9/26/2001
I guess I'm not done talking about this. It took a while for the idea to settle in that one way or another, this is going to have to become normal for a while. For a long time. They're saying it will take six months to get to the bottom of the rubble. And the get the worst implication out of the way right now, yes, that means there will be bodies lying unattended in there for that long. I've heard an estimate of six thousand dead in there; again, those of you who live far away but own televisions probably know more about it than I do.
It's another thing that was more or less unthinkable before, or at least unthought-of. We generally get our disasters tidied up pretty quickly. The damage, maybe not; buildings will show their damage for long stretches, especially in poorer areas. But road accidents, even train wrecks, are cleaned up immediately. Dead bodies do not lie around in the open in America. That happens in war zones. Somewhere else.
But it's happening here--not just in America but in downtown Manhattan--because we can't do a thing in the world about it. That's how much rubble there is.
Here's my temp job: I'm doing data entry for HR. Specifically, I'm running through a rote series of basic stats for each executive who sends in a form that was distributed some time ago. That's the main thing. In between I punch in info for people freshly hired, and failing that, rock bottom (where I spend the bulk of my time in practice) is a slow march through the filing cabinets, from A to Z, transferring a narrowed range of information from marvelously haphazard paper records to the database they've evidently acquired only recently.
That, anyway, was my job before the attack. And by default, I've finally settled back into doing the same thing again, even though I spent some time letting it hang, because there's good reason to think a lot of it is irrelevant now. But nobody had much of anything else for me to do, other than a little gophering, and it was frankly embarrassing to be that utterly inactive while the rest of HR was in a panic.
This company, an enormous and basically malevolent corporation, had extensive offices in 1 WTC, high up, right where the first plane hit. Hundreds of people have been lost. The balance, those who were for whatever reason not in their offices that day, have all come here to be assimilated as best we can manage. The families of the missing came here to ask for news. Offers of help in many forms, from volunteer space to the incredible crassness of jobseekers billing themselves as helpers in need, are pouring in here. And eventually HR will be doing the dirty work of cataloguing the victims, and some temp will sit at this same desk and check the box on one record after another.
I had the privilege, new for me, of being trained for this stint by my predecessor, Alex, who may be returning in a couple weeks to take the position back. I quite enjoyed those first three days. He was a polished and educated guy, with wit, and a day of mindless processing is hardly bothersome at all when one can trade quips about it the whole time. Alex was a good temp, which seems rare indeed, and which begs the question of why he's temping at all. His excuse is that he's a filmmaker and theater guy, so temping pays the bills while he makes movies. (Mine, as I was careful to indicate last time I wrote, is that I'm between career objectives at the moment.)
Knowing he might return (I guess I he will return if his theater festival hasn't made him famous in the meantime) I've left a file for him, beginning with notes about the database that I thought he might find useful, but quickly degenerating into a running commentary about whatever I felt like talking about. It's the sort of thing I do; I leave little written traces of myself anywhere I spend enough time, I suppose mostly because I'm always interested to find such traces of other people.
This is a recent passage from that file:
What charm this job had is gone. For some time the only way I could pass the time was to try to work as fast as I could, my eyes on the arbitrary target of running all the way through the files in the cabinets before leaving the job--which I estimated there was just about enough time to do if I could work somewhat faster than one drawer a day. And mostly I found I could do that, I could do two drawers in a day if there wasn't too much else landing on my desk (which practically by definition there isn't).
I certainly don't mean to say it was at any point not boring. But at least there was that idea of the achieveable goal, the completion of something, and there's some satisfaction in that. But all that got set back by almost two weeks when the attack hit, and though I did start putting files in again--it was that or sit utterly idle most of the time--I'm still far from certain that it makes sense to do so. Many of these people are almost certainly dead. Every so often I flip around a file looking for an emergency contact and there sits someone's work location: 1 WTC, 95th Fl. What's the point? Do I close that file, or go on duly recording the minutiae of some guy's high school summer job as a lifeguard while downtown they're digging in the rubble for his body, and will keep digging for six months, they're saying now, before they can finally uncover them all?
One of the first files by which I was disgusted on this job--A***, whose son not only works in the company after a previous work history consisting entirely of caddying, but went to the same college and prep school she did--today her memorial service was on the list in the latest little newsletter. It doesn't stop me from being disgusted. But that doesn't make me any happier to see the memorial notice; it's a strongly disturbing thing to hear of the death of someone whose name you recognize, even when you only knew it peripherally and with rancor.
