I’m in downtown New York. It’s a place that’s full of memories for me. I lived here for a few years immediately after college, before starting law school. At the moment, I have a kid who lives in SoHo, and so whenever I reasonably can, I visit her. I’m surprised by how much emotional resonance this place has – I have unexpectedly found myself fighting back tears more than once, as the memories and the associations and the feelings wash over me.
These memories should be sweet. I had a lot of fun. It was the Eighties, the time of Bright Lights, Big City; of Madonna and Odeon and Danceteria; and I worked for a cool ad agency as a writer. Yet, there’s a mist of sorrow here for me, a constant undercurrent of intense sadness. We’re close to what used to be the World Trade Centers, and I cannot help but think about 9/11, particularly since yesterday was, in fact, 9/11. It hurts, the way I’d imagine an old injury does. New York is a city of Fisher Kings — a kind of royalty, but forever wounded.
I remember those buildings. I remember running around in this neighborhood when I was in my twenties, and seeing those impossibly huge, solid walls of light floating in the sky on the southern end of Manhattan. They were always there, always lit up, a beacon you could always see. At 3 in the morning, you’d walk out of some bar, and there they’d be, immense and warm and bright. Not anymore, although as I walked back from dinner last night, twin beams of light from memorials placed at the site cut into the night sky, an appeal to Heaven.
On 9/11 the World Trade Centers were gone, in a matter of minutes, turning thousands of people and hundreds of firefighters and cops into nothing. Two airliners full of people and jet fuel had been hijacked and flown straight into each of the towers. The people died, the planes were destroyed, the jet fuel burned and burned and burned, and eventually the colossal, impossibly huge towers collapsed on themselves. People inside 110 story buildings that fall aren’t just killed – they’re turned into dust. They’re cremated, incinerated, reduced to gas and chemicals and powder or nothing at all.
I remember that when this happened we had just moved to California and were living in a pretty little house on a hillside in San Carlos. Amelia was a toddler, and slept in a bedroom so tiny we didn’t even know it was there until we opened a door to, we thought, a closet. We spent the morning, like millions of other people, frantically making phone calls, and endlessly watching the news, trying to learn something, understand what the hell had happened, in a kind of cage frenzy of disbelief.
People just vanished, like ghosts, or ideas, or memories, which is all they are now. And like all memories, they’re fading.
The trauma and the upheaval that day caused is still rippling around the world. There are thousands of stories that are never going to be told. Bruce Springsteen will never sing about my sister, who was working in one of the other World Trade Center buildings at the time. She was evacuated, and as she was being hustled down the street, bodies hit the sidewalk around her. She made it home, drank until she passed out, and is still not okay. How many people are there like that out there? How many wives, sons, daughters, families, are still living with that? I keep thinking of that line from Lord of the Rings: So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?
That’s usually what starts the tears. No matter what, or who, or why, what kind of world results in people who are so consumed by hatred that they’re willing to kill themselves and thousands of strangers, who had nothing to do with anything? Animals don’t do that. Dogs don’t. What sick darkness is part of being human that causes some of us to dole out death like this? Why? Life is so brief, and powered by hope — as the Grateful Dead have pointed out, it’s such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there. Why devote it to killing strangers? Nothing’s more wrong than that.
I think a lot about Father Mychal Fallon Judge, a Catholic priest who was one of the first people to die. Other people have already written a great deal about Father Mike, like so:
He overcame all other fears on the morning of 9/11, when he dashed from his room in the friary next to the Church of St. Francis and raced down to the World Trade Center. He showed uncommon courage as he stood in the lobby of the burning North Tower, giving spiritual witness and support as the firefighters, cops, and other first responders headed up to answer hate with greatest love, pure evil with absolute good. A photo of Judge’s body being carried from the fiery ruins would be called the modern Pieta.
Two cops crouched by Judge’s body and improvised the last rites. A group of firefighters carried him up into St. Peter’s Church. The roof had been struck by the landing gear of one of the hijacked jets, but the interior was undisturbed, and the firefighters placed his body before the altar. The firefighters set his chaplain’s badge and a priest’s stole on his chest. They then removed their helmets and knelt to pray.
