House of Pain: New and Selected Essays

World Trade Center

WO R L D T R A D E C E N T E R No one had to tell people to use the term Ground Zero. It had been waiting, buried in our language, since before Hiroshima. It emerged on its own when the right time came. Of course, Ground Zero is the term nuclear scientists invented during the Manhattan Project to refer to the point at which the atom bomb exploded; everything else was measured outward from there, as everything was now being measured outward from a heap of twisted steel located at three addresses in lower Manhattan that used to be right about at Cedar Street just west of Broadway. The steel won’t be there much longer, but the name will stick: Ground Zero. Even the police commissioner used it in his interviews on television, and each time it came out of his mouth, he reacted as if he hadn’t expected himself to say it, but he couldn’t figure out where else he might be standing. Certainly not at the World Trade Center. That didn’t exist any longer. So there I was, at Ground Zero, watching a twenty-story yellow crane lift a bucket with three men in it and lower them like a sacrifice to an angry god into smoke that rose a thousand feet into a paper blue sky.The men in their bucket disappeared into the cloud,and in a while, the crane’s boom lifted a girder out of the chaos and set it on a flatbed truck.It rumbled away through the people lined up on Broadway,who pointed their cameras at the two-inch-thick steel, which was twisted back on itself in a way that threw the very solidity of our world into question. The scene was like a state funeral: thousands filed past, pressed in so tight that it became difficult to walk.I was jammed against a preservation architect named Mary, who was calmly trying to get home to   Cedar Street,which had faced the World Trade Center.She laughed as we talked, saying, “Isn’t it strange? I preserve historic buildings!” And she pointed out some local landmarks for me, saying that it looked as if they’d survive. Then she engaged a policeman, earnestly entreating him to let her go home. Somewhere else in town, the daughter of the architect who designed the World Trade Center telephoned her father, and he sadly told her, “I can’t fix it this time.” A block away, the antenna that had stood atop the North Tower jutted skyward like a javelin from the cemetery of Trinity Church. –––––––––––––– One morning I saw a couple on the subway with that thousand-yard stare.They were all over town,those people,but especially on the trains, because no one could stand to sit still. They were in their twenties and stood holding onto each other as the train rattled downtown.They said nothing. Their hands did not move over each other’s bodies, as they must have only days before. They didn’t look at each other and smile that secret smile that makes us look away.I saw none of the normal whispered giggling, the titillation of contact, which we’re so used to seeing in public places. They’d been the envy of a care-worn world, which spread around their delicious lives, their catalog clothes and financial sector jobs.As recently as Monday,many of them could scarcely believe their luck—God, they were running the world. And what a view! Daylight brought the Statue of Liberty, a goddess of plenty just outside their windows.Nighttime they spent planning vacations in Tuscany and selecting cool names out of handbooks for new parents. Now they had those Hansel and Gretel eyes, as if they hadn’t slept for days. They were so young to be shipwrecked. The fact of their touching was no longer embarrassing, it was painful to watch. Their groping connection gave no comfort as they reached for something that wasn’t there.And those were the lucky ones, the ones not interred at Ground Zero. After Hiroshima, the Japanese called it “do-nothing sickness,” the apathy that settles in the post-traumatic haze. I didn’t have to follow them, because we were both getting off at the Brooklyn Bridge. I climbed the stairs behind the couple. They  WORLD TRADE CENTER [3.15.147.215] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 09:05 GMT...