Planes sound intolerably loud now. Everyone stops for just a beat when one passes overhead. Everyone glances around when somebody rolls a heavy cart upstairs. On Monday the building conducted a series of fire drills, of all things--not to practice trooping out, as we would in school, but to gather by the doorway and listen patiently to a lecture about what we would do in the event of a real fire. Except on this occasion faces were truly grim, and there were a lot more questions than usual. And the old rote answers were woefully inadequate. Don't use the stairs if they're full of smoke, the warden told us, go around to the other stairwell. What if they're both full of smoke? As easily as that, he was stumped, shrugging and spreading his hands. After a moment he decided we should take the less smoky stairwell.
Grimly rebellious looks were exchanged all round when we were told that we should only walk three floors down and wait for further instructions, in the event of a real fire. "Fire goes up," he said in the clear voice of a tour guide, "it does not go down." Yes, said the faces, fire goes up. Masonry comes down.
I don't know what the execs are saying, but every secretary in the place has heard how the staff in the WTC was told to remain seated and wait. The people who tell these stories are the ones who snarled at the order and took off.
Another, earlier, clipping from my ongoing ramble to Alex:
So the network is back up. But I've no idea what I ought to be doing. L***'s not really available for a while, she's telling the story of being alive, presumably because she was late to her meeting on Tuesday. Am I still needed at all? Nobody's come here to say otherwise.
Now some git is on the PA making a briefing. Reading a speech no worse than most of those issuing from the Oval Office these days. Eulogizing dead employees as having "worked hard every day to make *** a great company." Astounding. The banal narcissism of the American corporation pauses for nothing. Nothing.
The day I went back to work, the 13th, I stopped outside the office to buy a photograph of the skyline--it's the one at the head of the first installment, I stopped to scan it on the way home. The photographer was selling that and other such pictures as fast as he could take the money. I didn't think any harm of that, I'd already decided I wanted to find some postcards or something, but it's harder to look well on the guys hawking "World Trade Center t-shirts" on the corner for the last week and a half. I haven't looked so closely but I'm betting those shirts were designed and printed in the last two weeks. Souvenirs of a catastrophe still smoking an hour's walk away.
The worst of many such astoundingly crass things I've seen so far is a faux-Suess narration of the disaster, forwarded to epic lists of recipients--probably I was the last to hear of it, which would be typical--under cover of a patently false bit of drivel explaining that it had been written For The Children.
I don't know why anybody is amused by imitation Suess under the best of circumstances, but what kind of a brain does it take to think of writing it now? Have you ever seen a specimen of fake Suess that wasn't mocking its subject matter?
I guess I'm wandering into a pet peeve of my own there, but I was pretty steamed when I first saw it.
The politics that follow the attack seem to exist in an entirely different world from that of the aftermath locally. I suppose the time will come when I want to write some about those repercussions but it's hard to focus on right now. I'm aware of things that frighten me--Carnivore becoming legal, the probability of war on Afghanistan (attended by the darker specter of war with Pakistan), the suddenly real possibility of any number of further attacks, taking potentially any form at all, and all the frenzied thrusting of everyone's familiar old agendas into the ears of a suddenly impressionable Washington.
And the flags. It's hard to know what anybody means by them. What does patriotism have to do with recovering from this? I suppose it's something to do. The candles made more sense to me. I live in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood and my neighbors know all about lighting candles. They have their flags too though.
I'm realizing lately that I've slipped into complacency already. I made a genuine effort to find a way to help, the day after the attack. I kept my ears open for a day or two after that. And then I stopped looking.
Now, though, I know a handful of people who have found ways to make themselves useful, and anyway now it's sinking in that this work won't be done for a long time. It's time for me to try again. I'm working myself up to it. This weekend, I hope. In a kitchen, very possibly, but it's still helping. And Rebecca might be able to get me into the actual digging, she said, by way of the carpenter's union. I'll try for that if I can.
I don't even try too hard to track my reasons for wanting to take part in this. I know it's gruesome downtown. I know the people who have some kind of training in these things can probably get it done without me more or less as fast as they will with me. But I want to do something. I want to do what little I can to try and get this over with. I want to try and get the measure of it with my own eyes. Or maybe it's just vanity, the urge to see fresh history up close. Some part of the urge is that, surely. More of it, I think, is my old anxiety about growing up white in a fat country in peacetime: how much of life on Earth goes over my head because nothing in my own life has gone wrong?
In the end I may look back and decide my reasons were craven and hollow after all. Even so, I will have done a little work, so carting my muscles downtown under dubious intentions won't have been useless. For now I'm not fretting too much about why. I want to go down there.