REFLECTIONS: 9/11/01 AND BEYOND
T Minus One Day
It was the Age of Aquarius, the year after the long-awaited millennial year. Neither the Second Coming nor Y2K had happened. Neither troubled me; I counted myself to be a good person and with our bank account starting to rise, now that we were both working at jobs commensurate with our abilities, I was feeling that this thousand years was certainly going to be a lot better than the last one.
It was Monday, and I was missing New York; regretting our decision to move upstate to a bucolic little town that lacked a subway and yellow taxis and Sabrett's vendors with their green-and-white umbrellas. I longed for the noise and the lights that glittered in the skyscraper windows, towering overhead like giant protectors.
Our champagne Camry crawled through streets as clogged as a meat lover's arteries. Hawkers, carters, daydreamers strolled the avenues, stepping into the paths of vehicles ten times their weight with the twin expectations that no driver in his right mind would really hit them, and if one actually did, they would litigate.
"Maybe we should have taken the subway", my father-in-law said to his bride of fifty-seven years. 'Mother' was a theater buff, and every September the the two of them went to Manhattan to 'do' Broadway. She was quite the snob, too; if 'everybody' was going to see it, she would opt for something else. 'Pop' went gamely along; this was her reward, he said, for putting up with late-night calls from his students and having them over for seminars and luncheon at the house that she had to hostess.
"Surely", she said, "You don't expect me to take the subway!" She made the most of her five-foot-two height, drawing herself up to at least twice that.
We drove them back to their hotel off Central Park and took the car. "See you next Sunday!" we called as we pulled away.
T Plus Twenty Minutes
I started the group late, because just about everybody was chatting and I was tired. I'd had dreams the night before, dreams about airplanes, and I'd tossed all night. I'd dreamed six planes flew overhead; they'd all been hijacked, and when you looked up in the sky you could see them passing, like carrion on the scent of prey, I told my husband. He'd studied Jung for years, and usually he had an explanation for my nocturnal visions. Not today. We'd driven Mother and Pop's car to work, because it was so much nicer than our last century's model.He was gripping the wheel, anxious to get the Camry into the garage without scraping it and having to answer to his father.
'Skids', our most delusional patient came in. He was usually yammering away with people who apparently lived inside his skull, and spewing whatever they told him to the group. Today appeared to be no exception.
"Did you hear?" he said. "A plane hit the Twin Towers!" The more stable patients snickered. "Sit down, Skids," I said. "But don't you care?"
he asked. "We'll talk about it", I said. We'd talked about whatever, hygiene, or something, for a good half hour, when Cassie burst in. Cassie was depressed, not delusional.
"Sorry I'm late", she said. "I was watching what happened to the Towers." I motioned to my intern. "Go check", I said. He returned after a moment, his face ashen.
The chief of psychiatry thought it best to allow the patients to watch the news, and so we all saw the second plane approach like a shark and wreak its devastation on the second tower. Papers floated out of the building like tiny birds; people drifted out the windows like five-pointed leaves, premature victims of an early autumn. And then, with a roar and smoke like the end of the world, the towers came down. We moved our inpatients into the gym and the cafeteria, and put them to work rolling bandages and assembling cots for the patients we assumed they'd pull out of the buildings and send north. When the sun set and we'd received not a single casualty, we knew the worst had come to pass: there were only a handful of survivors.
Where were Mother and Pop? There were no landlines into the City, and despite their worldliness they weren't sophisticated enough to own cell phones. We couldn't go to them; cars were being turned away at the bridges. Wherever they were, they were on their own.
The names of other friends: Chris and his exotic girlfriend who lived two blocks away, Walter who worked on the 98th floor of the North Tower, Phil, who wrote the most outrageous music and loved to breakfast at Windows of the World, Tecumah, who'd been fired two days before the attack in 1993 and who'd been reinstated, the cool guys at the car park who used to banter with us when we parked there.
T Plus Three Days
Who did this?
Our son was stationed in South Korea. He'd re-upped just last winter, not content to serve in the States and get computer skills. I had no idea that he was in a troop truck, rumbling toward the DMZ, where he'd aim a rifle at a North Korean kid about his age until somebody figured out North Korea had nothing to do with this. Newspapers showed people dancing in Arab countries. Bush refused Castro's proffered olive leaf. People were taking out their rage on anyone they thought looked Arabic: East Indians, Jews, Puerto Ricans. Policemen stood shell-shocked in the streets, too stunned to protect or serve.
T Plus Two Weeks
Chris called. His girlfriend had persuaded him to eat at Junior's that morning, and they were having scrambled eggs when the first plane hit. The blast from the collapse sucked the air out of their building and suffocated their cat. Tecumah had been let go again the Friday before, and he'd collected his severance check and left the building just moments before. The car park guys saw what was coming and tore out of their booth. Not a single one of the cars was touched, though most of them were never called for. Mother and Pop finally got through, and we went to pick them up. Mother seemed more upset that Broadway was dark and she didn't get to see some of her choices. "That happened 'way downtown," she whined. "I don't see what it had to do with Broadway." One by one, friends who worked in or near the building called to let us know they were, fortunately, alive.
Walter and Phil were not so fortunate.
T Plus Three Months
Airline passengers eyed each other suspiciously, particularly after the pilot warned that everyone must take responsibility for anyone or anything that looked suspect. The flight plan from Albany to Charlotte passed over the new hole in the world. We already had gone mute, but the pilot asked for a moment of silence and commemoration. I developed breast cancer, Stage One. I blamed it on the shock, the anxiety, the realization that the world had ended after all, and we had all been consigned to a hell of uncertainty, mistrust, and intolerance. Y2K hit too, sixteen months late, and financially, prognosticators said, America was on the verge of a depression.
T Plus Eight Years
Pop died a couple of years back, and Mother is in a facility. She refuses to get out of bed, even for theater. Our son got out of the Army after two tours in Iraq, and decided to stay with law enforcement. There's been no recurrence of the cancer since chemo and radiation. I lost my second job, the one I had as backup for the first one. My husband had a heart attack, and we're living on his pension.
I can't wait for the construction people or whoever to finish whatever they're going to put where the Towers used to be. The sky looks so barren.