And Then, There’s More

On 9/11, Park Slope lost all of Squad 1 on Union Street, next to the Food Coop. No one returned.

I’m not sure how long after the towers went down that the neighborhood had a vigil – Seventh Avenue, the main drag, was blocked to cars, and we all walked. I had my youngest on my shoulders, and was minding my oldest who had a candle in a cup. Park Slope had another fire station, on 14th Street, and those trucks were lined up along the avenue. Firefighters, in full gear, leaning out the windows, taking the hand slaps that we normally gave marathon runners in November, three avenues down.

Not too long after that, I was taking the kids to Prospect Park, where we used to practice rollerblading (my youngest, at age three, in a veritable armor of protective padding and helmet). We passed by the 14th Street station – there was a kind of shrine there. Big glass-encased votive candles, memorabilia. From the stroller, a small voice piped up: “But where are the bones?”

Indeed.

People talk about what a gorgeous late-summer day it was when the planes hit the towers. It was. When I finally convinced my job that work was impossible, I walked out of my apartment building, just to clear my head and get away from the computer. My neighbor, Vincent, beckoned to me, and we went up to the roof of his building. We sat and watched the smoke for a while.

Vincent was old-school – he’d bought his building in the 1960s, after emigrating from Trinidad. He would give out yellow apples to my girls as we passed by his house. He told me I could stay up on his roof as long as I wanted. And we both stayed up there a good long time. I knew my kids were safe – my ex had collected them from school and day care, and they were with him in his apartment two floors above mine. We watched the columns of smoke, ceaseless and unending, until it became clear that smoke was all we were going to see. I guess we ran out of things to talk about.

What I didn’t know at the time was that a former colleague was on Flight 93 – Jeremy Glick. I did not know him well – in fact, after the news came out that he had been one of the team who had taken down the hijackers, I was shocked. He was a judo black belt – I had no idea. He was quiet. He was, as I remember him, shy. Softspoken. At the company we both worked for, they set up a kind of trophy in his honor.

Many months later, in December, I was Christmas shopping in Manhattan. (We used to do this in person.) J&R was always a stop on the Santa train – DVDs, Tamagotchis – and I hit Park Row with a vengeance. And in many ways, it was vengeance – for my kids being scared. For me being scared. It felt necessary to prove, on some level, that we were all provided for.

Walking back to the A train, with my shopping bags, I passed a gap of buildings and caught sight of the burning crater. It was still burning, yes. And the stench – not just of burnt steel and concrete, but of human flesh….Between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I worked for a summer at the laundry room of Seaford Memorial Hospital. At the time, it was situated right next to the incinerator. And what they burned was…whatever was excised from the person they were operating on. So I knew the smell. It is the smell of, not just grief, but of carnage.

That stench lingered for a long time over lower Manhattan. And that’s something that conspiracy theorists will never fully understand. There were human lives that ended in the rubble – so many human lives that the rescue dogs had to be placated with pretend rescues, because they got so depressed only finding partial or full corpses.

The sense-memories of that day, for New Yorkers, will never be erased. Aaron Brown, on his first day at CNN, saying, “There are no words.” Office workers covered in dust and grit, who later died of cancer. Rescue workers who ran into the buildings and never came out.

Five years after the attack, I was commuting from Brooklyn to Newark, as a consultant to Audible.com. And I had to take the PATH train from the former World Trade Center. As I passed through the turnstiles one morning, I heard a tourist guy saying to his wife and children, “But as we know, jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams.” I wanted to go back to him and bonk him over the head with my backpack.

But it wouldn’t have done any good. We’re in a world now where the quite-unnecessarily-paranoid have taken over. You can’t fight this – fighting it only affirms it. We can’t agree on what’s sensible; we can’t agree on what is reality.

AI has not helped one iota with that – don’t like the reality you live in? Create a new one! On some level, that has beneficial merit – reframe your thinking! Come at the situation from a new angle! All very helpful.

But on another level, believing in a voice that affirms your every thought will make you insane.

I don’t know if 9/11 started us on that path, but it certainly cemented the path. And I don’t know if that was part of al-Quaeda’s plan – to splinter reality into a thousand shards – it pretty much doesn’t matter. It’s what happened.

Squad 1 has been rebuilt. My kids actually did, with some neighbors, a little lemonade/cookie stand to raise some money for them, and got to tour a couple of trucks as their reward. Park Slope has healed over, though some scars will last perpetually. Victor eventually passed away, and his building was sold. I’m not sure if my kids still like yellow apples. They’re full adults now and don’t need me to monitor their likes and dislikes.

But I know where the bones are. The Freshkills landfill reopened on September 12, 2001, to receive the debris from the World Trade Center. Much of that debris was inextricably combined with human remains. There is no way to untangle the two, although people have tried. Staten Island is turning the area into a park – it used to be, basically, the town dump for New York City, and it desperately needed re-naturing. I haven’t been there yet, but I understand there are ospreys and eagles. A hopeful development!

Where are the bones – when I was a kid, my terror was skeletons. My dad tried to disabuse me of that fear, saying that skeletons would be arrested for indecent exposure. Hilarious, unless you’re an eight-year-old taking out the trash to an empty garage where the bins are, and scuttling inside.

I don’t know if the horror of bones will ever leave me. But I feel a certain culmination in living 10 miles from Freshkills. A kind of completion of a witness’s journey.