you knew this day was coming

September 11

The dawn light does its work again, tingling my eyelids, stirring me to roll over and face the world through the open hatch of the van. Brian sits as if in meditation, shirtless and cross-legged in the sand, documenting through the camera a solitary meandering crab. Behind him, the cloudless morning sky is colored like the inside curve of a conch.

          The beach is silent but for the whispery sluice of waves. Green umbrellas stand abandoned with matching chairs. Half-bundles of wood are piled on a picnic bench and sand villages dissolve in the receding tide. Two old men, deeply tanned and wrinkled around their little black swim trunks, wade into the gulf with stick-and-string fishing poles. At either periphery I see signs for Tang-o-Mar and Caribe, private beaches for use by residents and guests only; mid-century condominiums rise diagonally beyond them. The warm air is still. Brian has been tracking the sunrise for a half hour in this solitude; his crumpled orange juice box sits on the bumper next to the camera bag.

            I remain in the scene a few moments more, prone on my stomach, chin propped in my palms, tears forming in the burgeoning sun's glare. I ask Brian if we are okay and when he turns and smiles, I grab fresh clothes and walk to the showers. When I return to the van he’s gone, so I take my own juice box down to the water’s edge where I watch my toes disappear in the slurping mud. Sandpipers join me. Then Brian, back from his shower, sidles up, grabs my hand and tugs. We walk west up the beach, the rising light against our backs, fingers entwined, quiet. Okay, we will start again today. It’s a short walk, and before 8am we’re pulling out of Destin’s resplendent campground and heading further away from the sun. 

 

            On Highway 98 I get re-snagged in the current of the swim-wear superstores: high yellow walls with huge windows obscured by giant wire bins of inner tubes and boogie boards. They are open already, because any sunlit hour is a consumer opportunity here on the endless summer coast. Brian feels my longing looks, and must be committed to the morning theme of peace offering.

            “Shopping before breakfast?” he asks.

            “Why not!” I squeak. “We’re crazy road-trippers like that. And I really do need a new bikini.”

            Inside, the cavernous store is crammed with beach or poolside gear from floor to 20-foot ceiling. Long grabbing contraptions lean against the walls. The sales counter is camouflaged by accessories; I only notice it when I hear the bored banter, thick with Australian accent, coming from the salesgirls. There's no one else in the store. As we wander aimlessly, fingering sleeves and price tags, one of the girls approaches.

            “Help ya find anything?”

            “Just looking," I respond automatically.

            “Well, the boy’s things are on this side,” she raises her arm in one direction, “and ladies are over here," other arm goes up the opposite way. Brian and I separate as directed and Sheila retreats back behind her counter. I pull several suits from the racks and then replace them, not moved to try anything on. Radio noise buzzes from invisible speakers. The morning show hosts sound confused, talking about whether or not a plane has crashed somewhere. I look up to locate Brian, miles away, inspecting a shirt with red waves rolling across the front. I can’t help smiling at his engagement with this activity; after everything, I can’t wait to be in New Orleans with him, where there will be so much stimuli and mapped out space that surely nothing can go wrong. As I watch him pick up another shirt, I hear one radio guy say something about the World Trade Center. 

            The Australian voices, though muted, seem to grow less bored. I work my way toward them, to the end of my circuit, knowing I will not leave this superstore with a souvenir. I’m reaching for a mental picture of the World Trade Center. New York? I wonder, feeling geographically closer to that dream city than I ever have. I make out the other radio guy saying “tower.” Yes, the twin obelisks of the Manhattan skyline appear in my mind's eye. The salesgirls are looking at me. It’s like they’re even talking about me, aware of something I am not, unabashedly dissecting it right in front of me.

            “Nothing to buy?” Brian asks, suddenly beside me.

            “Nope,” I smile at him, “you?”

            “Nope. I’m hungry.”

            “Okay.” We head out. The girls are still looking at us and whispering, and as I push against the glass door I clearly hear the radio voice say “…plane flew into the tower.”

            In the van, Brian pauses with his hand on the ignition key. 

            “Did you hear that in there?”

            “Kind of.” I cock my head, as if still trying to hear. “Did something happen?”

            “The guy said some pilot accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.”

            “Jesus, that seems like a weird mistake,” I say, but I’m only thinking of a toy plane and a toy skyscraper.

