Windows on Lehman - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Erica Sontheimer
MY MEMORIES OF RETURNING to work on 11 September have ossified from repetition. Records show the first plane hit the North Tower at 8.46 am. Those of us next door noticed the sudden jerk and swaying of our building, and then a distant boom that echoed around the walls. Only junior bankers and support staff were at work that early in the morning and we ran from our cubicles to the empty senior offices, where we could look out the windows and see the lazy descent of thousands of sheets of white office paper. I was one of the last people to shake off the shock and leave the floor, after the second plane hit the South Tower.
Outside I sat by the Hudson River next to well-dressed strangers for an unaccountably long time. We could see both buildings incinerating, and paper scraps and ash rising with the heat. Finally I joined the migration north. A few blocks away I felt and heard the low rumble and turned to watch the South Tower dissolve into salt. Minutes later the North Tower imploded. I kept walking uptown and by mid-morning I stood alone on the roof of a West Side warehouse, looking downtown. The whole city seemed to be turned out of its buildings, three dimensions reduced to two. The impact inverted everything and I felt like I had witnessed the sky-scraping deity's mortality, the destruction of the grid's origin. The sound of leaves rustling in the breeze was audible for the first time on those streets.
Already, by that afternoon, enterprising individuals had tripled the price of Twin Tower postcards and collectibles. The paths I'd walked in Lower Manhattan were buried. The only footprints left were those of the towers.
At home that night I saw the neighbourhood children draw the scene in chalk on the sidewalks. The North Tower burned and a plane flew into the South Tower, with stick-people hanging out the windows, screaming for help. I was obsessed with footage of the attacks and drew my own sketches over the next few days, unable to report to work and awaiting further instruction from the firm. Still home the next week, I threw away the newspaper clippings and photos. I wanted my memories to stay fluid, registering my experience in my own limbs, not these frozen images.
THE FOLLOWING WINTER felt particularly dark and cold. For six months Lehman Brothers took over a mid-rise hotel near Times Square. The elevators weren't designed for our needs and moved with agonising slowness. We were five to a room, sharing one phone line and emergency laptops. In place of beds and nightstands we had folding tables and low-wattage floor lamps. Outside, in the synthetic twilight of Times Square, the streets were clogged with elderly patriotic Christmas shoppers bussed in from other states, sporting red, white and blue tracksuits.
Our sector, Technology Mergers and Acquisitions, was bullish and gearing up for the full force of George W Bush's ‘shock and awe' campaign. Our clients included Raytheon, L3 Communications and other notable members of the military-industrial complex. Lehman stock had split and was soaring over eighty dollars per share, and my retirement investments were growing at a staggering rate.
Eventually we moved into a brand new building nearby (it had been built for Morgan Stanley, but after the attacks that firm decided to consolidate operations elsewhere) and the winter gloom lifted. However, I knew I needed to escape the holding pattern I'd been in for the past few years. Now that my job was permanent I couldn't simply arrange a three-month leave of absence to offset the months of corporate drudgery and boredom. I was closing in on thirty, had proved something to myself about living in the big city, and it was time to move on. When the time came, my boss gave me a Coach bag selected by his wife and a cheque for $1818.18, a nod to our thin bond of Jewish identity, since this figure is symbolic of giving life.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2003 I moved to San Francisco for love and a more fulfilling job in the not-for-profit arts sector. In spite of my disgust with Bush's war in Iraq and my discomfort with the blood money, I was too lazy and hypocritical to reinvest my Lehman stock in something more socially responsible. Sometimes I caught myself making justifications, thinking I had worked hard for the money and convincing myself that no investment could truly wash the blood off its hands.
It wasn't until early 2008 that my partner and I, now married and living in Brisbane, made a commitment to move the money. The stock had already lost a third of its value from its peak, but we were lucky to cut our losses before it plummeted over the next few months to end up under three dollars a share by 15 September, following the Dow Jones's largest drop in a single day since 9/11.
When I read the news of Lehman's bankruptcy I wondered about my former boss, friends and colleagues, but it would have been cruel to look them up and I had nothing to offer except smug curiosity. I did look closely at the videos posted to YouTube showing various employees leaving the corporate headquarters, but I didn't recognise anyone.
There was an unusual delay before CEO Dick Fuld surfaced in the public eye, like a petulant bully complaining about not being bailed out when the Feds had already rescued JP Morgan and AIG on the grounds that they were ‘too big to fail'. Fuld's hubris and sense of entitlement endeared him to no one and I found him nauseating to watch. He implied that Lehman Brothers was so intimately linked with the global economy that it was practically a crime against humanity to let it fail. Where was this guiding sense of interconnection when he and his team approved Lehman's unprecedented leveraging of mortgage assets, or when he accepted nearly half a billon dollars in compensation over the previous decade?
I realise that Fuld is an easy scapegoat for our own guilt and denial. We're wired for life, for growth and sensual gratification, and it's pleasing to believe we'll live forever and easy to justify our greedy urges. The phallic lingam itself is life-giving – but it doesn't grant us immortality. ♦