First the horror, then the grief and anger. Then the need to see New York, like an old friend back from the brink, and make sure that she's gonna be all right. So that we can be all right.
Paradoxically, travel has never been more or less appealing. For those who remain homebound, the flight of the mind will soon find a landing in Chicago when a piece of New York sets down for a stay. For others, pictures can't replace the real. They need to be there, and see it, or to be near there, and choose not to.
In the meantime, we're processing the past few months. Wounds are becoming history; the crime scene is becoming a tourist memorial. The tackiness is back.
We're healing.

The plane banks to the right, toward Brooklyn.

The last time I flew into New York, the 767 rode low over the lights of Manhattan, as if tugged gently along the beaded arterial glow of Broadway. It's a sooty dusk this December day, not from smoke, but from fog and shattered light. It is as if this spectacle were composed of albumen and platinum and memory, like a Stieglitz print on a clean, well-lighted gallery's wall.

Of course I look for the absence. I know New York. But not so well that my eye intuitively knows how to sketch in the missing towers. I cannot see coils of smoke, only sprigs of rain and approaching night.

The weather is unseasonable, warm, then hot, the renewal of spring in blizzard season. I am staying further uptown, where flowers are confused, in early bloom, their enthusiasm sentencing them to certain death. The next day, the light on the streets is as clear and bright as a new lover's smile. And it smells of spring. I go downtown to a friend's, nearer the site, and I expect the unspeakable buzzsaw of smells to assault my senses. The burning Coke cans, as some said, the bristle of burning wire, copy toner, frizz. But no. The night's damp still lingers in sidewalk crevices, along the facades of bodegas and bars and boutiques. At Houston and Bowery, I know I will go no closer. I have read, seen, talked, e-mailed, considered: I do not wish to know the literal void. The spiritual void is being filled. Colleagues and friends talk of renewal, not thematically, not dogmatically, but through simple enthusiasm, mere hope. The next day will mark two months since September 11. We don't talk around the subject, but no one really wants to talk about it. It is not a dance around the 220-story elephant in the room, but a dance of celebration, to the gift of inappropriate, untimely atmospheric conditions, a shred of global warming caressing the hearts, bodies, faces of the recently battered.

At Gitanes, the smell of brioche, café au lait, and that glorious attitude: I deign to serve you, how dare you look at me, enjoy your small parcel of land on this little sidewalk in so-large Soho. The sun beams down. We talk of many things, and all are good. The light of beautiful eyes, obscured first by sunglasses, but then by smiles that beam almost like phosphorus. We are alive; Manhattan is happy; we persist, we will grow stronger; soon, we will even be surly again. One of the waitstaff stands on the lip of the doorway, looks toward the sun. "It smells like France," she says.

"What part," I ask, "Are you from there?

"I'm from Morocco," she says, "I just imagine it smells like France."

"What does Morocco smell like?"

"The sun." She squints, then cuts me a smile like fresh creamery butter.

I'm invited to a dinner party that night. A documentary is premiering on the Sundance Channel. The filmmaker has invited friends and peers to share her debut, her public mortification, but first, to pour wine and rumor upon the waters. The owner of the apartment has just moved from Los Angeles to New York for work. It's further downtown, along the tributary of Broadway that feeds nearer the former World Trade Center. The wind is picking up. Night falls. The smell of the Hudson, the waft of the East River. Insurgent water, silent, somewhere near. A sour note of flowers somewhere, a pile of romantic gestures not made, left to founder and rot.

My nose is as nervous as a terrier. I will smell death, soon, I fear, jack-legging my way to this unfamiliar address. But no. Only the smell of spring and damp in the midst of encroaching winter. The room is warm. Bread is broken. The space is nice, but still not fully moved into. The hostess charms, a non-Angeleno returned to New York, concerned but not jumpy about the future. The back windows look downtown. There, from only a couple of blocks, you can see the dome of 2 World Financial Center, which was the most visible of squat survivors in the WTC aftermath. It glows. Too, the work lights, into the evening, and into the night after we will sleep, a glow of blinding, angelic transformation heightening the sky. I don't want to steal glances. The hostess pours more wine.

A few minutes before the program begins, there's trouble with the volume. As someone works to make sense of all the cables and jacks, a moment's silence falls. Of the dozen or so guests, I notice, all but one of us stares off, curious, wary, quiet, through the back window toward the weightless light.

"Aha!" the technician announces, the sound pouring out, a burst of sound and music promoting the show that starts in seconds. The personal expression, the entertainment, commences. We look gratefully toward art, toast our friend, our lives, alive.

Also by Ray Pride

SLUSH LIFE
Halfway through the twentieth edition of the Sundance Film Festival, instead of buzz, the sound was more like a cool hum. That is, except for the newly anointed filmmakers whose wet-from-the-lab work was bought up in the becalmed non-frenzy of acquisitions.
(2002-01-24)

SCARY MOVIE
My prediction? The "The Mothman Prophecies" will be big. Mark Pellington's third feature is a lovely, tense, distinctively stylized and remarkably frightening nail-biter about inexplicable psychic phenomena overpowering a small West Virginia town.
(2002-01-24)

FIRE FROM ABOVE
Ridley Scott's unrelenting pitch into the confounding hell of contemporary urban warfare is an unlikely production from billions-grossing producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Encased in a dark blue suit with a natty tie, the 56-year-old mogul is a small, nut-tan man with spruce, precise four-day stubble.
(2002-01-17)

LISTING CRAFT
Year-end top ten lists are forgettable. Ask for my list from 2000 or 1999, I'll only shrug. I remember the pictures. I tend to recall moments of empathy and tenderness, movies that celebrate simple or extravagant beauty. But, for this moment: ten instances of ten instances of lyrical, even delirious beauty.
(2002-01-10)

FICTION REVIEW
(2002-01-10)

VALET SPARKING
(2002-01-03)

GOOD GRIEF
(2002-01-03)

MANNERISM
(2001-12-27)

LOVED-IN SPACES
(2001-12-20)

MINDFUCK
(2001-12-13)

FRENCH TICKLER
(2001-11-01)

LOVE AS A FOREIGN LAND
(2001-10-25)