Absent Friends

Pausing now just inside the door, Marian met a hollowness that, though unwelcome, she'd known too well these past weeks. She had not spoken about it, at first hoping it would pass, later ashamed to have it mean so much to her. What was her loss, compared to others so much more profound, so much more bewildering? But she tasted its empty, metallic tang each time she walked through this door. The soothing sense she had always had here of coming home, of having found her way back once again to the place where she belonged, had vanished after September 11, along with all else she thought she had known.

In the minutes and hours of the crisis itself Marian had remained calm. (Those hours so elusive, difficult for memory to grasp: some episodes compressed, some elongated. Events recollected as following others when in reality they must have come long before. Some recalled as though only recorded by a single sense: this, an odd sweet smell. That, a shout, and someone weeping. Sticky dust clinging to skin and hair. An abrupt midday darkness that rolled away to reveal a new, ash-covered world.) She had shepherded her staff down the staircase immediately after the second plane struck. (Their building was not yet being evacuated; its security office was “assessing the situation.” Marian, watching in horror as flaming bodies and massive chunks of steel twisted through the sky to crash to roofs and slice through walls of buildings around them, wondered exactly what there was to assess.)

She had directed her people to a rear exit and had stayed in the lobby after they all had dashed outside, to help others find that back way, too, visitors to the building, strangers, office workers who came here every day but in the crescendo of their panic were losing all orientation, all direction. Thus she was still inside when the roar, the sound none had ever heard before, the rumble and clamor that froze them all, began. And as the black cloud poured down the street, she watched (helplessly, through the lobby glass) the implosion's immense pressure smashing down people trying to outrun it.

When the darkness (complete, much blacker than night, than closed eyes, than your dreams) had passed, Marian was first to the lobby doors, shouldering them open against the dust and debris. She shouted to people, ordered and offered and tugged them inside, as many as understood what she was saying, or would follow her though they clearly were too stunned to comprehend.

And when the second roar and crash and dust cloud came, pounding the lobby doors shut again, Marian waited for the darkness to pass once more and resumed her work.

People said later that she was an inspiration, that her calmness kept them calm, that her bravery made them brave. During the crisis Marian never panicked, and everyone said how courageous she was; but Marian knew that was a lie. Staying in motion, being useful, was how Marian outran—how she had always outrun—the boundless hollow terror that had besieged her and of which she was much more afraid than the roar or the cloud.

After the crisis, though, came the announcement that the building would be closed indefinitely. “Indefinitely” was just three weeks, as it developed, but she didn't know that then, who knew anything then? Marian was thrown into a state of alarm and dread. Without work, how could she go on? What would create solid ground for her to stand on, keep the void from swallowing her? She volunteered immediately for the most intense and time-consuming tasks she could find. She kept up with as much of MANY's ongoing work as she could, from home, fighting the lack of phones, the rerouted subways, the abrupt reordering of everyone's priorities.

And there was Kevin.

Kevin was in the hospital at NYU. Marian went every day, past the coroner's huge tent, past the refrigerated trucks that held remains waiting to be identified, past the crowds of relatives and friends who gathered there because others were gathering there, because someone might have glimpsed your parent or child or lover wandering dazed, lying injured, maybe they'd been taken to another hospital and someone had seen them there and you wouldn't have to come here anymore where the coroner was identifying remains.

Kevin was her godson, and she'd gone every day, and whatever time she got there, she found other firefighters sitting with him, or arriving, or leaving. Marian soon understood that Kevin, because he had lived, because he had been saved, was an emblem for these men. He represented something they could do: his brothers had saved him then, they could support him, comfort him, kid him along now. They came to visit Kevin, she understood, for the same reason that she worked and worked late into the night.