We’re Ready to Move On; They Aren’t Quite There

This morning, I’m fine until I catch sight of the window washers’ platform lashed to the building across from mine. A few nights ago, I had seen a platform just like it out at the World Trade Center site. That one was blackened and hung askew from a dark wreck of a building sunk in four stories of rubble. But it was the same shape and had the same orange mesh wrapped over the railings. At the time, I told myself it wasn’t what I thought it was--probably just a piece of rescue equipment.

Now, looking out my office window, I realize what I saw could only have been a window-washing platform, identical to the one before me. It holds two men. They have thick shoulders and wear red bandanas on their heads.

I wonder if men like these were blown off the platform I saw. I try to put it together. The platform may have burned where it hung, or it may have flown from the twin towers and got caught on the neighboring building. It’s hard to say, since there is a lot of debris clinging high on surrounding buildings. As I’m thinking this, one of the workers outside my window leans on the rail and points out something on the ground. The other man nods and laughs.

It’s the moments like that that ambush you. You’re fine one moment. Then the next, you’re thinking, “Oh, God, the window washers.” Others I talk to say they have similar experiences. Things get to you. Big things. Stupid things. The minute-long silence on the phone during an interview with a bereaved father. The way a group of Puerto Ricans tried to sing ‘God Bless America’ when they didn’t know the words. The way someone’s sobs wrenched their face into a different shape.

You can’t shut it out. I call a colleague who has been at the site for three days. “How are you holding up?” I ask, and I hear his voice shaking into the cell phone. “Truthfully?” he says, “I’m not.” Another reporter stops by my desk. “I just can’t take any more grief,” she says.

Not that the journalists are different from anyone else. In New York in recent days, the pain is visible just walking down the street. Life goes on as normal here, more than one might think, and there even seem to be fewer flags. But the strain shows in people’s faces, and in a dozen ordinary encounters a day. You say, ‘How are you doing?’ And you get, “Oh, hanging in there.”

New York is not an angry city today. It is not even an astonished city. It is just a deeply, deeply sad city. People on the subways seem raw, a colleague says; they seem to shrink from each other more than usual. You come across people on the sidewalks taking smoking breaks, and they are crying. Men and women. They just stand there, by themselves, smoking and crying.

At the same time, New Yorkers are excessively kind. People I stop for directions lean in and put a hand on my arm while they talk. They seem overly eager to make sure I get where I’m going, often calling out more instructions after I’ve walked away as if reluctant to let me go. I asked directions from a man in the car next to me while stuck in traffic on the expressway. A few minutes later, he reappeared, speeding alongside me at 50 miles an hour, calling advice about which lane to stay in.

There is palpable agony in these kindnesses. It creates a strange kind of intimacy. As I stand in the middle of the street, tears well in my eyes for no reason. A police officer says, “That happens to me, too.” It’s different being in New York. Distance seems to matter. Being here, it’s harder to put this away, as the rest of the country seems to be doing.

There is an inside to the World Trade Center bombing, and an outside. The nearer one is to the grief, and the physical reality of the ruins the more one is on the inside.

A New Yorker tells me he has this irrational resentment of anyone who doesn’t live here, people whose ordinary lives have resumed, who can “move on.” Many people I have talked here tend to repeat the phrase “This is my home” when talking about the disaster. When I ask one man what he means by this, he says he doesn’t know. But I think it’s a way of declaring oneself on the inside, not yet able to “move on.”

Many people here say the pain hit them the hardest when they actually saw the site not on television, but in real life. A week later, they cry just talking about the first time they saw that brown haze from an expressway bridge where the twin towers should be, or when they got their first whiff of it. I watched a truck pull a crushed, blackened firetruck down Canal Street on trailer. The whole street went quiet as pedestrians on both sides stopped and watched. People here often ask me how Californians are responding. There is a feeling that unless you’re here, you can’t understand.

In the innermost circle are those suffering directly from the disaster: the bereaved, the survivors, certain rescue workers, people who witnessed flames or jumping. An executive I interviewed had lost 67 of his employees. His body was so wracked by sobs I found myself wondering how one person could physically grieve for so many people. There are so many people. Twenty here, 70 there, hundreds over there, their pictures covering a wall.

A rescue worker described to me how the smell of death wafts up every time you shift a piece of concrete on the debris pile. A patrol officer seemed bewildered that remains could not be extracted by pulling away debris, as he imagined from hearing television reports.

The pieces are too heavy or tightly packed for that. He explained to his buddies how he had to use a concrete cutter to get to somebody’s foot. It took so long, he said.

The detectives at the family center look pale. Taking reports all day at cafeteria tables, they stare into one grieving face after another. A police officer I know had been assigned to the medical examiner’s unit. There, officers escort the contents of a body bag through the lengthy succession of X-rays and measurements. The officers stay with their assigned remains throughout the process, sometimes spending hours with an arm, or jaw, moving it from table to table. There are a lot of single teeth, he said. The officer said he could recall all the names of the few people they succeeded in identifying. Shortly after, he was assigned to work at the family center. He was terrified, he said, that some grieving relative would come to him with a name he recognized.

A man I met compared what has happened to New York with disfigurement--you desperately want to make it go away but you can’t. You just live with it, from now on.

The push for America to “move on” came too soon for many people in New York. Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer, says that violent death is not part of the consciousness of most people--especially Americans. They want to maintain control, wrap it up in some neat package, call it heroism or loss of innocence or retribution or closure, then move on, put it away.

New York wasn’t putting it away this week. But you could see the concentric circles of pain begin to pull apart. Some people started to go on living much as before, as most journalists probably will. Other New Yorkers followed suit but were sadder, diminished. Those in the center probably remained just where they were.