Originally published in Verbicide issue #5

The lights above my seat flickered in an epileptic pattern as the train emerged from the sub-city tunnel. Darkness beyond the car windows gave way to the cold glare of fluorescent tubes illuminating a vacant station. Groaning and shuddering, the train lurched to a halt, and the doors across the car parted.

“cckkhhkk  PARK PLACE,” crackled a male voice from the loudspeaker. I eased my way through the crowd, and the silent commuters, cowering like frightened children, suddenly turned to watch me as I stepped out onto the platform. The doors closed, the number two train rushed off, and I was alone with the buzz of the lamps and the gentle scuttling of rats. I pushed through a turnstile and acknowledged the old woman in the token booth, who returned my salutation with a blank stare. Then I ascended the stairs that led out to the city.

On Church Street, where I surfaced, Manhattan was in a state of overnight torpor. Uptown was lively even at this time of the night, but here the darkness and quiet solitude left me awestruck.

The air smelled of cold, wet pavement, even though it had not rained all day. Towering buildings seemed to lean out into the avenue, and I felt threatened by their monstrous, overwhelming size. The windows were free of any incandescence, and it was as though I could see straight through the glass to the muddy, starless sky beyond. I wondered, where is the light of the streetlamps, the bustling atmosphere of Wall Street?

“Nighttime has subdued the crowds,” I told myself. “At 10:40 p.m., white-collared New Yorkers have gone to bed.”

A booming noise broke my thoughts and stopped me in my tracks — a thunderous, terrifying rumble echoed over the buildings and reverberated off their walls. I regained and quickened my nervous pace, quivering with anxiety, trying to imagine what I was about see. I turned the corner where Church intersects Park and found myself merely a block from the corner of West Broadway. A fence extended along the length of the street, and I knew what was on the other side; I knew I was nearing the brink of the disaster that had weighed on the collective minds of North Americans for the past two months and six days.

I saw a few scattered people wandering the sidewalks with their arms crossed and eyes wide: several middle aged couples; a couple of stumbling barflies; a beautiful girl in thick-rimmed glasses at whom I cast a brief glance as I passed by.

At the corner of Park Place and West Broadway met two fences draped in green canvas, approximately eight feet in height, and there was a slight gap through which one could see. I placed my face between the gap, conspicuously adjacent to a sign that read “KEEP AWAY BY ORDER OF NYPD.”

Later in the week I would discuss with a friend what I saw. Echoing no certain sentiment of his own, he would inquire, “Now can you understand why so many people are so furious, and so eager to bomb the hell out of Afghanistan?” And I would reply, “No, misdirected anger is nothing new to me. I feel no differently than before.”

The human spirit is easily disturbed; the angered man is fervent to place blame. If guilt without reasonable doubt is not provable, he will instinctively point his finger at the most likely suspect.  An American cannot stand to have his toes stepped upon, let alone his entire sense of national security traumatized. Militant calls-to-arms and incensed cries of revenge brought me no surprise, and no comfort.

My face was frozen, wedged between the cold aluminum posts that my hands held in a tight grip. The crane whose foreboding clatter sent tremors over the city towered in the distance; tremendous spotlights cast a ghostly glow as bright as daylight over the sea of gray debris. The mountains of steel and ash stretched out endlessly, piled at the base of what still stood, approximately twenty stories of a wall-less office building. You could actually see into the building. You could still make out where cubicles and coffee machines and potted ferns had been.

On the other side of the wreckage, near the corner of Vesey and Church, crowds were gathered. Children laughed and gasped at the sight of the crane. Men and women held hands. Old people wept. Vendors hawked wristwatches and little American flags. Candles burned. Perpetual vigils were kept. Policemen pointed and frowned. A lady walked by with a parrot on her shoulder. Anti-war sentiments and pro-war convictions raged on.

I was on the other side, away from the congregation, feeling no desire for retaliation, no immediate fear, and no worries for the future. I couldn’t feel the presence of God, nor atheistic vindication. And I certainly wasn’t thinking about bin Laden, Colin Powell, or George W. Bush.  I realized that, strangely, I was utterly devoid of political, nationalistic, and religious reaction, and felt only a deeply disturbing, indescribable sensation of weight from my stomach to the soles of my feet.

All I could do was wonder how many people were digging through the rubble at that moment, and how many more people were crushed beneath, decomposing into cruel footnotes of history.

Why?

“Excuse me, where are you from?” inquired a voice from behind.

I turned around, and it was the pretty girl with the thick-rimmed glasses from before, likely hoping I was a New Yorker who could offer directions.

“Vermont,” I said after an awkward pause, as though such a question required intense contemplation. “Oh, but I live in Connecticut now. I go to school there.”

She smiled. She was from Kentucky, and she had noticed a patch bearing the name of a certain band sewed to the breast of my sweatshirt.

“Have you ever seen them?” she eagerly asked.

I said, “No.”

“We don’t get many shows in Kentucky, but they play there a lot. But we really don’t get many shows. We’re moving to North Carolina soon, and I hope it’s better up there,” she said, motioning to a woman standing about twenty feet away who I figured to be her mother.

And for several minutes, in the pale light, over the boom of the clean-up, on the threshold of a nightmare, we talked happily of music. I took off my backpack and handed her a zine; I said, “It’s mine, and it just got back from the printers yesterday.” She received it with both hands and flipped through it with interest. We said goodbye, and she walked with her mother down the sidewalk, into the horrible darkness. Then I shouted, “Write to me!”

“Your address is in here?” she yelled, holding up the publication.

“Yes.”

I watched her disappear and my face was overcome with a big smile. When I turned around I rediscovered reality. My heart sank as my countenance transposed. The scene told the story of the ages, yet in the night it glowed fruitlessly, like blank paper.

And I am still waiting for her letter.

-November 30, 2001