(3 of 3)
For those near ground zero, trying to reach stable ground felt like climbing out of a sand trap; a couple of steps up the slope, then back down again at the sound of some child talking about her missing daddy, a fiance mourning a wedding that will never happen or a wife aching that she did not say goodbye to her husband thoroughly enough that last time. The final love letters had been delivered by cell phone: Be brave, commanded a tender husband, take care of our daughter. I love you.
The city was a cemetery in waiting: streetlights and phone poles plastered with portraits of the missing where normally the ads for lost pets or cheap painters would be. Outside the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, the families afloat on hope and dread waited on line for the chance to fill out the seven-page form asking about their loved ones' tattoos and earlobes and shoe size and whether their fingers were tobacco stained. Maybe they are in a hospital, confused but safe. "I'm looking for my mother," says Brian Daniels. "Her name is on the website that she's fine, but I don't know where she is." He doesn't know that many of those listings are false, and no one has the heart to tell him. The despair is unrelenting, and the funerals have hardly begun.
But so too is the hunger for action. Lines for newspapers stretch half a block; people walk with flags sticking out of their purses, wear them as bandannas on the streets. Everyone fights back in his own way; Wall Street retaliates by getting back to business. "We'll have conference calls every morning," a boss tells his team, whose offices have been vaporized. "I want that letter of intent in the morning." You can't stop competing if you're an American business--now the fight is for office space across in Jersey City, N.J. Broadway reopens its theaters; at the end of The Producers, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick lead the audience in God Bless America.
It will take us months, years, to understand what has been changed by this, and how. Irony is no longer safe for comics; comedy itself is in tears. Three decades of popular culture have turned into period pieces: Working Girl and Escape from New York and Wall Street and Sex and the City and The Sopranos and every opening shot of the tip of the island that was designed to say, "We're in Manhattan right now." Now we will see those shots and know they came Before. When you got turned around in Greenwich Village's crooked streets, the towers were the lodestars. It will be easier to get lost now. "Those were my local mountains," a New Yorker says, but the mountains were laid low.
But yet one more hymn, from Friday's service:
And though this world, with devils filled, Should threaten to undo us, We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us.