Chapter 16-“People exist so they can be found.”
PART II – BATH, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM
Chapter 16 iNovel Link
“People exist so they can be found.”
ABSOLUTION – an M-Novel, by Russell Rose
MY love affair with New York City began as teenager when I went to visit my older brother, Kevin (eight years my senior) for the first time. Kevin had moved to Manhattan for his job, although by that time he was living in a little green house with white trim in suburban New Jersey. He was planning to marry and this was more than a house, he told us, it was a “home where he would live forever.” Strange how events unfold to make our meanings come true in ways we never intend.
Anyway, a divorce (no kids) scuttled his dreams several years later but he kept the house, a remnant, he said, of better times, a reminder of dreams instead of nightmares.
We went over as a family. My parents, with Kevin as guide, took me to the Empire State Building, the United Nations, Harlem, all those other places that define New York City, cognates that help draw the boundaries of the Western popular imagination.
In our huge car we drove along Broadway and Madison and the Avenue of the Americas. We walked on the paths and lush grass of Central Park that, to this adolescent boy, seemed definitely greener. My eyes and mind were filled with places I had only previously read and dreamed about. This metropolis was everything I had imagined and more.
Growing older, I continued visiting the Big Apple, sometimes to see Kevin (especially during his breakup with Ann), sometimes to play gigs or record or do business. I even had a streak going of 15 years in a row until my accident.
Each visit was like meeting an old friend. I would register the changes, sometimes good, sometimes bad, note the small differences, and see what time had wrought. In the last decade and a half, this grandest of soaring cities had aged well, friends opined. It was cleaner. It felt safer. Kevin said people seemed more polite. One of my friends, Roger, also a Brit and a frequent visitor, described it as "very smart indeed." Perhaps it was the change in mayors. Possibly it was the resurgence of the economy. Whatever the reason, New York had undergone some kind of renaissance.
This year, as I prepared for my May trip, now a little less than a year after the attack on the World Trade Center and a mere six months since my return from my personal blackness, I wondered at great length how New York City and its people had changed. How were they coping – and how would I? First there was the dilemma of actually visiting Ground Zero. Could I deal with it? The place where Kevin had disappeared that September day. Gone off to work never to return. Henceforth absent from his home, from his life, from me…
I realized I was focusing on New York because I could not bear to concentrate on me or the implications of this latest loss. I had to embrace the general because the personal was too raw, too brutal.
Maybe Maya would understand. A major reason in coming to New York was to see her again. Like me, she had lost her brother that day. We had only exchanged brief e-mails so how would I talk to her? What would and could I say? Had she visited the WTC site? I knew little, almost nothing.
To me, going felt like a compulsory pilgrimage. I had heard of others making the trek, even those who hadn’t lost someone close. Some people called them morbid thrill-seekers, the type of gawking rubberneckers incapable of ignoring accidents on bloodstained highways. But who can truly understand the innermost motives of others when we don’t even know our own?
After arriving in JFK and then Manhattan, the first thing I noticed was the flags. They were everywhere. In all sizes, on shops, in windows, and on the sides and even tops of buildings. On cars, in taxis, on pins decorating expensive suits. At night, even the Empire State Building glowed red, white, and blue.
Most of my appointments were in mid-town Manhattan. As I walked between visits, I could feel a pull, like some horrible gravity, reminding me of that great gulf downtown. I strolled past the Chrysler Building, always my favorite, and instead of marveling at its gargoyles and gleaming spire, I visualized an airplane crashing into it. What ghastly sounds it would make, not to mention the harsh scorched smell of destruction. I literally shuddered. The unthinkable was no longer so. Impossible as it was to imagine, the reality was actually worse.
Everything spoke to me of that day. The New York Times carried a page titled "PORTRAITS OF GRIEF," providing photos and brief, touching bios of everyone who died that morning. It would take almost a year for all of these heartbreaking portraits to be published, another symbol of the disaster’s scale.
