Date: 20/09/2001
In New York, with the dead still buried under tonnes of rubble, such instant commerce doesn't seem ghoulish, but a sign of life. After all the TV images of exploding buildings last week, the first glimpse of Manhattan from on board Qantas flight 107 on Monday had been surprisingly comforting. It's the same bird's eye view of the city the hijackers and their doomed passengers must have had.
But in the distance, it remains imposing. Silhouetted against the setting sun, with a cloud of white smoke overhead and missing what New Yorkers call her two front teeth, the city looks as exciting and beckoning as ever. It's still democracy's beacon, as Americans like to say.
But nothing can prepare you for the stench. As you walk south down Seventh Avenue towards Wall Street and the smoking ruin of the WTC, the smell begins to come on puffs of wind at about West 11th Street, still more than a mile away. There is the acrid smell of the fires that still burn deep inside the rubble. The fine dust, which everyone says is full of asbestos, leaves a chemical aftertaste on the tip of your tongue. "We're not being told how toxic it is," New Yorkers tell each other knowingly, while still not wearing the gauze masks that everyone downtown has tucked in a bag.
Then there is the other smell - darker, richer, more awful, that you can't even bear to acknowledge, as thousands of bodies remain buried in balmy temperatures. Television pictures don't prepare you, either, for the quiet of the once raucous city - no honking horns, no loud extrovert voices, no boom boxes, few sirens.
There's an air of shared reverence. Every few blocks is an impromptu memorial where candles and flowers and sympathy cards surround a wall covered with A4-size photocopied photographs of the missing. Parks, fences, phone boxes and shopfronts are papered with their smiling faces, over and over. There's Cindy Guan, 25, tax auditor on the 86th floor of WTC2. There's Lucy Crifasi, 51, from the 94th floor WTC1.
In Union Square, a small pretty park on 14th street, there are so many candles the paving is 2cm deep in wax. Here, each missing person photo is a personal shrine. In a shoebox are a beaten-up pair of men's black leather lace-ups and a firefighter's small torch. On the lid is written: "I looked for you my baby brother. I love you Matthew Diaz." Further south on Sixth Avenue, hawkers stand at cardboard stalls, selling watches and sunglasses and $2 sweaters.
Further south, the footpath outside Salvation Army headquarters is packed with bags of donated food. Volunteers in convoy wordlessly unload boxes of pink lemonade from a truck. There on the wall is Brian McDonnell's face in a sea of smiling faces. He's 180cm, brown hair, brown eyes, a cheery man holding his two-year-old son. At West 11th Street is Saint Vincent's Hospital. Here is Kevin P. York amid a wall of faces, "41 years young", a handsome man pictured with a smiling boy of about six. There's Patrick O'Keefe, NYC firefighter, 44, with reddish grey hair and blue eyes, last seen at the hospital between 10.30am and 1pm last Tuesday. "He was treated released and most likely returned to Ground Zero" reads his poster.
Further south and Mr Green Tea is double-parked outside the Yoko sushi bar. Here, at Varick Street, the smell sticks in your throat. At Brothers BBQ restaurant a sign asks for gasmasks and filters, model 6AD97. Half a dozen police are here on every corner - handsome, tough-guy officers from Brooklyn and Queens, in the iconic black NYPD uniforms. The smoke is visible between buildings. Under a Siberian Elm at Father Fagan Park - a tiny sliver of paving and pretty trees - sits a weeping black man in a blanket and two park benches covered with teddy bears and soft toys.
Taped to a wall at the corner of Broadway and Canal Street are dozens of letters and drawings from children in Mrs Alvelo's class at Potter Thomas School in Philadelphia. From Glenda Arelyz Vargas: "Our hearts are broken because of the bad news. Whoever did this is going to pay."
Strangely, in this aggressive city, there are few signs of anger. The New York Post yesterday published a poster of Osama bin Laden: "Wanted, Dead or Alive" and you see it here and there, on a wall, on the side of a truck, in a bar, sometimes with the word "Alive" crossed out. But it's not the main game.
Past police barricades at Canal Street the tree-lined streets are whisper quiet. No-one mentions the smell and here, close up, you no longer can really notice it. Maybe the wind has changed. Maybe you get used to it.
At Ivy's Bistro on Greenwich Street, people drink white wine at sidewalk tables and gaze down the street six blocks to the twisted pile of rubble they call Ground Zero and the empty sky where the twin towers stood. Edward Sullivan and John Healy, born and raised in Brooklyn, sit at the gloomy bar trading war stories from September 11. Both were almost killed when the building at 30 West Broadway they have been renovating for City University collapsed. Both have spent every day since helping to restore order to Ground Zero.
The day before, a spine was found - a whole, intact human spine. They want to talk in gruesome detail about the body parts being found in The Pit, as if to expunge the horror by sharing it. There are candles here, too, and little kindnesses. Neighbours make breakfast for each other, strangers take in the newly homeless, restaurant owners give away meals.
That is perhaps the most comforting realisation of all about New York. As much as some Australians like to imagine Americans as vengeful war-mongers intent on plunging the world into instant catastrophe, the truth is they are too sanguine to be overwhelmed by revenge, and therefore are far more deadly to the enemy.
Miranda Devine also writes for The Sun-Herald.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
Story Picture: Illustration: Aragon
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