|
 e
are used, those of us who work in the financial markets, to watching
the news as it breaks. The information snakes across our screens,
impassive, unrelenting, flowing in the orange of a Bloomberg headline,
or the boldface red of Reuters' breaking news. With luck, it is
something quick, something timely, something to give a trader the
edge, enough perhaps, to make that extra Buck. There are televisions
too, mounted, on the walls of our Midtown office, hanging , even,
from the ceiling, relaying garrulous, greedy CNBC, and the nonstop
chatter of a world going about its business.
And then the
chatter stopped. On the TV screens, we could see the smoke, billowing
murderous and black, out of that first brutally wounded tower, a
dismaying repeat, it seemed then, of an earlier tragedy. The messages
went out to Downtown, to the people we knew were there. Some said
that they might evacuate their building, others were not so sure.
It looked as if, they hoped, everything would be OK.
There was still
at that point a remnant, just, of normality, an impression, almost,
of maneagable horror. What we were witnessing, it appeared, was
another bloody chapter in the long terrorist war, cruel, spectacularly
savage (could that really be true about a plane, we wondered) but
not something so different from what New York City, and the world,
had been through before.
So the routine
news continued to flow, retail sales, CBOT December wheat, but there
was no real return to work, just a few half-hearted glimpses at
the dealing screen, with the gaze returning again and again to CNBC,
to the images of that first tower, and then, suddenly, drawn by
a fireball, to the other. More smoke, more flames, and fluttering
down from the windows of the outraged building, scraps of paper,
Hell's tickertape, the last trace of all those shattered offices.
Safe in Midtown,
we watched the World Trade Center's end, we watched the destruction
of the building we knew so well, the site, for us, of countless
meetings, the workplace, we worried, of too many friends.
Later, we could
see that the European stock markets had fallen, but, it was not
something, really, that we wanted to discuss.
|