            “Yeah…I wonder…” He turns on the radio, then leaves the parking lot and speeds up in the right lane, westbound. We listen to the same morning talkers we heard in the store, now speculating about why both towers of the World Trade Center are on fire.

            “Two planes?” Brian asks, turning up the volume. 

            The radio responds. “A second commercial airliner has crashed into the South Tower, that’s confirmed. Does this sound like terrorism?” one host asks the other.

            “Oh shit,” Brian answers in a low tone.

            “What, on purpose?” I’m staring at the radio, “Crashed into buildings, what is that?” These hosts don’t know, so I twirl the dial in search of a more confident voice.

            “There’s a Krispy Kreme,” says Brian, slowing down. “I’m going to get us some food and see if they know what’s going on.”  I’m not exactly sure how this makes sense; I’ve forgotten I was hungry a minute ago, but he’s parked and out the door before I can look up. He’s left the van running, so I lean towards the radio, and now I’ve got four guys in a booth somewhere making references to War of the Worlds. One of the guys is identified as CNN’s call-in expert, and explains to the others that this is unquestionably a terrorist act, as if he’s not at all surprised. Then another cuts in and says he’s just gotten word that the FAA has closed down every airport in New York.

            “What?!” The edges of my mental geography are expanding again, with me a tiny speck stranded in the middle. The guy adds that the crashed planes are American and United Airlines. I see the passengers on them, still flying above me. Brian opens the van door and puts a bag of donuts in my lap. 

            “There were a bunch of people just sitting in there. I told the cashier to turn on the news.”         

            The radio is filtering us reports of mayhem in the Manhattan streets. “It was regular planes,” I tell him. “From Boston; they say hijackers…?”

            “Okay. I think I’m going to fill up the tank.”

            “It’s not even half empty.” But three minutes more down the road we stop at a Texaco. As Brian pumps the gas, I pass the report to him through the window that the President has confirmed the terrorism theory and shut down every airport in the country. I’m finally listening to a DJ who sounds sufficiently concerned about what she is saying. Brian goes into the store and returns with $400 in cash, the maximum daily ATM withdrawal.

            “That serious?” I plead with him as he starts to drive again “God, where are we? How are we going to get home?” My eyes go to the cell phone, sitting in the shift cradle between us. I grab it and dial my mom. The sound on the other end is the universal busy signal, the emergency pulse of all connecting lines overloaded. Everyone everywhere is trying to reach each other; and the sound of this surge hits the first level of palpable fear in my stomach. I toss the bag of donuts behind me. And then the frightened lady DJ says a plane just flew into the Pentagon. I look at Brian to gauge the magnitude of this. 

            “I think we’re in trouble,” he shakes out. 

            “Jesus Christ, isn’t the Pentagon, like, the center of all our defense… everything?” Hot tears break. Through them I see the blurry sign for Pensacola, two miles. A vision of Pearl Harbor in flames. “Please get us away from this military base, Honey.”

            “Right,” he says, and presses down to 80 miles an hour. The road is all ours. We speed along without speaking, spinning through the radio stations—none of which are still playing music—listening to details trickle through various strained voices. Details about the Pentagon and White House evacuating, Bush leaving Florida (how strange that he’s right here), passenger numbers from the crashed flights, cops and firemen from all over New York flooding into the Twin Towers, workers trapped on high floors jumping out the windows. I’m crying pretty hard now, shaking my head reflexively, picturing the Statue of Liberty, the Space Needle, the Golden Gate, the Sears Tower, Mt. Rushmore, the Vegas strip, all fire-bombed while we drive down the road. Then, as we approach the Alabama state line, the radio describes the South Tower of the World Trade Center dissolving a hundred stories into the ground.

            Something wrenches sideways inside me, “I have to stop.”

            “What?” Brian's staring straight ahead at his own ghastly images on the road.

            “At that McDonalds up there, okay?” 

            Inside the restaurant I stagger at the sight of families munching McMuffins, clueless. The news has somehow been no part of their day so far. I make it to the bathroom and throw up, painfully, as it’s little more than last night’s carrots. I stand and press my forehead against the cool metal of the stall door. I wait a few minutes to make sure there’s nothing more coming up, then wash out my mouth and douse my hot face at the sink. Back among the diners I scream “Get out of here!” but only in my head.

