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oversized entropic gothicness
Friday, September 21 2001
Last night Thor really brought down His hammer hard on Park Slope. Rain fell in a continuous roar. Every lightning strike seemed to be within a block or two of our brownstone, each immediately followed by a loud and uncompromising thunderclap. Sally the Dog was terrified.
During my 3pm lunch break, I took the Red Line down to Fulton Street, one of the open subway stations closest to the site of the World Trade Center. I guess I'd never really been in the thick of things downtown, because I was immediately struck by what deep, narrow canyons the streets are down there. The streets clearly date to some ancient quasi-medieval period when horse-drawn carts were considered reasonable transportation. Meanwhile, the buildings on the sides of the narrow twisting streets would all qualify as skyscrapers in any other American city. They so thoroughly block out the sky that even in daytime the streets are twilight. Occasionally a stabbing ray of sunlight cuts through the gloom, but it's almost always a reflection from a window. When I looked to the tops of the buildings high over my head, I could see a great many new antenna nests in the process of installation.
I didn't know how close I'd be able to get to the World Trade Center, so I kept on walking northward, blending into the crowd that seemed to be carrying on with the usual New York business-as-usual attitude despite the crazy circumstances. Up and down streets sullied with sand and greyish mud, police tape was everywhere, as were cops of all descriptions. Periodically I'd see groups of National Guard troops in green camouflage, but I was terribly disappointed that they weren't carrying any big scary guns. It's amazing how preposterous a fully-grown man looks dressed head-to-toe in camouflage without a big gun in his hands or at least strapped across his back.
Then I rounded a crook in the street and saw it, the lacelike facade of the old World Trade Center rearing skyward for several stories in the smoky distance, stuck like massive throwing stars in the ground. Seeing it with my own eyes, it was both more horrible and more beautiful than I could have imagined. In their oversized entropic gothicness, they were the Gates of Hell. Beyond them lay six thousand corpses in tangles of iron, glass, paper, office equipment, and drywall. For a moment I thought I could smell the decay, but then the wind shifted ever so slightly and the smell was gone.
As in days before at 14th Street, Houston Street, and Canal Street, the approach was again stopped by a police cordon. But now I was so close to the fearsome ruins that the cordon retained no mystery. Hundreds of others were there for exactly what had brought me, the desire to witness, photograph, and be affected by the scene of the single greatest American battle wound in history. I took a few pictures before being shooed along by police. After taking a few more pictures from another intersection, I found my way back to the Fulton Street Station.
The subway back north was extremely crowded and to my jumpy prejudicial instincts, every brown-skinned man looked like a nervous suicidal terrorist about to jump to his feet and explosively proclaim "Allahu Akbar!" For their part, all brown-skinned men are clearly aware that people now look at them this way and they keep their eyes pointed mostly at the floor. I've been noticing lately that all the Puerto Rican guys are wearing huge golden crucifixes around their necks; no mistaking them for Muslims. These are just some of the many ways the world has become a less friendly place to live.
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Bits of facade.
The wreckage of the World Trade Center facade, viewed from the east.
Click for a much bigger version.
Police at the site's east cordon.
Messages written in World Trade Center dust adhering to a shop window.
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