The Railroad (4 page)

Only this seemed to be a part of the station I’d never seen. Instead of leading us up to the street, this set of stairs left us inside still. I’d been in stations, like West Fourth Street, where platforms hovered three deep over other platforms, each one serving a different train line. I’d never known that Wall Street had a section like that. It was a disturbing revelation because, somehow, something rang disturbingly false.

I was pondering the mystery, looking for some more light and a way out of the tunnel when I looked up. And saw a strange sight: a traffic light hanging from the ceiling of the subway tunnel. It took me a few seconds to absorb the information, leaving me totally confused.

And then I saw the light change. It changed from red to green. Green for go, like I’d seen all my life. Like something that was part of my blood. We were outside and it was darker than any night I’d ever seen in New York City. The light said
go
and there was no traffic to heed it.

Peter was beside me. He was looking ahead, probably still trying to figure out where he was and how to get to the street. “We’re outside,” I said.

He squinted at me through the haze. “No we aren’t.”

“Look,” I answered, pointing up at the traffic light, swinging slightly in a soft breeze we could hardly feel. Everything was still.

“Fuck,” was all he said.

We all stood there for an eternity. I heard motion behind me as other passengers made their way up the stairs to confront the same unreality that I had faced. There was no explanation; it was night when it should have been day. Had the terrorists put out the sun?

And then someone called to us. “Over here. Come here!”

It was as if a door opened out of the darkness, into another dimension; a man’s shape was outlined in the bright light. The rational part of my brain told me it was a lobby door. But it seemed more like a dreamscape where a demon beckons you from the only lighted door on a plain of utter darkness. I ran and then so did everyone around me. I could barely see them.

We came through, suddenly engulfed in light. I looked at Peter and saw what looked like grayish dust on his face. He looked like a young man cast as a senior citizen in some cheap high school drama production where there’s no money for decent makeup. I looked at my hands and saw the same dust there.

“There’s a bathroom downstairs.” I got to see the man who’d brought us out of the dark. Despite his sandy blond hair, he still looked very New York. His accent matched. “Go down and try to get yourself cleaned off.”

Cleaned off? I followed the herd down the stairs to the basement. Even there I saw a faint hint of the haze. I found myself in an incredibly ugly old basement. We milled around, waiting for those who’d come in an earlier group to finish cleaning themselves as best they could at the few sinks available. “What is this stuff?” Peter asked me, gesturing at the dust on his hands.

“I don’t know.”

Unsatisfied, he turned to the doorman who’d brought us to safety. “What happened? What is this stuff?”

The man took Peter’s measure, looking him up and down, wondering how much he could handle. “It’s from the buildings. From when they collapsed.”

Peter stared at the man for what seemed like forever. “That’s crazy. Why should I believe you?” he snapped.

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“I wish I had the Bible with me. Then we’d see if you were telling the truth.”

I stared at my co-worker. I hadn’t realized how traumatized he was until that moment. “Peter…” I started.

Our host cut me off. “I’m a minister. You can believe me.”

“I already do,” I chimed in. And I did. Somehow it made more sense than anything I’d experienced so far. New York tends to make you accept things quickly.

Peter stalked off to the bathroom. “What do you really think this stuff is?” I asked the minister.

“Glass, steel, insulation. The rest I don’t want to think about.” He looked at his hands.

It hit me then, just what had been in those buildings. I shook my head; it was too hard to accept as fact. I had a quick flashback to a time, years ago, when I’d gone for a job interview in Tower One. I remembered the surreal sensation of being 79 floors above the ground. I‘d had moments of vertigo when the high winds had buffeted the tower and made it rock ever so slightly. I remembered the people bustling around in what had seemed like an eagle’s nest.

It was their ordinary day to day world. That had all changed. And what was in that dust? I pushed the thought from my mind.

A few people walked out of the bathroom, giving me an opening. I rushed in, suddenly anxious to wash the grayish dust from my face. A woman stood over one of the other sinks sobbing, working slowly at the dust. I saw what was ahead of me when I got to the sink. The dust had simply streaked in trails where she scrubbed. Soon, I made the same vain attempt and felt it cake up on my hands as the water touched it. Now that I wasn’t concentrating on saving myself from the subway, I noticed that I could feel it in my mouth, gritty and somewhat like sawdust. I thought again of the minister’s analysis of the make-up of the dust and I looked again at the sobbing woman, wondering if she had been thinking the same thing.

She caught my eye and smiled weakly through her tears. “It won’t come off will it, mister?”

“It will,” I said, the lie coming easily under the circumstances. I doubted it ever would. I knew what I’d be carrying with me for the rest of my life.

“I don’t know. Were you on the street?”

“No. In the subway.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh god! I’m glad I wasn’t trapped in there.”

“I’m glad too,” I answered a bit too brusquely. I didn’t want this conversation.

She walked over to me and took my hand as though we were the best of friends “I was on Rector Street and all of a sudden I heard this noise. Mister, you never heard a noise like that. I can’t even tell you what it was like. Sort of like the world cracking open. That’s what I thought was happening. And then, a little while later this big cloud came over and all of a sudden, I couldn’t see anything. My friends were all screaming and I thought it was all over. I thought I was going to die.”

Her eyes filled with tears and I had a hard time not turning away from her. As her grip tightened I watched helplessly, not knowing what comfort I could give her in the worst moment of her life.

*

I had spent ten minutes debating with Peter about whether we should walk out or wait. What was outside was something out of a science fiction movie: night in the middle of the day. In the end we waited until the dust began to settle and we saw enough light to make us bold. Our destination would be the Brooklyn Bridge. There Peter would head over the bridge toward the end of Long Island with a chance of making it back to Queens.