            In the zipped-up air-conditioned van Brian is on the phone; he has reached his mom. She describes what chaotic Manhattan looks like from the Today Show, and the charred gash in the Pentagon, and she asks her son how there can be so much evil in the world. She tells him to get to his aunt’s house in Gulf Shores, as planned, and not to worry. She has a more heartening grasp on how far this can actually go. He hangs up and leans over to me, hugging me close.

            “We’re gonna be okay,” he says into my hair. “Are you okay?”

            I look at him hard. “I’m glad we're together.” 

            We blast out of the Sunshine State, and hear that a fourth plane has crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Even at this speculative stage, it is accepted, by the radio at least, that its target was the White House. The fact that it missed that target is advertised as the best thing that’s happened all morning. Then the other Trade Center Tower falls down. 

            As soon as the buildings are both gone and the ash billows up in their place, it makes sense to me that that’s what would happen to something if a plane flew through it. But for the preceding hour, reason had not been at work at all. It was too surreal to be anything but theory, just metal twisted wrongly into more metal. There was no complicated infrastructure, no hundreds of obliterated bodies strewn horrifically through the tangled sky, no massive fuel and debris fire raging toward your cubicle, no absolute inability to escape, no reason not to charge up the stairs to guide people out. But now the central figures of the American skyline are nothing but toxic brown dust barreling through the narrow streets, and everything that was inside them has to be utterly gone. An unbearable amount of lives destroyed, on a Tuesday morning, while I putter along the Gulf of Mexico.

            Finally my mother’s sleepy voice is there on the other side of the phone, across the time zones, to reassure me that my own world in Washington is still in order, still safe, maybe the last safe place on the far forgotten brink of the country. She says yes, she’s watching the news, they woke up to it twenty minutes ago. Am I okay? Don’t panic. Where am I? She thinks it’s over, whatever that means. She wishes I was with her, but we’ll get home eventually. I’ll call her back when we get to New Orleans. What else can we do but still go, if this has happened anyway and our own life is somehow relatively intact.             

 

             So we drive for another hour, into the southern tip of Alabama. It looks as I expected it to: watery, run down, dense with undergrowth and overhang. Sparsely peopled, it looks as if nothing has happened to the north this morning, or as if no one would know if anything did. When the privation takes on a suburban sheen, we have reached the “resort” of Gulf Shores: a series of short cul-de-sacs along a wisp of isthmus, filled with homogenous condos on hurricane stilts, each with its own dock and skiff. Brian follows Uncle Don's scribbled directions to his aunt’s place and when we find it, we park under the landing stairs.

            “I don’t really understand what’s going on;” I say, “what are we doing?”

            “I don’t know.” He rubs his eyes. “At least we can see some TV; I’m sure they’re watching it.”

            Indeed they are, but not with much urgency. Aunt Donna is sitting at the dining table doing a crossword puzzle and Don is watching from behind the kitchen counter, where he plops ice into a tall glass of 7up. They give us cursory, it’s-good-to-see-you-kids hugs, not the desperate clutches we might expect from our elders today. We accept 7ups of our own and kneel on the carpet in front of the television. 

            It’s 11am Central Time, but Katie Couric and Matt Lauer are still on, delivering updates from the spartan desk in the gray studio where the serious news happens. They cut to all kinds of people on the street: dusty NYC pedestrians, Red Cross workers, DC firemen, Somerset County sheriffs and forensics experts. It’s all sirens and wails. In the background they loop clips of Mayor Giuliani and President Bush offering impassioned remarks on their way to safe locations, but mostly they keep coming back to the shots of the towers burning.

            “God awful,” Donna mutters intermittently; “Just terrible.” 

            And I’m thinking, I guess. In a bright flash I comprehend the meaning of the term desensitization, and how comfortably my generation is built upon it. I watched the Challenger explode on a TV wheeled into my 7^th grade chemistry lab. Los Angeles erupted in violent riots on the miniature Sony in my college dorm room, and the Oklahoma Federal Building collapsed on the pull-down movie screen in a fraternity house between my classes. I’ve seen Joe Theismann’s fractured femur punch through his skin a dozen times, and that grainy footage of Jackie crawling over the back of the convertible to retrieve JKF's brains is practically a cartoon to me. But listening blindly all morning to the unfolding details of the hijackers’ damage was sheer horror, my mind could run away with it, and it ran all the way to apocalypse. Now, thanks to the magic of television, it’s just a plain old picture contained in a box. A shadow of a doll falling carelessly out a window. It’s manageable. It makes me even sicker.

