26: The Lock-Out Cake

One of my best friends in the world decided to make the four-hour trek to New York, taking the Chinatown bus (from Chinatown DC to Chinatown Manhattan) at 2:30 in the morning. She arrived at 5:50 A.M. and I picked her up in case it was still dark and sketchy (it wasn't dark, but Chinatown is always sketchy, just ask Jake Gittes).

We drove across Lower Manhattan, which was empty as it never is except for on early weekend mornings. By mistake (or unconscious design) I drove us too far west and we ended up passing by Ground Zero, a site which induces a lot of personal anger in the few visits I've made and not because of the attack.

When I visit a place like the World Trade Center complex, I have no ideas and no remarks to soothe the static over. The energy of the innocent dead stirs everything, I'll speak for me, and everywhere like it (Terezin, Auchwitz, Majdanek, Europe) that I've ever been has felt the same.

I felt the same while living in D.C. and enduring that inclination toward reticence whenever passing the Pentagon. I always think back to the same moment in freshman year geology, which is where I was, completely oblivious in an underground lab when the Pentagon was hit. We all left class, walked upstairs, tired as normal, and from the chaos of the sidewalks, some four blocks from the White House, we were never going to be honest with ourselves again.

Ground Zero is ingrained into my consciousness each day when I leave work and take the subway home from 53rd and 5th Avenue on the E train which ends at the World Trade Center. They repeat where the line ends at each and every stop until everyone gets off and continues with their life. They have not changed the name of the line, maybe for nostalgia or out of stubbornness, maybe for tourism like the way Auchwitz was shamefully made into a museum.

And at this New York Satellite Museum of the Tragic, there are signs that tell people that it is illegal to sell anything on the premises because who's silence and mourning would want to be interrupted by people selling shoddy souvenir photographs and albums of the attack, with pictures of explosions and people jumping out of windows and dying on the street?

The cops would roll by and the vendors folded their tables up with their merchandise and pretended to not want to make money. My first instinct was to scream at them and turn over their tables (a la Jesus and the moneylenders), but there is little English understood there and in many ways, it's probably not the fault of the sellers that they have to sell these items to make money to live on. It's probably my fault that they do. It's another reason to get angry at something internal, something that I could possibly make different but won't.

The point is that I didn't want to write about this. I wanted to write about the birthday cake that my friend made for me. The one that she meant to bring with her to New York. But she forgot her keys and couldn't get into her apartment before she left for the Chinatown bus. So she sent me a picture of the cake, which is just as nice as having the real thing.