Public Enemy (13 page)

I returned to my reading and my coffee, but the background buzz in the coffee shop escalated suddenly, and the place got noisy. I looked up as everyone crowded around a man at a table in the center who was pointing at his computer screen and shouting, “It’s not a film . . . this is real, and it’s happening right now!”

Everything suddenly cracked open, brittle or broken, and frighteningly out of balance. We were already living in a post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post–Viet Nam world, and we’d taken the measure of mass terror perpetrated on innocents more than once before. But what was this? In those early hours and first days, no one knew for sure. The images played over and over—an airliner slicing into the tall building, smoke, disbelief, the second airliner going at full speed into the smoking tower, bodies tumbling to the ground, the two massive towers collapsing in slow motion as thousands of people fled. It was incomprehensible, horrifying, and sickening, and eventually numbing. Bits of information emerged every hour; the air vibrated with rumors and speculation and theory. But no one knew what had happened, or what was to come.

At the reading in East Lansing the night before I’d joked about American politicians and their media allies sweating and fretting in public about how threatened we were (“Security precautions for the Super Bowl are elaborate and more costly than ever!”), while the US military scorched the earth and US power menaced the world. It was generally true, but suddenly, weirdly miscalibrated in the dawn’s early light.

“Come home,” Bernardine said when I reached her an hour later. She had talked to Zayd, who was studying in Boston, and to Chesa, who was in school in Santiago, Chile, and demonstrating on the anniversary of the US-sponsored coup and assassination of Salvador Allende. She was with Malik, whose flight back to California and college that morning had taxied out and then returned to the gate, grounded.

“I can’t come home yet,” I said. “I’ve got this event tonight.”

“Cancel it,” she said.

I walked over to Shaman Drum, where I was set to read that night, and sat with the bookstore staff in a troubled knot watching the coverage on a laptop for several hours. Should we cancel the reading? I called my publisher and editor, and she agreed with me and most of the folks gathered at the store: people need a place to gather, a place to talk no matter what. “Go on with it,” she advised.

Bernardine weighed in on the other side: “Come home! Come home!” she repeated.

I wobbled, unsure, and asked if Major League Baseball had canceled games. By midafternoon, baseball shut down, and so did Shaman Drum. “We’ll sort things out from here,” Bernardine assured me. No planes were flying, the whole book tour was put on hold, and I reluctantly drove back to Chicago, the sound track of all-news radio accompanying me on my solitary slog, hyperventilating and speculating, deeply disoriented and confused, uninformed and struggling to catch balance. In those early hours, we were all feeling a huge hole blown through our collective consciousness, but the rupture presented such an unruly range of dimensions that no one peering uneasily into that smoldering crack saw exactly the same things. It was a tumultuous but desolate drive.

I dissolved when I saw Bernardine—exhausted and relieved—and I held onto her for a long time, weeping—so much unrecoverable loss and so much unnecessary pain. But I was home at last.

Mona Khalidi called right away, insisting that we come for dinner, and of course we would, we must. On this night of all nights, I thought, people would be reaching out to friends and family to touch and talk, to try to make sense, yes, but mostly to find some solace and salvation in our simple connectedness—the preciousness of one another, the sanctity of modest gestures, and the vastness of small affections. The world was in flames, the West was burning and the oceans rising, but we would not so easily collapse into the conflagration, and so we gathered ourselves.

We’d met Mona and Rashid Khalidi by chance years earlier, just before we moved from New York. They had three kids the same ages as our three, and their babysitter happened to be one of my students. When the babysitter introduced us, she was certain that Bernardine and I would hit it off with the Khalidis. “Same relaxed approach to raising your kids,” she’d told me, “same crazy politics, same everything.” When a few weeks later and within days of each other, our two families rambled to Chicago from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she was sure it was destiny, a match made in heaven. “Karma!” she said happily as she waved good-bye. “You guys will love each other.”

