All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (16 page)

This was my continuing dream that summer, the locus for my imagination, a voyeuristic wish to inhabit the scene of a suicide, to see the carnage firsthand and taste the smoke in the air, the smoke from the heat of the bullet.

My commute, door to door, typically took fifty minutes on the N train. It was another part of my day I cherished, a three-quarter-hour journey in benevolent captivity, an in-between time. On the train I came back to the world outside my own head. Boarding near the end of the line, before the cars became crowded, I usually managed to find a place to sit. I used the time to read or, when my attention faltered, to survey the kaleidoscope of city life in the faces of my fellow New Yorkers, the galvanic friction of young and old, rich and poor, black and white and every shade between. Bound in a fragile intimacy sustained through studied nonchalance, we were acutely aware of those near us but discreet with our attentions lest we send a creeper vibe, most of us anyway. There were always creepers and I tried not to be one of them. Nonetheless about every other day I swooned for a woman I would never see again, a one-way romance consummated in a sideways glance and lasting mere minutes, poignant in its transience and futility, in the sickly purity of my unexpressed longing.

I had one commute more memorable than all others by far. It was election day, the mayoral primary—a day on which the city painted itself in red, white, and blue, posters and placards taped to light poles and subway-stop railings, an upbeat but languid mood in the streets, as people played hooky from work to do their civic duty. I intended to vote in the evening at my polling place in Queens, for Mark Green, whom I felt sure would be the city’s next mayor if he survived Fernando Ferrer.

As it happened, neither man would be much heard from again.

At a little after nine a.m. my telephone rang. It startled me. No one ever called me in the morning. I had a bad feeling before I even answered.

My friend Sarah wanted to know if I’d heard the news. I told her I hadn’t heard any news. She said two planes had hit the World Trade Center towers. It looked like terrorism.

You probably won’t be going to work today, she said.

Damned if I won’t, I thought.

On my way to the subway, having just missed a train pulling out of the station, I stopped in a bar and looked at the television, saw the two towers framed by the camera, both of them smoking, not white smoke but black, a hint of the tremendous heat at work. It looked bad, but I couldn’t begin to imagine how bad. I made a vow that sustained me through the next three hours of travel by train and by foot to an office building I would enter for what would turn out to be the last time: I would not be reduced to a stunned spectator. I would not sit in a bar and stare at a screen. This was the biggest story in the world all of a sudden, and it was happening just across the street from my employer, a newspaper regarded as a secular bible by some of the people who worked in those towers. I didn’t care what I had to do, I was going to work, straight to the managing editor, to whom I’d offer myself for whatever was needed, phone dictation, rewrite, you name it. It was strange to feel this way—preemptively purposeful. I’d become so jaded with the limitations of journalism that I no longer thought of myself as a journalist but as merely another drone in the hive mind of Lower Manhattan, trading eight hours of each weekday for cash at a paper whose editorial stance I found not just wrong but dangerous. Some habits die hard, I guess. I’d spent seven years, off and on, and many tens of thousands of dollars on an education that taught me three major things: stay curious, be dogged, run toward the story. Old instincts kicked in like a muscle memory.

So I went to the story, which turned out to be many stories, depending on how you looked at it: a heinous crime, an audacious act of mass murder, a made-for-TV spectacle, a catastrophic fire, an airborne toxic event, and the most successful terrorist attack in the history of terrorism. September 11 was a lot of things and the beginning of many more: refugees and civilian dead in foreign lands, killed and wounded soldiers, TSA gropings, the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, CIA black sites, waterboarding, a linguistic squabble disguising a moral question about the meaning of the word torture, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, sadomasochistic photo shoots at Abu Ghraib, Total Information Awareness, drone assassinations, border hysteria, NSA data collection . . . a full accounting is beyond my ken. But before all that, before it became a rallying cry for war and state surveillance, it was a drama of suicide. Nineteen men on a mission demanding death on a day chosen for them. An untold number of jumpers from the towers who faced a choice of deaths on a day not chosen by them. A chain reaction of suicides. The hijackers believed their reward awaited them in the afterlife. The jumpers, who can say what they believed? When it came to the afterlife, they must have believed dozens of different things, but the one thing they all believed was that ten final seconds of flight was preferable to the inferno they fled.

