We walked through the World Trade Centre without saying much. Coffee, watches, everybody moving at the pace New York moves at. That building deserves its own piece and it will get one. Then a set of doors, a crossing, a wait for the signal, and you are standing at Ground Zero on a June afternoon with a hot dog cart somewhere behind you.
The noise stops about ten steps in. Not the actual noise, the city is still there, sirens and delivery vans and all of it. Something else drops away. People arrive talking and then stop talking, and you can watch it happen to them, one group after another, as they come through the trees.
Tourists everywhere. A man from another continent by the look of him, holding a fistful of brochures and what were clearly train tickets he had not sorted out yet. He had the particular grip of a man who has lost a ticket once and will not lose one again.
Where were you?
We were with our hosts. Their son asked his father where he was when it happened. The father answered in his own language, quietly, taking his time about it. Then the younger boy asked where he had been. He was not born yet. This was explained to him, also in their language, and the whole group laughed, the small helpless laugh you allow yourself in a place like that.
I did the arithmetic on myself. Where was I?
An STD booth in Thrissur
Thrissur. I was travelling. The news came in pieces and none of the pieces fitted together, so I walked to an STD booth to phone a friend. Yellow board, a man behind the counter watching the meter tick, the little display counting rupees. We talked. Then my parents. Then a few others, the way you do when calling someone is the only useful thing available. I turned around at some point and there was a queue behind me. Four or five people, waiting, patient, saying nothing. I had been on the phone a long time.
I remember feeling nothing. That surprised me for years afterwards. I was not new to bad news. The thing was simply too large to enter. The mind has a doorway and some things will not fit through it. So it stood outside the phone booth and paced.
Twenty-four years is a long time to carry something you did not feel.
The pool that was closed
The South Pool was closed for cleaning that day. A polite blue sign explained that this was so the memorial would be preserved for generations to come, and suggested we walk north to see it in its intended form. Somebody scrubbing grief to keep it presentable.
I stood and read that sign twice.
A man called Jim Maroon has been wading into these pools at night since 2012, pushing a vacuum up and back, forty-four trips each way. He was a few hundred yards from the towers on the morning it happened, and he has cleaned the place every night since without anyone who visits ever learning his name.
So we went north.
Two square voids, exactly where the towers stood. You understand the size only when you try to walk the length of one and find yourself still walking. Water comes down all four walls at once, a wide grey sheet of it, loud enough that the person beside you has to raise their voice. It gathers in a black pool, flat and moving, and then falls again into a smaller square at the centre. That second hole takes everything and gives nothing back. You cannot see the bottom of it. You lean over the edge anyway, everybody does, and there is nothing there.
Around you the new towers go up into the sky, glass catching the afternoon, the city rebuilt and busy and fine. And at the centre of it, two holes that were deliberately left as holes.
The rose
The names are cut into bronze around the edges. Your hand goes to them without instruction. The metal was warm from the afternoon.
On one panel someone had left a single white rose, pushed into the cut letters of a name. I learned later that the staff do this on birthdays. Somebody in an office, every morning, with a list. Today would have been his birthday. Here is a flower.
That was when it arrived. The scale of it I still cannot hold. The rose did it. One person, one birthday, one flower standing in a trench cut into metal, and behind that another two thousand nine hundred and something birthdays, each with a line on the same list.
Time heals
Someone was weeping. Others were taking photographs, holding phones out over the water. An old woman held her grandson’s hand and told him that time heals.
It does something, certainly. It thins the noise. It lets numbness finally turn into feeling, which is a strange direction for healing to travel in. It does not fill the square holes. They were built to stay empty, and that is the most honest thing anyone has made about that day.
The trees were doing what trees do in June. A school group went past. Somebody’s phone rang and they answered it a bit too loudly, then walked off apologising to whoever it was.
The rose was still there when I left.