She was right. We lived only a few blocks apart in Hyde Park, and now we began regularly looking after one another’s kids after school and going to the beach or the movies together on weekends. Bernardine proposed having dinner once a week at each other’s houses, but soon we were having dinners on alternate nights at one or the other of our homes, and it grew into a new big blended family tradition—dinner four or five times a week at seven o’clock for at least ten people, and often fourteen or sixteen or more, as one or another kid brought along a classmate or we invited friends and colleagues and elderly parents or folks visiting from out of town or one of the many Khalidi “cousins,” an indistinct but vast and expansive collection of relatives just passing through. “The diaspora is far-flung,” Rashid would note with a wink whenever a “cousin” was en route, “and Samer is the second cousin of my great-aunt’s brother-in-law.” “It’s well known,” he would continue, “that we Semites—and not exclusively the wandering Jews—are tribal and nomadic peoples, drifting here and there in search of our land.” He would then pull out a series of maps in order to trace Samer, for example, from UCLA back through Detroit to Lebanon and Jerusalem, and the high desert beyond.

Mona, wooden spoon in hand, pot bubbling on the stove in the background, stood at the center of the shimmering multitude—organizer and scheduler, comrade and companion, advisor, critic, agitator, busybody, provocateur, reporter, newsmonger, nudge, nag, fixer, Arabic coach, cheerleader, librarian, yenta, lover, healer, nurse, community psychologist, schemer, social worker, earth mother, and cook. She was elfin, but there was nothing diminutive about her presence—she had a huge heart, a colossal spirit, a big brain, and a supersized opinion about everything. Something was always cooking at Mona’s because food was not only nourishment, it was also love and therapy, rehab and remedy, the perfect medium for problem solving or political discourse, homework help or healing. Feeding people was Mona’s default position, no matter what, and so whether things were fast-paced or slow, happy or sad, urgent or relaxed, she insisted that whatever else was on your agenda, you had to eat, so stop by “just for a bite.” Once ensnared, you didn’t dare refuse a second helping for fear of unleashing the ferocious Semitic inner mother lurking in the centuries-old well of accumulated cultural memory: “What, it’s not good enough? You don’t like my food, or you don’t like me? Which?” Still, hers was the lap every wounded child desired, the ear every troubled teen sought out, the essential table for serious conversation.

Our communal kitchen quickly took on the tone and spirit of a lively and eclectic salon—we designated the Khalidi kitchen Club-K, and our house B and B’s American Café. Over time, it felt that we were feeding the wide, wide world, one memorable dinner at a time, our very own movable feast. One night a few regulars joined a coincidence of visitors, and the extraordinary scene led Mona to suspend a standard rule. Edward Said, the literary scholar and Palestinian rights activist, had been staying with the Khalidis, and Jaqui and Homi Bhabha, colleagues at the University of Chicago, had come for dinner with their kids; Edward called his friend Daniel Barenboim, maestro of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who then called Zubin Mehta of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who was in town for the day, and each brought partners and special friends. Brandy flowed, Turkish pastries and tangerines were consumed, and when Daniel said, “Mona, would it be all right if I had a cigar?” she didn’t hesitate: “Of course, Daniel, please.” All the regulars were shocked—Mona in the thrall of the maestro had become a pushover. Everyone lit a cigar, and we sat around the table blowing smoke toward the ceiling.

On September 11, Mona served her signature tabouli with its surprising amounts of mint, finely chopped green onions, and gallons of olive oil and lemon juice, chicken with yoghurt (and about four heads of smushed garlic and a dusting of sumac) over white rice, and Khubz Arabi (what Americans call
pita
), but the table was unusually somber and subdued. Sim Sim, the last of our collective six kids, had left to begin college three weeks earlier, and it was just the four of us together, with Malik quickly off to see his local friends, and of course everything was in a muddle. No one had much of an appetite for dinner that night.

Everything but Mona’s food felt bizarre, beyond reason or logic, murky and clouded with wild reports of armed men on the Washington Mall and warships in New York harbor. The constantly ringing phone—kids checking and rechecking in, friends and colleagues calling from New York, London, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Los Angeles to share information or to speculate about what the hell had just happened—added to the turbulence. All we knew for sure that night was that four passenger planes had been hijacked: two had flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York—the sickening images captured on film and playing over and over—one had hit the Pentagon, and one went down in a field in Pennsylvania. We were groping in the dark, all of us, across the country and the world, but we couldn’t help wondering: what would come next? Retaliation and revenge were in the air, but what shape would they take? What forms of violence loomed ahead? Was a huge war inevitable? Who might the United States strike now? And who later on?