            “So, you guys ready for some lunch?” Donna asks.

            “We’re gonna take ya to my favorite place, Brian,” Don teases, “Lambert’s!  With tha throwed rolls, ‘member?”

            “Oh wow,” Brian rises from the floor, dazed.

            “First a picture of you kids, out on the porch.” Donna already has her camera in hand. We smile stiffly for her. Guided beyond our own will, we crawl into the sauna back seat of her Cadillac and head for the acclaimed restaurant. 

            Brian manages the small talk on the way into town. I stare out the window at the low swaying trees that separate the Home Depot from the Borders Books from the Old Navy, etc. The parking lot at Lambert’s is full, but the vast interior of the restaurant has one empty table for us. The rest are occupied by large parties, most with children who gurgle and squeal at the suffocating memorabilia strewn across the wood-paneled walls, and at the messy plates in front of them. When our waiter arrives, Donna is all business.

            “Okra for us, and four sweet teas,” she instructs.

            “Yes Ma’am.” The peppy waiter smiles. How did he come to work today? How does he return moments later to spread a thick paper towel over the middle of our table and toss down dozens of greasy okra from a big silver bowl with his tongs? How does Uncle Don so carelessly dig right in? I gulp my tea and kick Brian under the table.

            “I guess I’ll get the frog legs,” he announces, sounding like he’s stoned, “why not?”

            “Eeewww,” says Don, and then, “Hey!” He turns and looks over the booth behind him. “Over here!” Into his raised hands flies a hot roll. Donna grabs the next one, and a third lands steaming in her lap. Our waiter is gleefully tonging them all over the room. More squeals from the children. I have entered another dimension.

            I pick at a plate of catfish while Brian bravely munches his frog legs, and his relatives undertake a platter of fried chicken. The rolls are the least irritating thing to my pallet so I get a few more thrown our way. By one o'clock it’s over. Back in the caddy, back to the condo, back into the bathroom for another splash of water with the TV murmuring morbidly in the background, and it’s clear that we must move on. Donna finally shows concern.

            “Are ya sure? You kids could sure stay here tonight and see what happens, plenty of room. We’re gonna take the boat out tomorrow…”

            “Thanks, no, we want to get to New Orleans. We have a hotel, we’ll be fine.” 

            In the haven of the van we are, in fact, whatever fine can be at this point. We understand each other in here; it is our stuffy, reliable life raft drifting through the blank dark of outer space. It carries us out of Alabama’s lowest, uncultivated country and back up to Highway 10.

            “There’s Mobile.” I tell Brian, as we pass the tallest buildings we’ve seen today. But he is listening to the radio.

            “…international flights have been diverted.” A deadpan voice drones. “Transportation Secretary Mineta has directed the Federal Aviation Administration to suspend operations until at least noon tomorrow. He has also issued orders controlling movement of all vessels in United States navigable waters…” 

            We hear details of the four doomed flights, the collapse of smaller buildings in New York City, the status of the vice president, tucked away in a secret bunker, and the president, coasting around in Air Force One preparing to address the nation tonight. Guest callers discuss the background and motive of the hijackers and the possible extent of the damage they’ve done. The local DJs advise their listeners to take the afternoon off to be with their families, fill up on gas and maybe emergency supplies and stay safe at home to ride this out. We drive into our eighth state of the trip.

            “There’s Biloxi.” I say.

            “The Federal Emergency Management Agency has activated eight urban search and rescue forces in New York and four of these highly trained teams are at work in DC at the Pentagon…” says the radio.

            And our eighth state is almost behind us. Before the Louisiana border, at an exit called D’Iberville, I ask for another break.

            “There’s a Dairy Queen.”

