The City Since 9/11

Author:Keith Wilhite
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2012-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

It is crucial that Stella answers her email and wants to meet Cayce face-to-face because of the double connection of urban terrorism and family loss. Cayce and the twins have had their homes destroyed and they have been exiled: Cayce is self-exiled from New York City and her Manhattan apartment, and Stella and Nora have been forced to hide in Moscow for fear of further terrorist acts against them.

When Cayce finally meets the sisters, their faces seem to speak, registering the rarity of Cayce’s face-to-face interactions and helping ease her fear of being watched on the F:F:F forum and followed by Dorotea and her hired Russian agents in London. Although less injured than her sister, Stella was disfigured in the attack: “It is Stella’s face, but some fault bisects it vertically, not quite evenly. There are no scars, only this skewing of the bone beneath” (PR 314). Cayce finds out that the other sister, the real “maker,” Nora, had undergone nearly a dozen operations, but surgeons have not been able to extract a piece of the U.S.-made Claymore mine, which still rests inside Nora’s skull, in the shape of a “T,” and the T is also the shape in one of the film clips Cayce has been trying to interpret. Cayce realizes that what the world had thought was a film clip that resembled a blurred map of some city in the shape of a T was actually Stella’s consciousness “bound to the T-shaped fragment [of the Claymore mine] in her brain” (PR 305). When Cayce looks into Nora’s “dark eyes,” we merely read: “Nora sees her. Then doesn’t. Turns back to the screen,” and continues her work (PR 304). Nora’s work is a sort of writing, a sort of filmic memoir in which she attempts to process fragments of her memories of her family (possibly her parents) and her self and the extra-diegetic bombing moments—trying, it seems, to reintegrate a sense of self. Making the film is what seems to keep her alive, and I want to suggest that Nora’s wound, “speaking wordlessly into the dark” (PR 305)—and now seen as footage by the world—is also an example of cruel optimism, a painful reminder of loss and injury, of severe disability, yet also a condition of possibility.

These details of the larger forces are important because they influence the action in the same way that a large ship must avoid an iceberg from a distance; the anxiety of collision creates a new horizon of choices. Such choices get fine-grained attention by Cayce—ultra sensitive to violence and markets. The first moment of human touch for Cayce occurs when, outside of the film studio, she cries, and Stella “places her hands on Cayce’s shoulders. ‘Now you have seen her work’” (PR 306). The mystery is solved on multiple levels: Cayce is able to display a strong and honest affect—crying—and she finds the maker of the film—a disabled woman—and she learns that it is a work-in-progress, not a completed film cut up and sent out in fragments.

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