Through the Children's Gate Read online

  What is so difficult is the scale of the disaster: both greater than you can imagine and smaller than you can believe. There is so much left, so many tall glass towers, that if you didn't know something vital was missing, you would never guess it. The huge pile into which the towers crumbled looks like what it is, a vast and terrifying graveyard. But just across the street, not fifty feet from the site, stands a building with an ad for E∗Trade painted on it: finally, a place on madison avenue where you can invest money, instead of spend it. It's as though the sinking of the Titanic had taken place right beside a subway station and been watched by a frightened or curious crowd who saw something unbelievable, the great ship listing and rising up and breaking in two and the people falling from the funnel, and then walked home from the disaster and showed their families that their hands were still cold from touching the iceberg.

  Although you were officially required to show that you worked on Wall Street to get there, a less than intrepid reporter wandered around, found himself following a group of National Guardsmen along William Street, talked to them briefly (they wanted a beer), and then, meandering up the first big street he came to, found himself directly beneath the big flag on the front of the Stock Exchange. Brokers in blue jackets were standing there, taking a cigarette break. “Your shoelace is untied,” a cop said, disgusted, and moved him along. At some semiconscious level, the decision had been made to let life go on. Normalcy is basically incompatible with security. Either life will go on or it won't, and if it does, it will go on as life, with its shoelaces untied and an unexpected back way to the destination.

  Inside, the brokers were saying what their country was worth, and the country was asking them not to. As you talked to brokers coming out of the exchange, they would begin by telling you the truth—“Well, we were headed downhill already, and so this is really just …” And then they'd stop themselves and say, “This is a great day for America. The fact we're open.” Though a stock exchange is part of civil society, it is not a civic-minded place in the conventional sense of the term: It is not about people pulling together for the common good but about people pulling apart to pursue their own interests in the long-term faith that the common goodwill eventually emerge someplace out there, in the form of buildings and wealth. A stock market exists to make bets on what will happen, and since what has happened has for so long been what we want, the idea of hope has gotten stuck on it like a decal. On Monday, though, the brokers knew that a disaster had been made to happen within a few feet of where they were standing by people who hated everything they stood for. We were asking them that morning to bet it wouldn't make a difference to what would happen next. They decided to bet it would.

  At the Javits Center, where the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Guard are keeping their spirits up, the vast main atrium is empty. But there are to be a couple of press conferences downstairs, where someone has found the only cramped and dingy-seeming room in the huge well of light and space. A lectern has been placed up on a dais, with a blue cloth behind it and American and New York City flags all around. National Guardsmen hover at one side of the stage, men in their forties and fifties (the younger ones are downtown) who, in combat fatigues, look costumed for a G.I. Joe party. State troopers with Smokey Bear hats have created a hangout on the other side; they, too, look incongruous indoors. “You keep expecting them to pull you over for speeding,” someone says.

  The first press conference turns out to be an announcement by Governor George Pataki that the penalty for aiding terrorists will now be raised in New York, and is followed by a press conference for “Auction for America,” on eBay. Even though the mayor—who has, in a week, become an international figure, the Churchill of the moment—is to be present, the press conference is sparsely attended, with the rows of bridge chairs only half full. Governor Pataki, a very tall man, says that spirits in the city are higher now than they've ever been, and then he introduces the head of eBay and executives of Visa and MasterCard, who have promised the “waiving of the fees” for the eBay auction. The auction will be a hundred-day event intended to raise $100 million. The executives get up and speak in the new language of the disaster. They offer their deepest sympathies for the victims of the atrocious event, along with their thoughts and prayers, and congratulate those involved with the auction for their great team effort. They use the expression “waiving of the fees” again and again, as though it came from the Bible.

