World Without a Superman

It's not every day you tell your son about the mass murders of 2,973 people.

by Duane Swierczynski

It's not every day you tell your son about the mass murders of 2,973 people.

We knew it would come up someday; on 9/11, my wife was two months pregnant with him, and once the shock had dulled, we asked each other: God, how are we ever going to explain this?

This past Saturday, I found out.

My wife and I had traveled to New York City for a book appearance just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. We arrived early, so we took a walk down West Broadway, toward the gaping hole in the sky. We rounded the corner of Vesey and Church, right across from St. Paul's Chapel. It took a few minutes, but we realized that this was the corner where the Borders used to be — a gateway to the mall beneath the WTC, and the PATH trains and subway. Ten years ago, we lived in New York City. The Borders had been one of our favorite places to hang out. I took a photo of the corner.

We walked to St. Paul's, the fragile-looking Revolutionary War-era Episcopal chapel that had survived not only the collapse of two 500,000-ton skyscrapers a block away, but the Great Fire of 1776, when the redcoats tried to destroy the city. This was one tough New Yorker.

My wife had heard stories that, during the collapse, nothing in the chapel had been touched — not a single pane of stained glass had been cracked. Inside the church, it turned out to be the truth. A steel beam had been hurled toward the chapel like a cruise missile, but an old oak tree in the southwest corner had deflected the strike. The stump of the tree is now on display in front of St. Paul's.

But the most amazing thing wasn't so much the force field around the chapel, but the stories of the rescue workers and cleanup crew posted inside. Those workers spent eight months at the site, lifting debris and looking for survivors — and then, body parts — by day, sleeping on steel cots in the chapel by night.

My wife took a photo of a worker's cot, which was on display, and covered with stuffed animals.

Later that night, back home in Philly, we loaded the images onto our computer. My son, who's almost 5, wandered into my office. "What's that, daddy?"

Before I realized what I was doing, I started telling him about 9/11.

I told him that bad guys had flown planes into these giant skyscrapers, and they had collapsed.

"Did people die?" he asked.

Yes, a lot of people died, I told him.

He looked at the image on the screen: heavy construction gear in the pit that used to be the WTC.

"I want to see what it looked like when it collapsed."

I told him those pictures might upset him, hoping he'd change his mind.

He didn't.

I stalled and did a Google image search for photos of the Twin Towers in their shining glory.

"I want to see them collapsed."

I understood. Without a visual, the collapse is just an abstraction. There's no way to describe such devastation; you really do have to see it.

I did another image search, wondering if I was in the process of warping my son for life.

An aerial view of the collapse popped up.

He saw it.

He understood.

He started to cry.

Then he asked:

"Why didn't Superman save them?"

I think I almost cried myself right then.

A month ago, we'd watched the original Superman, shot in New York City, complete with Twin Towers. To my son, that's where Superman lives. If something bad happened, he was supposed to be there to help.

He should have been able to catch those people in the buildings.

I explained: "Superman is a made-up character. Believe me, I wish he were real. But he's not. He's just a story, just like some of the other stories you watch."

My son cried some more. I hugged him.

Then I realized how I could explain it.

"You know, this country is full of people who were there to help," I said, double-clicking on the image of that solitary worker's cot, perched on the floor of St. Paul's Chapel, that my wife had snapped.

There are bad men in the world, I told him. But the world is actually full of Supermen.

(duane@citypaper.net)