New York at War, by Erica Jong

New York at War
BY ERICA JONG

Some September days in New York the sky is blue as Alice in Wonderland's Victorian pinafore. Last Tuesday was a day like that. New Yorkers awoke with all their usual love worries, money worries, real estate worries -- and then in a roiling flash of orange flame -- we were reminded of what really matters.

A little before nine and a little after nine on a workday morning two hijacked planes blasted into the double phallic symbol of the World Trade Center, raped our innocence and let us know how vulnerable we really are. Now all of surviving New York is subdued, dazed, eerily quiet. From my 27th story window on East 69th Street I can still see the billowing yellow smoke where the World Trade Center once was. Another building collapsed at 7 World Trade Center several hours after the initial disaster and more collapses may be immanent in lower Manhattan. On the uptown and midtown streets, New Yorkers are silent, polite, helpful. No horns honk. No one screams profanities. There are few cabs, few private cars. Many schools and businesses are closed and the weather remains glorious -- so Central Park is full of people and dogs, little kids and parents. But the quiet is eerie. Banned from lower Manhattan, Ground Zero of the disaster, we watch the unfolding news on television. For most of the day of the impact, telephone lines in Manhattan were iffy. Cell phones didn't work at all and even landlines often didn't provide dial tones. We stayed indoors glued to television sets mostly and then we got itchy and found a reason to go out. Between the eerie uptown streets and the blazing television sets replaying and replaying the moment of impact, there was a profound disconnect. The first day, everyone knew someone who almost died. In my case, it was a young friend who walked down fifty-one floors to safety from her office in the northern tower. When I talked to her she was still nonchalant about the events. It still hadn't struck her that had she dithered for five minutes she'd be dead. It was her decisiveness that saved her. She didn't wait to be evacuated. She left. Too bad more people were less decisive. Or were trapped on higher floors. Or, in some horrifying cases, told to return to their offices. Each tower became a chute in which the stories fell on each other flattening whoever and whatever was underneath. Rescue workers have been amazed to find so few survivors, but a plan of the buildings made it obvious why. The skin of the buildings supported them. Once that was punctured, the floors cascaded down. By the second day, most New Yorkers knew someone who never came home. Within a week, we'll all know somebody who died. By the day # 2 the TV news was full of stories of relatives wandering the city from one hospital to the next, looking for relatives. Those of us who were, for the moment, spared a direct hit on our lives also wandered around vaguely, looking to make ourselves useful -- queuing in endless lines to give blood, volunteering if we had medical skills, or just wandering to pass the time.

The number of stunned New Yorkers still wandering the city on day # 3 is amazing. Each of us has a kind of waxworks expression. The real shock is that war has come to our shores. We can't believe it. It's as if God promised us immunity. All those towers pointing to the sky -- would we have built them so tall if we believed we were vulnerable? New Yorkers believe themselves entitled to celestial views -- if they can afford them. Celestial views don't credit the possibility of terrorism. Last Spring there was an earthquake under the East River that shook the apartment tower in which I live. Looking back, it now seems like an omen.

There's insouciance about New Yorkers that measured Europeans adore. It comes from living in a country that has never been ravaged by war and doesn't believe war can cross the Atlantic. On September 11th, we lost this insouciance. We will never be the same. We have joined the vulnerable human race.

The change started to sink in as the haze of yellow smoke started to sink into our bones. We could smell the city smoldering. By Wednesday evening eyes were stinging all over Manhattan. The yellow smoke drifted northward, reminding Upper East Side residents that the war had come home. Tanks and military trucks rattled up Fifth Avenue. The skies were eerily silent except for fighter jets circling overhead when they could no longer do much good. The mayor ordered eleven thousand body bags from the federal government even though he knew that the bodies to fill them might never be found. Anyone who has traveled around America by plane cannot be surprised that four commercial jets were hijacked simultaneously. Our airline security is a joke. The lowest paid workers, often with no language skills and minimal training, ask a few questions, check your photo and speed you on your way. If El Al were allowed to supervise our airline security checks, there would be no more hijackings. We'd have trained security people interrogating passengers. We'd have reinforced doors between cockpits and passenger sections of planes and pilots would be forbidden to open them under the direst circumstances. We would not leave the safety of the passengers to each other. There would be guards on the planes. All this would cost money -- but more than that it would mean a change in attitude. I'm not sure Americans are capable of changing attitudes. Between our worship of the bottom line and our Frank Sinatra-esque I've-gotta-be-me religion of narcissism, we simply fail to understand how easily our security is breached. We expect to win because we've always won. We resist becoming paranoid. But paranoia may be necessary in a world of terrorism. As the crisis goes into its third, then its fourth day, the feeling one gets in New York is that American altruism and innocence have grown not diminished. Coffee shops and delis are sending free food to blood banks to nourish both workers and donors. One shop selling sneakers handed out free shoes to women in fuck-me pumps hobbling home on foot. People are falling all over each other to volunteer as rescue workers. Nobody seems to be locking up their apartments and taking the family car to Canada. We react to emergencies by becoming more ourselves, not less. Perhaps that will be our downfall.

Meanwhile, we wait for word from our leader. George W. Bush with his simian smirk has clenched his jaw in the hopes it will make him look "presidential." As usual he stumbles over his words -- except for the robotic "God Bless America." Our New York politicians are eloquent by comparison. Senator Hilary Clinton, Governor George Pataki, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani have all acquitted themselves movingly and well. But more than that, New Yorkers have been positively benevolent to each other. Our normal love-hate relationship to our city has become all love all the time. The city is hugging itself to its own wounded bosom. We are licking each other's wounds rather than rubbing salt in as you'd expect New Yorkers to do. Here is the strangest thing about New York -- New Yorkers really love their exuberantly disgusting city. We have taken this direct hit on our island as if it were a direct hit on our hearts. Even as lower Manhattan was cordoned off, forbidden, declared dangerous, many of us could not resist sneaking into the war zone to see the huge craters, the mountains of rubble with our own stinging eyes. It was as if we needed proof that this was not just another disaster movie. It was far worse than television had foretold. Dust still hung in the air and the smell of burning was infernal. The sky was dark. The rescue workers still looked ghostly behind their masks. Their hands and faces were powdered gray with gypsum and asbestos. They were breathing in the poison as they passed buckets of debris to each other -- buckets containing pulverized building material, twisted metal, the odd high-heeled shoe.

I thought of those writhing figures trapped by molten lava in Pompeii. I thought of the firebombing of Dresden, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here too, people had been vaporized and would never be found. Their relatives would wander from hospital to hospital, from morgue to morgue and finally go home not quite knowing how to grieve. The firefighters and police would stop searching for human remains only when exhaustion felled them. Suddenly it seemed obscene to be one of the lucky ones who was spared. I wanted to crawl into the rubble and start sifting through it myself to prove I was a real New Yorker. I wanted to travel into the rubble and find a survivor or disappear. I wanted to slip my feet into those odd, orphaned shoes. For years I have watched disasters on television without really understanding disaster. Now Vietnam, Rwanda, and Bosnia are under my skin. New York's terrible rubble is a part of me. This dust is mine. As it sifts through my fingers, I know I am going to die.