It came as a surprise, the way people talked with one another. In New York City. And it went beyond language. Their eyes met. Although somber, they exchanged looks of compassion, half-smiles that spoke more than a million words.
But there was something else, a sense about the place itself. At first, I couldn’t figure it out; then it struck me: the light. Lower Manhattan had been a dark canyon, back in the days when I made the pilgrimage to this part of town to raise capital for IPS, when I used to plot strategy with my investment bankers over dinner at Windows on the World. You had to go that high, to the top of the World Trade Center, if you wanted to see light. Now, here it was at street level. The canyon had been split wide open, and we who stood on the street beside the ruins were warmed by the sunshine. I couldn’t help wondering if the view of the sky, of the light, had helped people open their hearts. I felt guilty just thinking such thoughts.
I turned the corner at Trinity Church and headed down Wall Street. Back to the old New York, enveloped in shadow. No sky, no light. People hurried along the sidewalk, ignoring one another. A cop screamed at a stalled car.
I sat down on the first steps I came to, at number fourteen. From somewhere, the sounds of giant fans or an air blower rose above the other noises. It seemed to come from the massive stone wall of the New York Stock Exchange building. I watched the people. They hustled up and down the street, leaving their offices, hurrying home, or heading to a restaurant or bar to discuss business. A few walked in tandem and chatted with each other. Most, though, were alone and silent. I tried to make eye contact; it didn’t happen.
The wail of a car alarm drew my attention down the street. A man rushed out of an office and pointed a key at the car; the alarm went silent. I sat there quietly for a few long moments. After a while, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a neatly folded piece of paper covered with statistics.
Then I saw him. He shuffled along the street, staring down at his feet. He had a scrawny gray beard and wore a grimy overcoat that looked especially out of place on this warm afternoon on Wall Street. I knew he was Afghan.
He glanced at me. Then, after only a second of hesitation, he started up the steps. He nodded politely and sat down beside me, leaving a yard or two between us. From the way he looked straight ahead, I realized it would be up to me to begin the conversation.
“Nice afternoon.”
“Beautiful.” His accent was thick. “Times like these, we want sunshine.”
“You mean because of the World Trade Center?”
He nodded.
“You’re from Afghanistan?”
He stared at me. “Is it so obvious?”
“I’ve traveled a lot. Recently, I visited the Himalayas, Kashmir.”
“Kashmir.” He pulled at his beard. “Fighting.”
“Yes, India and Pakistan, Hindus and Muslims. Makes you wonder about religion, doesn’t it?”
His eyes met mine. They were deep brown, nearly black. They struck me as wise and sad. He turned back toward the New York Stock Exchange building. With a long gnarled finger, he pointed at the building.
“Or maybe,” I agreed, “it’s about economics, not religion.”
“You were a soldier?”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “No. An economic consultant.” I handed him the paper with the statistics. “These were my weapons.”
He reached over and took them. “Numbers.”
“World statistics.”
He studied the list, then gave a little laugh. “I can’t read.” He handed it back to me.
“The numbers tell us that twenty-four thousand people die every day from hunger.”
He whistled softly, then took a moment to think about this, and sighed. “I was almost one of them. I had a little pomegranate farm near Kandahar. Russians arrived and mujahideen hid behind trees and in water ditches.” He raised his hands and pointed them like a rifle. “Ambushing.” He lowered his hands. “All my trees and ditches were destroyed.”
“After that, what did you do?”
He nodded at the list I held. “Does it show beggars?”
It did not, but I thought I remembered. “About eighty million in the world, I believe.”
“I was one.” He shook his head, seemed lost in thought. We sat in silence for a few minutes before he spoke again. “I do not like beggaring. My child dies. So I raise poppies.”
“Opium?”
He shrugged. “No trees, no water. The only way to feed our families.”
I felt a lump in my throat, a depressing sense of sadness combined with guilt. “We call raising opium poppies evil, yet many of our wealthiest people owe their fortunes to the drug trade.”
His eyes met mine and seemed to penetrate my soul. “You were a soldier,” he stated, nodding his head to confirm this simple fact. Then he rose slowly to his feet and hobbled down the steps. I wanted him to stay, but I felt powerless to say anything. I managed to get to my feet and start after him. At the bottom of the steps I was stopped by a sign. It included a picture of the building where I had been seated. At the top, it notified passersby that the sign had been erected by Heritage Trails of New York. It said:
The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus piled on top of the bell tower of St. Mark’s in Venice, at the corner of Wall and Broad—that’s the design concept behind 14 Wall Street. In its day the world’s tallest bank building, the 539- foot-high skyscraper originally housed the headquarters of Bankers Trust, one of the country’s wealthiest financial institutions.
I stood there in awe and looked up at this building. Shortly after the turn of the last century, 14 Wall Street had played the role the World Trade Center would later assume; it had been the very symbol of power and economic domination. It had also housed Bankers Trust, one of the firms I had employed to finance my energy company. It was an essential part of my heritage—the heritage, as the old Afghan man so aptly put it, of a soldier.
That I had ended up here this day, talking with him, seemed an odd coincidence. Coincidence. The word stopped me. I thought about how our reactions to coincidences mold our lives. How should I react to this one?
Continuing to walk, I scanned the heads in the crowd, but I could find no sign of him. At the next building, there was an immense statue shrouded in blue plastic. An engraving on the building’s stone face revealed that this was Federal Hall, 26 Wall Street, where on April 30, 1789, George Washington had taken the oath of office as first president of the United States. This was the exact spot where the first man given the responsibility to safeguard life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people was sworn in. So close to Ground Zero; so close to Wall Street.
I went on around the block, to Pine Street. There I came face-to-face with the world headquarters of Chase, the bank David Rockefeller built, a bank seeded with oil money and harvested by men like me. This bank, an institution that served the EHMs and that was a master at promoting global empire, was in many ways the very symbol of the corporatocracy.
I recalled reading that the World Trade Center was a project started by David Rockefeller in 1960, and that in recent years the complex had been considered an albatross. It had the reputation of being a financial misfit, unsuited to modern fiber-optic and Internet technologies, and burdened with an inefficient and costly elevator system. Those two towers once had been nicknamed David and Nelson. Now the albatross was gone.
I kept walking, slowly, almost reluctantly. Despite the warmth of the afternoon, I felt a chill, and I realized that a strange anxiousness, a foreboding, had taken hold of me. I could not identify its source and I tried to brush it off, picking up my pace. I eventually found myself once again looking at that smoldering hole, the twisted metal, that great scar in the earth. I leaned against a building that had escaped the destruction and stared into the pit. I tried to imagine the people rushing out of the collapsing tower and the firefighters dashing in to help them. I tried to think about the people who had jumped, the desperation they felt. But none of these things came to me.
Instead, I saw Osama bin Laden accepting money, and weapons worth millions of dollars, from a man employed by a consulting company under contract to the United States government. Then I saw myself sitting at a computer with a blank screen.
I looked around, away from Ground Zero, at the New York streets that had avoided the fire and now were
