There I was at Ground Zero this past week staring up at these odd skeletal wings, bone white in the sun, after taking in the 9/11 fountains. Pits really. Deep enough to fall off the edge and break your neck, yet open to the public in such a way that anyone contemplating recreating the long-fall death chosen by many to escape the flames could do so willingly or by chance.

I was with a pal, the one who took this picture of me. He said the water swirling away into the deeper central area was getting sucked into the pits of Hell. I was too stunned by the dangers of the memorial to the living to comment on the morbidity of that observation, but he was right. The new trade center looms over the more northerly pit, I guess the footprint of Tower One, and I said to him, “Do you see the upside down cross in the shape and shadings of the window on the Freedom Tower?” I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t find in the upside-down “V” of its windows slimming to a point the object, the suggestion of the Vitruvian man dangling by his feet.

I hated the vibe of the World Trade Center from the time the towers went up. I spent hours in those tombs working as a temp feeling the sway under my feet; not unlike the feel of an earthquake I woke up to in Manhattan so long ago and knowing it was what I’d experienced. And I stood in Washington Square Park on a sunny, remarkably beautiful day and watched the planes smash, the towers fall, as humanity around me tumbled and fell as though into a snakepit of shrieks and wails and torment.

The skeletal bird is the Oculus, a new subway station that houses the Path train. We found our way into its deep cavity lined with white marble, like a body cavity stripped of blood and flesh. In its core the sunlight beaded down on us through panes of glass through those cement-winged bones and we saw the spaces for the shops that are to come, the pedestrian traffic that will crawl beneath these death-wings that lie in the shadow of the Freedom Tower. The vast labyrinth led to the Path trains and I knew to reach them I’d have to move forward, descend deeper, to where sunlight doesn’t penetrate at all.