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Posted on 09/23/2001 8:06:05 PM PDT by Pokey78

In a letter to The Observer's literary editor Robert McCrum, the award-winning novelist Peter Carey tells of his desperation when his wife went missing, the rage that overcame him - and the pride he now has in his city

Dear Robert

The last week is a great blur with no divisions between night and day. Time is broken. The events of the first day bleed into the next and all the powerful emotions and disturbing sights are now so hard to put in proper sequence.

I was sitting here in this office which you know so well, looking out over that little garden. I heard a passenger jet fly over, very large, very low. I did feel momentarily alarmed. Air disaster crossed my mind, but only for a moment. It was probably 10 minutes before I went out to the street, and then only to buy a can of food for the starving cat. I wandered up to the corner deli. As I entered, a young Asian American woman smiled at me, as New Yorkers will when something weird is happening. I was puzzled. I wondered if she was a student I'd forgotten.

I got the cat food, and suddenly realised that the deli radio was playing very loud. What is it? I asked the girl. She said: a plane has crashed into the World Trade Centre. Of course it was a terrorist attack. I never doubted it. Crowds were now gathering around the loudspeaker in the little doorway. They spilled into the street and looked down to the WTC. Smoke was already pouring from the upper floors.

In retrospect it seems an innocent and optimistic moment. We had no idea how huge this disaster was. I knew my wife was in that building, not because she had told me, or told the kids where she was going, but because all three of us males knew that this was her favourite time to pick up discount clothes at Century 21, just across the street from the north tower. You go through the 1 & 9 subway in the Trade Centre concourse to get there. Of course you now know Century 21 from TV - that blackened broken jigsaw of disaster that has not yet fallen down.

I wanted to wait by the phone for Alison. But I wanted to be in the street. I wanted to see my wife coming down from 6th Avenue, carrying those big plastic shopping bags filled with children's clothes. On the landing of our building I found my neighbour, Stu, crying. He had seen the plane crash into the building. So many friends were looking at the World Trade Centre at this moment. They now have this nightmare branded into the tissue of their cerebral cortex.

My friend Caz was jogging down the west side highway and witnessed it. Pure evil. Rocky was working on a roof on 11th street. He ducked as the 757 flew over his head, then stood to see hell arrive just down the road. Now he cannot sleep. Now none of us can sleep. Rocky thrashes and moans all night long. Charley our 11-year-old cannot sleep. He didn't see the plane but he was at school at Brooklyn Heights and his friends looked out the window and saw what they should never have seen and then the Manhattan kids all went through the difficulty, the uncertainty, of evacuation. Manhattan was burning. The bridges were closed. They did not know where their parents were. Now Charley faces the mornings exhausted, tearful, leaving a soggy bowl of half-eaten cereal on the table.

Our street drew us all outside. Our community was far more important than the television. We huddled together, on our landings, in the laundromat, at the corner deli.

From my doorway I saw MaryAnn from across the street. She was walking up and down with her baby in her arms. You could see, from the way she kissed her baby's head, that she feared her husband dead. Feeling her agony, we looked up towards 6th Avenue where the fire engines were already appearing in huge numbers. They drove the wrong way down the avenue, soon followed by black 4WDs with lights clamped on their roofs.

MaryAnn's husband entered the street. We were so happy to see him alive. 'Lloyd, Lloyd.' We called to him but he did not even hear us. He was a man who had seen something very bad. Now we started to hear about the attack on the second building, then the Pentagon. I ran back and forth between the silent phone and the street, like a madman on a leash. I could not be anywhere. I could not miss the phone. Could not be away from my neighbours.

Finally: a call. It was our friend Bea phoning from her apartment on lower Broadway, just near City Hall. She had heard from my wife. Alison had buzzed from the street just as the second plane hit the South Tower, almost next door. Bea was distraught. She had seen bodies falling past her window. She was going to try to find my wife, but the street below was chaos, billowing malignant smoke, stretching to engulf whoever fell or stumbled. Bea said she would try to make her way to our house, a 15-minute walk, just north of Houston.

So I now knew that Alison had escaped the first building, but was she safe? How could I know? I paced like MaryAnn had paced but outside the street was crowded. Pedestrians were fleeing from downtown. You could recognise these people straight away, the stark, seared horror in their eyes, the blankness, but also sometimes the frank appeals for human contact. They now begin to stream along Bedford Street in ever increasing numbers. These people have felt horror, they are like no other crowd I have ever seen.

Among them, finally, comes my wife, remarkable for the lack of trauma her face reveals. It takes a little while for me to understand she was in the building when it hit. Only when I read her own account do I appreciate the extraordinary escape she has made, how lucky we are to have her alive.

We have two sons at different schools in Brooklyn and today we are both very happy they are there. We discover our response is quite different to many other Manhattan parents who immediately set out through the ruined city, fighting the problems of closed bridges and roads and subways, to collect their children.

Bea's husband John is one of these. Why would you do that? I yell at him. You're fucking nuts. Leave her there. She's safe. But his daughter wants to come home and he is her father and he sets off into the chaos of midtown traffic.

Although we believe that our kids are safe in Brooklyn, they are, just the same, suffering their own traumas in their separate schools, knowing their mother is probably in the building, seeing weeping friends whose parents had offices in the WTC. Some of these stories will have happy resolutions, but not all.

