ZEROES

BY PATRICK CAUGHEY

While walking down toward the South Street Seaport, I saw a street performer. Smiling at children, playing with fire, flirting with the women, and juggling tennis balls, he entertained a crowd. He was impressive to watch, but with a hand grasping a triple-scoop caloriefest, I could hardly clap my amusement. He was launching diablos into the air when I moved toward the piers of New York Harbor.

It smelled of Fisherman’s Wharf back home, on the other coast and not as crowded. The warmth of the sun dissolved the clouds, covering Manhattan in a clear blue sky. I sat on a wooden block on the pier, writing postcards unimportant but for the fact that they would receive a New York postmark. A group of tourists wanting to share the bench with me were driven off when its matriarch said, “Let’s leave him to his postcards.” My gray jacket and jeans weren’t threatening, but my sunglasses sometimes have an adverse effect on people, mirroring visions of strangers back at themselves.

Leaving the pier, I passed the compromises of American culture: The Gaps and Fitches and UNOs that draw in tourist and local alike. The icons of America urbana were present as well, the fire trucks giving off a mist of red light as they pulled into the commercial square. The street performer had disappeared, leaving his trunk and boom box and instruments behind. Perhaps he spontaneously combusted, but I didn’t see a remnant of charred cobblestone underfoot; all that remained were his unattended articles, and the overly attended red monsters. He left the only things that distinguished him as a performer; not even his body remained.

A left onto Pearl led me southwest into the sunset and into the land of glass and steel giants, empty of all crowds and cars. Compelled by the promise and loneliness of an empty escalator, I rode it to its crest, overlooking the harbors and the Brooklyn Heights across the water, a mass of earthy red brick. I followed the plaza around the curve, down stairs, and walked to the right of the FDR expressway. I came upon a wall of dirty glass, the type of glass found smoothed over by thousands of waves on California beaches, not orderly amalgated into a structure.

It stood tall: a rectangle of granite and etched glass, two empty doorways making it look like a square M in profile. To the touch it felt like smoothed beer bottles washed up on the shore. I walked around it, through it, and found a path flanked by monoliths leading to a steel table. Two kids ran up the runway, jumped on a railing, posed for a picture, then dissolved into a group waiting for them yards away. I wasn’t a tourist like them; I considered myself more of a pilgrim, journeying not to the monument to take pictures, but to feel the duty and honor of soldiers past. I wanted a connection to those who came before me; to my past.

I strolled down the path reading the names on the chest-high monoliths. The steel under my fingers was smooth, only disturbed by the engravings. I don’t find my father’s or mother’s family names. It comforted me and simultaneously filled me with an odd sense of dread, realizing no one from our family had paid that price. Yet.

My father’s number was 7; his academic deferral led him to serve 21 years in the US Army after the conflict in Vietnam. I remember his dog tags, one for his possible corpse and one for its collector. The names on these slabs each had a small metal token go to it as well. I reach the table at the far end, a large map of Vietnam, and barely glance down as I continue back to the road.

I arrived at Battery Park next, witnessing it as I have in fiction and in film. I approached the larger monoliths from behind; a cute young woman jumps over the stone balustrade and passes me. I imitate her movement in reverse to stand behind the monoliths. The stone eagle stands back and center, overlooking much like a commander would the two ranks of larger-than-man monoliths saluting the harbor, and staring at the Statue of Liberty beyond. Again I looked on the stones, searching for a familial name, and finding none. The stone squads are rough under my touch, worn with age and rain and salt. How much had been tears? I shed those tears of sorrow when Uncle Fritz died, and tears of anger when my parents refused to let their son attend the funeral. But there is something else here; it lingers in the air. Pride. I feel it looking out to the water, pride that not only we won, but that men were willing to lay down their lives for love of country and the pursuit of freedom.

I stop to take a picture; the eagle staring out to the copper monument in the distance. I realized as leaving the monument behind me that they only displayed names from the US side.

US dog tags are in fact two tags, two twins of thin metal sheeting displaying name, rank, blood type, religion, and ID number; they are meant to identify when nothing identifiable is left. German dog tags were perforated ovals to be split in half when needed, not separate entities like Allied tags. My maternal uncles and grandfather had served the other side in the Second World War, and honestly I don’t know if any of my kin died overseas, over the line; what I do know is that they were called to service, and that they served terms as officers and prisoners, both to their fatherland and to their enemies.

