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9-26-01
Smoke
By Libby Garland
The Friday after
the plane crashes, I turned on my laptop at 3:50 a.m.
The Microsoft icons came winking on in the dark living room of my South
Brooklyn apartment and I tried to write. “The
city is filled with smoke,” I typed. “I
have never paid attention to which way the wind is blowing here, but now it is impossible
not to know. When it blows north, as it did
yesterday, you can smell the smoke in midtown, where my office is. When it blows south, as
it is doing now, as it did Tuesday, it comes in through my apartment windows, five miles
away. Three-thirty a.m. I woke up to it, a
smell like burning rubber, and shut the windows. There
was lightning, too. It has begun to rain. I don’t know if this is good or bad for the
rescue workers. On the news, I have heard
both.”
Then I gave up,
turned the computer off, went back to bed, tried to breathe in my smoke-stuffy bedroom,
tried to fall asleep. I have been only partly
able to do anything; concentration eludes me. I
keep feeling I need to write. I am
supersaturated with the things I have seen and the stories I have been hearing and
reading, through the official networks of National Public Radio, The New
York Times, CNN.com, and through the unofficial ones, the friend who knows someone who
knows someone who made cell phone calls from the burning roof, or the friend whose
ex-boyfriend’s brother just happened to be speaking at a conference that was
happening on the 102nd floor that day, or people talking on the subway or on
cell phones as they walk down the street. But
mostly I just feel too exhausted—by the mass grief around me, by the scale of the
devastation in this city of edge and energy, by the fear of what will be a week from now,
a month from now—to write anything coherent at all.
In any case, there are already too many words out there, too many reports,
too many analyses to absorb, even though it feels urgent to try. But for the moment, I will give up on coherence,
on a chronological narrative or analytical take, and try to put down some of the bits and
pieces instead.
When I finally get
to work on the Tuesday morning of the crashes, everything is confusion. Outside I run into a co-worker, who says they just
hit the Pentagon, and I have no idea what the Pentagon could have to do with the smoke
coming from downtown. Upstairs, people are
listening to radios and Internet broadcasts, until someone goes out and buys a television. Then we alternate between watching the television
and staring out the window at the crowds of people walking north along car-empty Park
Avenue. No one in the office is quite sure
where to go. The bridges and tunnels are
closed; the trains and ferries are not running. We
become acutely aware that Manhattan is an island. We
keep hearing things: there are still four hijacked planes in the air; they have evacuated
Rockefeller Center. A lot of the day is
spent trying to make phone calls; the lines are impossible.
Cell phones are not working. It
takes me three hours to reach my parents, at work, to let them know that I am all right. Everyone is trying to check in with everyone else.
And then the
e-mails start, friends from all over the country and around the world e-mailing, wanting
to know if I am okay, wanting to make contact, I think, somehow, with New York. It is good to hear from people, including people
I have not heard from in years, but I don’t know what to tell them. I don’t know much more than they do, and at
times I know less. As the week goes on,
people keep e-mailing and calling, and my friends tell me the people they know are doing
the same. We are grateful for the connection,
but overwhelmed. We can’t call back, in
any case, because the phone just does a rapid Beep Beep Beep when you dial long distance.
On Tuesday, a week
after the plane crashes, I wake up with a nasty cold.
Instead of going to Rosh Hashanah services, I drag myself out into the
beautiful sunny day to go to the Hong Kong market three blocks east to buy a chicken to
make soup for myself. My immigrant
neighborhood, dense with people speaking Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic, has one American
flag or more on every house, every car. “America—love
it or leave it,” people have written on paper flags like the ones K-mart printed in
the newspaper with instructions to cut out and display.
On the industrial block before the market I pass a few of the
neighborhood’s garment sweatshops where Chinese immigrant women work long, long hours
every day of the week, sitting in front of the clacking sewing machines. Then I pass some garages rented out for storage,
and in front of one of them stands a large white guy, maybe sixtyish, in old plastic
glasses and a grubby T-shirt. He has a pile
of tiny American flags he is carefully attaching to miniature metal flagpoles. Where are those from? I ask him, because I have
heard that it is hard to find flags anywhere right now and that they are sold out all over
the country. He tells me, in a voice that
makes me think he is a lifelong Brooklynite, that he had them printed up during the Iran
hostage crisis, in the ‘70s, and had stored them away in this garage ever since. Were people buying lots of flags then? I ask him. Not like now, he tells me. And then he shows me something else he has pulled
out of storage to serve what he predicts will be a sudden demand: a black metal gizmo that
looks a little like a crazy old typewriter, but is, it turns out, a Civil War-era machine
that prints metal identification tags. He
bought it in Atlanta years ago. All these
people, he says, bringing in their DNA samples, going crazy because they don’t know
whose body is whose. Metal tags, see, they
could have come in handy.
