of how we prefer to see ourselves.
Patrons stare at the screen as if it were a mirror in which the United States might recognize itself. It has been 60 hours since the world stopped to watch, horrified. Gone instantly was the mire of impossible Hollywood action heroes, missing or corrupted political interns, N.F.L referees on strike, pseudo-celebrity road rage, and so-called reality television. I watch knowing that in two days I will go to ground zero. It is too big, too awful, too otherworldly to comprehend without being surrounded by it. I must see it for myself.
Just before sunrise on Saturday, Sept. 15, my Long Island Rail Road train is just west of Freeport. A crescent moon is visible through the train window. Three ironworkers, two men and a woman, in heavy jeans and boots, with hard hats and tool belts, take seats near the door. The conductor approaches and looks them over.
“Are you going in there?” he asks.
One man nods.
“It’s on me,” the conductor says before moving on.
At the outer perimeter on Canal Street, police are turning away a constant barrage of would-be onlookers trying every imaginable excuse to get closer to the scene. They want to bear witness to what has befallen our nation, their city, and possibly their friends and family.
At this first concentric circle of my descent into what is being called the zone, a disheveled man who looks as if he has not slept in days paces along the barricade screaming a woman’s name. Everyone ignores him until he tries to cross over. A policeman takes him gently by the arm and turns him around. The man curls into a ball at the policeman’s feet, sobbing without tears.
Three teenagers use the distraction to slip inside the line. I show a press pass and begin my journey.
Walking past the Supreme Court building at the intersection of Centre Street and Worth, also known as Avenue of the Strongest, I read the inscription carved above the court steps: “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.” Hours later. I have snaked my way closer to the smoking rubble, avoiding detection by representatives of every imaginable federal, state, and city jurisdiction. They have instructions to keep the press in a designated area six blocks north of ground zero.
Inside a rest center for rescue workers I am handed a hard hat and a bright orange vest. A man tells me to join my group for the briefing. After talking with one man I find out everyone in the group of 25 lives in Pittsburg but is originally from Guatemala. “We had to come,” he says. Their instructions are being translated into Spanish. I remember the conversation in the Grill and smile, thinking now of the rescue effort as international, in the way the United States is international.
Everywhere at ground zero the air is smoky and smells like a slipping clutch and burning hair. I break off from the group and sit at the corner of West Side Highway and Vesey Street, dumbfounded but trying not to look it. Two retired New York City policemen lean against an empty Dumpster labeled “F.B.I. Plane Parts Only.” Every five minutes dump trucks overflowing with macerated concrete and bent steel leave fully loaded.
“The government will never admit they blew it up,” one of the men says. They are discussing United Airlines Flight 93, which slammed into a field in Pennsylvania. “The people couldn’t handle knowing we killed some of our own citizens,” he continued.
The second man thinks for a minute, then responds. He sounds as if he might be discussing whether the New York Giants should have thrown a Hail Mary or gone for the conversion on the fourth down. “I think they should admit it. Come out and say it with no shame. Do it on the evening news so the bastards that did this know we stop at nothing.”
Both men tell me they did not lose any relatives or friends in the attacks.
Nearby, in Battery Park City, a group of five attractive young women, barely 20 years old, sport tight jeans and bright yellow shirts reading, “Scientology Minister – Talk to Me.” Amid the chaos they are commandeering a single-seater A.T.V. driven by a National Guardsman. All five of them are laughing and yelling as they try to pile on.
“Looks like trouble,” is all a middle-aged white man putting a roof on the scaffold will say about them. At the base of the structure a waist-high sign sits directly in front of a row of seats overlooking the debris field: “Commercial photography throughout the World Financial Center is prohibited without a permit.” The once-serious looking advisory is now a sick joke. I am sure that, before this is over, someone will steal it.
The man on the scaffolding comes down for a break. “I like the patriotism. It feels good. But the nationalism has me worried.”
No questions asked, a stranger loans him his cellphone to call his wife in Queens. “Dinner? I was thinking of grabbing something here.” He leans on one of two 50-gallon drums filled with cooked hot dogs. There is too much of everything, except maybe miracles. No survivors have been found in the 16-acre New York crash site since the day after the attacks. “No unemployment check? Well, call them!” he says before hanging up.
Further south on Washington Street, a stone’s throw from the shrinking pile, shop windows are covered in the thick, gray dust of pulverized concrete that engulfed the financial district after the fall and has lingered despite heavy rain on Friday.
“A Different Kind of War.” “Jesus says look up.” “Iron workers build America.” “Kelly Richards Tower 1 Come Home.”
