Windows on Lehman
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Erica Sontheimer
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Emerging from the subway I joined the crowds of Lower Manhattan, anxious about my first day on the job. The older buildings of the financial district were squat, tarnished sandstones puckered with sooty recessed windows. I walked towards a sense of openness and, turning a corner, saw the World Trade Center towers rising before me.
Like pewter-skinned jewels, the twin towers sipped sunlight from the source, illuminating all of Wall Street, both a beacon and a boast. The North Tower held aloft antennae which slipped under the sheath of firmament, like a hypodermic needle, poking bubbles of Babel into the stratosphere. The steel columns channelled gusts of wind and I imagined cloud particles swirling in the dust around me.
I passed through the plaza on my way to Lehman Brothers, next door, where I took up a temp job that lasted for four years. It was 1999; I was twenty-five years old and wearing a cheap polyester suit from my small home town. The echoes of hard-heeled shoes clattered off the marble walls and cancelled out my own footsteps. The lobby's revolving doors were a banal fortification against Trojan Horses.
For my first two weeks I answered line two when line one was busy, assigned to a pool of assistants supporting a vice chairman who spent most of his time in Israel brokering mergers between pharmaceutical companies. Line two only rang once or twice a day. I sharpened a box of pencils and arranged them neatly in a cup on the vice chairman's desk. I read the New York Times, and then filled in all the O's with one of the pencils.
In between these tasks, I stared past the glass wall, out to my patch of eighteenth-storey view: a swatch of sky, a stitch of Staten Island and a swathe of Tower One. I pictured myself as a co-ordinate on a three-dimensional grid. I imagined a transparent New York, all structures clear and colourless. I would walk along streets squinting up at clusters of bodies standing self-consciously rigid in imperceptible elevators, rising and falling along thermal shafts. My vision – a city disrobed and vulnerable – was a perversion of New York's collective consciousness and its tough, cool persona.
After that first assignment I was promoted to an ongoing temporary position in the recruiting department. The market was strong and Lehman Brothers spared no expense to attract the best talent from the Ivy League universities and business schools. We offered signing bonuses, stock options and moving allowances, plus all-expenses-paid outings to Yankee games, No Doubt concerts and catered evenings at the trendiest bars and clubs. The four of us in the recruiting department – all young, single women – co-ordinated these events and tagged along to help the recruits break the ice. We were also there to step in when a ‘situation' arose, like the time one of our candidates pissed on his seat at the No Doubt concert and had to be escorted away from the open bar by the security guards.
During this time I also spent two months in Windows on the World, where Lehman had hired space to train the new recruits. The express elevator ride to the 110th floor took ten minutes. The elevator operator chewed gum to pop his ears. There was no running out for a breath of fresh air: once you arrived at Windows you were there for the day.
The restaurant and conference centre were panelled in dark wood and burgundy fabric, with a low ceiling that hid a network of ducts, wires and pipes. Closer to the windows, sunlight streamed in unobstructed by anything save the clouds and the curve of the earth. New York and New Jersey lay flattened out below, extending into a smoggy haze, the Empire State Building twinkling like a toy.
The view, elevating us above the community of eight million below, was designed to stun and brought to mind the archaic sense of real estate: that the king possessed all within view from his royal seat. Within a week I was fatigued of the ride and the rise, the sensation of feeling the earth fall away beneath me. The proximity to the clouds, sky and sun unravelled no myths or poetry in this tomb of trade. I remained a temp in my corporate masquerade, earning a regular pay cheque and biding my time until something better came along.
Secluded high in the recesses of this cloud-cave, I felt mummified. Everything had to be piped in or wired up to us: air, water, food, electricity, information. The panorama distorted eye-level details, and my mind grasped for something fundamental, something which would rein the world back to direct sensation. My mind wandered: What would it be like to fall? How many people collected the trash and brought it back to ground level? Where did these buildings cast their shadows?
By the summer of 2001 the market was softening as the dotcom bubble burst. There was no budget for temp workers but I hadn't lined up anything else, so I agreed to take on a permanent position as an executive assistant to a managing director. He had a reputation for tyranny, but I was up to the challenge and was able to name my salary in addition to negotiating a three-month leave of absence shortly after I began working for him.
I spent those three months at a yoga ashram in California, happily exchanging my hard-earned money for the privilege of washing dishes and yanking weeds, with clover and dirt poking up between my toes. The first day I climbed 108 steep wooden steps to visit the Shiva temple. It was a satisfying walk in the hot dry air, the effort quickening my breath and provoking a sweat. At the peak I was startled to see a shrouded figure at the centre of the open-air temple, sitting erect and motionless with a mound of dreadlocks piled high on its head. Afraid I was trespassing, I turned and retreated downhill.
Soon I returned to the temple with the group for an evening meditation. The dreadlocked head turned out to be a Shiva lingam, the oldest idol of Hinduism, a primordial phallic tower. We chanted mantras and bathed the stone lingam in cow milk and rosewater and oiled it with ghee. Strict tradition dictates that a Shiva lingam must be tended to and worshipped every day, to quell the cosmic force of destruction.
I found my meditations at the Shiva temple the most profound. It was refreshing to acknowledge the inevitability of death and destruction, and to consider the role of this season in the cycle of creation. In contrast, New York's ceaseless worship of youth and vigour was tiring.
The summer interlude of yoga and meditation, abstaining from stimulants as mild as garlic, refined me. When I returned to New York my body responded like a voltmeter to the sheer energy of the place. Even the overlooked nature strips moved me with their beauty, and I admired the weeds and wildflowers that seeded themselves at the first moment of decay in the bitumen and concrete.
On the warm and rainy evening of 10 September I sat in the window of my favourite café. Architecture and history were reflected in dark pools on the surface of wet streets and sidewalks. A strobe of lightening mixed with the yellow flashes of an ambulance. I invested the rain with my own infatuation of the city. The water soaked up culture, mirrored the artificial lights of the night, and stained expensive and delicate shoes. The run-off followed the contours of the natural gullies and streams submerged beneath the pavement. I longed to lie down in the rain, limbs outstretched, touching the whole city at once.