On the Thursday
after the crashes, I return to work; the office has reopened after being closed Wednesday
because the trains were so crazy. Who knew
who could get in to Manhattan from Brooklyn, Queens or Westchester? My co-worker Daniel is not there that morning; he
is a rabbi and has been volunteering as a chaplain with the Red Cross since Tuesday night,
when he discovered there was no way he could reach his home in New Jersey. Thursday afternoon he returns to the office,
sweaty, exhausted, devastated. He has spent the morning at the Armory on Lexington and 25th,
around the corner from where we work, in the unairconditioned space the city has set up as
a centralized emergency information bureau for families of the missing. Cops, clergy, counselors are there to sit down
individually with thousands of desperate people, to try and guide them through the
hospital lists and the seven page questionnaire the city has put together: Any
distinguishing scars? Tattoos? Dental records?
It is from Daniel that we learn, before the media has reported it, that what
they are finding are not bodies, but body parts, which get shipped in refrigerated trucks
to somewhere where the seven page questionnaires will help in the identification process. It is from Daniel that we learn that though
many families have spent the past 48 hours trekking from hospital to hospital hoping to
find whomever they are seeking among the unidentified, the hospitals have no John Does. The few who have come into the hospitals have been
identified. Most were Dead On Arrival.
Outside my office,
and on bus shelters and parking signs and telephone booths all over the city, and
especially on walls of hospitals, there are signs that look like the signs kids put up
when their kittens have run away, with photos and handwritten pleas for information: this
person worked on the 101st floor; this person has a heart tattoo over her left ankle; this
person is from Ethiopia; this person was last heard from at 9:05 on his cell phone saying
he was okay and that he had made it to the 78th floor. I start to recognize the same pictures, happy
smiling photos of people who become familiar as I see them again and again all over the
city. I see the guy who sits at the front
desk of my office building saying “Good Morning, Sir” and “Goodnight,
Miss” posting one of the pictures of the Missing on the bus stop sign in front of our
building.
I listen during the
week almost nonstop to the radio news; I don’t have a television. The reporters on WNYC, the city’s public
radio station, sound exhausted, they stumble over their words. President Bush is coming to crash the site, says
one reporter, then corrects herself, I mean he is coming to view the crash site, she says,
and I can’t help laughing. The station is broadcasting from National Public
Radio’s offices. Its own offices were
at Ground Zero, its transmitter on top of the World Trade Center, and so the radio station
has also had to flee. I buy The New York Times when I can find it—it is
sold out early everywhere—and read every article two or three times, so obsessed that
one day I miss my subway stop and end up in the wrong part of Brooklyn because I am lost
in the newspaper. There is too much to think
about all at once, the local disaster, the global implications: cells and Osama,
infiltration and box cutters, rubble; anger and hope, grief and confusion, fear; the
failing airline industry asking for money from Congress; the profiles of the terrorists
and the profiles of those who died on the planes; which subway stops and lines aren’t
in service; speculation about whether the era of the skyscraper is over; heated debates
over letting national security trump civil liberties; reports from the local fire stations
that have lost half their firefighters; press conferences with everybody, commentary from
everybody. Everything is bad.
The tension, the
jitteriness in the city are overwhelming. In
the Arab part of my neighborhood, police stand in front of the mosques, the stores. Someone sends around an e-mail saying that there
have been several attacks reported in this neighborhood already. On the subway on the
Wednesday after the crashes, the woman next to me starts to cry as we go over the
Manhattan Bridge, and the gray-white smoke rising above the ruins of the World Trade
Center comes into view. The young
student-type on my other side tells me he is from Belarus, and was planning to stay in New
York, but is now reconsidering. The political
situation in Belarus is very bad, he says, but so is this.
His mother, at home, was in hysterics on Tuesday, thought the whole city was
on fire.
The Thursday after
the crashes there are ninety bomb scares around the city.
They evacuate Grand Central Station, Penn Station, the main branch of the
public library and the building that holds the Swedish Massage Institute, as I am told by
the young woman at the wine shop in Grand Central Station when I go there to pick up a
bottle of Spanish red for a friend’s birthday dinner.
As I walk around, everything looks different, everything looks like a
target. Police have blocked off the street to
the west of Grand Central. When I get off the
train at Pacific Street, Brooklyn’s main subway hub, there are about forty police
officers lining the walls; later I learn that there was a bomb scare there, and a fight. Four days later, the conductor on the W line
announces that we won’t be stopping at Pacific, and as the train sails by, I see that
they have cleared the platform of everyone but a few cops.
Another bomb scare, I assume. I
am jittery, too. One morning at breakfast I
knock over my grapefruit juice so that it goes everywhere, and I start to cry.
On the Tuesday of the crashes,
after leaving the office to try to give blood—though I give up on this when I see
that thousands of people are milling around the hospital trying to do the same—I look
up when I hear the roar of a plane. It is an
F-16, which I know because I have seen them on TV, a smooth-flying bat, large, triangular
and loud. On Wednesday I go downtown, to
Houston Street, a half hour before 7 World Trade Center collapses. The streets are blocked off to regular traffic and
people are everywhere. Some wear surgical
masks to keep out the soot, some sit at cafes, some wander around with flags or cameras;
news crews are there with their vans and microphones.
