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Wednesday night was terrible, surreal. One's eye flitted between the events outside one's door and the reports of those events on television. More hard information was to be learned from TV than from the dark, but there were things that the cameras did not or could not pick up--the reek of the jet fuel burning; the twinkling helicopter lights competing with the stars; the moist, ominous air; the sight of silent, empty ambulances heading back to other quiet towns like Flanders and Manorville; or the people themselves, hunched in front of their TV sets, growing steadily more aware of their altered state.
"If anyone should find a body part on shore," said a local television announcer, "call 911."
Cameras could not penetrate the imagination either. "Did I know anyone on that flight?" "Maybe I'll cancel my trip to El Paso." "How exactly does one die in an airplane crash?" "How long are you conscious?" "They'll show the families soon. How will they bear it?" "We went to Paris once. Remember the exhilaration when the plane surged up?"
It turns out that the disaster was as near as it felt. A young couple from Manorville had been on the flight.
But television could go where the wreckage was, and one could peer into the obscure video to find the pieces that were eventually going to become a comprehensible story. Boats maneuvered in the darkness. Nets dipped into the black water. Flares dropped by C-130s hung in the sky like naked light bulbs at the ends of luminescent cords.
From high above, the burning remnants of the crash looked like a city's lights at night, like the lights of Paris. At sea level they became a pulse of fire, lifted and lowered by the roll of the waves. The shape of the mile-long area of the fires changed continuously, like drops of mercury. Now it was a pool of votive candles. Now a constellation. Now the elongated map of Long Island itself.
On Thursday morning the early light is wrapped in haze, the grass is wet, the half-risen sun casts great splotches of shadows on the front lawns. It is going to be a scorcher. The traffic, bemoaned by the woman on Atlantic Avenue, redoubles by the hour. Official cars flash red and white headlights and roll through.
At the point where the road forks left toward the Coast Guard station and Moriches Bay, the people who were allowed to pass park their cars in a baseball field and walk a mile or so in the hot dust. License plates read Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont. The TV people have come with huge trucks and satellite dishes, some of which are the size of dinner plates and sit atop tall poles; they are connected to the trucks by red wires in coils. A parking lot full of these trucks looks like a moon landing at rush hour.
What resembles a modern sculpture of fused microphones is set up for anyone in charge who would speak to the press. Whenever New York Governor George Pataki or one of the Coast Guard officers steps in front of the mikes, the reporters rush to create a mosh pit around them. But no one has anything new to say.