A Plea for Eros

direct, I stopped. Looking down at the man at my feet, I said, “Thank you so much for the invitation, but I’m busy tonight.” Without a moment’s hesitation, he grinned up at me, lifted the bottle in a mock toast, and said, “Lunch?”
    2003

9/11, or One Year Later

1
    9/11
HAS BECOME INTERNATIONAL SHORTHAND FOR A CATA- strophic morning in the United States and the three thousand dead it left behind. The two numbers have entered the vocabulary of horror: the place names and ideological terms that are used to designate dozens, hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of victims—words like My Lai, Oklahoma City, the Disappeared in Argentina, Sarajevo, Cambodia, Collectivization, the Cultural Revolution, Auschwitz. 9/11 has also become a threshold and a way of telling time—before and after, pre and post. It has been used to signify the dawn of a new era, an economic fault line, the onset of war, the presence of evil in the world, and a loss of American innocence. But for us New Yorkers, whether we were far from the attacks or close to them, September 11 remains a more intimate memory. For weeks afterward, the first question we asked friends and neighbors whom we hadn’t seen since the attacks was: “Is your family all right? Did you lose anybody?”
    The media question “How has life changed in the city since September 11?” is one that has been reiterated over and over in the press here and abroad, but it can’t be answered by passing over the day itself. There can be no before and no after, no talk of change, without our stories from that morning and the many mornings that followed, because even for those of us who were lucky and didn’t lose someone we loved, September 11 is finally a story of collective trauma and ongoing grief.
    Twelve of the thirty firefighters from our local station house in Brooklyn died when the World Trade Center collapsed. Charlie, the owner of the liquor store only a few blocks from our house, a man who has helped me and my husband buy wine for years, lost his sister-in-law. She was a stewardess on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The terrorists slit her throat. Friends of ours who live on John Street were trapped inside their building as the towers fell, their windows shattering from the impact. With help from the police, they finally managed to get out, but as they left, they found themselves stepping over human body parts lying on the ground.
    My sister Asti, who lives with her husband and daughter, Juliette, on White Street in Tribeca, was walking south toward P.S. 234, an elementary school only two blocks north of the World Trade Center. She had dropped Juliette off not long before but decided to go and get her after the first plane hit. Asti remembers wondering if she was overreacting. Then she heard the blast of the second plane as it crashed above her. She looked up, saw the gaping hole in the building looming above her, and started to run. By then people were streaming north. She heard someone say, “Oh my God, they’re jumping.” A woman near her vomited in the street.
    My friend Larry, who works at
The Wall Street Journal,
the offices of which were directly across from the towers, escaped from the building and ran until he couldn’t run anymore. He stopped to catch his breath, turned, and saw people on fire, jumping from the windows. Hours later, he managed to make his way home across the Brooklyn Bridge. When his panicked wife, Mary, opened the door, she saw a ghost man, covered from head to foot with a fine white powder. After he withdrew from the hug she gave him, Mary noticed that her arms were bleeding from the tiny pieces of pulverized glass that were part of that milky dust.

2
    Seeing isn’t always believing. Traumatic events are often accompanied by a form of disassociation. What is unfolding before your eyes seems unreal. Although I saw the damage done by the first plane from the window of our house in Brooklyn, I saw the second plane go into the second tower on television. The two pictures I hold in my mind are strangely mismatched. The first has a power that the second doesn’t. It has something to do with scale and something to do with un-mediated vision. The smoke rising from the familiar skyscraper through my window shocked me. The image on a twenty-one-inch television screen had an alien, almost hallucinatory quality that forced me to say as I watched, “This is true; this is real.” Asti, on the other hand, who witnessed the second