It was Goldilocks time: stocks and weather were neither too hot nor too cold, and the markets teetered precariously between boom and bust, as I savored the blue sky over New York harbor and sat down to write.
My fingers had just hit the keys when I heard the bang that signaled the end of the World Trade Center, a black cloud in the blue skies over Manhattan – and any expectation of a market boom.
I spent the next few hours on my balcony describing what looked like the last days of Pompeii for radio and TV stations around the world.
After each fall, a menacing thick cloud of smoke and dust advanced across Manhattan, driving the denizens of Wall Street before it. Columns of shirtsleeved-but-necktied refugees streamed from the financial district, up South Street and over the Brooklyn Bridge. Incongruously, some of them wielded umbrellas against the heavy white ash that rained down like toxic snow.
It evoked assorted apocalyptic images: Hiroshima, Vesuvius. Whatever. In retrospect, I was glad to be working since it took the edge of hysteria away. Hysteria was close though, like when the Canadian Broadcasting Corp told me to stand by while they made some local announcements – and the second tower collapsed as I waited. Perhaps it was a good thing that my unparliamentary language down the unheeding phone never made the airwaves.
When I went closer, there were two doctors from the Downtown Hospital standing by the police line on Fulton Street, looking at the flaming ruins where the World Trade Center used to be. They were, ironically, in line of sight with the Titanic memorial behind them: ‘Death by fire and ice.’ They described a rush of burns, then of fractures and wounds from falling debris, and then, ominously, nothing. Nearby, a deli’s display of flowers was, like everything else, covered in white ash, like a macabre shrine. As I choked even through my face mask, I had a revelation: I was inhaling people. Windows on the World had become a peephole into hell, a monstrous funeral pyre at the end of my street.
The old story, unverifiable for obvious reasons, is that as you die, your entire life flashes before you. As I walked towards Wall Street, the old story took a new form. The world’s financial life was flashing before me. Millions of pages from the alleged paperless office had escaped the furnace and blew around the deserted streets – bunkering invoices from Pakistan, environmental works in Texas, depositions from prostitutes, blank checks and Japanese brokers’ statements – all showed that the name of the World Trade Center was not just hubris.
Outside Federal Hall George Washington’s wig was powdered for the first time in two centuries as he stared mutely at the ruins of his handiwork. But commerce had fled. Wall Street was closed. Even the hot dog stands stood deserted, fossilized buns coated in white ash.
And for a week, money was useless downtown. Those of us who stayed did so without electricity or telephones, eating our way through rapidly deteriorating contents of dead refrigerators. Uptown, shocked citizens lit memorial candles on corners. Downtown, we argued our way across police lines to buy them to light the dark rooms.
Then commerce began to creep back, like plants on a volcano. In Chinatown, they sold postcards of the stricken towers, furtively, like the snuff pics they were. Flags were everywhere, and you could almost tell how foreign people felt by the number of flags festooning their cabs, stores or apartments.
On Saturday, the Korean 24-hour deli by Wall Street was the first downtown retailer to reopen. For days the sanitation department sprayed and brushed the streets, almost obsessively, like a rape victim trying vainly to scrub away the memory of the hideous assault. Downtown had never been so clean. Yet permeating the area was the sulfurous smell of the pyre, still burning. By Sunday, ready for the NYSE opening, the radio began to drop its total preoccupation. A broker’s ad exhorted, ‘Buy stocks! Show your support for America, buy stocks in American companies!’ But if listeners had missed the market at all it was because they were waiting to sell.
The head of a European investment house told me about the memorial meeting they held. ‘I’ve never seen them so subdued,’ he said of his normally brash young brokers. ‘They all had friends working there. They had not thought about dying so young.’
But they did – old, young, CEO and dishwasher, people from all over drawn to the financial center of the globe, only to learn that even a superpower has to look over its shoulder, and that money does not, after all, solve everything. It won’t be the same. And four weeks later, it is still burning.
The Speculator