“We got drunk and ran up to the top. We had all-access passes and that was so cool. We’d just run into the building and go straight up.” She was medium-height, brunette, evidently mid-twenties, as was her blonde clone. The NYPD officer she was talking to looked on with almost a baffled amazement. He stood behind the stenciled barricade, keeping unwanted people out of the general site, and walked away from the barrier as the women walked away from him, hesitant to be dragged into another conversation. I walked past the crowds, banners, obituaries, entrances, exits, and fences.

“I heard that some people had to jump out the window.” He’s short. Rightly so, a dwarf hardly ten years old, with a customized Blue Devils hockey jacket to fit his mini frame. His father didn’t give him any mind, and his friends continued following their shepherd. I only hoped their conversation drifted off into more innocent realms as they marched on to a hockey game or toy store or church service.

Army officers leaving, a general, five colonels, three LTCs, a major with a red hardhat, and the lonely goldbar of the group, left the gate for the platform, and entered between grates the church adjacent, a shelter for those working to unshelter what was buried yards away. Each of these officers, and their NCOs behind them, had tags of their own, underneath the jackets and blouses and shirts, pressed against their chest, hoping never to be cut away from their chains, working to uncover the remains of those without chains of obligation. Wars are fought between soldiers; armies. Not against workers, children, civilians. To every war there is a conduct, and actions that don’t conform enrage a nation; they enrage me at the injustice.

I walked Broadway up and past Canal, searching in stores for diversions to hunt and kill my time. I answered some Valentine’s questions for bad girlfriends (shopping) and bad tourists (navigating) and bad people (peddling). I finally decided to turn around and head south again.

Past the stores, the vendors, the blacks and whites and yellows and pinks and oranges and zucchinis, I found my way back to City Hall, to Wall Street, and to a blemish in Manhattan’s crust.

I meandered around the area. I signed a poem and a name to barricades riddled with support. My ticket admitted me at 6:30. The NYPD officers posted at the line admitted me at 6:00. More signatures, poems, wishes, and grievances were on the railings of the woodwork leading up to the platform, a miniature of the twin towers erected over a pile of dirt from the dig site. I waited as the line lurched and stood, marched and froze, at the behest of two officers at the top of the incline.

The buildings surrounding the site were enveloped in shrouding of black and red, mourning the loss of sister structures, while being rebuilt themselves. The Star Spangled Banner hung from a southern building, star upper left and stripes downward, facing the ditch before us. I was a gray yellowjacket in a place of no absolute whites or blacks; I was within a place of transition, closure a long way off. A thrum from above leads all heads turning skyward, the plane passing overhead far enough away for safety, but much too close for comfort.

A slight rattling in the odorless breeze; tinny whispers land upon me. I looked to the right, the cemetery of the church mostly unscathed, but for an overturned tree and damaged gravestones. The stones are covered with plastic, a tent manned in the hallowed ground most likely for restoring them. The sound ensues; my sight traces up a tree. The relic lies limp above me, above the crowd, at once nestled and entangled in branches above us. Gnarled into an abstract token of industry and capitalism it watches over the crater. It is one of those things you are not surprised to see given all that’s occurred. Then the question of the temporal enters: five months gone, and this survivor is suspended for all to see and none to notice. Other trees had streamers of plastic or paper neglected high above reach. This one caught a tan set of window blinds, the paint slightly rusted away, the cords hanging low, the plastic adjustment rod missing, buried underfoot or blown away. My camera captured it; I left the trench before me only to memory.

I left the site before the officers called the three-minute limit on observation. I passed posters of saints for the FDNY and the NYPD, and a list of victims. My fingers ran smooth over the plasticized canvas, not feeling the whites and blues, the names and tears. A gust of wind pressed my clothes to my chest, and I felt the twin medallions against my own midsection, an unauthorized flourish of knotted cord tied on the silver chain along with my identity embossed upon them. I felt ready to serve, even though a few years remained before my oaths would come to term. I do not shy from the fact that perhaps I will have a gravestone before my peers; I shy only from the grief that will come to others when a son of much-defended liberty will be lost defending his beliefs.

It reminded me of my father. He buried many during peacetime, from accidents honest and stupid; he told me he buried more children than soldiers, children too reckless or just unfortunate to live a fuller life. The way he said it told me it tore him up inside. I feel inadequate to him when I’m around him: He’s strong, old, wise, experienced. Sometimes I feel I want to share those experiences, but realize that I should feel privileged not to. Some things should never be beheld.

I inspect the lists of names, and again I find no tie to my blood.

I’m dreading the time when I will.