City buses with “Out of Service” on their foreheads drive by
filled with firefighters. Trucks and trucks
and trucks filled with what look like construction supplies are parked along Houston; more
trucks whiz by with police escorts, sirens. Police
have barricades all along the street and let no one south of Houston without
identification proving that they live there.
The next day, on
the city’s West Side, I see soldiers in green camouflage, and matching camouflage
trucks. This reminds me, bizarrely, of
walking with a friend across the plaza in front of downtown Brooklyn’s courthouse
about three years ago, and seeing trucks exactly like these, and then realizing they were
part of a movie set. What are you filming
here? we asked a guy winding cable around his arm. Oh,
something with Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, he said.
Arab terrorists bomb New York. I
also don’t quite believe it when I start to see the T-shirts—I Survived the
Attack. Or when I go by Madame Tussaud’s
wax museum on 42nd Street, and see they have placed their George W. Bush figure
on the sidewalk in front of the American flag, behind a sign with a quote from a speech he
made asserting the beauty of freedom and the evil of terrorism. People are lining up to get their picture taken
with the wax President and the flag and the sign with the quote.
The Saturday after
the crashes I try again to volunteer, this time at the New York Waterway bus depot, where
the main task is to sort the vast amount of stuff that has been pouring in from across the
city and the country: water, canned goods, dog food for the rescue dogs, batteries,
towels, sweatpants, Tampax. This is not even
the central volunteer site, it is nowhere in the newspapers—people have just found
out about it by word of mouth. At other sites
there are more people, thousands, trying to do something to help. There are too many people here, too, college
students, and men who have turned up with shovels and hard hats and rope, hoping to go dig
downtown. I help move bottles of water for a
while—I think all of us like to pretend that we are moving rubble—and then get
assigned to standing at the door turning people away: the trucker who arrives in an
18-wheeler that says Bananas and Produce, the college guys who have driven in from
Philadelphia. Suddenly I realize that the
tough-looking man sitting there silently, in the sun, on an upturned bucket, has not moved
since I arrived. He looks dazed. Are you okay? I ask him, not knowing whether he
has been digging downtown, whether he knows people who have died, or whether he is just
exhausted and sad. He looks up and says Yeah,
thanks. I ask him if he wants some water and he says No, thanks, and gives me a small
smile, and goes on sitting.
After I leave the
bus depot I go downtown, wander around Wall Street, turning every time I come to a police
barricade. I have never known this part of
town very well; now I am totally disoriented, just turning left and then right. Other people seem to be doing the same, most with
cameras. Everywhere, on the ground, on the
buildings up to the second or third floor, there is the gray dust I have been seeing on
the boots and pants of exhausted, red-eyed rescue workers around town. Some people wear surgical masks, some wear gas
masks. I look through the window of a locked
Chase Manhattan Bank branch, and see, sitting on the counter where people fill out deposit
and withdrawal slips, an open newspaper, and a half-eaten bagel and cream cheese. The newspaper’s date is Tuesday, September
11. Though it makes me cough, I root around
in the dust next to another building, looking at the papers that fluttered down when the
buildings collapsed. Health insurance forms from Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 700
employees; a half-burnt page of a Manhattan phone book; fax forms from the Port Authority.
Later, I try to go to a meeting someone told me about—lefty, progressive groups from
around town meeting to talk about antiwar actions. I
get there late, and the meeting is so crowded there is no more room left. I leave my name and e-mail, and over the next few
days my e-mail overflows with even more announcements, forwarded petitions, links to
articles.
The Tuesday morning
of the attack I was a little late leaving for work, and so transferred to the express
train, hoping that would get me to midtown quicker than the train that went under the
World Trade Center, the one that crawled through lower Manhattan. I was frustrated when the express kept stopping in
the tunnel, and saw other people muttering in that grumpy way New Yorkers do when they are
inconvenienced. Then the train pulled out
onto the Manhattan Bridge and stopped. The
conductor’s voice came over the public address: You can see the flames from here, he
said. Everyone looked out. Someone said Jesus Christ and other people just
sucked in their breath. The first thing I
saw: smoke, puffed clouds of it so big I thought the fire was right nearby, in Brooklyn. Then I saw the red gashes high, high up in the
towers. What the hell is that? someone said. A woman on the train who had gotten on at the last
stop said she had heard on the television that a plane crashed into the building. People speculated.
Someone said Maybe it hit one tower and then went into the other. Planes don’t fly there, said a guy who was
standing up and leaning against the window. If
that was a plane it wasn’t an accident. Even
though we didn’t know what had happened, or how, it looked horrible, lethal, a
nightmare. Through the train windows it
seemed both impossibly near, and impossibly far away.
We were able to do nothing but watch.
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