Ground Zero–a Writer’s Trek Into The Heart of Darkness on 9/11

A sobering yellow-grey smoke rose from the earth at Ground Zero, the kind seen smoldering in war movie battlefields the morning after a particularly fierce or important battle. Strangely absent were the blood and teeth, the blurry sobs of the lone trumpet, the empty moans from the wounded. Ground Zero seemed more junkyard than graveyard, nothing more macabre than a few stray shoes or a box of office stationary, making the holocaust that occurred just hours before and seemed so fresh in the mind feel like something out of ancient history.

Hours after Mayor Giuliani ordered everyone out of Lower Manhattan, Ground Zero was haunted only by machinated hums and crashes, the heavy equipment of the living. Tractors, backhoes, fire trucks and support vehicles. A stinging incense of disintegrated glass and debris blew as thick as sand among the silent fires and flashing lights. Generators groused and grumbled; floodlights glared into the stink aand rubble of the darkness but illuminated nothing. Fire hoses and electric cables ran along the ground like disgorged innards. Two thousand ghosts lay buried in the mud and rubble below, while above, thousands more scurried about with pick-axes and steel-cutters—roving ghouls, their faces full of the blank stares of the dead, men and women who’d seen way too much too be able to blink. These were the heroes.

I watched the television replays of the first plane hit from my office in Midtown. My friend Kevin called me from his cell phone in Battery Park, outside his girlfriend’s apartment, just a few blocks away. He was on the street, holding his cat, describing the scene—”People are jumping! Ouch! Quit it, Jakob! Damn. There’s a hole the size of … Ouch!”—when the second plane appeared. I could hear the engines increase thrust as they roared overhead and homed in on the second tower. Kevin clicked off and I ran to the TV, where I watched petrified for the next hour until both the towers had fallen.

Out on 42nd Street, there was screaming, laughing, crying—every range of emotion. Like the millions that would make the pilgrimage down to Ground Zero in the year after, I was moved by a driving, perverse sense of duty to get down to the site, to be a participant, to bear witness.

Getting past the “frozen zone” south of Canal Street was the toughest part. The entire southern tip of Manhattan was officially closed. One cop didn’t want to let me in, with or without my press badge. Then there was confusion as to where I was supposed to go. Finally, he gave in and told me to head over to the press area but he didn’t know exactly where it was. Heading south on Broadway, there were fewer and fewer people on the streets, fewer lights in the windows, fewer bodegas open. Past the empty triage sites, I saw doctors standing with hands in pockets, others sipping coffee and waiting. They would wait like that all night. An officer at the second checkpoint pulled aside a blue sawhorse and let me past. I was getting closer. I passed the broken windows of a discount store on Broadway, a place where the merchandise ranged from video cameras to discount dresses, a place I had passed just the other day and thought, who in their right mind would go into that place on purpose.