An Unimagined World
© by Jillian Blume


THE ATTACK

The roar of an engine shatters my sleep. I open my eyes as an explosion rattles the window. In the eerie silence which follows, I almost fall asleep again, but the feeling that something is wrong draws me to my feet.  Peering out my bedroom window which frames the South Tower of the World Trade Center, as do all the windows in my apartment, my eyes focus on a sky filled with a blizzard of papers. I wonder for a moment if there is some kind of celebration and this is a ticker-tape display. Remembering the Yankee’s World Series Championship Parade last year, I realize that what I am seeing is not shredded paper strips, but whole sheets of paper, a storm of office paperwork.
Because the South Tower blocks my view of the North Tower, I turn on the television to see if there is any news about what is happening. A reporter announces that a plane has just hit the North Tower in an apparent accident. I immediately call my husband who works uptown, writing software for an investment bank connected with many companies in the Twin Towers.
“A plane has just hit the World Trade Center,” I tell him. My voice comes out as if the sound wave has flat-lined.
“Really?” he says in an odd tone that I cannot interpret. As if I have just told him that snow is predicted, his voice is too calm. Or is it disassociation I hear, or disbelief? Or simply an unconscious mimicking of my own flat voice?  The timbre of his voice will haunt me. A tiny dissonant wave, brief and intangible, it will expand into a vacuum, and all our  words will fail us.  
A chasm begins to open between us as he passes on the news. The sound of television monitors in his office tuned to different stations tangle together. Downtown, where I am frozen at the window, staring at the papers twisting and fluttering in the sky over the graveyard of Trinity Church, it is so much more than news.

Here, the South Tower looms so close, if I stretch out my arm, I believe I can touch it. Sparks of sunlight transmute the steel into diamonds and innumerable glass windows burn with light.

I am pressing the phone to my ear as another blast thunders. Then the side and front of the Tower explode outward, ripping enormous craters out of the facade. Flames spew from the jagged black holes.
I hear a voice saying “Oh my God, oh my God, it exploded.” An unfamiliar voice, thin and breathless. When my husband asks, “What do you mean it exploded?” I realize the voice I am hearing is my own. He tells me his company has called an emergency meeting and we hang up. I am alone.
More explosions erupt down the side and front of the tower. Above the craters, rows of people are leaning out windows, waving their arms, as if the clouds could lift them free into safety.  
From the television in the background, a voice reports that another plane has hit the South Tower in what is now considered a deliberate act of terrorism. No longer the smooth, cadenced voice of the professional television anchor, it is the voice of a woman shaken out of her practiced role, the voice of the woman behind the mask, quaking and alarmed.    

There is no language or instinct in my head. I never ever think to step back from the window.  
The window reveals the incomprehensible, images beyond nightmares from an unimagined world:
Rectangles of steel drop spinning through the air.
And then other shapes—which I identify as people—sail out shattered windows. Several pairs are holding hands as they plunge through the still blue sky.
I cannot look away.  
Above the flaming holes, faces at the windows are shouting, their mouths wide open, but not a single word is audible. Not even the flashing red of sirens emits its scream.   
I can see the terror on the faces of the doomed.
 
Suddenly, from the top down, the Tower begins to shimmer. The steel rectangles melt. The faces at the windows melt. For a moment it becomes a swirling pillar of solid silver.  
Then from the top, the Tower slides straight down like a house of cards falling. When it hits the ground, a rumble rises, growing loud as millions of voices roaring. And then an immense, impenetrable, pitch-black cloud mushrooms upwards.    
As it rushes toward me, I do not back away or try to shield my face. It hits the windows, engulfing my home in a dense, alien blindness which all the lamps burning in my home cannot penetrate.

