Fresh Kills _ Where Am I? - Day 2

Where Am I?  - Day 2

Darkness.

(a pause)

Silence.

Thought.

It is difficult to imagine??

Where was I?  Like a dream?  Silence.  But I own my thoughts? I own my own thoughts? Where am I?

A moment ago I was in that smoky hallway with the blurred light of a torch, a flashlight, beckoning me on.  To what? To where?

I hear a rumbling sound like a distant sound of thunder.  But only for a moment.  What is that sound?  The sound disappears for a moment and seems to push me out, away.  Far?

Again I focus outward. I am disembodied still but I am still the substance of thought. And even without eyes I see. 

I see dust.  I see energy forming. Energy crashing towards gravity.  Straight metal returns to molded shapes and in some instance dust.

I hear the deafening sound of collapsing metal, plaster board, paint, plastic furniture, metal furniture, fabric tearing, florescent tubes, pencils, pens, breaking! Coffee spilling, vaporizing.  Bones shatter.  Blood oozing, no time to splatter.  Splatter indicates time.  There is no time.  This is all in a split second.  No dignity of time to conduct a scientific analysis of all things happening, collapsing at once into some energy vortex.

Is this how stars collapse into black holes?  What do I know of black holes? Dark holes?  I am in one!

The sound, the rush of air sucked out.  The air in an office space.  The air in an office refrigerator, the air in a half empty glass coffee carafe, the air in lungs.  All gone! In an instant, all gone. 

Compacted, compressed, crushed, metabolized, mercerized, downsized, minimalized and that sucking air leaving a once safe place in the universe.  Making a sudden very short sound merged with the whole chaos of it all.

Only to go where? Downward. Outward. Ever downward.

Gravity.  Gravity rules here in thought, sight, substance.

A thought of some science fiction scene flashes to my attention from some once viewed movie.  Of air being sucked out of a space ship comes to mind.  No words written in a book to explain this.  Just an image, a temporary image that I relate to.  To one image that I can only relate to. The answer to my question was already dormant, stored in some life memory.

It is as if I asked the universe a question.  But what is universe? I ask a question.  I receive an answer that translates not into words but into stored image in the brain, no, the mind. 

I ask what, the distant universe, a question but I am already, was, still am, part of the fabric of that universe.  That universe?  There are others?

I asked a question and have an answer.  Seek an answer, and you shall find.

Where was I?  Like a dream?  Silence.  But I own thoughts?  I own my own thoughts? Where am I?

Always a pause to my thoughts.  A pause just when I seem to have too many questions.  I must stop.  The important idea, answer unfolds before me.  

Thoughts must, are prioritized here.  Wherever here is.

Again I float above the ant farm.  A cloud of dust descends below. The sounds turn into whispers but I am enveloped in the ignorance of a blind, see nothing cloud.

A hear screaming.  I see people jumping into water. Panic!!!

Why are they jumping?  The cloud of dust back at the WTC has arrived here at Whitehall ferry terminal at the southern tip of Manhattan.  The protective hood of the docking collar shields sight from some of the arriving dust from the recent collapse. 

People are jumping into the water.  Screams and panic! 

In my thoughts and or imagination, there seems to be a connecting stream of energy of thought, panic, screams going up all over this bottom tip of Manhattan and going back to the now mortally wounded and dying World Trade Center.

The flow of energy transports me to strangely terrorized feelings of people now living.  If I was still amongst the living, I would be feeling goose bumps on my skin, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck rising and probably wetting myself too.

The ferry boat is crowded to bursting, way over its legal capacity.  People on the boat that just uncoupled from the docking bridge are grabbing life preservers from overhead on the outdoor part of what is that, the John F. Kennedy or the American Legion ferry boat?

Preservers are tossed into the water.  Radio commands, hand signals and shouts between shore control, all in low dusty visibility, to deck hands and the bridge of the boat push the vessel on slow speed but definitely on its way off this island.

Splashing, thrashing in the water, as I suddenly find myself tucked under the doorway of the old AT&T building on Broadway, a block from the WTC.  Dust and soot covers people who are pressed up against the bronze framed glass windows on the lobby.

These survivors of the great untamed energy are seeking, clinging to anything for shelter from the man-made storm of the building’s collapse.

The dimly lit lobby, with its forest of Doric columns in that lobby and its shiny polished white marble floors, reflects light outward into the gloom of the dust and the refugees now encrusted in it.  I always thought they could have shot a Hollywood movie in that lobby with the death scene in the Senate of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.  The mind does wander.

I know I am dead not unlike old Julius. I got more than thirty odd stab wounds.  I got vaporized.   I am part of surroundings here on earth and in the short distance from the half dead now World Trade Center. 

I begin to frame the next question and perhaps too the next answer. 

If I am dead, why am I still here amidst this horror and chaos?  Do lives, spirits, souls linger after death?  Is there a life after death? Is this it?  Is this all I get from the science of it all?  Do I just stay with basic body chemicals no matter what form they take as a whole or separated and scattered all about this battlefield of some as yet unnamed war?

The surge of questions brings a pause.  I am unseparated from all the unscripted drama.  Darkness comes again.  I retreat into my thoughts.  I retreat into the priority of my thoughts and the priority of answering so many questions.

If I was alive, perhaps I would be in a church and asking? Why?  What or who is? – I am suddenly blank.  Oh yes, the word is God.  A word. Just a word.  Not a thought, a concept, a reality? 

Suddenly I shudder.  I have no body and a cold of the absolute zero degree of the universe touches.  I am frozen for a moment and some energy vortex sucks me back to a more recognizable warmer, viable place in time and space. I had been thinking about a church and a God and suddenly I am sitting in a place that is a church.

I look about and realized I had walked or more likely drifted across the street from the old AT&T lobby to St. Paul’s Chapel.

The cloud is starting to settle outside.  The rubble sound, the shaking has put some wall sconces off kilter and internal dust from the shaking, drifting; the earthquake of the great fall has knocked books off pews and fragments of paint off the ceiling and woodwork.

I shudder.  In a dark and lonely place passed death, I am in this empty vessel of a place of worship built before there was even an official United States.

I call out to the universe.  Here the term God seems so vain and inaccurate and useless.  If there are any more questions to the universe or myself, the answers may lie here in a place dedicated to silent thought and reflection and the occasional sitting meditation.

I drift off into thought and reflection and travel to another place.

In the distance I see a white stone.  My thoughts touch the stone.  I am transported still to another place in time, space, non-space, paradise – what?

I reflect on the touching of the stone. 

I look about the surrounding space of Saint Paul’s Chapel.  I realize that I have been here since the first day.  First day?

This space, this non-space, this time, non-time is here and now but it is parceled out into some sort of time frame.  I look about the chapel and see the holy book and then I see, feel the number forty in my thoughts.

The universe answers.  There are forty parcels of time, energy, reflections, between the last moment of human breath and the next real moment on the other side.  Other side?  Yes.  There is another side to all this mortal frame of reference.

Other side?  What it is it?  Heaven? Paradise? Happy hunting ground?  Hades?  Hell?