| 5,000 stories
John Herzog and his wife were at the American Stock Exchange on the 11th. His wife, who is seven months pregnant, hasn’t been to work since. She’s been checking with doctors and worried enough about the foul smell of burning plastic to need time to think about the health risks. Herzog has gone back to work, though doorstep-to-desk time from Long Island to 26 Broadway has increased considerably. “Today was the first day where it wasn’t crowded on the train and there weren’t long lines,” said the sales manager at Headhunter.net. “And they finally opened the station closest to my building.” He also has to sign in like a guest at his own office. “It’s fine,” said Herzog. “Whatever it takes to make it safe.” * By 9 AM, Aamir Irfan had been standing in front of the barricades at Broadway and John Street for a half hour. The man, dressed neatly in a jean jacket and slacks had forked over his Pakistani passport, papers listing his employment for a window-washing agency, and a photo-I.D. card. He and his supervisor, who had made it across the police checkpoint already, were trying to negotiate with the NYPD officer stationed there so that Irfan could join the group of workers on their way to a job at Gateway Plaza, not far from the World Trade Center. They had already given the officer several phone numbers to call, but none of them seemed to work. “There’s no answer at this number either,” said the officer, turning to the supervisor, “You can take the other guys through. Could you send your boss over here?” Irfan and his supervisor conferred in a language other than English. Sighing, Irfan tried to hand over his bag of work supplies. Two men wearing fatigues, gas masks around their necks, stopped him. “You can’t do that, sir,” they said. “It’s horrible,” said Irfan, who had no trouble getting to work yesterday at a checkpoint farther north on Broadway. He was visibly frustrated and said that he thought he probably did get hassled “slightly” more because of his background. But, he said, “It’s reasonable for security.” * I’d been only there for an hour and a half, but the bitter smell of the slow-burning pile gave me a headache. It took the headache and the sight of twisted, leaning arches that used to welcome guests to the lobby of Tower 2 -- the only part of the building left -- to convince me finally that 9/11 was real. I’d seen the billowing smoke coming from the World Trade Center on my way to work. I’d had my I.D. checked on my way home to my apartment below 14th Street. I’d called all the friends who I thought might work in the financial district. I’d assured relatives in Switzerland that yes, I was OK. Yes, I was in Manhattan. But I didn’t even know what was happening when I saw everyone else standing on Greenwich Street looking downtown. When I saw the man with the camcorder, I looked to see what he was so intent on capturing. Smoke. Hm. I’d never seen a building burn. Was this what a building fire was like? It did seem unusally thick. I figured the best way to find out was to get to the office, to get to Newsweek. I ducked into the subway station and caught what must have been one of the last trains uptown. Like everyone else, Newsweek staffers were glued to the TV. I saw the second tower collapse on CNN and felt that strange disconnect that others thousands of miles away felt. “This is like a movie.” Anthony Lane, the movie critic at The New Yorker, has pointed out that this is a specifically American response. Europeans might have said, “This is just like London during the air raids” or “This is just like Dresden,” but a widely experienced attack on America has never happened. Pearl Harbor is the closest simile, but only those at the Hawaii port actually saw what happened. I’m still in shock, I think. And I’m not sure I can watch any more replays of the kamikaze nose-dives of those 767s -- now so obvious, so deliberate. But I am not sick of hearing stories. There are the 5,000 stories of the people who are counted as missing, whose pictures crop up on photocopied posters on pay phone booths and subway stations. There are the stories of the rescuers. There are the stories of the survivors.
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Also Inthefray > Part one | Monday, October 8, 2001
Ground Zero, September 28, 2001 5,000 stories |