Twenty-five years after September 11, in the same place, it is a splendid day. Blue sky, ideal temperature. It was also a splendid day that Tuesday in 2001. A detail that seems secondary until it stops being so.
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At ground zero you don’t hear silence because the four waterfalls of water never stop falling. But it is such a continuous and deep noise that it ends up becoming silence. People walk slowly around the two black rectangles that occupy the place of the Twin Towers. Almost everyone wears sneakers, because historical pain is also visited with comfortable footwear. There are no smiles. The only ones appear in some heartless selfies. The phone forces you to smile even when behind there is a waterfall rushing into a black hole and, in front, a bronze with the names of the dead. It is the most resilient automatism of our time: one can stand before the absence of almost three thousand people and, when it counts down three, two, one, show their teeth.
There are no smiles today at the World Trade Center. The only ones appear in some heartless selfies.
The names are not alphabetically ordered. Here death does not start with A nor end with Z. They are placed according to where the victims were, the company they worked for, the plane they were on and, when their families requested it, the relationships they maintained. Colleagues next to colleagues. Friends beside friends. People who entered the office together that morning and remain together twenty-five years later. The memorial calls these proximities meaningful adjacencies, significant neighborhoods. Even to organize a catastrophe, an administrative expression had to be invented.
There are people who run their finger over the bronze and people who check their phone to locate their dead. The memorial has a search engine: you enter the name and the screen indicates pool, panel, and position. The technology used to find restaurants or taxis also allows finding a father who died twenty-five years ago. Some move forward counting plaques until they stop. Then they rest their hand, take a photo or do nothing, which may be the most accurate way to do something here.
Flowers have been placed in the cut-out letters. Purple and yellow daisies, white and pink carnations stand out from the metal as if the names had blossomed. There are also flags and photos.
I walk around the south pool with Will Jimeno. He was a Port Authority police officer and was 33 years old when he entered the World Trade Center with Sergeant John McLoughlin and other colleagues. The collapse buried them. Only twenty people were rescued alive from the rubble and Jimeno was one of them. He remained buried for thirteen hours. Oliver Stone turned his story into the movie World Trade Center: Michael Peña plays Jimeno and Nicolas Cage, Sergeant McLoughlin.
The film needed sets and smoke machines. Jimeno keeps simpler documentation. He walks with a prosthesis on his left leg, partially paralyzed. A scar runs down his calf. They had to open his leg because the muscles were dying and perform skin grafts. Near the knee he has a hole that fits a finger. He says it without dramatizing as if pointing out a manufacturing defect. That night he almost died twice and underwent eight operations.
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Jimeno rests one hand on the bronze and looks at the water. He carries a paper bag in the other. This morning he walks again through the place where for thirteen hours he believed he would never walk again. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t need to maintain a solemn expression. He wears solemnity.
The night before, 2,977 drones flew over the port of New York, one for each victim, and drew the silhouette of the towers in the sky. For a few minutes, the buildings existed again, turned into points of light. Then, the drones descended and the sky returned to its normal appearance. New York City is a specialist in making things disappear twice.
The night before, the buildings existed again turned into points of light and then the drones descended and the sky returned to its normal appearance
Next to the memorial there is a store. It sells miniature police cars and fire trucks for $6.95, Downtown building blocks for $24.95, and a reproduction of the surviving tree for $26.95. It also advertises a 3D replica of the plaza for $49, special offer. In New York everything ends up having a store. You can look at the names of almost three thousand dead and leave with a firefighter sweatshirt.
People keep arriving with their sneakers, their phones, and their dead located on a screen. The water falls toward a center that cannot be seen. The names are written, but the people are not, the towers occupied this place but now their volume is air. Twenty-five years later, ground zero looks like a designed wound, surrounded by trees, photographed and with a souvenir shop.
But it is still a wound. You just have to stop smiling at the phone to realize it.
