After what Walt Whitman called “the huge first Nothing” of annihilation, with the psychic convulsions of a demonic force still redounding in the acrid air, the spirit of the city sleepwalking in purgatorial pain, came the posters. Taped to lampposts, walls, store windows, gathered in great clusters on the sides of hospitals, they were a humble catalogue of the missing, on view for months, intense visual windows onto internal disruption and cosmic pain.
