I was asleep Sept. 11 when the telephone rang and a friend said, “Turn on your television,” then hung up. It was the terrorist attack on New York City, certainly a mind-boggling act of violence, and for me this has been a solemn week, a grave week.
People are bouncing off the walls, making wild pronouncements, declaring war against an unknown enemy. President Bush was in New York hugging firemen, looking animated, no, looking manic. The nation has been energized in the worst way through panic.
Panic is no stranger to me. I lost someone dear quite suddenly in 1989, and for a long while my world was as chaotic on the inside as New York’s is on the outside. The hospital called and told me he had been in an accident, that he was in stable condition, but that it was quite necessary for me to come. It sounded fishy.
Not wanting to know, I fussed at my friend in my mind for being so careless. But as I got closer to the hospital, the layers of my mind began to peel like an onion, and I began to know, to understand, what I had refused to accept a half-hour before: The person I had loved for 10 years was dead.
I was met at the door of the emergency room by a nun with a large crucifix. I saw her like a cubist would see her, as if there were three of her at once at different angles. I knew then. I picked up a sofa in her office and threw it at the wall.
After the bubble of denial burst, I was angry, ablaze at everyone and everything in my path. The overriding emotion was panic, though. I was too afraid to stop, too afraid to sit down.
I lived in another place then, and I walked the streets of that small river city, watching men hunched over fishing poles, way down on the shore, the fog closing in on all of us. I remember watching a tug push barges of coals. Sometimes the river was choppy when one the big barges rippled the surface; it left no mark on the river, though, which rolled on serenely, indestructible as a redwood tree.
I took my little dog, Hoosier, with me on those walks. When she got tired, I carried her, having conversations with her as if she could talk like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I kept up both ends of the conversation. I usually carried a sharp pair of scissors in my pocket, but people never bothered me much. I have read somewhere that Indians left crazy people alone, and my obvious disorientation was like a shield around me.
During that time, too, I kept thinking, what if he’d escaped, what part of myself would I be willing to sacrifice. Like the tons of people leaving for Manhattan to help the firemen remove the wreckage, I was bargaining with fate. If enough of them go, will it lessen the pain? If we give enough money, will it make up for the fact that we’re alive? If we put enough security in our airports, will we feel safe?
When one bad thing happens, something equally horrible tends to follow. After my friend’s death, just a few months after, in fact, I learned my father had inoperable cancer. Then three musicians I had played with for years died, and I found myself in the strange position of having outlived my band.
I wasn’t wise enough then, and I numbed myself to one funeral after another. I had no clue about the other side of the tapestry, the part where you could see how things are made, where the knots are tightest, the borders weakest. Madness, panic and chaos reigned.
For a long time after my friend’s death, I was in no condition to make any kinds of decisions. Some days I didn’t get out of bed at all. Other days, I had the energy of 10 women. One day a few months later, I sat down and drew up a plan for myself, followed it and broke through to the other side.
I heard on one news report about the Sept. 11 events that the United States “didn’t have the stomach” for the kind of war this will be. My mother reminded me of mighty kingdoms being excavated by archeologists, whole magnificent civilizations buried in the sand.
Another person asked me, “Do you even remember what happened before Tuesday?” Yes, I do, but it’s the distant past now. Anything I was writing, anything I was reading became passé in the space of two hours.
When I went out the afternoon of Sept. 11 to walk my dog, Sister, we stopped at the red light at 13th and Sycamore streets, and I saw the profile of an old black man in a pick-up truck. His face looked ashen, his cheeks sunken, his skin looked as soft as fine leather.
I smiled at him, though he didn’t see me, and I waved at the woman standing outside the door of the School for the Creative and Performing Arts. She waved back. I said hello to her as if she were a long lost friend.
It could have been us, I thought. It could have been me. ©
This article appears in Sep 26 – Oct 2, 2001.