Anthony's Pictures 5pm PDT
The envelope sitting in front of Anthony Samyu is unmistakable: what the one-hour photo place gives you when you get your pictures back. Anthony Samyu's envelope bulges. Three prints each of 24 shots... of the ruins of The World Trade Center.
That makes him a ghoul, doesn't it? A tourist who further clogged the pinched-off streets of lower Manhattan just to take shots of the nightmare. Someone with no sense of the human toll, of the sadness that will spiral out for years, because of what happened here.
You couldn't be more mistaken. Anthony Samyu... is a rescue worker... at Ground Zero. Moreover, because he is thin and spry, he's one of the men they lower into the crevices in the debris.
And he's taking pictures. He says he needs to; it's the only way to comprehend that what's around him is finite, that as devastating as it is, it will be history some day, and he will need to remember it. He says that at the rescue site, he has never seen so many cameras. Firemen have them. Cops. Medics.
What does he think of the civilians, blocks away, taking their snapshots? He understands. We should remember this. We must remember this.
It is suggested to Samyu that the affect of seeing, in person, the hell that the World Trade Center has become is so profound, so moving, that some of it - perhaps that seven-story shell of the ornamental metal work, the stuff that looks like a wall of the Roman Coliseum - should be preserved as it is, where it stands, or somewhere close, as a permanent, raw, heart-wrenching memorial - to the dead, and of this time.
Anthony's haunted eyes suddenly flare with life. "Yes," he says softly. "Yes. We have to do that."