Text size:

Public Displays Not for Everyone

Jimmy Breslin

September 16, 2001

"Where was it?" I ask. "There," she says. "Between those two buildings." I am in my bedroom in the morning and I am looking straight downtown at the place where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center always stood for all to see in their high silvery commercial grandeur and glory.

Now there is nothing. A blue sky with smoke still there, from somewhere.

My memory of inanimate objects lasts for about 15 minutes. I think they were overpowering when you drove across the Brooklyn Bridge. But now I can't remember what I saw out of my windows.

My trouble yesterday morning is that I know how the buildings went. On Tuesday, I was on Liberty Street and the sky shook and the people on the street moaned and ran. Suddenly, the top of the tower blows up in fire and smoke that turns the sky to night.

Anybody working there was gone. Three thousand, four thousand, dead in the sky in front of your eyes.

I ran from that street. All week, I thought that my running had left the thing behind me. Usually, I get over something disturbing by writing about it. It takes me five or six hours to write a column, and by the time I'm through, any emotion is gone.

Not now. I am trying to type this when the phone rings. I didn't want to answer it, but on a whim I picked it up. It is Helen Rosenthal, a dear friend and neighbor.

"My brother is lost," she said. "Josh is lost."

I didn't have any words.

"He worked on the 90th floor," she said. "Fiduciary Trust."

Then she said softly, "Carmen is a little traumatized." He is her husband. "He saw the plane go straight into No. 2 where Josh was. His office is across the street."

There are 4,500 and more like her brother. All were office workers who were, in their monument to our city's values, at work at their desks before 9 a.m. There is proof that they were there then. They are not here now.

On Tuesday morning, I went from the street where a war surely began to my work, which this week was to try to report on things that I did not know anything about. That bedeviled me. In my time in my city I never have been at a loss for anything. I stand up, chest out, wise look and expound on anything to do with the city of New York. In all those years at bars I was infallible.

But now I do not know anything. I don't know how it happened and I don't know who did it and I don't know what happens next.

More than that, all week long I did not have the slightest idea of how I felt. Is my life every day as inanimate as a building?

I had my first real feeling late Friday. It came when I was passing one of these walls on which they have a thousand pictures maybe of people missing since Tuesday.

"Have you seen my husband?" one poster says.

This produced the first real emotion to come out of me all week. And it was the best emotion I have, anger. I muttered to myself. "You bet I've seen him. Up in the sky. What do they think these buildings were, an erector set?"

Then on Friday night, some people got together in a woman's living room and wanted to hold a memorial service for a 30-year-old named Margaret, who had worked on the 93rd floor of the building that I saw blow up.

"Her sister won't come," somebody said softly.