Through the Children's Gate (19 page)

L
ast week you could walk almost anywhere you wanted to in New York if you had the sneakers and the time, and what you saw when you were walking looked different from what you saw when you watched television. Things looked older and, on the whole, better. The Wall Street canyon on Monday morning, just before the market opened, for instance, looked as though it had come from another time—several other times, in fact. It was as if the urban landscape, the look of the city itself, had collapsed back into its historical parts, gone searching in another time for a new meaning. The ruins of the Trade Center, glimpsed from the corner, looked like the ruins of a Gothic cathedral, Reims, in World War I. The Gothic tracery that had been the towers’ one concession to ornament had dignified them in death. On the other hand, the narrow valleys of streets, emptied of cars and caked with white dust, looked as if they belonged to the early part of the last century. The dust caught the light and turned it into beams, and filled the canyons in searchlight columns, making the buildings behind look like old photographs of themselves. Even the music playing seemed to belong to another time. Someone had, weirdly, placed loudspeakers outside the Federal Reserve Bank building, and all morning they were blaring out martial music—American martial music, the marches of John Philip Sousa. First came “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Hands Across the Sea,” but then came “The Liberty Bell March,” which has been known for the past thirty years exclusively as the theme from
Monty Python's Flying Circus.
For three or four minutes, the Monty Python theme dominated the streets of lower Manhattan.

Everyone in New York is desperately looking for a way out of mourning, a path toward healing, and the sign of “healing,” we are told, is “normalcy”—but, like an unstable compound, normalcy tends to break down quickly into its component human elements of routine and absurdity and fatuousness, which, when they appear, seem like an insult to mourning. And so, as people catch themselves smiling or laughing at the wacky music or just walking along and humming, they return, guiltily, to mourning—which in turn demands healing, whose sign is normalcy, which shows itself in routine and absurdity and fatuousness, those insults to mourning…. It is a strange cycle, and New Yorkers were riding it up and down this Monday morning like a wave.

The reporters who crowded the streets had three stories to tell: Life Goes On, Life Does Not Go On, and Does Life Go On or Not? “Are there weddings going on in there?” one reporter asked, gesturing at the Municipal Building and seeing images of recuperation and paper carnations, life in the midst of loss. But there weren't, and she kept plugging down Broadway toward Wall Street. A crowd of onlookers, an anonymous sneaker-and-windbreaker crowd, followed the first ranks of stockbrokers and messengers and reporters as they surged downtown. Peddlers sold T-shirts: five-fifty for one that showed the towers and an American flag waving; two-fifty for a hat with just the flag. In a way, people were there to gawk, and as they came downtown through the beautiful morning light, they were judiciously allowed one gape each at the corner of New and Wall, where you could see the ruins. “Okay, move along there, you've seen it, let's just move along,” the cops said peaceably. The people looked down the street at the place where the towers had been—not seeing much, just the fencelike facades that still stood at odd, expressionist angles—and then walked on. Photographers turned toward the crowd and took pictures of the people looking at the ruins, and the people looking at the ruins looked back over their shoulders, trying to figure out what the photographers were taking pictures of. In another way, people had come not to gawk but to see—to see if life would go on or not, and what was reassuring was that they were not allowed to gawk. The cops sounded neither more nor less emotional than they ever do—sounded, in fact, like the salesladies on the eighth floor at Saks on the day the Christmas tree is
lit, letting the nightgown shoppers stare for a moment into Rockefeller Center. Officiousness is one more form of normalcy.

What is so difficult is the scale of the disaster: both greater than you can imagine and smaller than you can believe. There is so much left, so many tall glass towers, that if you didn't know something vital was missing, you would never guess it. The huge pile into which the towers crumbled looks like what it is, a vast and terrifying graveyard. But just across the street, not fifty feet from the site, stands a building with an ad for E∗Trade painted on it: finally, a place on madison avenue where you can invest money, instead of spend it. It's as though the sinking of the
Titanic
had taken place right beside a subway station and been watched by a frightened or curious crowd who saw something unbelievable, the great ship listing and rising up and breaking in two and the people falling from the funnel, and then walked home from the disaster and showed their families that their hands were still cold from touching the iceberg.

