The Sheila Variations

There was already something a little off ...

about that morning.

I was running late. Normally I am on the bus, on my way into Manhattan from Hoboken, at 8:45, 9 am. But that morning, I was 20 minutes behind. Because I was late, I decided to walk two blocks north, and pick up the bus at 9th and Washington as opposed to 7th and Washington. Washington is the main drag in Hoboken. Washington is 3 blocks west of the Hudson, but the brownstones lining the street block any view of Manhattan. If you walk east on the numbered streets in Hoboken, you can see the Hudson and a glimpse of Manhattan (the Chelsea area) at the end of the street, but that is it. We were completely unaware, as we gathered at the busstop, that an enormous jet had plowed its way into the WTC.

As has been described ad nauseum, it was a stunning day. A real fall day. Saying "not a cloud in the sky" is not a euphemism or an exaggeration. It is the truth. The buildings of Washington cast long shadows in the morning, long chilly shadows, but the day was bright and blindingly sunny.

I am such a creature of habit in the mornings. I am also barely awake in the mornings. But I had taken an unfamiliar walk, I had veered off course, I had chosen 9th instead of 7th, so ... Well, for me, it made a difference. I could walk down 7th Street in Hoboken with my eyes closed and never ever trip on the buckling sidewalk. Not so on 9th.

I never walked up to 9th, but that morning I did.

I was 3/4 of the way through Catch-22, a book I had never read before, much to the amazement and chagrin of ... THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD. I come from a long line of Catch-22 worshippers, so I finally picked it up.

I mention this only because this is a post about what I remember on that morning. And it's weird what you remember. Or what grows in significance later, when you look back on it. I remember that I had my nose in Catch-22, standing in the long chilly shadows on Washington Street, at 8:35 in the morning, 8:40, 8:45 ... wondering, in the back of my mind: Where the hell is the bus?

Full disclosure: I do not wear a watch. So I can put together the timing of the events on my side of the river only through deductive reasoning. I left my house at 8:30, late for me. I arrived at the bus stop, at 8:45 or thereabouts. I was on the causeway before the Lincoln Tunnel when the second plane hit. Puzzle pieces.

I began to read. Standing on the curb.

Busses during rush-hour, in Hoboken, come one after the other after the other. If you wait 3 or 4 minutes for a bus, it feels like a long time. And if 6 or 7 minutes go by, then you know something is up.

So 6 or 7 minutes went by.

Desultory conversations broke out between my fellow commuters. "I wonder where the bus is." "I should call work ... I'm gonna be late." People stepping off the curb, peering down to the left, squinting for busses. "Maybe there was an accident in the Tunnel," I heard. Then someone arrived at the bus-stop, and I heard her inform a couple of people, "I guess a plane hit the World Trade Center." This was second-hand news. She was not hysterical, just reporting a possible reason for the slow-down of busses.

This was, even though we had no idea of the scope or the magnitude, disturbing to hear. In the same way that anything bad is disturbing news, if you have a heart beating in your chest. A massive earthquake in Turkey or South America. You take a moment to think, "Oh God. How awful. How awful." Fellow human feeling. Some kid shoots up his school across the country. You take a moment: "Oh my God, how terrible ... I hope people weren't too hurt." Hearing about the plane generated a response on that level, for the most part. Perhaps it was a bit more intensified because it was just across the river, and also: we couldn't SEE anything yet. We, as human beings, have a need to SEE. I know that the first thing I did when I finally was let off the damn bus 40 minutes later, still in Hoboken, the first thing I did was run, as fast as I could, down to the water, so that I could see what was happening. I HAD TO SEE.

So not being able to see what was going on just across the river was ... disturbing. Everybody got thrown off. People dropped their change. Strangers broke out into conversation.

I assumed, as many people assumed, that this was probably a (as I called it in my mind) "JFK Jr. Situation". An inexperienced pilot, a small plane ...

If I had actually contemplated it, and tried to be logical, then I would have soon come to the conclusion that that guess made no sense whatsoever. JFK Jr. was flying over the ocean, on a foggy black night, with no instrument training. Flying only by what he SAW, which was a wall of black. How in the world could someone MISS the World Trade Center? When they are the tallest things on the landscape, dwarfing all else, and visible from miles away? My "JFK Jr." guess made no sense.

But again: I wasn't sitting there trying desperately to figure it out. I had a moment of: "Oh God. I hope nobody was hurt! That is terrible!" and then went back to Catch-22.

It sounds so callous. But we had no information, and no visuals, even though it was happening just across the river.

I did notice, (again, in a desultory casual way) that everybody was on their cell phone. And that nobody was actually speaking into the cell phone. I didn't make anything of it. It was only later when I realized that that was the beginning of the being-unable-to-use-our-phones phenomenon. Everybody knows somebody who worked in those buildings. Everybody was trying to get through to them, and say, "What happened? Are you okay?" And already, at that early time, before the second plane, people's phones had stopped working. Obviously because the rest of the country probably had a better view of what was going on in Manhattan than the majority of us actually here did. And everybody picked up the phone.

And still ... the bus wasn't coming. I don't know how long we waited. 10 minutes maybe. 15. And then a bus came. We all piled on, gratefully. At last! We're off to work!

In my memory, the bus lumbered down Washington very very slowly. It seems like we were in slo-mo, but that could just be retrospect coloring the memory. I am not sure what was true, what was not, but I felt like we were chugging along at a horse-and-buggy pace. Why?

