Rivers of wax
September 17, 2001
Since last Tuesday, the New York skyline has been defined by what is not there. Seeing the Twin
Towers from a distance set ablaze and watching them fall on TV, I still have not come to grips
with their not being there when I walk out onto Peir A in Hoboken. While I have always thought
the two towers as an inappropriate addition to the landscape and struggled often to imagine the
skyline without them, now I struggle to replace them in my mind's eye with the vast emptiness
left behind.
Only the rumble of the constant ferries breaks the incredible silence, and the whispering
footsteps coming and going to the make-shift memorials that line the low wall and the metal rail
-- the largest of these positioned closest to the point where people stood on Sept. 11 to observe
the disaster: wreathes, candles, poems, missing posters, pressed against the metal bars, mingled
not with blood as those across the river, but in the river of melting was, candles here smoldering
in sympathy to the smoldering of the disaster zone.
Few funeral wakes have struck me as painful as this one as mourners make their way here before
boarding the PATH or the ferry to devastated Manhattan. From here, it is hard to imagine the
screams that accompanied the wrath of that moment. We saw only the billows of smoke and the
momentary flash of fire when the two jets struck. We saw no bodies falling. We heard no cries
for help. We could not even see those on the top floor waving their shirts in hope that someone --
anyone -- might rescue them. And now, a half dozen days later, we don't even know who exactly
died, bodies plucked in pieces from the rubble without names or recognizable features. We
know the dead only by those who did not come home, a handful from this town or that, as if we
could hide the horrendous number by dismembering its total -- issuing out their numbers in
pieces as small as the pieces of bodies recovered.
I am struck as hard by the vast space left by that loss of life as if their accumulated karma left a
black hole as large in our lives as the towers were on the skyline. Those of us who survived,
preserving their essence through the only possible immortal building-material we have, memory
lasting longer than any brick or glass.
As I sit here, I watch people move gingerly to the make-shift monument, the way people do in
ordinary wakes, each waiting for the previous person to vacate before moving closer, each
seeking that last private moment to look over the body of the deceased, but a body made
invisible except for smoke, wax and photographs -- pictures of missing people pasted to the
ground always with the pictures of the two tall towers, which we once could see clearly from
here.