In New York somehow life goes on

10 Dec, 2001 10:06 AM8 mins to read

Three months after September 11, the World Trade Center is still burning. Herald correspondent ROGER FRANKLIN on how he and fellow New Yorkers handle living with constant reminders of the unthinkable.

Thirteen weeks have passed since the blue morning when the first of two hijacked jets sped so low and loud down the length of Manhattan that my son, who was sitting in a classroom on 28th St, watched a noticeboard shiver on the wall beside him.

As he tells the story, his teacher stopped in mid-sentence and everyone dashed for the windows, overturning desks and chairs in the rush to snatch a glimpse of the anomaly passing overhead.

Only the sliver of empty sky between neighbouring high-rises remained.

Young Ned, my child, swears his teacher said, "Something isn't right," and then the class strained ears and imaginations to plot the receding rumble as it faded into the south at 800km/h.

A heartbeat later, because the urban landscape doesn't stand quite so tall on 14th St, the dog-walkers at Union Square would have had a better view, able to watch and wonder as the errant jet altered course just a whisker above downtown's water tanks and boxy tenements, the square merlons and coned turrets of the Village skyline.

As the shadow and its roar rippled over Canal St, the World Trade Center must have filled the cockpit window and the end of 3600 human lives was but seconds away.

Today, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of concrete and steel, glass, plastic and, yes, thousands of bodies, remain, lit up at night by a 10m Christmas tree adorned with hundreds of white paper angels made by schoolchildren.

Underground fires from what is likely to be remembered as the longest-burning building blaze in America smoulder on, occasionally sending pungent-smelling smoke through lower Manhattan.

New York Fire Department deputy chief Charles Blaich has promised neighbours the flames will be out by year's end, or early January at the latest.

The problem is that burned-out cars, pieces of furniture and fuel tanks burn slowly because of the lack of oxygen, but the blazes cannot be put out unless the firefighters can get directly at them - impossible without first clearing the levels above.

Rescue workers are now gaining better access to the basement levels of the twin towers, and firefighters have uncovered pockets, including elevator cars, where they expect to find many bodies.

But most of these were either crushed in the collapse of the towers or burned in the intense blaze and will never be recovered.

With few exceptions, all the relatively intact corpses were extracted within the first week or so.

Then it was parts of bodies, and now, as the dig has gone deeper, mere fragments.

It is all a matter of gruesome physics, as a fireman friend who is also a Ground Zero volunteer explained over beers at a neighbourhood bar the other week.

Consider the World Trade Center, he said, as a pair of concrete concertinas that had been stood on end above the deep steep shafts of their shared foundations.

Now, in the mind's eye, collapse the towers once again. Slam down each of the skyscrapers' 100-odd storeys - thump-thump-thump-thump - on to the floors below.

At the lowest levels, where many of those who had farthest to descend were caught and crushed almost within sight of safety, that crashing kinetic energy was most intense.

As my friend put it, everything and anyone - concrete and flesh - was "pulped to atoms".

I have on my desk, a 10cm length of steel that testifies to the forces unleashed.

Thick as my thumb at one end, it has been drawn out into a curlicue twist at the other, where some terrible strength first teased the metal and then sheared it off with a bright and mirror-shiny snip.

It is a segment of reinforcing rod, what must have been but a few cells of the ferrous sinews that once stiffened the concrete of the towers. I picked it up from the gutter near a gate in the chain-link fence around the disaster scene.

I assume it fell from a truck shuttling to one of the "sorting grounds" on Staten Island or across the Hudson in New Jersey, where debris is spread by the truckload so sniffer dogs can hunt three shifts a day for human tissue.

When a frond of fingers turns up or something that might have been a knee is observed within a trouser leg black with blood and soot, the lump is set aside for DNA testing.

That is how, chunk by chunk, the dead are being reconstituted, each anonymous element referenced against the bar-coded library of genetic profiles extracted from the relics of the dead - the hair on combs and pillows, even the unwashed socks and underwear that family members surrendered along with the last of their faded hopes.

Why dwell on the condition of the dead this way? Because of the need to sharpen memories that the mere fact of living in this town has made it necessary, indeed essential, to blur.

For those of us who lived through the attacks and must still contend with their aftermath, the urge to edit memories and soften images is irresistible.

You see it - or rather you don't see it - on the nightly news.

At first, over the initial two weeks or so, the pictures of those planes striking home were everywhere and always.

But then, in a demonstration of remarkable restraint, the networks retired their most disturbing footage to the vaults.

I can't remember exactly when, for example, I last watched a replay of those cruciform shadows cartwheeling down from the upper floors, each one a human life.

We can conceive of a landmark gone missing; it takes an effort, but it can be done. But the mere thought of all those tumbling specks still stops the heart, just as it did to see them on September 11.

Now, thanks to the networks' circumspection, we in New York don't have to contemplate the unthinkable - unthinkable even though we saw it happen - unless we so wish.

Less than an hour ago, on one of the cable networks' ceaseless gabfests, the producers substituted the blandest of computer simulations for the original footage.

In this sanitised rendering, a little toy plane brought down bland building blocks. Such visual euphemisms help to push reality back into the more comfortable domain of theory. Everything happened as we saw it, yet we grant ourselves a dispensation not to dwell.

It is that way with so many other aspects of daily life. You might be making your way down a Chinatown street, the sidewalk as crowded and alive as the buckets of squirming, bite-size turtles on sale outside the fish shops, when a capricious gust brings just a whiff, the merest fading scent, of scorched tar and melted plastics.

Ground Zero's is a complex stink, sharp on the nose but with so many strange, unknowable taints that it demands real effort to whistle past the graveyard those odours bring to mind.

This is the smell of a charnel house, you think. And then, because there is no choice, you exorcise the spectres, force a passage through the throng and continue to dinner with appetite more or less intact.

The "blitz mentality" is the way Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has described it when urging his city to regain its normal routines.

Compartmentalise your thoughts, he counselled. Don't push the horror of that day from mind, but refuse to contemplate the graphic details of that which cannot be undone.

Work, consume, pay the mortgage, go out in the morning for bagels if you are a local, catch the Rockettes at Radio City if you are a rube from the sticks.

And when the darkest memories blossom, offer a private prayer of thanks for the random gift of having been spared.

In the New York of today, this bruised Big Apple of post-September 11, learning to think that way has become a survival skill.

The mental filtering makes it possible, for example, to see my son's classmate, Alicia Fodi, on the schoolhouse steps and not break down at the thought of what happened to her dad. Poor Robert Fodi, Little League coach and devoted father to two other kids, was one of the 350 firemen who died beneath downtown's rubble.

For 20 years, he had earned at best a modest living running into burning buildings. At the end, when he was last seen shepherding office workers down the smoke-filled stairwell of Tower One, common sense and instinct must have been screaming that it was madness to remain any longer at his station.

Yet he kept at it, staying where conscience and duty ordered until it was too late to save anybody else, including himself. As of a few days ago, no trace of his body had been found.

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