            Brian pulls off and parks at the red-roofed shack. We each get a chocolate dipped cone, and though it is comfortably air-conditioned inside, we eat them out in the parking lot. The soft serve vanilla runs through the chocolate cracks faster than our tongues can chase it in the 95º shade. Across the street at the Chevron there's a long line of cars at every pump, snaking all over the lot and across the curb. Because we were camping, restless, up and on wheels at dawn, we’re past all this. We’re eating ice cream.  When it’s nothing but gooey napkins we lean into each other, against the van, holding on.

            “Never mind last night,” Brian says at my ear, “or any of that shit. I love you. We’re going underground now. I’m taking you to the Big Easy and we’re going to get drunk.”

            “Okay.”

            Coming upon New Orleans is (not surprisingly by now) a surprise. I wasn’t prepared for an actual city, with skyscrapers viewable through the film of smog. But there it is, and streaming both into it and out of it, across the bridge that connects the bayou to the civilized world over Lake Pontchartrain, is a throng of traffic. We’ve arrived at rush hour and not many people have taken the “leave early” advice of their DJs.

            “This is the worst traffic we’ve seen,” says Brian as we crawl over the bridge.

            “Except for that North Carolina stuff.”

            “That was South Carolina, if you’re talking about Hilton Head.”

            “I was talking about Winston-Salem.” I surely never thought traffic comparisons would be a part of our travelogue.

            “Oh yeah; that was bad too. But this is sick.”

            “Looks kind of like downtown LA again, with all that haze in the background, all these cars, all these interchanges.”           

            "I guess the deal is, a hot city looks like a hot city."

            At the end of the bridge, most of the cars around us exit into suburbs while we continue through the narrowing streets that lead to the French Quarter. They are adorned with withered storefronts, gothic churches and crowded graveyards I remember wanting to explore. As the sun sinks behind the unbroken line of buildings, an alluring flavor grows over them—rhubarb brick, vanilla shutters, licorice iron railings, baskets of bougainvillea and ivy bursting over the balconies. Everything is rounded at the corners; the streets become cobbled. Just before we are back on the bank of the Mississippi River, at Decatur Street, we see the French Market Inn, and everything is now what I imagined it would be, except real.

            After unloading me and the bags on the sidewalk in front, Brian tucks the van into the underground garage for three days. What a concept. As in Savannah, we can walk or get public transport to anywhere worth going from this prime location. I’m already bewitched by the fishy smell of the river, the sloshing at the docks, and the clanking of the trolley that will float up into our bedroom window at night. The trip is not ruined, even though the world might be.

            The diminutive lobby of the inn is plush red with century-old fixtures and moldings, and with our room key comes a card promising us each one free drink in the bar at happy hour, and continental breakfast in the courtyard. Behind the lobby is that courtyard, where fountains murmur and vines thread over the brick walls, birds twitter in the birch trees and someone reads the newspaper at one of the many bistro tables. We look up at the criss-crossing stairways and curtained windows that surround us, and find our room on the third floor. 

            The room is less than perfect. In fact, I don’t think I can stand it. An enormous dark suite, with an enormous bed against an enormous velvet headboard, flanked by dark oak tables. A TV sits on a gothic dresser far away, and around the corner, beyond the mirrored wardrobe that doubles the gaping space, is the bathroom, enormous and glowing pallid yellow. Somebody would appreciate this room as luxurious, somebody Southern or French maybe, or a vampire. Under the circumstances it scares me—too much dark dead space. Everything about the day, the night to come, the morning to wake to, rattles inside me; my heart somersaults. I don’t want to get dizzy, but I don’t want to lay down on this bed or its taught shimmery coverlet. I don’t want to have a panic attack in this room.

            Brian is fighting to get the safe in the closet open so he can stow all his cash in it. Something about the buttons keeps tripping him up. I sit down and press two finger pads into the side of my neck. The pace of the thump there is not consoling. “I don’t think I can do this.”

            “What?”

            I cower with my fingers still imploring my pulse. “Do you like this room? It’s really big and dark. Isn’t it weird compared to the rest of the place?” Fix it, Brian. You did it on Tybee and in Destin; do it again.            

            “Are you kidding?” He’s finally got the safe figured out but easily transfers the frustration. “What did you think it would look like? It’s OLD.” His fuming justifies my disgust with the atmosphere. I simmer in it for a good fifteen minutes, perched motionless on the edge of the endless bed, measuring my breath, while he paces around the bathroom, fumbles with the TV, changes clothes. He looks no more comfortable than I am, so I insist.

