The Mornings After
Commentary: Looking out from New Jersey, the view of the Manhattan skyline-- and of the world beyond-- has been changed forever.
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From the suburb where I live in New Jersey you can see the skyline of Manhattan. When it appears through the trees or beyond the edge of a hill I find myself checking it and checking it again, to see if the World Trade towers still aren't there. What happened to them and to the people in them is unacceptable to the mind, and we must use a lot of effort to get it straight. To accommodate ourselves to the facts is to feel a weight that gets no lighter no matter how we adjust it. The weight has a particular heaviness in the early morning. After a troubled but forgetful sleep, I wake up at 5:45, before first light. For a moment I don't remember what happened; in the next moment, fully awake, I do.
There's a kind of impact as memory revives: Yes, what I'm remembering isn't a dreadful misgiving that ran through my sleep; it's real. Outside the bedroom, the morning is quiet. Traffic hasn't yet begun on the busy street in front of my house. As I lie there listening, I know that millions of my neighbors in the suburbs and the city are having the same experience I just had. People are waking; there's a heartbeat of not remembering, and then, heavily, memory returns. For me, pain of it is broad but not sharp, because no one close to me died in the attack. But for many thousands of people—the paper said more than 5,000 children lost a parent—the dawning memory is specific and hard and unrelieved, poking through the early morning like a piece of angle iron among the pillows.
I think of the weight of memory falling in all those houses and apartments in the quiet half hour or so before the day begins. It's a weight that's continental in size, and it has a motion, heading westward as people there start to wake up, too. The weight consists of details—orange and black explosions, news clips run over and over, the smoke from something that shouldn't burn, the headlong verticality of the buildings' gigantic collapse, a rush of history like the Titanic going down. Each detail produces its own inward wince. It's an unusual feeling, and not a bad one, to know that at a particular moment millions of your fellow citizens are all thinking about the same thing.
Of course, the mind doesn't exactly think about what happened. Rather, memories and images enter it unbidden, and it encounters them and veers away. For me, the attempts at evasion lead my thoughts to ridiculousness and fantasy. I remember the desperate image of people jumping from the building, and the next thing I know I'm thinking about what if some of them had happened to have hang gliders in their offices, and they launched themselves out the windows and came gliding safely down, hundreds of them gliding down and getting away. Or what if there'd been helicopters with big nets for people to jump into, or slurry bombers like they use in forest fires out West, and the slurry bombers swooped down into the Hudson and sucked up big loads of water and flew up over the towers and put out the fire?
Then my mind escapes even further, the scenarios involving the brave people who decided to fight the terrorists on the plane that later crashed in western Pennsylvania. Lots of thoughts have taken refuge in them, I'm sure; they provided our only victory of the day. What they actually did was amazing enough. But what if those people (I daydream) had succeeded even more? What if they had not only attacked the terrorists, but had subdued them, gotten control of the plane, and somehow landed it with all or most of the passengers still alive? Wouldn't that have been cool? If they had been able to do that, they would now be heroes such as America has never seen. Audie Murphy and Babe Ruth and the Founding Fathers themselves would shrink to nothing in comparison. We'd all be weeping and cheering still. The whole country would be at their feet, and the celebrities we pretend to be interested in for want of anyone better would disappear, possibly forever, in the brightness of the heroes' fame.
If I were really grieving, these daydreams would only make me feel worse in the long run. The further you go from reality, the more it hurts when you come back. Plus I would probably hate myself for having such nugatory thoughts when someone I love had died. But my personal suffering, as it relates to this particular incident, is not the worst that humans have ever been through. In letters my grandmother wrote during World War II she complained that due to wartime rationing she could not find nylons, cake mix, rubber overshoes, or crown rib roast in the stores; aside from a few travel inconveniences, I have not had to deal with difficulties even as small as hers. At the end of President Bush's speech laying out our country's response to the attack, he said that sacrifices would be asked of the American people. The first sacrifice he mentioned, as I recall, was "Hug your kids." I have hugged my kids a lot since then. Doing that has been no trouble at all.
Last spring I became kind of obsessed with Osama bin Laden. I had seen an FBI "Wanted" poster on the wall of a post office in a town near where I live, and I had studied that poster microscopically. Among the bin Laden facts that interested me was how really tall and skinny he was—possibly 6 foot 6, possibly 140 pounds, according to the FBI. I even wrote an article in these pages about my bin Laden musings and about "Wanted" posters in general (July/August 2001). Driving on our local Jersey streets, my friend Bill and I would occasionally pass the time by ruling out pedestrians as possible bin Ladens in disguise: "Too short"; "Too fat"; "Too young"; "Too old." This idleness looked different later, when I learned that some of the September 11 attackers may have lived in the communities of Wayne and Fort Lee, both just a few miles away.
I don't know exactly why bin Laden interested me as he did. Maybe it was because so much back then seemed known—what the Republicans would say, what the Democrats would say; what the news would do with the next scandal; what one interest group would argue about another; what we all wanted, i.e., more. But there, on the post office wall, was someone peering out from the (to me) complete unknown. And not just unknown, but far away. That was part of the joke: how far bin Laden certainly was from his picture on the post office wall.
After the attack, at the very moment when we began to bomb Afghanistan, bin Laden released a videotape of himself saying that the destruction in America was an act of God's vengeance and threatening more violence to come. Everyone in the world saw it, so I don't have to describe the outdoor daylight he was sitting in, the rock outcropping behind him, the camouflage jacket (possibly of U.S. Army issue) he had on. People in America perhaps did not like to think how frightening it was to have this man's face pop up on their TV screens the second the cruise missiles flew, as if he'd been hiding back there all the time. The president's office, in a conference call, asked the five men in charge of most news broadcasts in this country not to show this video or others like it, and they agreed. The idea was to prevent the passing of encouragement or secret messages to the enemy. The deeper reason, of course, was that the video scared us so.
If I could, I would watch this video many times. I want to listen to bin Laden's voice, not the translator's, until I can recognize it on the phone; I want to absorb his offhand manner, the half-lidded expression in his eyes, the enormity of his matter-of-fact acceptance of the loss of so many lives. Bin Laden is six years younger than I. In a generational sense, he's not unfamiliar; I seem to remember guys like him, even down to the turban and camo jacket, sitting at a table by themselves in the college dining hall. And yet as I watch him it's dizzying, overwhelming, to imagine the galactic distance between us. To me, he is a cartoon archvillain become horribly real. To him, I and 300 million other Americans are instruments of Satan, and also fools.
Anyone who has been an American traveler in a poor foreign country knows how foolish you feel sometimes. As for how foolish you look, local people can always be found who will fill you in on that. Our optimism, childishness, naivete, lack of guile, and belief in comfort and safety attract plenty of scorn. Equally bad, in critical foreign eyes, is our ability to disengage: When our fantasy of the world is punctured, we run back to our American homes and let the whole foreign experience evaporate like a dream.
Nobody can accuse us of being too isolated and safe anymore. What used to be far from us has become near, international war and large-scale religious hatred unfortunately included. Even if we still want to, we can't disengage as easily as we did before. Maybe our next struggle will be to remain our hopeful, foolish selves while caught up in the complications of the wider, wiser world.