  When Rudy Giuliani arrives, the temperature changes. Seen up close, the mayor seems to have collapsed in on himself, becoming stooped and gray; his shoulders hunch, and in repose he has not the fed-on-organ-meat look of a man of power, as Governor Pataki does, but the bowed and nervous look of an earlier generation of politician. In his round wire-rimmed glasses and baggy suit, he is like a figure from the era before charisma. He stands with his hands clasped in front of him, rocking a little. It is possible, in this moment, to sense the real source of his authority: He lacks imagination, genuinely does not care about appearances, is not self-conscious about the effect he is making, and has the crucial ability to know just how grave things are and, at some decent level, not be overwhelmed. Where the governor carefully modulates his voice, trying to deepen it when he mentions the families and find a note of rueful optimism when he is being ruefully optimistic, Giuliani rises to the occasion because he is not ruled by a sense of occasion. He is not a good actor. He is just a public man, a mayor.

  Someone asks the mayor about the costs of rebuilding, and he says simply, “They're incalculable. We've never had an attack of this dimension.” For a moment the smell of the white soot from downtown seems to fill the room. Another reporter asks what the mayor will donate to the auction, and he stops to think and brood. “Let me see,” he says. Then his face brightens. “I know! I'll donate my Yogi Berra baseball. He gave it to me on his day at Yankee Stadium, at the last perfect game.” Someone passes him a piece of paper, and he brightens even more. It seems that someone is “donating the 1999 baseball that was the final out of the Series—it was the final out of the twentieth century!” Happily, he repeats, “The final out of the twentieth century.”

  * * *

  There has been a rash of street poetry pasted up on walls. At least two pastiches of How the Grinch Stole Christmas have appeared. One, called “How the Binch Stole Christmas,” tells how a Binch decided to stop the singing in Uville:

  “I must stop that singing,” Binch said with a smirk.

  And he had an idea—an idea that might work.

  The Binch stole some U airplanes in U morning hours

  And crashed them right into the Uville twin towers.

  “They'll wake to disaster,” he snickered so sour.

  “And how can they sing when they can 't find a tower?”

  They do, of course.

  At a higher level, W. H. Auden's poem “September 1, 1939” has been circulating in the city like a text by Nostradamus. It was quoted on the editorial page of the Post(in the same issue that offered readers a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster of Osama bin Laden), posted in a forum on the Academy of American Poets website, and read aloud on NPR. (One writer says that he received it as an e-mail six times within the week.) This is the poem about the onset of World War II. The poet, in exile from London, sits “in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street” as the hopes of a “low dishonest decade” expire and “The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night.” He sees an enemy gone mad in the worship of a psychopathic god, confronts

  the lie of Authority,

  Whose buildings grope the sky,

  and decides that “we must love one another or die.” Composed “of Eros and of dust,” he prays to “show an affirming flame.”

  Auden, whose “Funeral Blues” became the semiofficial poem of AIDS in the eighties, seems confirmed as the preeminent elegist of our time. Yet “September 1, 1939” was one of the poems that he banished from his collected works, as too sonorous and false (we are a
ll going to die whether we love one another or not). The poem, as Joseph Brodsky once pointed out, is really about shame—about how cultures are infected by overwhelming feelings of shame, their “habit-forming pain,” and seek to escape those feelings through violence. What drives men mad—drives them to psychopathic gods—is the unbearable feeling of having been humiliated. The alternative, the poem says, is not to construct our own narrative of shame and redemption, which never really comes in any case, but to follow our authentic self-interest, which means being in touch with the reality of what is and is not actually possible in the world. Although a lot of people have said that the attack marks the end of irony, this poem of the moment is actually in favor of irony. That affirming flame begins, ironically, as “ironic points of light,” meaning the skeptical clarity that sees the world as it is, rather than as our fears would make it. The crucial movement in the poem is not from decadence to renewal but from symbols to people and from rhetoric to speech. “All I have is a voice,” the poet says, “to undo the folded lie.”

  The dive in the poem, as it happens, was a gay bar and cabaret on Fifty-second Street called Dizzy's, once, apparently, a wild place. If you go at night, after many hours on foot, and stand on West Fifty-second Street where Auden imagined the poem, you find that Dizzy's is gone, and so is the townhouse it was in. Now there is just another mute lit tower groping the sky, and hoping the sky won't grope back.