            “Is it that big a hassle do you think, to just see if there’s another room?”

            Instead of replying, he simply picks up the phone and dials downstairs. Of course it’s not a hassle. It’s a blistering Tuesday six months out of Mardi Gras and the northeast has just been annihilated; there’s hardly anyone here. The hotel wants to make those of us who are here as comfortable as possible. 

            A boy in a red velvet suit arrives, grabs my bag, trades keys with Brian and leads us down the outside corridor to a smaller room. It’s still dark, with oak accents in the beams that stripe the low ceiling, but it’s snug. From the double bed, with its much softer and pinker quilt, I can reach the TV, the dresser drawers and the window, and it’s four steps to the bathroom, which has a wallpaper border of blue fleur-de-lis. Okay, I’m going to be okay.          

            “Thank you,” I say very sincerely to Brian when the bellhop is gone. The room was not his fault, the panic attack was not him attacking.  A light bulb begins to sizzle over my head, and I see that we each have to take care of ourselves first if we are going to take care of each other. Had I walked in and immediately walked out to request another room myself, we may not have missed a step. “Don’t you like this one better?”

            “Yes,” he sighs, “I like it better. But Dear God I’m ready for a drink.”

            We get our free ones first, in the bar downstairs, which is more like a liquor closet with a window. We strain stale-tasting vodka tonics through our teeth, then try two slightly better screwdrivers, then slip back up to our room to see what George Bush Jr. has to tell the nation. He tells us a bad thing happened and we’re gonna get whoever did it. We’re gonna pray and we’re gonna kick ass. When he’s finished, it’s time to explore the neighborhood. 

 

            Next to our Market Inn are four stores in a row with wide open fronts, each stocked with feather boas, beads, bedazzled masks, and other clichéd merchandise. All four stores look exactly the same; the racks rolled out to the sidewalk showcase the exact same boas and beads. Why are there four separate stores? What kind of logic determines which one makes the sale, especially for the unfortunate two in the middle? Maybe I’ll find out from my own experience, if I can’t leave town without some plastic memento to prove I was here. But not tonight. The fifth store sells antiques, has a regular door in front, and looks interesting. The lights are out though, and a handwritten note on a scrap of paper has been taped to the door’s glass pane:                                

closed for now

what a terrible day.

            “No shit,” affirms Brian. The sign is soothing in a way; we may no longer be in another roll-throwing dimension.

            The sun has set and my skin is still sticky. We walk to the Crescent City Brewery and decide to sit and consider eating. The pub is crowded with younger people than we’ve seen assembled together anywhere in eleven days. Everyone is drinking pints and discussing with gusto this morning’s mayhem. I catch bits of conversation involving the stock market, the Middle East, and stealth fighter jets. There are several TVs over the bar tuned to news. On one of them a woman is talking about her husband, who called her on his cell phone before his plane crashed in Pennsylvania. She’s telling a reporter that her husband knew what was happening and he was going to try and stop it. For some reason she’s not crying, but I could at any moment. I order a bowl of chowder and a glass of chardonnay. Brian tries two different beers. 

            I eat half the chowder in baby spoonfulls, thinking about what a good day it is for Gary Condit, the scandalized congressman whose possible murder of his aid, Chandra Levy, has been the top story for months. I wonder what else happened today that would have normally taken up all the news time. So much for the Summer of the Shark. As the CNN segment wraps up, I hear a song coming from the TV that I’ve only ever heard coming out of Brian’s SUV on the Fourth of July.

            “Ha!” he says swallowing the last of his beer, “Lee Greenwood. Let the American pride begin. More wine?"

            “I don’t think so.” I’m already light-headed.

            “Then let’s go to bed.”

            “Yeah.”

            Brian puts one more pint glass on the bill, for the collection clinking in the depths of his duffel bag. We walk the three blocks back to the hotel without stopping. I like our room even better when we return to it—the curtains do puff in with a river-laced breeze, and the sound of rogue partiers drifts up from the street. Under only the sheet, we snuggle in tight and flip through a little more TV. It will be a steady trickle of new information all night, focused on how many miracles might happen tomorrow.

            “Thanks for the new room,” I say.                                         

            “Thanks for being with me.”

            “Yeah.”