Absent Friends

SECRETS NO ONE KNEW

We lost voices

Lives

Loved ones

Secrets no one knew

—Sarah Williams, 17, “Voices” (excerpt),

from Wordsmiths: A Teen Poetry Journal

TREE, FALLING

A tree falls in the forest; no one is there to hear it. To whom does it make a difference, then, whether it makes a sound?

COMPLICATED WORK

What is a good man but a bad man's teacher?

What is a bad man but a good man's job?

—Lao-Tse

THE MAN WHO SAT BY THE DOOR

A New York City police officer tells this story: I took my wife upstate to visit my uncle Rob. To get away for a few days, you know? This was maybe a month after 9/11. Rob used to be a warden, one of the prisons up the Hudson. They call them medium security, but, trust me, they're tough places. He retired long ago, kids are all grown and gone, wife died years back. Talks about moving to Florida, but still lives in the same house he used to, across the street from the main gate. So the first night up there, Rob makes lasagna, we talk for a while, then my wife and I are ready to turn in. Rob takes us to this bedroom upstairs, says good night, heads downstairs again. You staying up for a while? I ask him. No, I'm going to sleep, he says. I sleep here. He points to a chair in the living room, facing the door. Got used to it years ago, he says. And damn if he doesn't sit down in that chair, fully dressed—even shoes—and sleep like that until morning. And all I could think was, I thought I was putting in a lot of overtime. You know?

THE OLD MASTERS

(SAILING CALMLY ON)

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along . . .

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure . . .

. . . and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

—W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

THE WOMEN IN THE TENT

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

In the days after September 11, two friends spoke on the phone. Not wanting to break the connection, they searched for topics to talk about, though only one thing was on their minds, the same as on everyone's. One of the two was a man with a disability. “Did you know I'm using a cane now?” he said. “It's not that I can't walk; I can. It's just that sometimes I feel like I can't find the floor.” My God, that's how I feel, the other thought, though she said nothing. I know where it is, I must be standing right on it, where else could I stand? But I can't find it. I can't find the floor.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE PIG

An old story about Abe Lincoln: riding through the countryside in a carriage with a friend, Lincoln spotted a pig stuck in a fence. The pig was squealing and writhing, but it couldn't get loose. Lincoln stopped the carriage, took off his jacket, and wrestled the pig out from the rails. The pig trotted off. Lincoln, covered with sweat, mud, and bruises, returned to the carriage.

“Was that your pig?” his friend asked.

“No,” Lincoln answered, picking up the reins.

“Your neighbor's?”

“I don't know the man who owns this land.”

“Well, that was awfully good of you, then,” said the friend. “To put yourself to so much trouble for a stranger's pig.”

Lincoln said, “I didn't do it for the pig.”

“For the owner, then? Whoever he is?”

“No. For myself.”

“For yourself?”

“Yes,” said Lincoln. “I don't want to have to lie awake all night listening to that damn pig squealing in my head.”

THE BODIES OF THE BIRDS

The fireballs that erupted when the planes hit the towers of the World Trade Center scorched the feathers from the wings of sparrows, finches, grackles, pigeons, and seagulls hundreds of yards away. Small charred corpses were found as far north as Houston Street.

THE INVISIBLE MAN STEPS BETWEEN

YOU AND THE MIRROR

The undead, so legends say, though visible to the eye and capable of great destruction, don't appear in mirrors. The Invisible Man, though, who cannot be seen at all: does his presence, as it is said, distort reflections?