  Second Thanksgiving: Intensities

  It is hard to explain how much the sounds have changed in meaning. The small, constant din of density that we noticed all last year—the cars snorting at intersections, the harrumph and burst of a motorcycle, the helicopter hovering, the three-in-the-morning sound of the bus rushing up the avenue, heaving and rumbling—all have altered in possible meaning, in what they could portend. You wake up at night, hear the bus, and think, Is that a bus, or a plane, or a … ? We scan the skies for low-flying aviation, sudden experts on cruising altitudes. Anxiety is a stimulant; fear is a hallucinogen and a paralytic—it makes you imagine things that aren't happening and then freeze in the face of your own imaginings.

  We had two parties for the two children; one on September io, for Luke, and one on September n, for Olivia. The one on the tenth was better. Luke has now read Harry Potter, so we had a Harry Potter party. We had been planning for it all summer.

  “Are there any wizards in Harry Potter?” Martha, a Potter non-reader, asked innocently. Luke and I paused in wonder and then broke up in cruel guffaws. “Are there wizards in Harry Potter!” we said.

  It had been a wonderful summer, the best. There were fireflies in the air and black seals in the ocean water. The fireflies had been out in force near the park all summer long. If you took a walk up Fifth Avenue alongside the park, they were everywhere: floating in and out of the twilight along the cobbled sidewalk near the park, resting invisibly among the twigs in the gutters, hovering around the doormen at epaulet level. They were out elsewhere, too, of course: Everywhere in and around Central Park was dense with them. But there was something piquant about their presence on Fifth. They were the only creatures living there who have not had to seek approval first. They were this year's Razor scooter, the thing that every child wants. Luke set off for Fifth Avenue in the Nineties one night, jar in hand—actually, it was a plastic receptacle that had held take-out chicken vindaloo the night before—and stalked his prey. (It was not very good sport, since fireflies are almost ridiculously easy to catch: You can pluck them out of the air gently with your hand and hold them there.) The summer's fireflies glowed green, and only when they wanted to. The green was a strange X-Men kind of green, the color of the aureole that comicbook artists used to draw to suggest mutancy, radioactivity—the chartreuse glow that engulfed Bruce Banner as he became the Incredible Hulk. The folk explanation for the abundance of fireflies was that they were here because the mosquitoes were not. Last summer's West Nile spraying, the legend goes, had eliminated the bloodsuckers and left a niche for the fireflies. Last summer's bug was the whine in the ear of an imperial city, reminding us how vulnerable we are. This summer's was a consolation, and all the things we would still like to be: sexy yet reticent, and bringing its own gilding to a drier season.

  And then, on our two weeks by the sea, there were seals—real honest-to-goodness big black harbor seals that would come within ten or fifteen feet of the shore. They would just sit there and watch you, mustachioed and skeptical, looking like the uncles in turn-of-the-last-century photographs. You almost expected them to be wearing bathing costumes, like in a Chaplin film: striped suits with long pant legs and bare arms.

  We took pictures of our family and our friends all summer, and planned the Harry Potter party. I would play—I was drafted into playing—Dumbledore, the head of Hogwarts, and I'd do a little magic show. I have my doubts about Dumbledore. Although he is relentlessly good and wise, he seems strangely lax in his administration. He allows the Slytherin house nearly free reign in Evil; tolerates the malicious Professor Snape; and generally intervenes only at the very last possible second when Harry is facing a hippogriff or a basilisk or the all-evil Voldemort. I am instinctively a religious conservative: I want God, Dumbledore, just to take care of it, to intervene before the evil takes place. But he can't, or won't.

