Notes from Ground Zero

The TV cameras never captured what must have been a surreal sight: thousands of pieces of paper billowing out from the fire and smoke, many falling down, many making their way over the river like messages of disaster borne by invisible carrier pigeons. To see them with one8217;s own eyes would have been to receive tidings of the day8217;s events, qualitatively different from the images one saw on the television screen. These papers, far from the desks that were their proper home, became the signs, gentle and silent yet palpable and unmistakable, of the destruction unfolding at a distance.

By Thursday September 19, there didn8217;t seem to be any remainder of this fallout near Ground Zero. On and around Wall Street there was a film of soot on walls and pavements, particulate matter in the air that made one cough, puddles of water at one8217;s feet from hoses used for the clean-up operations, cigarette butts, bits of this and that. The papers, however, were gone, like the other white flakes they must have resembled as they fell softly to the earth. Since the entire area had been blocked for several days to everyone save security and rescue personnel, there was not even the usual transient city trash in evidence on the sidewalks. Ten days after the tragedy, what stood out in the vicinity of the vanished skyscrapers was not the overabundance of paper but its absence. The paper snow had melted away from the streets in nearby parts of Brooklyn too, though there at least the regular litter was back in place, testifying to a modicum of urban normalcy.

This month of September 2001 New York experiences the horror of so many cities at once. Newspaper editors compare it to historical Pompeii, as it lies buried and choked in ash and rubble from a terrorist-activated Vesuvius. It recalls Ilium of antiquity 8212; the site of the Trojan War 8212; with its topless towers collapsed in a smouldering heap; it resembles its own dystopic projection, Gotham City, visiting a future darkness upon the hapless present. Worst of all, it is Inferno, where thousands of human beings are suffering terrible agonies as part of a larger design they cannot fathom. But none of these other places real and imagined that come to mind as metaphors have what New York has 8211; paper. An entire archive of life lived and business conducted in the destroyed offices literally fell out of the sky into our hands, the hands of the living. And what did we do with these fragile testimonials to the universe of activity that hummed for 28 years inside the gigantic twin towers?

A woman called the phone number scribbled on the piece of paper that fluttered down into her garden. Another stared at photographs dirtied by footprints, and wondered at how evocative the smiling faces of total strangers can be when one finds them strewn on the street corner. A man found an incomplete list of things-to-do, and felt as though he had received a personal invitation to a mass funeral. Someone held a half-burnt legal letter or a blank signed cheque or a ripped insurance policy with trembling fingers. Uncomprehendingly we understood that no agreement is binding when things fall apart, that nobody is 8220;covered8217; when history decides to overtake a nation. We saw that proof can pass and contracts atomize into the acrid heavy air we inhale, that tender is tender indeed, that the hardest of copies crumble. We encountered a strange truth, one that underlines the vulnerability of office routine: the printouts of our certainty and the notations of our knowledge are ephemeral after all.

Many displaced companies report that they had electronic backups of much of their data. They are continuing work on computer networks that somehow still exist. They are piecing together the information they lost in paper 8211; from versions with clients, from memory, from duplicates on file in other locations, from cyber-archives. So the processes of retrieval and replacement are underway. Instead of lamenting the paper now scattered in every direction, the city is trying to reproduce it, and rightly so. But what about all the recorded text that cannot be reconstructed, because there were no copies, or because those who might have remembered the contents, are gone? What of all the unduplicated and therefore irreplaceable scraps of paper now lying in the landfills? With them disappear the singed threads of countless intersecting narratives that were woven together each day to make up the fabric of life in the World Trade Center.