Scene of the crime

The Fulton Street stop on the New York subway's red line is located
beneath a barbershop -- if you were approaching it from the street, you'd
never know it's there. It's also right next door to the Strand Book Shop
Annex, a wonderfully inclusive store that in previous years was the only
reason I'd ever get off at Fulton Street. These days, it's the place to go
for tickets to what used to be the World Trade Center.

Tickets are available at South Side Seaport, an attractive little
tourist destination with cobblestone streets and nautical gift shops that
I'd never heard of before making my pilgrimage last Thursday. I wasn't the
only one. There was already a long line of people from all over America
-- all over the world, judging by the accents -- outside the ticket booth
by the time it opened, and none of them was buying a ticket to the seaport.

I don't know how I feel about waiting in line for tickets to the
world's largest crime scene. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense -- if
nothing were done to regulate the flow of people, the sheer number of
pedestrians in lower Manhattan would be overwhelming. On the other hand, it
just felt wrong. I decided to pass on the viewing platform and make my way
up Fulton Street, past the kiosks selling picture postcards of September 11
and ties with images of the twin towers, to the place where New York ended
and something else began.

Everywhere else I'd been in New York in the last few months had
given me the impression that nothing much had changed. Food and
accommodations were still at Woodstock '99 prices. Packs of gold-chain
wearing youths on the subway were still belligerent in a manner that struck
me as pitiful but dangerous, like half-starved wolves. New Yorkers in
general were the same assholes they had always been, which is to say they're
only a few degrees nicer than Bostonians.

What told me things were different, after all, wasn't the endless
series of displays covering the churchyard walls on Fulton and Broadway.
I'd been expecting them, and anyway they looked to me like a larger version
of the little roadside memorials you see in my part of the world whenever
anyone has died in a highway accident -- those exit sign shrines with
portraits of the deceased, flowers, teddy bears and banners. It's not my
place to decide, of course, but I sometimes wonder when these sites grow
from floral bouquets to T-shirts and posters with pictures from every member
of a Brownie troop whether the contributor hasn't crossed the line from
wanting to pay respects to wanting to leave a mark, to be a part of history.
(And yes, as I think these things, I wonder whether I'm not guilty of the
same thing. Why, after all, am I there?)

I walked around the military guard, around the line for the viewing
platform, around the displays and the camcorders recording the displays,
around the endless crowds of construction workers, police officers,
firefighters (they were rescuing a woman who'd had a heart attack or
something on the sidewalk), headed up a side street, rounded a corner, and...

My God.

The size of it.

I feel stupid, because of course I knew how big it was; I'd been to
the World Trade Center, after all, rode its elevators on an eighth grade
class trip and stared out at the city from a place as far from the earth
as I am ever likely to be while still feeling the ground beneath my feet.
I'd seen the pictures, seen the news footage, and still -- is it possible
for a thing to be bigger in its absence than it was as a presence?

You can't see it, at first, because there's nothing to see: like a
footprint, or a shadow, you see its edges first: the half-ruined building
on the sidelines draped in black, the nearby tower with all its windows
replaced with sheets of plywood, the backhoes and port-o-johns surrounding
something that looks for all the world like Boston's Big Dig

except that no one is swearing, or hurrying, or looking away

and you heard on the radio this morning that they just removed the
body of the first female police officer

and there's a sign on the corner advertising the wonders of the
towers, how much steel went into their construction, how many people work
there, how much of everything came together to make them happen, and it
seems an anachronism, a guidepost to a place that could never have been

Trinity Church is just up the street, across the way from the
American Stock Exchange. Less than a century ago its spire was the tallest
building in New York. I climbed the stairs that led to its churchyard
and wandered among the dead of two centuries ago, telling myself that I
really hadn't seen much of anything, after all, that I'd probably see a lot
worse before all of this was over.

I sat down on a bench outside of the church, let my backpack fall
to my knees, and remained there until I could walk again.