Kevin’s had been written by his best friend, Peter (now living in Los Angeles). Although I never went anywhere without it, in truth I had only read it twice because the loss behind the thoughts expressed were too much to bear. Instead I read others, deflecting some of the pain but also kneading it, working it. The May 5th edition, for example, listed 12 people including one Thomas M. Regan. Part of his portrait, titled "Proud Father of Twins" read: "How proud was he of the twins? Within the first five minutes of any conversation he would digress into how much they were sleeping, what they were eating, how they were growing…. One day his boss came across him intently reading a book and highlighting sentences. He sneaked a look. It was a book about how to become a better father."
The farther south I traveled in Manhattan, the more the presence of something no longer there loomed. I am a skeptic by nature but I also felt a force emanating from the people who had disappeared there as well.
In shops and stalls, I saw books of photographs of the disaster as well as ball caps honoring those that fell that day. People were already profiting. Money changed hands. Disaster had become sales – capitalist recycling. But I felt no real anger because I sensed an inherent respect. But I’ve been wrong before – so many times before.
Grand Central Station was the site of my first encounter with a memorial, a long bulletin board set up for photos of forever missing people, desperate messages, prayers, and other attempts to say what none of us ever wanted to.
After much introspection, I decide to visit Ground Zero on Tuesday, two days hence. Of course I’ve been putting it off.
I talk to a lot of New Yorkers about making the short but long journey and they all understand my need and motives and they help convince me. By and large, however, they choose to stay away, to mourn in a separate fashion. "We don't need to," said a friend. "We know it's there. We were there. We live it every day. We don't even talk about it that much."
I wonder if Maya has gone. And the others. All the others. How many people do all of us know? How many people like us and love us and call us friends? How many of them have gone to site and how many have been unable to confront such annihilation?
As I leave the subway station and approach City Hall, there’s another impromptu memorial set up across the street from the statue of Benjamin Franklin. The World Trade Center buildings are usually visible from everywhere around here, serving as landmark by day and beacon at night. Their absence is already overwhelming and I’m still blocks away.
The next thing I see is St. Paul's Chapel on Fulton Street, which serves as a center for police and fire crews still working the site. The tightening in my chest tells me this is it. There are barriers on the sidewalks and wooden construction walls and every inch of barrier and wall and ground below them is covered with notes, messages, photos, hats, telegrams, drawings, flowers, rosaries, banners, flags, ribbons, badges, crests, bottles, postcards, letters, and more. I scan them. I wonder if Kevin’s photo was ever up here, or perhaps somewhere else. Who would have tacked it to the board or taped it to a hard concrete wall? My parents were already dead by this time and I was in a coma.
The messages come from all over the United States and around the world. They offer condolences, hope, and …well, anything and everything that the human mind and heart can express. It’s beyond comprehension. One large poster has a photograph of the WTC and reads: "MISSING: Pair of 110 story office buildings. Concrete, steel, and glass. Full of thousands of free and innocent souls. Center of great human achievements. Last seen 9-11, 2001."
Suddenly, a passing truck backfires. I whirl at the sound. No one else seems to notice, which I can’t understand or explain.
The entrance to the WTC site viewing platform is on the south side of the church, although tickets must be obtained elsewhere. I stand and talk to people. I ask Jonas from Sweden how he feels. "The same as you do," he said. "We are all human." I don’t tell him about my brother.
I speak with a Sgt. Sherman of the NYPD who, on this bright sunny day, mirrors the weather. I ask him if people treat him differently now. "Yeah, they say thanks more," he says. "Some people show more appreciation and respect, you know, but others don't." I ask another officer what kind of questions he gets. "Mainly they want to know where the subway is," he laughs and I wonder how many colleagues and friends he’s lost. It makes my grief look trivial, if such an idea exists. I marvel at human strength and resiliency. I search for mine.
