Ground Zero

As I was scurrying home last night from the Sports Blogger Semi-Circle Jerk, my commute took me through the World TradeCenter PATH station. It was the first time I'd been there in well over a decade, and the place has had some renovations. You might have heard about them, I think the President has mentioned them once or twice.

Anyway... it's a big temporary feeling place, bare concrete and constant construction sounds and, for last night at least, cold as the morgue because, well, it is one. Outside of the station, you can see workmen pushing dirt around for some unknown purpose, and the crush of commuters on their way to Hoboken and Newark all have the look and feel of people, well, on their way to those places -- which is to say, not the most inviting or interesting places that you've ever been to. You more or less put your head down and find your train.

But there's this otherworldly creepiness about the place, like it's a big movie set with the cameras missing, and it stays with you. The only feeling that I've ever had that was remotely like it was waiting for a train in Frankfurt, Germany, knowing that something similarly awful happened here before, and that I was standing in the space of murder. The flight instinct takes hold, and you feel like prey, like a gazelle at a watering hole, even when there's no one near you.

Oh, and a word for the powers-that-be that haven't quite figured out what to do with the place, well over 2000 days later... congratulations. It still feels, to me, like an open wound. You must be very proud.

A year ago, my relatives came to Manhattan for a day, and I took them out to lunch. Guiding them through the crowds, my sister remarked how I had picked it all up so fast, like being in the city was such a daunting and impossible task. I thought at the time that she just needed to get out of her part of the world more often, but now I'm starting to realize that people become New Yorkers through the casual repetition of things that people from other parts of the country find remarkable.

The speed in a shop, the crush in a subway, the disarming candor of people in a hurry, the single-minded pursuits of things that don't seem important or necessary, but happen nonetheless, because they are part of your routine -- well, you pick them up pretty quickly, and within a week or a month or so, you no longer have that tourist look of staring up at big buildings and not knowing where the subways go.

But walking through a place where thousands were horribly killed as part of your mundane commute? That's taking it up a notch, really. And the fact that people do it, and still (for the most part) don't vote for 9uli11ani any more, or for the party that speaks to that fear as a security blanket... well, it makes for a little sense of pride. Or awe, or fearful respect. From one gazelle to another, to the one that just walks though, drinks and leaves. Either something is wrong with them, or you, but in the meantime...

Drink.

Go.

And try, very hard, not to wonder what it was like for the other gazelles.