What was it, June, July? Maybe it was August by then, mornings thick as clarified butter, dead wet afternoons during which sunlight beat down in iron bars as heavy as the skyscrapers hemming it in. Yes, August—
maybe
—but it doesn’t really matter. It was just another hazy day while I ticked away the minutes until I left the dying city behind. Blue-gray skies, burning sun, temperature and humidity both hovering around ninety. The vibration of jackhammers and earth movers on lower Church had become familiar by then, also the crowds gawking at them through chainlink festooned with ribbons, pictures, postcards to the dead or prayers on their behalf. I went there because I wanted to see what No. 1 would look like when I was gone. When
it
was gone. Would it look like a valley, a crater, a canyon? A grave? A “footprint”? Would it look like something was missing, and would that something belong to the past or the future? Would it look like something had been taken away, I mean, or would it be just another slot in the grid waiting to be filled? A few twisted I-beams littered the hole like bits of yarn and the pipes poking from concrete boulders the size of city buses looked like fossils embedded in shale, but not even the flags and photographs and souvenir sellers and people posing for cameras—mouths set in grim lines but eyes twinkling with the carefree glee of holiday-makers—could give the scene anything like real sentiment. The buildings were gone, the bodies too, and it was just another construction site spewing noise and dust and smoke that settled in lasagna layers around the U.S. Steel Building, the Bankers Trust building, the World Financial Center, and I didn’t realize I’d abandoned the hole in the ground for the latter’s trio of geometric copper cupolas—dome, ziggurat, true pyramid—until a flash of light closer to street level caught my eye. All I could make out was a blurrily colored but extremely shiny ball further down Church where it turns into Trinity Place. Not a ball really, but a blob, big, twenty, twenty-five, maybe thirty feet around, and as I watched the blob lobbed high into the air like something animated—like a cartoon—then slowly slowly slowly floated back to earth. Even the memory of it s’enough to send a shiver of excitement down my spine. My mouth goes dry now as it went dry then, the sweat thickened on my skin, and I was all like
Shit
.
By then the construction crews had started to notice too, and one by one the earth movers pulled up short in ear-splitting hydraulic squeals. Cautiously, keeping one eye on the machines and people zigzagging their way through the crowded avenue, I started walking downtown, and as I got closer to the bouncing blob I noticed something dangling beneath the shiny mass each time it arced into the air, something smaller and less colorful than the blob itself, and even as the jackhammers ceased their labor like foraging birds looking up from the ground I realized that the blob wasn’t a single unit but a knot of hundreds, thousands probably, of brightly colored balloons, the kind they make from that metallic foily stuff, but it wasn’t until the last operator had switched off the last chugging engine and the street was as silent as a held breath that I allowed myself to accept what I already knew: that the thing dangling from the bunch of balloons was human. Two humans actually. Two teenaged boys laughing and whooping as they leapt high into the air and were carried forward by a breeze as thin as the strings that tethered them to their balloons.
Mira
,
mira
, they shouted, shirtless and skinny, their legs poking from pushed-up warm-up pants. A scapula of red white and blue beads in the shape of the Puerto Rican flag hung around the thin neck of one of the boys, from the shoeless foot of the other dangled a sock, gray and torn and ready to abandon him, and that sock, I remember, and that flag, leant a shape to the boys’ pleasure, a palpable sense of effort and purpose so
necessary
that I pressed myself flat on the ground as they approached me and held my breath as they bounced over me with the slow easy effort of trampoliners on the moon.
They bounced over me; bounced past. The crowd had turned from Ground Zero to the street by then, and even though it was the middle of the day I still found myself imagining thousands of flashes as thousands of cameras snapped thousands and thousands of pictures, although in truth no other light was needed than that which shown off the watchers’ beaming faces, no record than the one etched into our eyes. What I mean is, anything could have shattered the boys’ illusion of flight. A gust of wind could have blown them into the side of a building or a cop could have grabbed them as they came close to the earth—they could’ve just let go—but for as long as they held on we did too. We joined them in the conspiracy of belief, felt their freedom as if we clutched one of their strings in our own hands, and even the memory of it tugs at us, tangles us in its web, balloons and audience merge together and what bounces up the ruined avenue is imagination in its purest kinetic form. This is the key to the city. This is its secret. Though its roadways crumble and its buildings collapse the real monument lives on inside us. It lacks name and shape but not purpose. As insistent as a heartbeat it says only,
Forward
.
Forward
.