What Colors the Steel Sky Blue

I think the biggest cruelty of life is felt at times right after a traumatic event. Usually what hurts most is not the event itself. What hurts most is that the next day almost like clockwork, the sun rises, clouds drift calmly in the sky, even birds fly overhead singing completely inappropriately happy tunes.

The morning of 9/12 was no different. I woke up and I did not remember the events of the day before; it seemed that I could have had a bad dream from last night's dinner at Sushi Samba. I headed to the bathroom for my shower. In the shower, I accidentally knocked one of my shampoo bottles and it fell onto another one, and soon several of my shampoo bottles were tumbling down into the bathtub. Right at that moment a ZING went through my head; the events of the day before came rushing back and before I knew it I was crying.

That moment did not last long however, just like it came, it went. I had a calm breakfast in front of the TV while the network TV replayed the planes crashing into the towers and towers falling down sequences more times than one can count. Later in the morning, I called my parents on the phone. They were telling to jump on the first plane and return to Istanbul. They had a point but somehow in the back of my head, it seemed this would be admitting defeat completely. I was not ready to go anywhere yet, let alone all the way back to Turkey.

After lunch, this staying at home and watching the news thing got quite boring. I was craving to go outside. I finally pulled myself together and left the apartment. I soon found out that most of the streets going downtown were blocked by the police. I had a camera in my hand, just in case I saw anything worth capturing. At the same time, as soon as I left my building, having a camera in my hand felt inappropriate.

The streets were full of people walking around in a daze. Everyone was gravitating towards the downtown but we all could not go past South of Houston. I was not the only one with a camera. Overnight, Manhattanites all had morphed into photographer/news journalist. People were out with their camcorders, fancy digital cameras, and some with cameras like mine a 28-year-old Olympus. Perhaps it was easier to approach the situation as an event to be photographed, captured. Perhaps by playing the journalist, these people were able to avoid feeling like the victims. Perhaps these were a bunch of greedy people who at the wake of thousand others were trying to make a buck from the pain of others. Perhaps all of the above.

I must have walked up and down Houston several times that day. The street was closed to traffic, and there were no cars in sight. Instead, there were huge dump trucks, and other construction equipment lined up on both sides of the road. Every now and then a fire truck would rush on by screaming with its sirens. Everyone in the street would stop and start clapping and cheering for the firefighters. On one hand it seemed to be the right thing to do given our helplessness at the time, on the other it was just absurd to be applauding a bunch of a people going in to a disaster zone.

Other rescue workers were grouping around their vehicles and getting ready to go to the site now called "ground zero." These workers had overnight turned into instant celebrities. Every civilian on the street was clamoring for a good photo of the rescue workers. Getting a photo of a firefighter was even better.

New Yorkers who have always hated the tourists in New York had overnight turned into tourists in their own city. I soon noticed I was doing was many others were doing: Anytime I came by a street that was north south oriented, I was taking a picture. Each of these streets was closed with a barricade and several officers and national guard standing by screening people. Only people with identification that clearly showed and address in the barricaded area were allowed through.

Usually in these pictures there would be two large towers protruding behind the usual SoHo buildings. But today, there was a tower of smoke like a big rainstorm had exploded downtown releasing a large cloud of mist over the financial district.

The streets were crawling with people but there was silence in the air. It seemed like everyone was mourning. Several people still had tears in their eyes as they looked southward to where the towers used to be. The air smelled like someone had burned hundreds of computers, cables, industrial carpeting in one big fire. The wind no longer blew towards Brooklyn, it blew North towards uptown on 9/12. There was something else in this smell. Something I have never smelled before. It was very unpleasant and I did not even dare to think about what it could be.

Occasionally we would see a large dump truck filled with debris roll by. It was clear, the towers were gone. They were reduced to mangled steel, dust, and things that did not even have any recognizable shape or size to them anymore.