Chicago and me, we’ve got a good thing going. It’s a marriage of comfort and convenience, not of passion, and I am not faithful, but Chicago doesn’t seem to care. Chicago is perfectly aware that whenever I come up with a little extra money or some airline has a sale, there I go, winging off into the wild blue to see my first and still true love among cities, with my heart pounding all through the plane’s long descent as I gaze down on that island of steep regulated canyons gleaming below. What braindoggling beauty: the necklaces of lights atop the bridges, the gleam on the waters, the insouciant squares of the twin towertops poking up into the plane’s armpit.
I didn’t sleep much on the train. Afternoon came and brought with it New Jersey. I begged off a conversation with a chatty staffer as we pulled out of Newark. The whole train fell silent as the Manhattan skyline came into broad view. People on the wrong side of the cars came over to see. I saw the same look on a lot of faces: So it’s true. It’s really, really true.
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My friend Cynthia, an art historian who works for a textbook publishing company, was near the World Trade Center when the planes hit. She writes notes to herself before she goes to bed: “Yesterday was Monday. When you wake up it will be Tuesday. But not that Tuesday, a different Tuesday.” Her partner, Nicole, a photographer who works at a college library, was depressed to begin with and now more than ever chain-smokes and watches TV news obsessively. There was still constant coverage on New York TV–desperate searches, firefighters’ funerals, shrines in the parks, cranes lifting twisted metal, Rudy Giuliani’s newly beloved face, FBI investigations. Time seemed frozen. It was as if nothing else had happened in the city or the world in the past two weeks.
There are so many reasons that I get tangled up in them when trying to organize them into a list. Simplified, though, they all amount to the urge to do something. For all the postmodernists’ and media moguls’ oddly compatible claims, a TV 800 miles away is still a pretty lame substitute for real life, particularly when you’re watching clouds of dust and smoke overtake crowds of fleeing people on streets you yourself walked less than a month ago. There was something about going through the motions of “real” life in Chicago that seemed much less real than the reality of the 24-hour news coverage; the street I live on seemed more like a movie set than that section of Church Street that for all intents and purposes has ceased to exist. Cynthia had seen bodies and wreckage raining. My college friend Raymond had suffered a sobbing breakdown watching the towers come down from the roof of his midtown office, sure that his partner who worked across the street from them must be dead. (He wasn’t, and the two of them spent the rest of that week cuddling on the couch and popping tranquilizers.)
Raymond took my hand. I kept squeezing his as we came round a bend and the first of the damage came into view. The biggest, most high-tech TV in the world couldn’t have prepared me for this: the World Financial Center buildings with rubble piled high around their roofs, the step work on their sides sheared off like torn corrugated cardboard, girders protruding at horrible angles like broken limbs (a steelworker later told me they weren’t native to the building they were sticking out from–they were from the north tower of the World Trade Center), the Winter Garden greenhouse shattered beneath a huge piece of charred metal. The Chelsea Screamer pulled up to a much larger harbor cruise boat, the Spirit of New York, which had been donated as a floating restaurant for the workers for the duration. From the back of the boat, the remains of the second tower were clearly visible, and very near, a horrid piece of bent metal lacework reached for the sky like a twisted claw. Beside it, a black skyscraper face had been gouged inward three or four rooms back, and behind that another building was burned out as if it had been bombed from within.
Hardly anyone blinked when the new Miss America showed up on the boat on Tuesday, wearing a USO outfit and leading the “troops” in shaky patriotic choruses. Raymond got a kiss on the cheek for his trouble. As the Chelsea Screamer pulled away, firefighters flashed us the victory sign. I didn’t interpret it as a peace sign for a millisecond. I felt more than a little like some sort of postironic Rosie the Riveter of the buffet tables, keeping the home Sternos burning. New York is not London, and this was not the Blitz–but I’ve never quite heard the old should-I-stay-or-should-I-go game that New Yorkers play framed in such clear terms of civic pride and duty. The only appropriate response to “I’m finally gonna get out, after this” is “Good-bye (good riddance)–can I have your apartment?” After all, if you already live in the greatest city in the world, ruins or no ruins, where could you possibly go that doesn’t constitute a tail-between-legs retreat?
By the time I reached Union Square I was aching, sleep deprived, dazed, and emotionally skinless. There was a chicken-wire sculpture of the twin towers with index cards and pens for people to write messages and deposit them inside. There was another replica of the twin towers with messages of sympathy from Tibet and Australia. There were the ubiquitous flyers about the missing–men and women of all ages, shapes, sizes, colors, and classes, restaurant workers next to stockbrokers, young brides next to grandfathers, Irish cops next to Indian techies. The concrete at the south end of the park was repaved in candle wax; there were shrines everywhere. I followed another woman’s example and got down on my knees with all my matches, relighting every candle that still had a wick, only to watch them go out almost as quickly. I stayed there, crawling on the wax and wilted flowers, for I don’t know how long. Then I sat down on a low wall and quietly lost it.
