Steel heroes hardened by fire. 200 may be dead. Our entire elite NYPD Bomb Squad is dead. God help us all.
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON I AM AWAKENED FROM A FITFUL nap by the instant message trill. So far it has been a 14 hour day. It is not over. It was my friend and war buddy Lisa asking, "Can you smell it?" "Smell what?" I IMed back, bewildered - we live in the same neighborhood and if I could smell the same gas leak 15 blocks away we had trouble. "The smell of death," she typed.
I stepped to my open office window that faces south toward the carnage at the World Trade Center and sniffed. The prevailing winds from the war zone downtown had reached us. It smelled of concrete dust, burning plastic, paper, rubber, cardboard, whatever goes into New York skyscrapers when they go up then blow up.
Earlier in the afternoon, armed with a virtually useless but decorative NYPD press pass and my son's NYPolice scanner and NYPolice towing badge, I climbed into the minivan I garage in the city to haul groceries and street furniture. My son, Josh, who had worked all night the night before driving the injured in a seatless school bus to the various downtown hospitals, climbed in along side. We headed south on an almost totally empty Broadway. The silence was beyond eerie. Thousand upon thousands of people, turned out of their offices and enjoying the crystal air of early fall day, shuffled slowly south to see how far below the DMZ of 14th street they could get. Television wasn't good enough. They had to see this for themselves. Every table at every open outdoor cafe was packed. Others waited in line on the street speaking quietly on cell phones. New Yorkers are now all related to each other. The busy-person snarl between strangers has been replaced by a touch of the shoulder, a soft inquiry or two.
One can only see the carnage on TV but the story told around St. Vincent's hospital was the result. Hundreds of people stood in an orderly if irregular line. Each clutched some sort of picture of a loved and missing person. Some were framed, some folded and crumbled, some still caught in wallets and lockets. One woman held a line drawing. It was all she had to help someone else recognize her brother who phoned Tuesday morning and then disappeared. They were waiting, hoping against hope that the bone tired nurses at the door of the lobby would tell them, "Sure, we have that person here. Come right in." It wasn't happening for any of them. They slowly turned away with tears in their eyes.
As we move across the nearly empty city streets, there were New York State Troopers on every corner. No one can remember ever seeing State Troopers in the city. We see ambulances from Bohemia, New York, York, Pennsylvania, Bridgeport, Connecticut.
People have set up tables on the street in Greenwich Village. They are making free sandwiches. No one seems to need or want sandwiches. But, everyone has to do something.
My friend Lisa says she will call me later. She is crying. She has been crying off and on since Monday morning. By 9 last night, the TV said 20,000 people were in the rubble. 20,000? By 9:30 p.m. Rudy Guiliani, our Mayor, our rock and our salvation, was quietly asking the federal government to come up with 6000 body bags. New York doesn't stock that many body bags. New York has never needed anywhere near that many. The Fire Department priest whose job it is to pray for the dead is dead. Our elite Police Department bomb squad - a true band of brothers - is dead.
I watch Peter Jennings get snippy about Attorney General John Ashcroft "apparently he has something more to say." No one seems to have told him producers have set up a one on one interview with Ashcroft. Jennings apologizes but not before he has made an idiot of himself.
At l0 o'clock, Josh calls to say he is "standing in front of the hole" at ground zero and will be going in shortly. He has been asked to help search for bodies. He's phoning to say we won't see him until sometime today. This does not ease the heart. Two more buildings are creaking and ready to collapse. Late, they report there are asbestos particles in the smoke.
I finally shut things down. I am afraid to turn off the phone as I usually do. The last thing I hear is that Al Gore is "stranded in Austria" and Bill Clinton is "under protective guard in a resort in Australia." For the first time in a long, long day there is some good news.
Lucianne.
-- Anonymous, September 13, 2001