From the world outside, I hear the staccato of explosions. In the dark, I pace a narrow path like a beast trapped in a cage. My body bends in half at the impact of a loud boom. I find my cell phone and call my husband.
“It’s pitch black in here,” I say. “Come home. I’m afraid.”
I am standing by the front door, holding the phone, when we hear a shout, hard as a brick, from the outside hallway. “That’s one of the twins,” my husband says. Their voices are distinctive. Identical, indistinguishable, the twins share the apartment next door. One of the twins works at the Cantor-Fitzgerald offices, level with the impact of the first plane. His brother runs past my doorway bellowing, rage and anguish and terror becoming a sound I have never heard before from a human throat. It is a cry I will never be able to forget.
My husband promises to leave immediately, to come home and bring me out. After we hang-up, I drift into the bedroom. A news anchor, barely containing his own panic, reports that there are bombs throughout the downtown buildings. I grab my phone to warn my husband, but I can no longer get through. All the cell phone connects me to is a busy signal.
To keep out the acrid smoke, I wet towels and stuff them against the bottoms of the windows. Then I crouch in the darkness with my two cats pressed against me. Some part of me is praying for my husband’s safety, but this prayer does not have words. It feels like a steel string from a musical instrument stretching tighter and tighter as its tuning peg is turned. It makes my body shake and soaks me with sweat even though I am freezing.
The black cloud begins to fade to a lighter gray, and the steeple of Trinity Church appears—unbroken—its gold cross on the pinnacle shining like the light of a lighthouse. I go to the eastern-most window to be as close to it as possible, waiting for more buildings to appear along Broadway.
Instead, another massive roar rises as the North Tower collapses. Once again, the dense black cloud flies toward the windows and fills my home with blindness.
Someone pounds on my door and yells, “Everyone must evacuate!” I do not make a sound until they go away. Crouching in the dark, hands hugging my own arm, I wait.
Finally, the front door crashes open. My husband is home; though he comes home every day, this time his appearance is miraculous. Soot covers him from head to shoes. Slick with sweat, he strips off his shirt. Black streaks run down his chest. We grab onto each other, but our bodies are numb. Words have deserted us.
He heads for the bathroom, strips, gets into the bathtub and turns on the shower. No water comes out. He wipes himself down with a towel.
Neither of us want to go outside into the toxic smoke thick as gray wool, into flying debris, sirens, panic. So we decide to hunker down in the safety of our home. We lay down and fall into a sleep that is sudden and deep, a blackout without dreams.

The sound of the front door and heavy footsteps jolts us awake. We jump up and stumble into the living room. Three firemen are inside our apartment. They are wearing black rubber coats, high rubber boots, helmets with face shields.
“You have to leave!” they shout.
“Wait!” I shout back, raising my arm with my hand, palm out, to stop them.  
They shake their heads. “Right now!” they order.   
Voice quaking, I ask if we can come back upstairs. “We’re only doing a head-count in the lobby. As soon as we’re done, you can come back upstairs,” one of them assures us.
My husband slips away and throws a few T-shirts, socks, and underwear into a backpack. He tells me to put on my oldest pair of sneakers and clothes that I don’t care about ruining. I give each of my cats a can of food and fill their water bowl—not nearly enough, it turns out, for the week they will be trapped there until the ASPCA escorts me up the dark, enclosed, smoke-filled stairwell to bring them out.
Without electricity, the elevators are dead. We walk down eighteen floors to the lobby, where a policeman tells us we have to leave. He gives us his last two face masks.

We do not comprehend what has happened yet; we think we will be able to return home the next day.

Out there: the smoke is so thick, I cannot see the curb. The air is hot and acrid, loaded with burning shrapnel.
My husband leads me across Broadway, then east on a soot-covered mine field of debris that must be Wall Street. We begin to thread our way uptown.
We walk through a purgatory of ash, office papers, abandoned cars, store windows webbed with cracks.
A single high-heeled woman’s shoe.
A man’s business suit draped over a soot-covered car.
A shattered pair of eyeglasses submerged in ash.

Pine Street, Liberty Street, Ann Street: unrecognizable. Some streets have become swamps of thick gray sludge. Some are strewn with glittering glass and spikes of metal and wood. We change direction again and again to avoid the unpassable. There is an unnatural silence in the back streets. We could be walking on the moon.
No—the moon is too familiar. This is an undiscovered, uninhabitable planet.

Only the shape of its round platform identifies Chase Plaza. Under a scorching sun, shattered glass sparks, steel shards root in soot thick as topsoil. Hundreds of office papers planted in the ash flutter the last words of so many lives. Letterheads like gravestones mark their only remains. On this day, the plaza has become a mass crematorium and a memorial, bearing the final messages of the dead.

I lose my sense of direction and my ability to recognize ordinary images. Street signs are melted, accordioned, or ripped from their poles, they have sailed though the air, landing in unrelated streets.
My own face is unfamiliar, reflected in the webbed glass door of a building.

The stench of burning—human bodies, jet fuel, carpet, wood, insulation—fills my mouth with the unmistakable, malignant taste of death.

With every footstep, horror invades me. Potent as a virus, it is alive, guided by instinct and indiscriminate purpose. It recognizes its host, injecting us with poison. This horror unravels and claims us. In its own image, we are redefined.   
Step by step, I am breaking down and becoming. I will never be the same again.
 
We keep moving toward light and clean air, toward a city we will recognize—a city we hope is still there.  

Mile after mile, we walk through unmapped, tortured terrain. Ash steams up from the ground and falls from the searing sky. It excoriates my body and shreds my beliefs until the most basic assumptions I held about life—the world as I understood it Before—peel away like a snake shedding its dead skin.


