A City of Blinding Lights

Any real view of the World Trade Center Memorial is tarnished by its surroundings. All the quiet reflection of the site is cradled by noisy construction. The TV cameras don’t show it, but Ground Zero is still very unfinished.

Towers with gutted floors, the beginnings of other buildings with deep abscesses into the ground, cranes and dirt and tools and noise. Tarps and fences and temporary barriers.

And of course, all of that is surrounded by a miniature police state. Car checkpoints and patrolmen staring at tourists. Traffic blocked for miles, with street closings and motorcades and sirens. You will need a photo ID and a hotel room key to get down that street. And you probably shouldn’t try to bring a backpack.

Sunday morning, we leave the service early. We had news to file. On the way to coffee and a computer, my colleague shows me where the “Mosque at Ground Zero” is supposed to live. She points out that the whole debate is strange, as the World Trade Center, before it was obliterated, always had a Muslim prayer space. And Islamic services are held in another building just down the road, as they have been for years after 9/11, without any conflict. Like so many other things about 9/11 and Ground Zero, most people don’t know the whole story. Most people don’t care to.

We finish our work. I go home to sleep. That night, when I wake up, it’s overcast, and my brain is full. I’m disturbed by the whole thing. Why is this place still unfinished? What does it say about America? Why was Manhattan a police state this weekend? I couldn’t help thinking the night before, as the cop at the checkpoint in Midtown had my cab driver open the trunk, “Yeah, the terrorists won.” As we left the checkpoint, the cab driver said to me -- in reference to my skin color, I suppose -- with as much humor as he could muster, “They probably stopped me because of you, no offense.”

None taken.

9/11 has changed us; this weekend in Manhattan showed me. It left us unfinished and scared, like the construction work at the Memorial and the general feeling all that police presence inspired throughout the weekend. And no remembrance, no matter how solemn or repetitive could change that. In fact, the more we indulge the reverence, the remembrance, the memorials, the more we point out how different we’ve all become in these past ten years.

Perhaps we all just need a break, to stop remembering, just for a bit. But I don’t say those things around a lot of people. “Never forget,” you know?

Sunday night, I head to the W with a friend, to drink and eat. The burger is good. The ambiance, like so many other things that weekend, is off. The Giants game is on, and people cheer for their team, but it’s all subdued. How loud and celebratory can you be on this day?

We ask for Jameson on the rocks. The bartender says they ran out of every Irish drink they had hours ago. Makes sense. The crowd is strange -- people who would never be there if not for a terrorist attack. How do you drink to that?

After an hour, my friend says, “This place is freaking me out.” We leave. “I want to find the lights,” I say once we’re outside, amongst the watchers and the overcast sky. We walk. And the then we see them.

The most beautiful part of the whole thing is the lights. Those two striking beams shining, some nights, into the darkness above, making a memorial of the entire New York City skyline. You’d think they’d be at Ground Zero, maybe even jutting out from the two fountains. They’re not. They are actually a few blocks south, on top of what looks like a parking garage. Only the dedicated onlookers find them. And to see it up close perhaps finally puts it all in perspective, this noble fracas, this melee of memorial, this cacophony of remembrance.

Everyone’s taking pictures. If you’re close enough, it looks like the two beams come together in the sky, forming a unity yet to be recreated at the official site, with its lingering disarray.

There are birds, flying into the lights, perhaps blinded by them. At that moment, I have the intense desire to be one of those creatures, for just a few minutes.

Someone told me earlier that day that one of the reasons those lights can’t shine every night into the New York sky is that they confuse the birds’ migratory patterns. The lights are so bright, so distracting, that the little winged things sometimes fly right into them, perhaps thinking it’s  the sun, forgetting where they’re going. Some nights, even, when the lights are on, they’re turned off for 5 or 10 minutes at a time, to let the birds find their way again.

That sums it up for me, I realize, standing underneath the weight of the light, and the fountains, and the memorials, and the remembering. Even with the birds, there is only so much light, so much tribute, one can take.