Wounded To Its Very Core

It's hard not to look up when you're headed for Manhattan. It was hard, until the other day, not to be overwhelmed by its skyline. Almost all of it still stands. But now not even the Empire State Building seems to scrape the skies. Manhattan looks small, feels small. It's a skyline that has lost attitude. That loss stares at you day after day whether you're a visitor or a New Yorker, getting in or getting out of Manhattan. That skyline won't let go off the memory of lives lost, of a city wounded. It speaks even when newspapers don't.

Into Manhattan, out at Penn Station, or at the Grand Central, the memory won't leave you. Hundreds of letters came up on bare walls to those who would never see them. New Yorkers have learnt to walk by those pictures and those letters. "I always loved you Sue, I'll always wait for you." "Bert, come back, Bert." You look at Bert's freckled smile, and you don't look any more. It's the brave one who stops, or who stops more than a moment.

At Penn station the police have cordoned the wall. Sometimes someone walks through to write something more. One or two stop to read what has been written. Mostly you focus away. But on the edges of the frame there is no escape, there are silent passengers with you still thinking the unthinkable, still living with a loss that won't go away.

Past the station and into the subway, the train schedules are all changed. The roads down south in Manhattan are blocked off. The bars are open in Greenwich village, about the coolest place in the world to be. But two months on, you sip your whisky to the smell of something burning. You pretend it isn't there, like you pretend the pictures aren't there.

It seems the evening is a usual one at the bar. And then you hear a fire engine and it all comes back. "Awful days," I say to the guy at the next bar stool. He nods politely and looks away. New Yorkers have always been hated by the rest of America. They love that; that the world is feeling sorry for them is what they can't handle. This city wants to be arrogant again.

New York seemed to be on the fast track to recovery. The city's hotels and its restaurants had begun to fill up in recent weeks. The Broadway shows were full up after appeals on radio and television to come watch a show for the sake of America. The retired dug into savings and travelled hours just to watch a Broadway show, some for the first time in their lives. "What America needs is the spirit of Broadway," says theatre agent Bill Sykes. "We've had full houses after we ran an ad campaign to come watch the show for the sake of America," he says.

And then came the plane crash on November 12, one day short of two months after the trade towers came down, hurtling down on Queens Borough and setting houses on fire. Again, so much more went down with the American Airlines flight than the people on board. Just when seats in planes were beginning to fill up, there came what was officially called an accident. No one is forgetting those early reports of an explosion on board; the official version is one thing, the people's verdict another. The same airline, the same city, roughly the same time the WTC towers were attacked. Conspiracy theories were the flavour of the day. New York has lived through the terrorist attacks, the anthrax attacks and now this crash. Not even New York can take any more just now.

It'll be Thanksgiving Day on November 22, the official start to the Christmas season.There will be dinners with turkey and parades to lift the spirits and the sales. The month between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas accounts every year for about 40 per cent of retail sales in the US. And about two-thirds of its economy lives off consumer spending. These few weeks will test America's recovery hard.

Santa will be doing the rounds in the malls. But with the Taliban out of Kabul, New York is waiting for the ultimate Christmas gift: the scalp of Osama bin Laden. "That'll be the big gift," says Bill, a fireman chatting with fans by Fifth Avenue. "A T-shirt selling in downtown Manhattan asks under a picture of Osama bin Laden: 'Have you seen me?' Now it seems they will, dead or alive, as Bush said. Then there really will be a Thanksgiving. And with that, shopping."

These are also the days when New York cannot take another hit. The FBI launched its biggest operation yet three weeks ago when more than 7,000 of its agents were pressed in to trace the source of the anthrax that killed one woman in New York. America cannot afford the fear of anthrax-coated Christmas cards. The free market could become a free-falling market.

The kind of business successes New York reported after September 11 were more worrying than reassuring. Gas masks sold, appointments with shrinks rose 25 per cent, sale of pep pills rose 25 per cent. New Yorkers just want to fix feelings, fix the future and yes, fix bin Laden. The dating business rose. The city of singles found it hard to be a city of loners. The dating firm match.com reported a 65 per cent increase in business in the third quarter, much of it post-September 11.

Last week, fresh cause for worry came riding with some good news. A commerce department report suggested that the car giants had begun to get America moving. October recorded a record 26.4 per cent rise in the sale of new cars, sold interest free with incentives thrown in. That buying came on the back of heavy borrowing. Retail stores reported higher sales but these were discount stores selling essential goods cheap. "It is a sign that people are going to malls, shopping and participating in the economy," commerce secretary Don Evans said. But, he warned, "we still have a long way to go" and acknowledged that the economy is "very weak".

A simultaneous report showed a record fall in wholesale prices that was four times worse than expected. This report said the cut-rate financing by car dealers was contributing to a rapid decline in wholesale prices. The financial pundits of Wall Street were anything but agreed on what these reports together indicate. "If the extent of the economic damage inflicted by the attackers is unknown at this point, so is the length of the time before aggregate economic growth picks up," says Roger Ferguson, vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve. Economists have begun to speak now of a "broad-based weakness". Interest rates have been cut 10 times this year from 6.5 per cent to 2 per cent. The desperation to restore confidence is in itself worrying.

What New York needs for itself is equally worrying. Governor George E. Pataki says New York needs $54 billion in government aid just for disaster aid, tax-free bonds to help the local economy and for transformation. Other demands mean that Manhattan is asking the federal government for more than $100 billion. This too, or whatever fraction of it is forthcoming, will come as a borrowing from its future. Not even America has endless billions.Right now, it means budget deficits of a scale never seen before. New York needs Osama to deal with its memory, and Santa to deal with its future.