Maybe we were actually going slow, because the driver, in contact with the officials at Port Authority, knew something that we, the riders, didn't. Of course, I didn't think this at the time. I was too busy reading Catch-22, and trying not to think about the horrible-ness of a plane crashing into a skyscraper. I was sure some people had died.

A woman sitting behind me had miraculously gotten through to her boyfriend on the phone, who was home, watching CNN, and trying to tell her what was going on. The second plane had not hit yet.

She hadn't yet transformed into the correspondent for the entire bus, as she would do, moments later. She was speaking quietly, privately, trying to figure out, with her boyfriend what was going on. "So ... what kind of plane was it? Is anyone hurt? Yeah, well, there's a ton of traffic on the causeway ... we're completely stopped."

Others were engrossed in trying to dial their cell phones. Some people were zoned out as though nothing was out of the ordinary.

As the bus chug-chug-chugged along Washington, towards 14th Street (and the edge of Hoboken), where it would then take a left, and then a right ... to head onto the causeway leading into the Lincoln Tunnel, I dealt with my own sense of "Something's not quite right about this morning" by reading my book.

I remember the whole Catch-22 part of this morning so vividly because that would be the last pleasure-reading that I would do for well over a year to come.

When I finally felt that I could read again (I mean, read a book just for pleasure, and not just read books by Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, Robert Kaplan, and Sandra Mackey) - I picked up Catch-22 again, and tried to figure out where I had left off on that blindingly blue morning. The book suddenly held even more significance than it had before. Catch-22 has always had a mythical glow around it, for me, because of my father's love of it, my uncles' love of it, my friend Rich's love of it... but now ... I picked it up again, and all I could see was the morning of September 11, being stuck on that causeway, before we knew what was happening, what was going to happen, that the world, as we knew it, was about to die.

I went to go pick up where I had left off in the book, feeling ... this deep sense of oddness inside me. "Where I had left off in the book" meant: Where people started screaming and we saw a pillar of flame in the sky ... That was when I put down my book. For good. Or, at least, for a year.

I hadn't remembered where I left off, so I figured it out through deductive reasoning along these lines: "Okay, so I remember the episode described in THIS chapter, so I clearly read THIS ..." (flip ahead) "Okay, I KNOW I didn't read THIS episode, none of it looks familiar, so I must have stopped before THIS ..." (flip back) And in this way I finally narrowed it down to the exact sentence where I put the book down. (I'm freaky like this.)

And, without any unnecessary commentary from me, let me just say, that when I re-read the last paragraph I had read before putting the book down on the morning of September 11, I put the book down and didn't pick it up again for months.

I was not ready. I was not ready to stop reading Bernard Lewis, Robert Kaplan.

And I also was astonished at what I read, at what I had been reading on the bus, having no idea what was coming, having no idea how prophetic it would be, having no idea ... having no idea ...

Chapter 36 The Cellar Nately's death almost killed the chaplain. Chaplain Shipman was seated in his tent, laboring over his paperwork in his reading spectacles, when his phone rang and news of the mid-air collision was given to him from the field. His insides turned at once to dry clay. His hand was trembling as he put the phone down. His other hand began trembling. The disaster was too immense to contemplate. Twelve men killed -- how ghastly, how very, very awful! His feeling of terror grew. He prayed instinctively that Yossarian, Nately, Hungry Joe and his other friends would not be listed among the victims, then berated himself repentantly, for to pray for their safety was to pray for the death of other young men he did not even know. It was too late to pray; yet that was all he knew how to do. His heart was pounding with a noise that seemed to be coming from somewhere outside, and he knew he would never sit in a dentist's chair again, never glance at a surgical tool, never witness an automobile accident or hear a voice shout at night, without experiencing the same violent thumping in his chest and dreading that he was going to die. He would never watch another fist fight without fearing he was going to faint and crack his skull open on the pavement or suffer a fatal heart attack or cerebral hemorrhage. He wondered if he would ever see his wife again or his three small children. He wondered if he ever should see his wife again, now that Captain Black had planted in his mind such strong doubts about the fidelity and character of all women. There were so many other men, he felt, who could prove more satisfying to her sexually. When he thought of death now, he always thought of his wife, and when he thought of his wife he always thought of losing her.

It was at this moment that the bus filled up with screams. An explosion had filled the air behind us. The second plane.

Screams. Hysteria. The girl, already on an open phone line with her boyfriend, elected herself liaison, so she stood up and started hollering out to all of us, what her boyfriend was saying, her boyfriend watching CNN:

"That was a second plane --- a second plane -- My boyfriend said a second plane just flew into the other tower."

This is when, for the first time, I thought of my sister. Who worked a block away from the towers, which were now both on fire. Black smoke was filling the air. Screams through the bus. Panic. People were jumping up and down. Crying. Screaming with frustration at how their phones would not work.

It seemed 5 million years ago since I had categorized the unknown magnitude in my mind as "a JFK Jr. Situation". Obviously, America was under attack.

But all the other stuff, all the stuff I live with on a daily basis now (the rage, the foreign policy perspective, the interest in global happenings, the voracious hunger for knowledge) - none of that stuff was going through my mind. I was just trying to call my sister. My parents. My brother.

And praying.

Dialing. And praying the Hail Mary. Underneath the established prayer, with memorized words, was another prayer.

let siobhan be okay let siobhan be okay let siobhan be okay let siobhan be okay let siobhan be okay let siobhan be okay let siobhan be okay let siobhan be okay let siobhan be okay

And that's enough for today. No more writing.

Posted by sheila