The Difficulty of Detachment By Mary Carmichael

photo: Greg Altman '95

moved to New York five months ago, and when my boyfriend came to visit me, he wanted to see only one famous sight: the World Trade Center. We had dinner at Windows on the World on his last night in the city. We looked outside and saw the lights of Brooklyn, the Statue of Liberty. We danced on the wooden floor. Still, I grumbled that we were acting like tourists, that we should've gone to Nobu instead. I might have been right, Tim said as our cab pulled away: "It's not like the towers won't be here next time."

Every day since September 11, I've thought about that conversation, and about the little things I saw that night: the carpet at Windows on the World, with yellow WOWs emblazoned on the fabric; the Italian family on the elevator with us; how breathless and scared and delighted we all were on that elevator, zooming toward the top, our heads spinning, our ears popping as floor after floor passed us by. I try not to think about the people who jumped, and whether their ears popped on the way down.

I try not to think, but it never works. It doesn't help that it's my job to think about these things, in accordance with the news cycle, twenty-four hours a day. I'm a reporter for Newsweek. When the towers crumbled, I went to the hospitals--not to give blood, not to find a loved one, but to pester grieving people. Later that night, I went to lower Manhattan. I climbed the rubble outside the World Financial Center, dodging a sharp scrap of metal that came screeching from the sky, trying to get facts, names, and numbers. I told my new sources I'd call them back "when things calmed down." Of course, things never did.

I suppose I should feel privileged that I got to cover this, the biggest story of my young lifetime. I suppose I should feel lucky that I was able to sneak past the barricades in the back of a squealing police car. I suppose I should treasure the dubious souvenirs--a hardhat, a gas mask, a stockbroker's notebook from the rubble.

Instead, I feel like one of those hundred people on the 106th floor, just one story under Windows on the World, whose final thoughts were recorded in a 911 operator's notes: "NEED DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO STAY ALIVE." Like most people, I try not to think about what's happened, but at the same time I can't stop thinking about it. The day of the attacks, I worked thirty-three hours straight. I didn't want to go home; I didn't want to be alone. The minute I sat down on my bed I bawled like a baby, then lay awake. It's happened every night since then. I don't go to bed until three a.m. now. Some nights I just stare out the windows.

At Newsweek, it's fashionable to say that we young reporters on "Team Terror"--most in their mid-twenties, a few in their early thirties, and me, the baby at twenty-three--have been turned into war correspondents. I don't think so. From what I've read, war correspondents are hardened and solitary. We still need each other. A week after the attack, we gathered at an Irish pub in midtown. Somebody played the piano. Somebody mentioned they'd seen body parts. Everybody smoked. Everybody threw back a shot of whiskey. Who needed the Employee

Assistance Program? Like grizzled old newshounds, we were drinking our grief away.

But the next morning, our spiritual malaise lingered like a hangover, and it is with us still. Weeks after the attack, we are afraid to walk under bridges, afraid that the elevators in our building will come crashing down, or worse, that the building will. We're not supposed to admit these fears. But I, at least, need to keep worrying, keep calling my parents every night, because as long as I keep talking about it, that's all it is: talk. To stop worrying would be to acknowledge the futility of worry in the face of certain attack. I can't do that.

photo: Greg Altman '95

For now, the plan is to stay in New York and keep doing my job, a job I was just learning when I was plunged into all of this. I've done cop reporting before, and I've seen a man executed; I thought I would be prepared. I wasn't. Three weeks after the attack, I received a reporting assignment more heinous than any trip to Ground Zero: Call the victims' families and ask them how much they've lost. How could I have prepared for that?

As I sat there on the phone, listening to stories of best friends and T-ball coaches and husbands of fifteen years gone, I felt it creeping in. Jaded. I was going to become jaded. And oh, the relief it would bring--if I didn't care, I wouldn't fear.Reporting would be so easy if I just didn't think.

But I kept going back to a column that Anna Quindlen wrote after the terrorists shattered our safety: We are not them, and we will never be like them unless we fail to value human life. So maybe our grief and terror is merely a reminder that we are still human, still alive. I read once that fear is an evolutionary gift to keep us out of danger. What better proof is there that we still value our lives than a nagging worry that we may lose them?

I'm glad I'm not an aged war correspondent, out on front lines that look to my eyes like any other. I'm glad that when I do sleep, I dream I'm dancing on the wooden floor again, looking out those windows on a world that is no longer there. In a way, I'm glad my daily life is stilltinged with fear, because as long as I can feel fear, I can also feel hope.

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