Where someone wrote “Kill Ben Linden,” another person crossed out the misspelling and rewrote the sentiment. A third person inserted various expletives around both versions. Among the writings on another wall are the words, “Montauk Fire Department.” There are poems, initials, as well as words of peace and praise for the rescuers. They are all summed up by four words on the window of the St. James Café. “We will never forget.”
I take some photos and walk a block east to Greenwich Street, where a lineman with ConEd, Phil from Hartford, Conn., is skeptical about the prospect of survivors.
“If they didn’t die in the crash, the fire, the collapse, or that dust tornado, we would have drowned them by now with all the water we put on that smoldering heap.”
He removes his mask to light a cigarette, leaving a bare patch. “We used to cut holes in our masks running wire down in the tunnels. Remember that?” He yells over his shoulder in-to the 20-foot-deep hole cut beside him through several layers and feet of black and gray concrete.
“Some guy came through here giving away packs of Marlboros. I talked him into giving me two.” For a second he is giddy. He tries to give me a half-empty pack of Dunhill lights. “Not my brand,” he explains.
I look across the street at two firemen resting on stools outside a corner café. Soda bottles, coffee cups on saucers with melted sugar cubes, and metal spoons rest on the windowsill.
A second later, all hell breaks loose on the pile. Fires have been flaring and then subsiding all week, but suddenly something is terribly wrong. A police captain in a white shirt and hardhat comes running out of the debris field, waving his arms and screaming. “GET BACK! MOVE! MOVE! MOVE! LIBERTY IS COMING DOWN!”
Soldiers in battle fatigues, doctors and nurses in scrubs, ConEd and Verizon repair-men, National Guardsmen, firefighters, police-men, truck drivers, search and rescue crews carrying their dogs, heavy equipment operators, Port Authority police, workers from the N.Y.C. Department of Sanitation and the mayor’s office, agents from the F.B.I., F.A.A., D.O.E, FEMA, and probably the N.S.A. and C.I.A., we all run for our lives, knocking down the final, concentric barricade standing just feet from the pile. Vehicles are abandoned, engines still running. Workers scramble up ladders, out of holes, down from scaffolding, drop their still-spinning power tools and run like hell.
Everyone stops after sprinting several hundred yards. It was either a false alarm or a very early warning. We look at one another. People cock their heads to one side, listening. After 15 seconds of complete silence, an all is clear is sent out over the radio. Within a minute the barricade is back in place and everyone but a lone ConEd driver is back at the job. His minivan is blocking the flow of traffic.
A tall black man driving a flatbed truck looks south toward the harbor. “Damn. Guess he went home. Probably from Jersey. Swimming home.”
Standing at Ground Zero, breathing the mingled rot of burning chemicals, cooked plastics, and the unspeakable, I realize why it will take months if not years before we can begin to rebuild. “Reality exists at ground zero,” I think to myself. The difficult part is not getting there, or even being at ground zero: It is walking way, separating myself from the collective sixth sense that binds people in the zone.
A vacuous calm fills TriBeCa as I head north on Broadway, passing the occasional column of National Guard troops. At Canal Street, exiting rescue workers and volunteers pause before crossing over, taking in the chaos of what lies beyond the barrier in the business-as- usual, getting-back-to-normal chaos of SoHo on a Saturday night. A policeman, a chunky young Asian guy who cannot be any older than 25, looks me in the eye as I muster the will to plunge into the crowd. “Good luck,” he says. I am covered in dust and smell of smoke.
Along Broadway, chic young couples sporting designer jeans and poodles that fit in a purse duck in and out of boutiques blaring dance music. People chat on cellphones making dinner reservations. There appears to be no acknowledgement of what is being done only blocks away. I am seized with a desire to approach one able-bodied disaffected youth and ask how he can casually stand on the corner watching women go by. I am angry but have to admit I know nothing of his own struggle. Maybe he volunteered yesterday, or lost a brother in the fall.
At the intersection of 14th Street and Broadway, Union Square glows with candle-light. A cross-section of America is packed into the park discussing the realities of war. A gospel choir is singing “God Bless America.” People are praying and mourning.
From Uptown I hear what sounds like rain. As it gets closer the sound of clapping mixes with loud whistles and muffled yelling. The park falls silent except for the chanting of Buddhist monks who, on Tuesday night, began a vigil at the foot of the statue of General Washington on horseback. The statue is covered in chalk messages begging for peace.
There is a horn blast as a New York Fire Department ladder truck rushes past the park. People climb on top of benches. Parents lift their children onto their shoulders and everyone, save the monks, turns to watch. People clap. A woman beside me yells to the crew, “Thank you. Thank you, boys.”
This is not a movie. The heroes are not actors. And I cannot help but cry.