Our conversation ricocheted rapidly around the room, moving from the well-being of our kids to politics and global power, our work, the fragile condition of our parents, the craziness of a story about Bernardine and me being featured in the
Times
on this day of all possible days, my shattered
Fugitive Days
book launch, and back to our kids. “I worry most about Sim Sim,” Mona said. “He’s been away only a couple of weeks, and he can’t have many friends yet. This must be hard for him no matter what he says.” Bernardine was relieved that Malik’s plane hadn’t got off the ground that morning. We agreed that in a day or two, depending on what unforeseen events popped into view, the four of us would drive to Macalester College in Minneapolis to spend a day with Sim Sim. I was so happy right then to have one another and to be here together, and to have a plan to do something, anything concrete. We would eat, and we would drive. Good enough.

Shortly after 8:00 p.m., the doorbell rang. It was Adele Simmons, the president of the MacArthur Foundation and an occasional member of the communal kitchen, who’d driven from Lincoln Park to check in with Mona and Rashid. “I’ve been worrying about you all day,” she said. “Who knows what’s coming next, but there’s already a whiff of anti-Arab sentiment in the air. I want to help.” Just as most liberals were poised to duck, cover, and disappear, coming to Mona and Rashid’s side was the sweetest and savviest thing she could have done, and so very typical of her.

I got an anonymous phone call at home after midnight: “Do you support the bombing of the World Trade Center?” a man’s voice asked angrily. I was astonished. “It was a monstrous crime,” I said, and added that I wished he would, whoever he was, call me at my office during the daytime. He replied in a suddenly subdued tone, “OK, thanks.”

The
New York
Times
piece with its off-kilter headline was on newsstands and porches around the country as the buildings fell, and through that bizarre coincidence of timing I became linked in the minds of some to the overwhelming event itself. The calls and e-mails, letters and messages, threats and warnings escalated wildly over the next several days, and I was accused of being one of the evil ones, a mass murderer, and a terrorist. One e-mail said, “I admire your tactics, and I plan to show you exactly how much.” Another said simply, “Hide . . .” Bernardine was often mentioned and singled out for threats of sexual violence—vile, vivid, disgusting stuff. “Screw you, cunt!” and “Fuck you and die, Bitch” were pretty typical.

The hate mail rolled in:

My eighty-six-year-old dad got anonymous calls, too, from men who berated him for raising me. “I just listen calmly,” he told me later, “and when they run out of steam I say, ‘You’re wrong,’ and I hang up on them.” Good old Dad—I felt rotten that he had to go through all this. Florence—such a lovely person, and caring for Bernardine’s mother, Dorothy, so creatively—left meticulous messages on the little island in our kitchen: “Bill, Someone called at 8:40 and told me you are a murderer and deserve to die, but he didn’t leave a name or a number. Love, Florence.” No name or number? How can I call him back to thank him? And what did poor Florence make of this entire tumult and hullabaloo? I felt terrible for her, too.

An editor from
Newsday
called to ask if I could write an op-ed about terrorism. “Why me?” I asked. “You know, just write something about terrorism.” No thanks. Then a Chicago paper wanted me to do a story about life underground. Nope. Before long I was besieged by reporters and editors wanting my take on Al Qaeda, on the psychology of fanaticism, on wanton violence. I declined every one. I don’t have any particular insight or information about that, I explained.

History was shuddering in front of our eyes, pain and suffering falling from the sky and etched into the landscape, US military power thrashing wildly out of control. The pettiness of my personal challenge was fully illuminated, the fate of my little book—which had been my focus and my obsession on September 10—suddenly and definitively overshadowed by the fate of the earth. Thousands of people were dead; rumors of war were in the air; troops were mustering, battleships and warplanes converging; US flags were rolling out of the mills in record numbers. The absurdity of launching a book tour at that moment added to the surreal shroud that enveloped me.