S Rozan - Absent Friends

A resident of downtown Manhattan, interviewed on the street, September 12: “My son asked, ‘Mommy, you always told me if I got lost I should just look for the towers and I could find my way home. How will I find my way home now?' That's how we all feel. We'll just have to come up with another way to find our way home.”

I have seen Him in the watch fires

Of a hundred circling camps

They have builded Him an altar

In the evening dews and damps

You can read the righteous sentence

By the dim and flaring lamps

His truth is marching on.

– “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

In California in 1848 John Augustus Sutter tried to keep from the world the knowledge that gold had been found on his land. His motive was not a desire to be the only one to mine this gold, rather a hope of avoiding the mining entirely. The gold might have made him rich. But Sutter had come to the valleys of central California to plant oranges and lemons, to watch the sun ripen the fruits on his trees, and to listen to the birds singing in them in the morning. Mining the gold, which in the end he could not prevent, destroyed all that, as Sutter knew it would.

Two women, New Yorkers, old friends, met for coffee sometime during the week after September 11, still talking in the slow, subdued tones of shock. The first said she had packed a knapsack with hiking boots, a sweater, a bottle of water, placed it in the front closet, in the event of evacuation. The second said she'd located the cat carrier, moved it near her apartment door for the same reason. The first woman, eyebrows raised, said, “You're taking your cat?” She paused, looking away; for a time both were silent. “It didn't occur to me,” the first woman finally said, “to take the cat.”

A woman who lives near Ground Zero was in the Caribbean on September 11. As a child she had nearly drowned in the ocean, was dragged through the waves to shore by a friend. (They were both surprised at the friend's unexpected strength.) For years she was troubled by nightmares: wild, luminous green water inexorably rising behind glass walls. The nightmares had long since passed, until the night of September 11, when, after an endless day spent alternately staring at the TV in the hotel bar and walking along the seawall, an exhausted sleep finally overtook her. A Caribbean hurricane howled around her hotel room, and dreams of green water and glass walls woke her twice. Since then the dreams have not stopped.

A lifelong New Yorker, walking through Chinatown in August, came upon an old woman selling two live turtles in a cardboard box. The turtles, an illicit dinner delicacy, were over eight inches long. Tightly wrapped in plastic net bags, they could hardly move; but they struggled, tiny, pushing gestures, little twists of their heads. He asked the woman the price; she sold them to him for ten dollars apiece. Sweating in the afternoon heat, he carried them in their cardboard box a mile and a half across town to a pond in Battery Park City, where he released them among the lily pads and the koi. Three weeks later the pond was clogged with debris and dust from the falling towers of the World Trade Center. Everything in it died.

… I walk uptown chain-smoking, while downtown people are dying from breathing smoke.

– Alison Shapiro, in the October 2, 2001, issue of The Spectator, the student newspaper of Stuyvesant High School

In the days after September 11, two friends spoke on the phone. Not wanting to break the connection, they searched for topics to talk about, though only one thing was on their minds, the same as on everyone's. One of the two was a man with a disability. “Did you know I'm using a cane now?” he said. “It's not that I can't walk; I can. It's just that sometimes I feel like I can't find the floor.” My God, that's how I feel, the other thought, though she said nothing. I know where it is, I must be standing right on it, where else could I stand? But I can't find it. I can't find the floor.

An old story about Abe Lincoln: riding through the countryside in a carriage with a friend, Lincoln spotted a pig stuck in a fence. The pig was squealing and writhing, but it couldn't get loose. Lincoln stopped the carriage, took off his jacket, and wrestled the pig out from the rails. The pig trotted off. Lincoln, covered with sweat, mud, and bruises, returned to the carriage.

“Was that your pig?” his friend asked.

“No,” Lincoln answered, picking up the reins.

“Your neighbor's?”

“I don't know the man who owns this land.”

“Well, that was awfully good of you, then,” said the friend. “To put yourself to so much trouble for a stranger's pig.”

Lincoln said, “I didn't do it for the pig.”

“For the owner, then? Whoever he is?”

“No. For myself.”

“For yourself?”

“Yes,” said Lincoln. “I don't want to have to lie awake all night listening to that damn pig squealing in my head.”

The fireballs that erupted when the planes hit the towers of the World Trade Center scorched the feathers from the wings of sparrows, finches, grackles, pigeons, and seagulls hundreds of yards away. Small charred corpses were found as far north as Houston Street.

The undead, so legends say, though visible to the eye and capable of great destruction, don't appear in mirrors. The Invisible Man, though, who cannot be seen at all: does his presence, as it is said, distort reflections?

Born and brought up in the Bronx, Rozan is an architect in a New York firm whose practice includes police stations, firehouses, zoo buildings, and the largest terra cotta restoration project in the world. A Knicks fan and a lousy but dogged point guard herself, Rozan has worked as a self-defense instructor, jewelry saleswoman, and janitor.

S.J. Rozan runs an on-going series of panels on the subject of "Crime Writing and The American Imagination" at New York's 92nd Street Y. She has a BA from Oberlin College and a M.Arch. from SUNY/Buffalo. She lives in a tiny but sunny apartment in Greenwich Village.