Eight people, at least eight, were murdered in Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, by a man who drove into them with a truck. Many more were injured. When I left my office, about a mile north of the attack, I could see the Freedom Tower, glowing pink in the fading light.
On my way back home, I passed Sixth Avenue. It was lined with barriers, erected that morning to prepare for the Halloween parade. The barriers were manned by police officers, who were there because of the parade. Not because of the eight murdered people, or not directly.
Kids in costume dragged parents by the hand up the sidewalk, and vice versa. A small boy’s plastic Spiderman mask slipped off his head and fell to the sidewalk. I stopped to pick it up, but the boy’s father beat me to it. Still, he thanked me.
On the downtown F train, on my way back to Brooklyn, my car was crowded as ever by New Yorkers from a broad spectrum of backgrounds. I stood next to a couple, middle-aged, dressed as Medusa and Hermes. “Are you Adam and Eve?” asked a woman across the train. “No,” said the woman with a crown of snakes, “Medusa.” “Oh,” said the other woman, “I thought because of the snakes.”
A family of three boarded the train. “Don’t touch the pole” said the father to his wife and daughter, being protective. “Everyone’s touched the pole.” They wrapped their arms around it so that it sat in the crooks of their elbows, skin guarded by sleeves. After West 4th Street, the train turned east. We did not pass under the place where the eight people were murdered.
When I heard about the attack this afternoon, I looked at my phone. Some people I knew in New York posted on Facebook to say that they were safe. Safe and sad, they wrote, one after the other. Many others did not.
I did not feel obligated. I texted my family, who live far away, and don’t know the geography of the city.
I didn’t text my husband and local friends, who I knew would not have been in that place, at that time.
In Brooklyn, across the bridge from Manhattan, I came out of the subway. There were more people in costume. A woman with pink and blue braids and a unicorn horn asked me for directions. Two families with small children, strangers to each other, discussed the best block for trick-or-treating. A grandmother waited on a corner with her costumed grandchildren. She leaned on a walker and smiled as they shrieked.
Early for a dinner gathering, which was not cancelled, I stopped for a drink. A man at the bar next to me held out his phone to the bartender. “Listen to this!” he said, and I waited for it, for more horrible details of the attack, and then the man said: “They have texts from Manafort’s daughter.” “I can’t believe it,” said the bartender, rolling her eyes, “it’s really unbelievable!”
Terrorism, in New York, is many things – acute and devastating and scarring. Always present. But it is not unbelievable.
“This was a cowardly act of terror,” the mayor, Bill de Blasio, tweeted, soon after the attack. “It was intended to break our spirit. But New Yorkers are resilient. We will be undeterred.” This was true. New Yorkers went on with their lives tonight, in one way or another.
- Jean Hannah Edelstein is a writer based in New York City
