Ian Williams' Day Two Report

Today, the winds shifted, both literally and metaphorically. Once the sun rose, they came from the South, blowing the acrid, sienna-hued ghastly ashes up through the city itself. No longer was the debris spit out into the ocean, over Brooklyn; this time, the winds curled up the streets, snaking around buildings, occluding the orange streetlights along the way. The smell is metallic, sometimes sweet, always awful.

Metaphorically, the winds shifted from disconnected horror to passionate resolve, as the folks around us in Manhattan geared up in a churning, relentless outpouring of charity probably never seen in the last 100 years. I'd heard of hundreds of therapists manning the phone lines, because many people would wake up this morning and be stunned that it wasn't a dream. The ones that woke up angry took to the streets - literally, folks were being turned away from charity centers because there were too many people trying to help. I've never seen 8 million folks all pitch in like this. It may have reawakened the brief "community service" surge that we thought would take over our generation in the early 1990s.

Michelle's restaurant was as mobilized and efficient as they would be in real life; there were prep tables lined by their clean-cut staff, piles of calamari and tomatoes waiting for delivery uptown. It's always amazing to see people at their best; the restaurant runs a tight ship, and terrorist apocalypses are no exception. Tessa, ever the movie producer, had us running at a quick clip. The restaurant, emptied of clientele - with its marble veneer, richly expensive wines, rare tequilas and impeccably dressed tables - reminded me of "Brideshead Revisited" when the British Royal Air Force took over the mansion estates to prepare for battle. With the hum of fighter planes overhead and the constant squawk of the radios, it felt like we going to war amidst the riches of patriarchal England.

We crammed ourselves into a station wagon (whose car was it? who are these people alongside you? these last few days you don't even ask) and fought our way through three police barricades to Bellevue Hospital on 1st and 27th, where grieving families were lined up around the block, waiting to give descriptions of their loved ones to the police waiting inside. One forgets that some of the truest human emotions don't look like tragedies - they don't look like anything. The people I saw as I passed out salads were gracious, but mostly blank-faced - many couldn't eat, just looked straight ahead in line. Many were clutching a specific kind of photo for identification: a vacation picture of their missing son or wife or sister, always smiling, with everyone else cropped out. The picture is blown up and bleeds over the side of the page where the cut was made, and a disembodied arm is draped over their shoulder. I was amazed at how many of these I saw.

And the first thing you think is: they're dead. They're all dead. The gruesome rule about this tragedy is one of polar opposites - you either knew a lot of people in the buildings, or none of them. And if someone was there, they are either fine, or dead. There are very few people who are merely hurt. Today was the first day I felt lucky. When I watched my sister pour salad dressing into the plates of a hundred refugees, I thought two things: this is the culmination of her 15-year career in restaurants; and, I am so damn thankful she's still around.

Things got weirder. We were shepherded up into the more secluded floors of Bellevue to drop off the hot food to the police who were taking down descriptions. The cafeteria happened to be just beyond the main convening room for the cops, so we happened into the main nerve center for the policework in Manhattan, during a portentous meeting between police chief and crew. I couldn't make out everything, but it amounted to "there are no more cars, and we are all sleepwalking here, but help anyway you can." A twinge of chaos, but the silent kind. The police filtered out of the room, looking at us, but not really. They had all lost someone close to them, every last one. They were literally about to collapse with the weight of news, stories of the human meat spread over downtown, the severed heads and arms found under cars, stories so horrifying they will all take them to their graves. Signs all over the building pointed to Room 415, where a chaplain was waiting. I realized then that the chaplain wasn't for the families, it was for the cops.

I felt shame even being so close to it all, in their sanctuary. We ran to the elevator, passing hundreds of civilians on the way out, each carrying the blow-up of the cropped relative, disconnected arm over the shoulder.

Back at Union Square, Tessa scared up some charity passes needed to get ourselves way downtown to drop off towels and supplies to the rescue center four blocks from ground zero. We walked to the City Bakery, and upon hearing that the manager was upstairs, she began to march up the staircase until I got her to calm down a little. She is truly relentless in all the best ways. We would have loaded up the Range Rover full of poorly-bleached towels if we hadn't gotten news that more structures were falling and rescue crews were running away from falling debris once more.

Instead, we went back to the Hudson River, where candlelight vigils were underway in the brown sunset. Most heartbreaking, a throng of hundreds congregated on Christopher Street by the river, cheering the workers as they drove away from the carnage up the highway. Tessa started crying, and I have to say, I've never loved a city so much. Girls held signs saying "NYC LOVES YOU!" and "YOU'RE MY HERO!!!" Some of the workers waved back or honked, inspiring deafening cheers (and making Tessa's dog, Chopin, bark like crazy), but many workers simply looked straight through the crowd, again, unable to even acknowledge that we were all there. They stared at us and seemed to say "I want to unlearn the things I've seen today."