I get my ticket, arrive at the appointed time, and move slowly up the ramp of the viewing platform, next to the church. Just past the entrance, there's a graveyard hundreds of years old to the right behind St. Paul's. I wonder if anyone else notices.
We finally arrive on the platform but at first my view is blocked. I look across the street, over the graveyard and two shops catch my eye. One is a "Smoke Shop" and the other has been selling its advertised "Hero Sandwiches" since before the disaster.
Finally it’s my turn. Where two 110-story building once stood, there’s now nothing but a huge, yawning hole. It resembles a massive construction site in reverse. Standing between this vast emptiness and me is a person wearing a tee shirt that says "GAP" in large letters. At the very moment I’m pondering the deaths of my brother and his colleagues and thousands of other people, a commercial jet flies directly over and beyond where the buildings once stood. I’m paralyzed, then shudder. Tears fight to get out like a swimmer short of air struggles for the surface – or perhaps a more appropriate metaphor would be Kevin gasping for life-giving air as the giant building crumbled around and on top of him.
As we file out after our allotted time, we pass a huge sign listing the names of those who died. The sign is probably 10 meters long and it takes me an eternity to pass it as I scan for the names I know are there. Kevin Lordman. Maya’s brother, Luis.
I find the names. But they never found Kevin’s body. He no longer exists, his body and experience vaporized by fire and heat, hell on earth.
So many names. It’s hard to imagine so many names. New Yorkers say it wasn’t 3,000 people killed but one person killed 3,000 times and I finally, fully understand what they mean. I totally lose it and start crying, bawling uncontrollably. Kelly, a girl from Tennessee, puts her hand on my shoulder and says, "I know, I know."
Later, after my shaking has stopped, I walk around the block to Church Street and come across a Heritage New York sign erected years ago to describe the wonders of the WTC. "1,200 rest rooms," it reads, "40,000 doorknobs, 200 elevators that traveled from 0 - 107th floor in 82 seconds." A German architectural student named Gertie sees it too. "I loved those buildings," she says. She doesn’t say anything about the people. I start to mention Kevin but stop. There’s no point. What is the point of anything anymore? Why have I been brought back to life only to experience all this death and loss?
I remember my friend Will writing to his friends after visiting the WTC site: "One minute tapping into that unbelievable grief is an eternity too long."
I return to my hotel. I dial Maya’s number. As the phone rings in that vacuum of circuits and wiring, I realize I’ll never forget seeing that huge, yawning gap. That vast emptiness will haunt me for years to come – possibly forever. I think about my own accident and its aftermath, the period of blackness, the coma that has hijacked my own life and robbed me of so much. But my survival is only one kind. I have no monopoly on grief. Can it be shared? Can the burden be lightened like a load shouldered by the many instead of the few or the one? How can something so personal and so deep be divided and allocated? I have only questions.
Maya answers.
Song for New York
©Words & Music by Jason Chiron
INTRO IS C/F 3 times INSTRUMENTALLY
C F C
The Chrysler Building & its gleaming spire
The mind's achievement & the heart's desire
C F C
C F C
The glowing skyline after it gets dark
The East & Hudson, the Brooklyn Bridge
Outer boroughs where the people live
Broadway, Soho, and that old subway
*CHORUS I’m singing New--------------Ooh----------- New York
I’m singing New--------------Ooh----------- New York
The Garden and Harlem and the Village too
The Empire State where I thought of you
Hot dogs, pretzels, for a buck or two
The Statue of Liberty, the symbol of free
Battery Park and Washington Square
Wall Street & the Office of the Mayor
Am G F G Am G F
Am G C F Am G C(hold)
A hole in the ground, such a hole in the ground (pause)
New York City, where its people aspire
To the mind's achievements and the heart's desire
*CHORUS I’m singing New--------------Ooh----------- New York
I’m singing New--------------Ooh----------- New York
*CHORUS I’m singing New--------------Ooh----------- New York
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