Word spread and other firefighters came in, their eyes reddened by grit, but not weeping yet, though they had all lost friends, some an entire company. The crying began as they prayed over their lifeless chaplain. Their tears left dark tracks in the gray dust that caked their faces and everything else in the transformed realm outside.
And so, yesterday, tired from all the travel, but also hungry, I went out in search of dinner late in the evening. This being New York, getting fed at 9 PM is easy. I settled on an Italian place, and sat in a post-Covid sidewalk enclosure with a Stella Artois, awaiting my meal.
It’s Fashion Week here. The streets, where it’s still sort of summery, are full of tall, leggy young women, like herds of gazelles. I’m 6’2”, and as I walked down Broome or Bowery or Prince Street, I thought, “Christ, am I shrinking? Am I that old?” There are shows and events and parties and gift baskets, and stories in the New York Times about what this designer or that one is doing. Michael Kors apparently hit it out of the park this year with his clean, summery, all-American aesthetic.
And as always, this part of Manhattan is full of young people, in New York hoping for adventure, for success, for love, for excitement. I’m by far the oldest person in whatever place I happen to visit. But forty years ago, I was one of them, too.
I’m writing this in the lobby of the citizenM hotel, an ultra-hip place with a coworking space in the lobby, arty décor, and that blend of technology and quirkiness that signals everyone that this is the place they should be. My bed has a cool stuffed doll sitting on it when I check in. There’s are orange paperback novels by Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh on the shelf, as both décor and a signal that this is a place for cultured people.
I hear French, German, and English in every possible accent around me. There isn’t a front desk, and the young woman who helps me navigate the checking-in process (I encode my own room key) is friendly and polite, but also very cool and low-key and smart. The guy sitting in front of me is writing code, and using two portable monitors and a detached keypad. Engineer for a startup, I’m guessing.
And almost all of these people were small children when 9/11 happened. The whole thing is a Wikipedia entry to them, or nothing at all. They weren’t here, they don’t remember, they don’t know and they don’t care. Down at the end of the enclosure in which I am eating dinner, a young man who looks a little like John Mayer is on an obvious date with a slender blonde young woman, and they do not give a shit about something horrible that happened twenty-plus years ago. They’re talking, flirting, feeling each other out, doing what young men and women have done together since human beings began reproducing. I think, Good for them. I hope they spend the night together, and wake up warm and sleepy and wrapped in one another’s arms.
Which, I’ve concluded, is exactly as it should be. Life goes on. New generations appear, unburdened, one hopes, by all the trauma and shit and hate of the previous, and focus on what they should be focused on. And in the focusing, the past fades away. It becomes a memory, then it becomes history, then it becomes nothing. There are those of us who still carry it around, but it’s not right to expect the next generation to inherit it. It’s also not healthy, or wise. They’re alive, and they’re doing what people who are alive need to do, should do, are designed to do. They’re living.
In order for the whole human catastrophe to keep rolling along, we have to forget about the past. Our memories need to be fallible. What seems like loss is also necessary, and makes room for something healthy and important. I’ve heard about this for years, but now it starts to make sense. I moving closer and closer to the end of my life, and I sincerely want those closer to the beginning to live their lives, not mine.
I finish my meal, pay, walk back to my hotel. I climb into my hip bed, in my hip hotel, in the middle of Fashion Week, and surrounded by the ghosts of the life I used to live, and the ghosts of the thousands of people who lost theirs, I turn out the light, and lie there for a minute, pondering, teetering on the edge of sleep.
The room is dark, and silent, efficiently sealed off from all the racket of the city. The bed is really nice — big, clean, comfortable, lots of pillows. The ghosts are all around me, including the Italian and Chinese and Ukrainian and other immigrants who lived and died here a century ago, and did basically the same thing then I’m doing now. We all did, and the young people around me are doing it now. That’s how this all works, and it’s okay. I find this reassuring, and solid, and I quickly fall asleep. And in the morning, I wake up and I write this.