The Tragedy Is Hitting Us in Waves

Ellis Henican

September 19, 2001

We're coming back to life around here, or so we keep telling ourselves. That's what the mayor has been asking us to do, isn't it? And the governor. And just about everyone else straight up to the president. God knows the restaurants, the theaters and the airlines are desperately praying we come back to life and quick - before their businesses all go broke.

But you can't quite call this living, where we are right now as a city. It's a work in progress at best.

Here was Brad Hodges, built like a linebacker in a slate-gray, three-button suit, coming down from his mortgage-brokering office for another coffee at Eve's delicatessen on Park Avenue South.

"I don't really need another coffee," he said. "I probably won't even drink it. But I've been sitting at the desk since 8 o'clock in the morning. There's only one thing I'm thinking about."

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And it isn't mortgages.

"My body's in the office," he said. "My mind is still downtown."

That's about where we are right now as a city.

This tragedy, as any shrink could have told us, is hitting in waves. Death. Destruction. Decimation. Depression. And now this: 8 million cases of attention-deficit disorder.

Honestly, who can pay attention at work?

Not Brad Hodges. Not yesterday.

"I'm reading the paper," he said. "I'm watching TV in the office. I'm calling up all my friends on the phone. Nobody's doing anything. Write that down. And I don't care if you do tell my boss. He's two offices down from me, doing exactly the same thing."

When something this bad happens, it isn't easy just to wash it out of our minds.

Fifty-four hundred of our fellow citizens are suddenly taken away. A whole lot of the ones remaining are going to know someone who is gone. And those who don't have friends or co-workers or relatives in the terror attack - well, the missing posters are there as reminders on every lamppost, pay phone or utility pole.

Yesterday was one week since the terror attack.

As 8:48 a.m. came and went, it was getting harder to keep using words like "missing" for the people who were there. But we're in an eerie twilight now. No one expects any to come out of the rubble. But still, no one is ready to start saying "dead."

Fifty-thousand tons of debris have been painstakingly removed from the site. For five days now, not a single person has been found in there alive.

Rudy Giuliani got as close to the D-word as is humanly possible without saying it out loud. He deserves credit for nudging the city toward this grim reality, as much as we all don't want to go there.

"The chances of recovering any live human beings are very, very small now, given the amount of time and the condition of the site," he said yesterday in a flat, exhausted voice. "Those chances are not totally, however, over."

So the rescuers will keep at it. The big bulldozers will wait. We'll have another day or two of the bucket brigades. But this is no time for false optimism.

"We don't have any substantial amount of hope that we can offer anyone that we will find anyone alive," the mayor emphasized. "We have to prepare people for the overwhelming reality that the chances of recovering anyone alive are very, very small."

All over town, we had these decent, well-meaning people urging us back to life. The man from FEMA, talking about a remarkable coordinating effort. The nurses, the paramedics and the doctors, waiting for patients who did not arrive. We had Larry Silverstein, whose family's real-estate company just signed a 99-year master lease on the World Trade Center, vowing somehow to rebuild.

Even David Dinkins was on the TV.

Go to a Broadway play, the ex-mayor was saying, as the current one tromped through the site. Go out to dinner. And vote next Tuesday in the rescheduled mayor's race. "Not for any particular candidates," Dinkins said, understanding this was no time to shill. "But everybody should come out and vote. Those terrorists would alter our way of life, and we should defy them."

It was good advice for a city trying to revive itself. There was no arguing.

But all over town, people were sitting in offices and not doing work.

"I don't know what's wrong with me," Brad Hodges said before taking his coffee back inside. "Maybe we all just need some more time."