Later I tried to imagine their final moments, as I had with my brother’s, but how far inside another man’s death can we truly see? Even our own is a mystery until it’s upon us, and for the people in those towers it can only be guessed at in the most superficial way. The thunderous explosion from the impact of the plane. Instantaneous fire erupting with a searing heat, the fire quickly growing. Panic as all exits close off. Smoke and flames swallowing all hope of survival, breathing excruciating, lungs overwhelmed. Suffocate or roast to death or jump, those were the choices, the last set of options, the question of how to die. There wasn’t much time to mull it over. It wasn’t a philosophical exercise. Die now—but die how? It was a question whose horror you couldn’t inhabit.

I was always ending up in all the wrong places: Bed-Stuy, the
Wall Street Journal
, the make-believe province of telephonic copulation. In order not to feel satisfied with life in the wake of my brother’s death—in order to prove to myself that I had loved him—I’d denied myself contentment in all its forms, as if pleasure were anathema to my holy grief. In an orderly world I’d have had no business working across the street from those towers, a pig farmer’s son from Minnesota, graduate of the University of Montana, a country boy in every way that mattered, though I’d tried to pretend otherwise. I had no business at all living in New York City, a place I’d judged hostile to most of what was beautiful about life on earth when I first encountered it. An arts page copy editor, I certainly had no business staring into the center of the biggest story in the world on a late summer day, rubbing my eyes, snapping pictures with a digital camera, inhaling pulverized asbestos, burning plastic, burning metal, burning paper, burning fuel, burning flesh. The images I encountered that day were ghastly, a scene of destruction on a scale unimaginable even as I stood on the edge of it, but it was the smell that stayed with me, remains with me to this day: the smell of an airplane made into a bullet.

By an accident of fate I finally got my wish. I paid witness in the flesh to the scene of a suicide—countless suicides. There was nothing else to do. The office was empty when I got there. The whole building was empty, evacuated hours before. I climbed the fire stairs and walked around the newsroom, amazed to find myself alone at lunchtime on a weekday, in a workplace typically restless with several hundred people living in the perpetual now of gathering news. When it finally sank in that I was useless, I went back outside and stood on the edge of the smoking rubble, trying and failing to understand what had happened, a spectator minus the distancing screen. Paper blanketed the ash that blanketed the streets. Firefighters sat stunned, covered in dust, their heads in their hands. There was nowhere to look and not find evidence of ruin. I joined a group of five reporters at the southwest edge of the pile. Two of them scribbled in notebooks. One fiddled with a tape recorder. One snapped pictures, one held a video camera. No one said a word that was printable in a family newspaper.

When the smoke made my lungs clench with intimations of an asthma attack, I walked north until I found a city bus. I sat down next to a man who told me he’d evacuated the north tower, and on his way down he’d walked past dozens of firefighters headed up. They’re gone, he said. They have to be, every one of them. I remember the faces. I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

I got off the bus at McHale’s, dusted in ash to the knees, but the usual discretion ruled. On me, the barkeep said, as she poured my first drink. No one asked me where I’d been. No one needed to. All eyes were on the television; I watched for a while and then I caught a taxi home.

The next day’s
Wall Street Journal
was produced that night in New Jersey and carried a six-column headline in type nearly as large as the masthead, the fourth banner headline in the paper’s history:

Terrorists Destroy World Trade Center,

Hit Pentagon in Raid with Hijacked Jets

I bought it and a copy of the
Times
at my corner newsstand early on the morning of September 12. I read all the front page stories and most of the inside of both papers, but one simple photo on page A7 of the
Times
stopped me cold. Taken by an Associated Press photographer, it showed a man in midflight. His head was down, his torso parallel to the vertical ribbing of the two towers behind him, several stories of them that filled the frame to the edge. He appeared to be falling along the demarcation line between them. One leg was straight, the other bent at ninety degrees. Together they formed a little triangle. One of his boots stood out, starkly black. His pants were black, his shirt white. His arms appeared relaxed. He looked almost peaceful, like a man suspended on a string, even as he hurtled with accelerating speed. His was the emblematic image of the terror of that day, though afterward it was not much seen again in the world of American journalism. We airbrushed him from the record. Readers excoriated the papers that published the photo, and the papers scrubbed it from their Web sites. We couldn’t bear to think of the panic of his final moments, his awful need for flight. We wanted pictures of heroism, patriotism—firemen or flags, or better yet firemen holding flags—and he did not fit the bill. He was the incarnation of our last taboo, the avatar of our worst private nightmare, a human being captured in the act of a self-willed death.

Only Connect

A
fter the attacks we commuted to the cornfields of New Jersey, a trip that took me two hours one way. We put the paper together in a makeshift newsroom in the training wing of Dow Jones corporate headquarters near Princeton. Almost all the stories in the paper concerned terrorism: its practitioners, finances, backers, tactics, goals. It felt, for a time, a little embarrassing to edit pieces about the Cave of Altamira or an Ansel Adams show.

When anthrax turned up in the offices of other media companies, all of our mail underwent a heat-steam treatment. The mailroom workers sorted it with masks on their faces and rubber gloves on their hands. They looked like lab technicians working with a deadly poison. When opened, the envelopes crackled like dead leaves, and the ink on the letters was often illegible.

On the editorial page the imprint of Bob Bartley lingered, his obsessions trotted out for endless encores: the beneficence of tax cuts, the imperative of a missile defense system, the need for military spending on hardware and troops for vast overseas mobilization. Saddam Hussein became an urgent addition to the repertoire; Osama bin Laden appeared as an afterthought. I started keeping a folder of clippings, called
FULL BLOWN INSANITY ON THE WSJ EDITORIAL PAGE
.

On September 12 the lead editorial stated: “We are entitled to presume that this is the work of the usual suspects—Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, the Iranian mullahs and other dictators who invoke Muslim fundamentalism to justify their fundamentally illegitimate power.” There was no mention of what made the authorial we entitled to such a wide-ranging presumption, nor was there mention of the man who turned out to be the mastermind of the attacks. The next day his name snuck into print alongside the primary suspect: “We would not be surprised if this week’s atrocity was the work of Saddam or bin Laden or both.” This contention was driven home by the pull quote in the adjacent opinion piece: “Can Osama bin Laden sow terror alone? Not likely. His group has had help from Saddam Hussein, and from Sudan.”

The next day the lead editorial called for hastening deployment of a missile-defense shield—“missile defense is as much a defense against hijacked airliners as it is against missiles,” it stated bizarrely—an effort that seemed to me like a man lifting an umbrella over his head while being pelted in the groin by snowballs.

On September 19, an unsigned editorial argued that the first and most important steps in combatting terrorism ought to include capital-gains tax cuts and immediate drilling for oil in Alaska. The same editorial stated: “Throughout history the periods of greatest military innovation have been wars. Now is the time to push for next-generation weaponry and electronics that will keep the U.S. ahead of not just terrorists but all adversaries. Democracies are reluctant to spend money on defense in peacetime, but in a war they will give the military whatever it needs.” It would seem that war was needed, because a massive military buildup was needed, because nineteen men with box cutters had flown passenger jets into three iconic buildings on American soil. I couldn’t follow the logic but I knew they wouldn’t stop clamoring until they got themselves an honest-to-god, maim-and-kill war.

Reading the paper became an exercise in cognitive dissonance. One day the news section would report that “U.S. Officials Discount Any Role by Iraq in Terrorist Attacks,” quoting intelligence officials who noted that bin Laden disliked Saddam and the two had nothing in common but a hatred for America; the next day the editorial page would write that “reports are swirling that Saddam Hussein was also behind last week’s attacks. . . . Deposing Saddam has to be considered another war aim.”