I was going to write a long piece on what it was like to work at Ground Zero in the days immediately after the attacks. Perhaps someday I’ll write that piece, but every time I started it this weekend, it felt false. What I wanted to write about was emptiness and silence. And what do you write about those things? Better writers than I have struggled with the impossibility of directly expressing an absence. The towers were there, hovering over every move you made downtown, and then they were not, but when they collapsed they left no impression behind them. There was just the sky, looking like the sky.
The shock, for New Yorkers was not just that they were gone, but how quickly we acclimated to the fact that they were gone. It wasn’t like losing a tooth–there was no visual cue that something was missing. Your brain might remember that something was supposed to be there, but your eyes quickly forgot.
At ground level, there was the tangible reminder–that multistory shard jutting out of the smoking rubble that became one of the iconic images of 9/11. But somehow, that didn’t make the absence any more real. I worked down at Ground Zero for a year, from shortly after the attack, to just after the first annual memorial. I stood right next to that monumental fragment when the ground was still smoking and firefighters were spraying it with hoses to keep the smoke and ash at bay. I smelled the odor that pervaded Ground Zero for weeks, maybe months–burning office fittings and damp embers. And yet in my deepest mind I didn’t connect any of it with the buildings where I had worked on and off throughout the 1990s–even though I stood looking at it from the very familiar streets where I’d eaten lunch so many times. It didn’t look like a building, or even the ruins of a building. It looked like a scene from a movie about the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Read the whole thing.