THE EXILE

Here resides a page of silence
Isolation, dislocation
Here resides disorientation
Here we bow our heads
But cannot pray
We cannot cry
Here emptiness fills us
Until we become ephemeral as ghosts
Hovering above freshly filled-in graves
Let us be silent and sterile
Let us submit and become nothing


THE RETURN

How the charred skeleton of the North Tower bruises
the smoky stinging sky;
how what is real and what is impossible shift
like shadow puppets sparring on a white wall;
how an elderly Asian couple abandon their home
wheeling two cockatiels in a cage on a luggage carrier;
how thousands of strangers: residents, National Guard, police,
risk their lives to rescue beloved dogs and cats;
how ordinary acts become extraordinary:
water flowing from a kitchen faucet,
an apple quartered on a blue plate,
opening a window to breathe in the river’s perfume;
how making love becomes a political act,
how it has the power to reanimate the dead,
how it honors and defies the ruins;
how a Jasmine plant in November’s hibernation
now blooms with dozens of blossoms white as stars
emitting a fragrance more powerful than smoke;
how windows and terraces are avoided;
how the floodlights at the site burn the dreams of entire families
in the bedrooms facing the skyscraper’s skeletal stumps
and chasms of silence separate husband and wife;
how in the homes overlooking Ground Zero
every action becomes a sacrament
and every word a prayer for reconnection;
how kissing becomes mouth to mouth resuscitation,
and crying has the power to dissolve the rock stuck in our throats;
how the streets are ripped apart like a sternum spread for open heart surgery
and men distilled beyond horror and exhaustion
operate on the guts of the exposed underground;
how forever after fireplaces bring alarm and not romance;
how electricity and running water signify a victory;
how a woman’s high heel shoes
are no longer alluring but dangerous,
how they make her feet bleed as she runs for her life;
how nothing about family or friends is predictable
and strangers embrace a shattered city
to hold its pieces in the palms of their hands;
how an identical twin whose brother
worked on a high floor in the North Tower
witnessed from the window in their home
the plane crashing through
and the top of the tower exploding
cremating his twin,
how a twin becomes halved,
how he will burn
every day for the rest of his life;
how telephones became organic
conveying last words
before thousands of lives were severed;
how water in the pipes high above the ruins
exude the lingering smell of decay;
how poems appear on large sheets of paper lining Broadway for a mile
and bouquets of flowers left for the rescue workers exhale their last perfumed breath;
how the flag of our country becomes a lifeline
tossed into the sea that no longer protects us,
how the wounded now cling to it
trying to keep their heads above water;
how the dead evicted the living;
how residents had to walk miles
through the poisonous streets
carrying their possessions on their backs;  
how men from allied countries
suddenly appear astride bicycle Rickshaws
at Liberty Place and Maiden Lane,
how they labor over hills until the veins in their calves bulge
to deliver the numb and the broken
to necessary feasts in Chinatown and Little Italy;
how a woman nine months pregnant went into labor
as the plane exploded through the South Tower,
how her contractions stopped as her husband
led her out into the unrecognizable streets,
how a blast of debris and smoke rushed at them
as he pushed her into a doorway
and shielded her body with his,
how he found an ambulance
and minutes after reaching the hospital
she gave birth to a baby girl
as the North Tower collapsed vaporizing thousands,
how a newborn baby howled as oxygen started up her engine,
how she roared with the force of life
blessing us all—
the dead and the living blessed—
how a newborn baby, whose parents named her
Grace, blessed us.


THE AFTERMATH

Among the office buildings, the stock exchanges and courthouses of the Financial District, there is a small residential community. We do not have our own neighborhood name; we are not listed in classified ads or displayed in the windows of real estate brokers. Our buildings are few and scattered, camouflaged by skyscrapers and businesses.
Before, our invisibility was alluring. Our oddity was amusing: we walked our dogs on New Street where the bomb-sniffing dogs were posted, and when the dogs met, they did what all dogs do, prancing and sniffing. When the guards declared New Street off-limits to all civilian canines on the grounds that their dogs are military personnel, actively on-duty, we held community meeting defending our right to walk our pets freely through our own neighborhood.
Secretly, we were charmed by the eccentricity of these problems.

We are no longer charmed.

In the aftermath, how can I explain or defend these residents?   
I can only reveal your misconceptions:
They did not worship Money as an autonomous deity.
Nor did they wallpaper their luxury apartments with hundred-dollar bills.
They did not confuse real-estate with that state of mind where the heart blooms.
Like you, they searched for their belonging-place. Like you, they were driven to find their way home.  