Outside there were a few people on the street. The haze still lingered but there was some life on Broadway. To my surprise I realized that we’d been across the street from One Wall Street the whole time. The whole area was one I knew like the back of my hand and, for a short while, I hadn’t known where I was.

We walked up to Wall and turned east. “I’m still going to try to make it across the Bridge,” Peter told me.

“You and a few thousand others.”

“I’m not staying here.”

We walked past an office building that had its doors open. Someone was standing outside giving out bottles of water for free. I marveled at the irony that those same bottles would have cost $1.75 at any other time. I took one and poured some water over my face.

“Come on inside. I’m going to call my wife,” Peter told me.

“I hope you can get through”.

The line for the phone was surprisingly short. Within a few minutes Peter was attempting to call his wife and finding that the phones didn’t work well, when they worked at all. After a few tries, he got through. He barely had enough time to tell his wife he was walking across the bridge. “She’s going to try to drive to meet me but I might have to get a bus,” he told me. “I’ll get there if I have to walk.

“You’ll make it, Peter, even if it takes a while. You’ll have a lot of company.” I pulled out a pen. “You have some paper?”

He looked out at the street where reams of paper were being swept around by the wind. “No,” he said.

I pulled an old card out of my wallet; it was from a plumbing contractor I’d met years ago. I wrote my address and phone number on the back. “If you don’t get anywhere come back across the bridge, you can make it to my house. I’ll be there sooner or later.”

He took the card and his face fell. “Thanks. I hope I don’t have to.”

“I don’t think you will. Just in case.”

He smiled.

We walked a few more blocks and then he waved good-bye at City Hall, just before he turned toward the Bridge and freedom from Manhattan. I lived uptown and had the luxury of knowing that all I had to do was walk for an hour or so and I’d be home.

*

       “You’re crazy,” Barbara told me later. I’d just told her that I’d stopped for lunch in Chinatown on my way back to my apartment the day before. “You were stuck in the subway for half an hour with screaming people and dust and you stop for congee soup?”

That was about what happened. It seemed quite normal to me though I had to admit that maybe I’d been in full shock. “I wasn’t happy about what happened,” I said. “But that seemed the best thing to do. What do you think would have been better?”

She regarded me from her perch on my kitchen counter. She had an unconscious habit of taking the advantage of higher ground when she wanted to grill you about something. I’d pointed it out to her once and she’d gone ballistic. Lately I tended to avoid any subject that highlighted any of her vulnerabilities.

I looked at her, carefully, for the first time in years. I guess that my experiences in the subway had knocked the complacency from me and my perceptions were a little heightened. She pinned me with her gaze, her long, almost perfect legs swinging back and forth in time to some inner music that only she heard. Barbara was striking, but not quite beautiful. Her eyes were too close together, though fashionably large, while her forehead was a bit too high. It had occurred to me that she was aware of both these flaws but I’d never been cruel enough to point them out, despite her penchant for letting me know what was wrong with me whenever she saw fit.

Barbara, above all else, strove for the illusion that she could and should be perfect.

We’d been dating for three years, an unspoken agreement since the quaint ritual of dating was far too “pre Gloria Steinem” for her. Despite her studied emancipation I also knew she wanted a commitment from me but would never have allowed herself enough vulnerability to admit it. I was happy with the way things were and satisfied with my all-consuming workaholic lifestyle; she was an excellent accoutrement to that lifestyle. Shallow. That certainly described both of us. But at least I was honest with myself.

She’d spent a good bit of the last three years hinting about how she wanted me to move in with her. I’d considered it once for a short time, the way you consider skydiving as something you need to try once before you die . It occurred to me occasionally that she’d want more than she was getting in the long run,  but I didn’t consider that a serious problem.

I stared out the window of my apartment, trying to distract myself from the steady drone of news from the television. With the falling of the towers, New York had ceased to be a place where people lived. Now it was a happening, a symbol, a bunch of sound bites. To my mind, that was the greatest indignity of the situation. I didn’t want to be a newsworthy freak in a ruined city; I wanted to be a normal person with a life.

I’d done my best to ignore it all and be a stoic New Yorker, but that turned out not to be so easy. I wasn’t able to go back to work; my office was too close to Ground Zero and the City was limiting any kind of travel below 14
th
Street. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it would be a week and a half before Crabtree and Dain would reopen its doors. There was also an invasion of the media; I saw hundreds of small transmitter trucks that had come from every corner of the nation. They’d parked wherever they could find space, mostly on the westernmost avenues just above 14
th
Street. I saw them everywhere, their mics extended, trying to siphon off a little of the blood that was everywhere and send it home.

Like many New Yorkers I resented the media’s presence,  most especially in the face of what was to be the most eerie and heart-rending by-product of the disaster: the posters. Everywhere you went you saw 8.5x11 handouts with pictures. They were on phone booths, the sides of buildings, car windshields, and shop windows. The dominant theme was
Have you seen this person
. Each of these lost souls had been in or around the Trade Center when it went down. My first few encounters with these paper pleas left me staring. Each of these people had hundreds of personal connections and each one, I knew, was likely to be gone forever. For the media vultures, all of these small sad photocopied cries in the dark were simply sound bites of a new story that wouldn’t quit.

Out the window everything seemed normal. That far north all we got was the smell from Ground Zero that occasionally wafted our way when the wind blew uptown. I stared downward, realizing that everyone I saw knew at least someone who knew someone who’d lost a friend or a loved one in the towers. For some reason I wanted to be out there and away from the sterile pabulum that the news was feeding me.