Our neighbourhood is now cordoned off from the city.You needed ID to get beneath Houston, to get back from above 14th Street. John succeeded in his insane trip across the 59th Bridge and up the Brooklyn Queens Expressway to Brooklyn Heights. He got his daughter, Leah, back home on a train that the news said was not running. Bea and John and Leah would not be able to return to her apartment for days. We cooked them pasta and made them beds and in the evenings that would follow listened to Bea as she arrived home after a traumatic day of grief counselling at Bellevue - it was she who talked to all those people looking for husbands, wives, children, lovers.

Late that night we discovered the F train was running. Charley came back to Manhattan with his best friend Matthew. I walked him home. He said the empty streets 'creeped him out'.

Our Brooklyn friend Betsy was caught in Manhattan with her beat-up car and her cat and she too headed out on the 59th Street Bridge just as John had, but now the expressway was closed down and so she started a low meandering journey through the side streets of Queens and Brooklyn until she found herself - ah, Bonfire of the Vanities - a white Jew alone in the tough black area on East New York. 'They were so sweet to me,' she said. 'These young men guided me to safety, getting this little white girl back to her own people.'

Now our neighbourhood has become a command centre. That evening we are standing on the corner of Houston and 6th Avenue watching the huge earth-moving equipment and heavy trucks rolling, bumper to bumper, in a never-ending parade towards the devastation. Here is the endless might and wealth of America. Here are the drivers, like soldiers, heroes. These are not military vehicles but huge trucks from small companies in Connecticut and New Jersey, from Bergen and Hackensack. Seeing all these individuals rise to the crisis, with their American flags stuck out of windows and taped to radio aerials, I am reminded of Dunkirk. I am moved. We are all moved. The crowds come out to cheer them. I do too, without reserve.

This is the same corner where we will soon be lighting candles for the dead and missing, where 11-year-old Charley and I will stand for 20 silent minutes watching those photographs, of lost firefighters, wives, mothers, fathers, sons. It's hard not to cry. We watch the tender way our neighbours lay flowers and arrange the candles. We do not know all these people in the pictures, but we do know our firefighters. We shop with them. We wait in line at the supermarket while they buy Italian sausage and pasta for their dinner.

Pleasant, hoarse-voiced Jerry from the laundromat is there on the corner. He is always on the street, but tonight he wears a stars and stripes bandanna and he cannot be still. He has three grown-up sons downtown right now, working in that perilous pile of deadly pick-up sticks. Jerry and I embrace, because what else is there to do? When one of his sons almost loses his hand, it is miraculously sewn on by microsurgery. I am praying, says Jerry, there is just a lot of praying to do.

Everywhere people are touched by death. Our friend David across the road has lost his best friend, the father of a new baby. Silvano the restaurateur has lost a fireman friend, and Charley and I are dismayed to see the huge piles of flowers outside that tiny station on West 3rd Street. The station was always so small, it looked like a museum. But now we stand, Charley and I, and we close our eyes and say a prayer, although I don't know who I'm praying to. There is no God for me.

Alison needs to stay home. She nests, tidies, spends several hours on small domestic tasks. Then, finally, she begins to write a powerful piece about her escape. She works all day, all night, she cannot stop. As for me, I have to be outside, among the people. It is all that gives me any peace. I want to stand in the deli by the radio. There I can be with my neighbours. We touch, embrace, cry, are half wild with anger. Emotions are close to the surface.

One night 15-year-old Sam says he wants to walk around the city. He wants to see Union Square where there is the biggest massing of candles and memorials. We walk along Houston Street which is now a war zone. Huge trucks from the New York Housing Authority stand in readiness to remove the rubble. We head east and then north. He is taller than me now, and likes to put his arm paternally around my shoulder. As we walk he says to me, apropos of nothing: 'I love this city.'

We walk to Union Square and I am proud of the complex, multifaceted way Sam is talking about these events. He is concerned that local Muslims may be victimised because of our anger, cautious about retaliatory bombing, but mad too, like I am. We stand among the extraordinary shrine at Union Square where nuke-crazed groups stand next to pacifists, all united by their grief. The searing, murderous heat of that explosion has brought us all together.

We see so many people whom we know. The sweet-faced man from our post office, whose continually lowered eyes have always given him a rather bemused and almost beatific expression, comes out of the dark to embrace me.

I am more vindictive than my son. I want to strike back, pulverise, kill, obliterate anyone who has caused this harm to my city. I have become like the dangerous American the world has most reason to fear. This phase passes quickly enough. It has passed now. But on those first days and nights, I was overcome with murderous rage.

We are all changed by what has happened. Some of the changes have been totally unexpected. Once, a year or so ago, I heard my son saying: 'When we bombed Iraq.'

'No,' I said, 'when they bombed Iraq.'

'No,' he said, 'we.'

It put a chill in me. I was very happy for him to be a New Yorker, but I wasn't sure I wished him to be American.

But on the second day after the attack on the WTC, the day Sam turned 15, I bought him a large white T-shirt with an American flag printed on its front. Sam is a very hard guy to buy a T-shirt for, but he put this one on immediately, and then we went out together again, out among the people, giving ourselves some strange and rather beautiful comfort in the middle of all the horror that had fallen on our lives.

'I love this city, Dad. I love it more than ever.' I did not disagree with him.

Yours, Peter

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