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Zero, Two Weeks After
I was at Ground Zero yesterday. My God! Saw burned-out Tower 5, the top 5 floors or so, which, according to a telephone worker, had crashed down through its understructure and was now on at ground level, erect, as if it were supposed to have been there. It’s a grim sight, and charred. Police everywhere. So is a chalky residue. You can taste it. Every once in a while something gets in your eye. Entire blocks cordoned off. Small pockets of troops in fatigues, but they are on the other side of the street. Oddly, the filters on their respirators are shocking pink. Clergy in hardhats. Trinity Church a makeshift command center. Letters from elementary school children in Richardson, TX, duct-taped onto firehouse façades. Their teacher has wisely directed the children to focus on the bravery of the firefighters. It is so moving. A man who’s also reading the letters tells me he worked construction on the 55th floor of one of the towers when he was just starting out. “The cranes were on the inside. I used to go up to the top before I went home sometimes. It was so scary. There was a rail, and I would lie down, and, holding on to it, look over the edge. Man, it was scary. The wind would be blowing, and all!” He goes to school nearby now, after work. “I like to get there early,” he smiles. It’s 5:30. A block further down from the spectre of Tower 5, I witness a five-story high vertical spaghetti of steel debris being flexed one way, then another by an unseen crane, I think, before it finally breaks apart. A smaller section falls to the right, and what’s left crashes backwards in a cloud of dust and debris. Gasps go up from onlookers, who peer from behind and between tarps draped down over scaffolding on “our” side of the street. We’re at a corner, and across the intersection, a city bus has been parked as a barricade. Still other onlookers strain to see through the bus windows. Behind me an overweight oriental woman bursts out crying, and is consoled by strangers. Is this a flashback from another war for her? Down another block, standing in the middle of a cluster of onlookers, I hear somebody say “It’s been two weeks now… What I want to know is, why aren’t the bombs falling?” Fire – ready – aim. To me, he’s just a regular looking 35-year-old, yes, preppie. Glad this guy isn’t in charge of national security! Along City Hall Park, every half block or so, hawkers with patriotic pins and ribbons. A passer-by walking his bike, emblazoned all over with Puerto Rican insignia, harasses them. “You should be giving them things away!” he tells them, disgustedly, with an accent. “You wait for something like this to happen so you can make money!” They don’t understand what he’s saying, but they feel the hostility. Knots of clean-up workers in white disposable suits try to relax with their Camels and Cokes. Hardhats buzz up and down the street on four-wheelers. Others practice their sprawls on barricades. Exhausted policemen in respirators do the same. City Hall Park is off limits. Two weeks on, people have a somewhat dazed look in their eyes, from suits to cops, from elderly aristocrats to school children, from secretaries to seniors in from the Midwest. Here and there, people stop to read missing people posters, poignant reminders of what has happened here. Construction and vendor trailers everywhere, as are miles of cables and makeshift everything. Store windows dusty on the inside. Keep moving, folks. My cab driver doesn’t complain when we are unable to make the correct change, and give him his tip. “Hey, catch me next time!” he says, philosophically. So it’s true: people are being nicer to each other down here. He tells me he was five blocks from the Towers and heading away from them when the first plane hit. He’d just dropped off a fare there. He’d heard the explosion. At first he thought it was a bomb. Looking in his mirror, much as he’s looking at me now, he’d seen people running. Later, he witnessed the second plane “… slice into the other tower. There was so little strength to the building where it hit, that the wings didn’t snap off or nothing, like they’re supposed to, you know, on impact. See,” he says, turning, and now I see his face for the first time. “It was like slow motion the way it hit.” He looks away now, far away, his bushy eyebrows arching. “To me, it took forever.” Edward Bailey is the father of two young Vermonters, and now an elementary school ESL teacher in Worcester, MA. He had traveled to Manhattan to pick up a car he had purchased. Before returning to Worcester, he decided to drive down-island first. He wrote this piece the following day. ... Of this piece, he noted, “This was as close to a war as I’ve ever been, or indeed wish to be. I needed to deliver myself of these images on paper.” . ******* ******* If you'd like to submit a poem, short story or literary essay for possible publication, please e-mail us at books@downstreetmagazine.com. The e-mail should contain your name, address, and a phone number where we can reach you. You may also send a copy of your piece. The text can either be included in the body of the e-mail, or you can send it as an attachment in just about any word processing format. Please be sure to include any identifying information within the body of the work. ... If your piece is accepted, we will pay a small honorarium for your interest & your time. [See Freelancers Wanted for more details.] ******* ******* If you would like to advertise in this section, or throughout the magazine, please visit our Advertising Info Pages ... or call, write, or e-mail ads@downstreetmagazine.com. ******* *******
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