Absent Friends

As unidentified bodies and parts of bodies were brought in refrigerated trucks to the morgue tents after September 11, a group of Stern College students—religious Jews in their teens and early twenties—took it upon themselves to ask for rabbinical dispensation to allow them to relieve their male counterparts in sitting with the bodies and reciting the prayers for the dead, who, according to Jewish custom, must not be left alone between death and burial. By Jewish law women may recite prayers over the bodies of women but not those of men. Of many of the remains brought to the morgue, it was unknown whether they were male or female. Nevertheless, permission was granted.

FIRST IN, LAST OUT

Captain Patrick Brown, one of the most decorated firefighters in the history of the FDNY, lost his life in the north tower on September 11. At his memorial service, held at St. Patrick's Cathedral on what would have been Captain Brown's forty-ninth birthday, pallbearers carried an American flag made of flowers, on which rested his helmet. Captain Brown, in the tradition of FDNY officers, was first in and last out at any fire, entering ahead of his men and not leaving until they were all out safely. Ladder 3, the company he commanded, lost twelve men on September 11. Captain Brown's memorial service was the last.

THE WAY HOME

A resident of downtown Manhattan, interviewed on the street, September 12: “My son asked, ‘Mommy, you always told me if I got lost I should just look for the towers and I could find my way home. How will I find my way home now?' That's how we all feel. We'll just have to come up with another way to find our way home.”

A HUNDRED CIRCLING CAMPS

I have seen Him in the watch fires

Of a hundred circling camps

They have builded Him an altar

In the evening dews and damps

You can read the righteous sentence

By the dim and flaring lamps

His truth is marching on.

—“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

SUTTER'S MILL

In California in 1848 John Augustus Sutter tried to keep from the world the knowledge that gold had been found on his land. His motive was not a desire to be the only one to mine this gold, rather a hope of avoiding the mining entirely. The gold might have made him rich. But Sutter had come to the valleys of central California to plant oranges and lemons, to watch the sun ripen the fruits on his trees, and to listen to the birds singing in them in the morning. Mining the gold, which in the end he could not prevent, destroyed all that, as Sutter knew it would.

LEAVING THE CAT

Two women, New Yorkers, old friends, met for coffee sometime during the week after September 11, still talking in the slow, subdued tones of shock. The first said she had packed a knapsack with hiking boots, a sweater, a bottle of water, placed it in the front closet, in the event of evacuation. The second said she'd located the cat carrier, moved it near her apartment door for the same reason. The first woman, eyebrows raised, said, “You're taking your cat?” She paused, looking away; for a time both were silent. “It didn't occur to me,” the first woman finally said, “to take the cat.”

THE WATER DREAMS

A woman who lives near Ground Zero was in the Caribbean on September 11. As a child she had nearly drowned in the ocean, was dragged through the waves to shore by a friend. (They were both surprised at the friend's unexpected strength.) For years she was troubled by nightmares: wild, luminous green water inexorably rising behind glass walls. The nightmares had long since passed, until the night of September 11, when, after an endless day spent alternately staring at the TV in the hotel bar and walking along the seawall, an exhausted sleep finally overtook her. A Caribbean hurricane howled around her hotel room, and dreams of green water and glass walls woke her twice. Since then the dreams have not stopped.

TURTLES IN THE POND

A lifelong New Yorker, walking through Chinatown in August, came upon an old woman selling two live turtles in a cardboard box. The turtles, an illicit dinner delicacy, were over eight inches long. Tightly wrapped in plastic net bags, they could hardly move; but they struggled, tiny, pushing gestures, little twists of their heads. He asked the woman the price; she sold them to him for ten dollars apiece. Sweating in the afternoon heat, he carried them in their cardboard box a mile and a half across town to a pond in Battery Park City, where he released them among the lily pads and the koi. Three weeks later the pond was clogged with debris and dust from the falling towers of the World Trade Center. Everything in it died.

BREATHING SMOKE

. . . I walk uptown chain-smoking, while downtown people are dying from breathing smoke.

—Alison Shapiro, in the October 2, 2001, issue of The Spectator, the student newspaper of Stuyvesant High School

HOW TO FIND THE FLOOR