Although you were officially required to show that you worked on Wall Street to get there, a less than intrepid reporter wandered around, found himself following a group of National Guardsmen along William Street, talked to them briefly (they wanted a beer), and then, meandering up the first big street he came to, found himself directly beneath the big flag on the front of the Stock Exchange. Brokers in blue jackets were standing there, taking a cigarette break. “Your shoelace is untied,” a cop said, disgusted, and moved him along. At some semiconscious level, the decision had been made to let life go on. Normalcy is basically incompatible with security. Either life will go on or it won't, and if it does, it will go on as life, with its shoelaces untied and an unexpected back way to the destination.

Inside, the brokers were saying what their country was worth, and the country was asking them not to. As you talked to brokers coming out of the exchange, they would begin by telling you the truth—“Well, we were headed downhill already, and so this is really just …” And then they'd stop themselves and say, “This is a great day for America. The fact we're open.” Though a stock exchange is part of civil society, it is not a civic-minded place in the conventional sense of the term: It is not about people pulling together for the common good
but about people pulling apart to pursue their own interests in the long-term faith that the common goodwill eventually emerge someplace out there, in the form of buildings and wealth. A stock market exists to make bets on what will happen, and since what has happened has for so long been what we want, the idea of hope has gotten stuck on it like a decal. On Monday, though, the brokers knew that a disaster had been made to happen within a few feet of where they were standing by people who hated everything they stood for. We were asking them that morning to bet it wouldn't make a difference to what would happen next. They decided to bet it would.

A
t the Javits Center, where the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Guard are keeping their spirits up, the vast main atrium is empty. But there are to be a couple of press conferences downstairs, where someone has found the only cramped and dingy-seeming room in the huge well of light and space. A lectern has been placed up on a dais, with a blue cloth behind it and American and New York City flags all around. National Guardsmen hover at one side of the stage, men in their forties and fifties (the younger ones are downtown) who, in combat fatigues, look costumed for a G.I. Joe party. State troopers with Smokey Bear hats have created a hangout on the other side; they, too, look incongruous indoors. “You keep expecting them to pull you over for speeding,” someone says.

The first press conference turns out to be an announcement by Governor George Pataki that the penalty for aiding terrorists will now be raised in New York, and is followed by a press conference for “Auction for America,” on eBay. Even though the mayor—who has, in a week, become an international figure, the Churchill of the moment—is to be present, the press conference is sparsely attended, with the rows of bridge chairs only half full. Governor Pataki, a very tall man, says that spirits in the city are higher now than they've ever been, and then he introduces the head of eBay and executives of Visa and MasterCard, who have promised the “waiving of the fees” for the eBay auction. The auction will be a hundred-day event intended to raise $100 million. The executives get up and speak in the new language of
the disaster. They offer their deepest sympathies for the victims of the atrocious event, along with their thoughts and prayers, and congratulate those involved with the auction for their great team effort. They use the expression “waiving of the fees” again and again, as though it came from the Bible.

When Rudy Giuliani arrives, the temperature changes. Seen up close, the mayor seems to have collapsed in on himself, becoming stooped and gray; his shoulders hunch, and in repose he has not the fed-on-organ-meat look of a man of power, as Governor Pataki does, but the bowed and nervous look of an earlier generation of politician. In his round wire-rimmed glasses and baggy suit, he is like a figure from the era before charisma. He stands with his hands clasped in front of him, rocking a little. It is possible, in this moment, to sense the real source of his authority: He lacks imagination, genuinely does not care about appearances, is not self-conscious about the effect he is making, and has the crucial ability to know just how grave things are and, at some decent level, not be overwhelmed. Where the governor carefully modulates his voice, trying to deepen it when he mentions the families and find a note of rueful optimism when he is being ruefully optimistic, Giuliani rises to the occasion because he is not ruled by a sense of occasion. He is not a good actor. He is just a public man, a mayor.