I do not understand why it is so imperative to me that you understand our loss. Words are insufficient, and I am sick of the sound of my own voice.
Let me get to the point before I lose your attention.
If the same need drives you to these pages, I will save us both a lot of time:

Simply close your eyes.
Lay down your claim in any one of two thousand dwellings.
Imagine living in this house, year after year, as it blossoms into home.  

Now envision sleeping in the quilted safety of your bedroom when the dislocated roar of a plane disrupts your dream. You are staring directly at Tower Two when a bolt of lightening blasts completely through it.

Please do not turn away! We are almost done. I have promised to get to the point. I will trust you are with me and fast-forward the rest of the tape:

Record flames jagged holes black billowing smoke windows of terror-distorted faces people jumping not birds but human shapes dropping from the sky.
Finally, regard the apocalyptic mushroom cloud rising from the ruins and breaking in through your windows.

Can you imagine the kind of violation that has the power to take a home and leave behind a cage with bars forever trapping you inside it?

***  

After weeks of exile, my husband and I are allowed to return. We are now the involuntary residents of Ground Zero.
Every night I dream about witnessing the South Tower exploding from my bedroom window, and every morning I awake in the bedroom of my dream.   
By day, we cannot escape the jagged steel stumps of the skyscrapers.
The rescue workers sift and search. They collect bones, wallets, photographs, wedding rings. They fill dump trucks with toxic rubble that have to be hosed down before they leave the site.
After dusk, the harsh blue illumination of their floodlights assaults us.  
Layer by layer, they break down the ruins. Its form constantly changes. Every single time I see it, I see it for the first time.


***

Now the world appears to us inverted like a film negative. The physical reality of our existence and our station is invisible or forgotten, while intangible abstractions appear organic and dimensional: the sacrifice of firemen is shiny and metallic; the astonishing altruism of rescue workers arriving from distant states transmits a beacon of light an entire planet can see.
Yet the downtown residents become ephemeral as ghosts, while the roar of the dead grow. At the eye of the storm, where homes were abandoned, the dead have moved in and evicted the living. As residents we have become murky obstructions. Like cataracts, we are excised and peeled away. We are discarded
We no longer cast shadows on sidewalks or reflections in mirrors. Even our voices have been claimed by the dead. Blindness and silence are now our inheritance.

***

You may be wondering about my credentials. Who do I think I am to tell you these things, to state them as facts? Truthfully, I am only a homeless woman. I don’t even merit a name. But it is too late for you to deny me: you have opened the door to your home and invited me in. Take this document as the gift that your hospitality dictates.
Now you have been served.
It is a summons from the Residents.
I  am only a messenger; I bear their stories and their evidence. Examine these artifacts and listen to my words.
Citizens of America—this is the voice of your diaspora. Please do not disown me; do not kill me.    

***

I have become an aberration: I have the body of a woman, but in the place where my head should be, there is a steel tower bleeding flames from a black gaping wound. Above it, a row of people lean out windows, waving their arms in the air.

Let me pause here for a moment. Let me wave my own arms and cry for help. Please do not stop searching: we are still alive down here, buried in the rubble, tapping against blocks of concrete, steel beams, against the fallen doors of offices, hoping that someone will hear our signal. Do not mistake it for a trick of your imagination. You must know by now that the impossible is real.  
Bring your bloodhounds and oxygen masks, axes and shovels and crowbars, bring bright lanterns and miles of strong rope. We have learned to live down here, without food or water, without light; we have adapted to the visible composition of the air.‑There is still time for us; we have not passed beyond hope.
You must prepare yourself. We exist in a darkness that is more than the absence of light. It is an indomitable force, spontaneous and self-ruled. It has changed us in ways which may render us unrecognizable, even to ourselves.
We may frighten you, we may terrify our former selves, but we will not harm you. We have become incapable of harm.

***
 
How long will I be this creature whose head is a burning building inhabited by the doomed?
This question plagues me. It allows me no rest; it robs me of faith.
If anyone can hear me, please answer me. The words themselves do not matter. Make up anything. Lie outright if you must. The sound of a single human voice will be enough to assuage me.

The South Tower loomed so close, if I stretched out my arm I believed I could touch it. Sparks of sunlight transmuted the steel into diamonds, and innumerable glass windows burned with light.

Please, let us pause for a moment before this image of light.
Let us become physicians and use this light to cauterize our fatal wounds. Let us each fill our sacred bowls with ashes and cover our nakedness with grief. If we cannot believe in anything divine, then let us be submerged in the River of Time. Let the currents carry us away. When we come to the Dead Sea, we will rise to the surface, we will float in beds of salt.

Then let us look back and behold two beacons of light, two twin towers of light that rise from the basins of eternal lamps.