  The party was fine. The kids played pin the snitch on the Quidditch broom, and pass the broomstick, and lots of other games, and there was a green Ridgeback dragon piñata. I failed rather grandly as Dumbledore, doing magic, sweating through the artificial robe and unbelievably scratchy white beard. The kids all knew how the tricks were done and let me know it—not aggressively, but sore with boredom. Sorry, Luke's Dad, I've seen that one. I felt a little exasperated with New York children, their knowingness and their knowing too much too soon—their lacking, at times, the sensitivity that goes with being a little fearful of the world, that look you see in French kids’ eyes that reflects their knowledge that the world is a difficult and demanding place.

  We went to bed thinking, God, this two-birthday business is a marathon.

  Olivia slept through the whole thing, taking her morning nap. We stumbled out onto the street with half a crazy thought of laying in provisions. I ran into David Del Guiso, a friend in wordless shock who happened to be carrying a big brown paper package, which I knew was the framed version of a French etching of a white woman stretched out on a blanket in the forest of Fontainebleu, her back turned. I had bought it for Martha one Christmas. He had framed it for us, and now he handed it to me, and, perplexed and cheerless and robotic, we hung it up. It looked wonderful; she looked wonderful. Then I walked downtown. The pile of presents stood on the table. Later, we got back the summer snapshots and found that there was something wrong with the camera; all of them, all, had a black band cutting the picture in three, two thirds cheer and then a marked black stripe cutting off the image of good times. Everyone forgot about the fireflies.

  * * *

  Early Thursday morning, a friend brought me into the Emergency Operations Center, which had been set up on Fifty-fourth Street, right by the river. The intended command center had been, with an irony that was almost unbearable, in 7 World Trade Center and had been destroyed. People who had seen it before said that it was very fine, with light-up maps and signals that told you the condition of every traffic light in the five boroughs. The city people had been given two days to create a new center from scratch.

  They have been mapping every day, the mapmaker tells me, flying over the site, taking pictures, and then translating them into schematics. “It's a very dynamic site,” he says drily. It is hard to give a sense of how virtuous they seem. These are the city men who live in a world where it is always 1961. Every morning they send out an aerial camera to see exactly how the destruction lies and what lies beneath. They treat it as a challenge in mapping. Only they know the precise, impossibly intricate pattern of cables and pipes and sewers and tunnels and lines. They don't stop; they don't grieve or mourn or melodramatize. They just
work.

  These, of course, are the bureaucrats, the deadwood employees of a socialized state for whom everyone had contempt, and who were being made obsolete, we were told, obsolete by the forces of the New Economy. Now, as that world cowers, or at least is paralyzed, it is the City Men, of all improbable people, who come to the rescue. The infrastructure of New York has turned out to be solid and resourceful, which one would have guessed if one had spent time with the map-makers in the first place. The firemen first, and then the policemen—but it was the mapmakers and the engineers and all of the anonymous bureaucrats in loosened ties and white shirts and gray flannels, the women in suits, who held us together and stitched up the wounds when everything was coming apart. Alan says to me, “I never want to meet another guy who talks about deadwood in the bloated city bureaucracy,” as he looks out over the vast, hastily assembled, room full of energy. The public had come to the rescue of the private and, to its credit, did not jeer at the private's incapacities or impotence or weakness, as the private had so often done to the public.

  Later that day, I bump into F.A., the Arabist, and we have a talk about What Is to Be Done. I ask him if there is anything we can do about madmen who worship psychopathic gods. And he says something obvious but interesting: that there's nothing to be done about the core, the real nuts, but they exist, as human beings must, within concentric circles of culture: an immediate circle of murder-minded sympathizers and financiers; a circle just outside that of sympathizers who would not do such things themselves but will not stop them from happening; a circle beyond that of people who choose not to know what is being done but sympathize with the radical purpose; a circle beyond that one of the fearful and even sentimentally sympathetic—on and on, each circle of culture outside the actual nucleus of evil a little larger and a little less regular in its orbit than the one before, and therefore able to be dried up, reduced, set loose. Attack and persuade the outer circles of culture to abandon the inner circles, and eventually, the core will be all alone, isolated and futile.