Someone asks the mayor about the costs of rebuilding, and he says simply, “They're incalculable. We've never had an attack of this dimension.” For a moment the smell of the white soot from downtown seems to fill the room. Another reporter asks what the mayor will donate to the auction, and he stops to think and brood. “Let me see,” he says. Then his face brightens. “I know! I'll donate my Yogi Berra baseball. He gave it to me on his day at Yankee Stadium, at the last perfect game.” Someone passes him a piece of paper, and he brightens even more. It seems that someone is “donating the 1999 baseball that was the final out of the Series—it was the final out of the twentieth century!” Happily, he repeats, “The final out of the twentieth century.”

* * *

T
here has been a rash of street poetry pasted up on walls. At least two pastiches
of How the Grinch Stole Christmas have
appeared. One, called “How the Binch Stole Christmas,” tells how a Binch decided to stop the singing in Uville:

“I must stop that singing,” Binch said with a smirk.
And he had an idea—an idea that might work.
The Binch stole some U airplanes in U morning hours
And crashed them right into the Uville twin towers.
“They'll wake to disaster,” he snickered so sour.
“And how can they sing when they can 't find a tower?”
They do, of course.

At a higher level, W. H. Auden's poem “September 1, 1939” has been circulating in the city like a text by Nostradamus. It was quoted on the editorial page of the
Post
(in the same issue that offered readers a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster of Osama bin Laden), posted in a forum on the Academy of American Poets website, and read aloud on NPR. (One writer says that he received it as an e-mail six times within the week.) This is the poem about the onset of World War II. The poet, in exile from London, sits “in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street” as the hopes of a “low dishonest decade” expire and “The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night.” He sees an enemy gone mad in the worship of a psychopathic god, confronts

the lie of Authority,
Whose buildings grope the sky,

and decides that “we must love one another or die.” Composed “of Eros and of dust,” he prays to “show an affirming flame.”

Auden, whose “Funeral Blues” became the semiofficial poem of AIDS in the eighties, seems confirmed as the preeminent elegist of our time. Yet “September 1, 1939” was one of the poems that he banished from his collected works, as too sonorous and false (we are all going to die whether we love one another or not). The poem, as Joseph Brodsky
once pointed out, is really about shame—about how cultures are infected by overwhelming feelings of shame, their “habit-forming pain,” and seek to escape those feelings through violence. What drives men mad—drives them to psychopathic gods—is the unbearable feeling of having been humiliated. The alternative, the poem says, is not to construct our own narrative of shame and redemption, which never really comes in any case, but to follow our authentic self-interest, which means being in touch with the reality of what is and is not actually possible in the world. Although a lot of people have said that the attack marks the end of irony, this poem of the moment is actually in favor of irony. That affirming flame begins, ironically, as “ironic points of light,” meaning the skeptical clarity that sees the world as it is, rather than as our fears would make it. The crucial movement in the poem is not from decadence to renewal but from symbols to people and from rhetoric to speech. “All I have is a voice,” the poet says, “to undo the folded lie.”

The dive in the poem, as it happens, was a gay bar and cabaret on Fifty-second Street called Dizzy's, once, apparently, a wild place. If you go at night, after many hours on foot, and stand on West Fifty-second Street where Auden imagined the poem, you find that Dizzy's is gone, and so is the townhouse it was in. Now there is just another mute lit tower groping the sky, and hoping the sky won't grope back.

I
t is hard to explain how much the sounds have changed in meaning. The small, constant din of density that we noticed all last year—the cars snorting at intersections, the harrumph and burst of a motorcycle, the helicopter hovering, the three-in-the-morning sound of the bus rushing up the avenue, heaving and rumbling—all have altered in possible meaning, in what they could portend. You wake up at night, hear the bus, and think,
Is that a bus, or a plane, or a … ?
We scan the skies for low-flying aviation, sudden experts on cruising altitudes. Anxiety is a stimulant; fear is a hallucinogen and a paralytic—it makes you imagine things that aren't happening and then freeze in the face of your own imaginings.