Free Open City by Teju Cole Page B

JAMES CAHILL , SEPTEMBER 29, 1854 . It went on like that through the years, one entry after the other, rank, name, date of death; there was the expected, disheartening cluster in the fall of 2001, then a few others who died in the years that followed. Below that was a vast, blank face of polished marble, awaiting those among the living who would die in uniform, and the not yet born, who would be born, grow up to be police officers, and be killed while doing that work.
    Across the plaza, on the other side of the West Side Highway, the big buildings of the trading district were lined up on an invisible perimeter like animals jostling for space on the edge of a lake, taking care not to pitch forward. The perimeter marked out the massive construction site. I walked up to a second overpass, the one that once connected the World Financial Center to the buildings that stood on the site. Until that moment, I had been a lone walker, but people then began to troop out of the World Financial Center, men and women in dark suits including a group of young Japanese professionals who, tailed by the rapid stream of their conversation, hurried by me. Above them, for the third time that evening, I saw the bright lights of an exercise facility with the rows of bicycles, in this case looking out onto the construction site. What, I wondered, went through the minds of the exercisers as they pedaled and strained and looked out there? When I came up to the overpass, I was able to share their view: a long ramp that extended into the site, and the three or four tractors scattered around inside it that, dwarfed by the size of the pit, looked like toys. Just below street level, I saw the suddenmetallic green of a subway train hurtling by, exposed to the elements where it crossed the work site, a livid vein drawn across the neck of 9/11. Beyond the site was the building I had seen earlier in the evening, the one wrapped in black netting, mysterious and severe as an obelisk.
    The overpass was full of people. In its rafters were brightly colored advertisements for various tourist sites in lower Manhattan. SHOW YOUR KIDS WHERE THE ALIENS LANDED , the one for Ellis Island read. The Museum of American Finance was promoted with the words RELIVE THE DAY AMERICA’S TICKER STOPPED . The Police Museum, also entering the spirit of distasteful puns, invited people to visit New York’s first cell provider. The commuters with me marched along, shoulders up, heads low, all in black and gray. I felt conspicuous, the only person among the crowd who stopped to look out from the overpass at the site. Everyone else went straight ahead, and nothing separated them, nothing separated us, from the people who had worked directly across the street on the day of disaster. When we descended the stairs into Vesey Street, we were hemmed in on both sides by a chain-link fence, penned in, “like animals” stumbling to the slaughter. But why was it permitted to treat even animals that way? Elizabeth Costello’s nagging questions showed up in the strangest places.
    But atrocity is nothing new, not to humans, not to animals. The difference is that in our time it is uniquely well-organized, carried out with pens, train carriages, ledgers, barbed wire, work camps, gas. And this late contribution, the absence of bodies. No bodies were visible, except the falling ones, on the day America’s ticker stopped. Marketable stories of all kinds had thickened around the injured coast of our city, but the depiction of the dead bodies was forbidden. It would have been upsetting to have it otherwise. I moved on with the commuters through the pen.
    This was not the first erasure on the site. Before the towers had gone up, there had been a bustling network of little streets traversingthis part of town. Robinson Street, Laurens Street, College Place: all of them had been obliterated in the 1960s to make way for the World Trade Center buildings, and all were forgotten now. Gone, too, was the old