15

To Dream on the Ship of Sorrows

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION TITANIC XIII

Sometime between the post–dive 7 debriefing and Georgyj Vinogradov's 3 a.m. visit to the bio lab, another one of the Russian biologists found me at work on something that, puzzling though it might have seemed, I simply thought should be done.

I was carefully cleaning what had by now come to be called the two Titanic crosses: the boat 8 railing and the davit bitt. Days earlier, Lori Johnston and I had stripped them completely of their rusticle roots, and I was carefully cleaning and oiling the two crosses for their return to the portside boat deck. Wherever the metal allowed it, I tried to make their surfaces appear shiny and new.

The other Russian scientist, like Vinogradov, thought I should be in my cabin resting; he added that there was no apparent “use or purpose” for what I was doing.

“Why this?” he asked.

I did not know why. I said that I simply wanted to return something to the Titanic in better condition than we found it. He nodded and said that he understood.

There was no way of guessing, between 2 and 3 a.m., the weight of time and coincidence in the heft of a rope from the boat 8 davit bitt as I draped it around the shoulders of its cross. There was no way of knowing that in just a few days, journalist Rip MacKenzie would be e-mailing me photographs of a Franciscan chaplain standing with a group of firefighters and recovery workers beneath a steel cross (with a sheet of aluminum down-blasted over one shoulder to resemble a shroudlike piece of cloth), atop a place that would briefly be called Ground Zero Hill.

Recalling what a Russian scientist had said many days earlier about two Titanic crosses and a third cross coming, MacKenzie captioned the photo, “Here's your third cross.”

About 3:30 a.m. Titanic time, I stepped out of the lab onto the portside deck and looked up at the stars. In the past few nights there seemed to have been more bright meteors than usual, including the occasional smoke trailer and spark thrower.

Either one found boredom out here or one found peace. For me, the middle of the ocean was incomparable peace.

Under the meteor shower, as the line of shadow that bisected Turkey and Egypt retreated toward us from the east, my cousin Donna Clarke was still peacefully asleep in New York City. She had shared some tears with our Aunt Hannah earlier that night, a bit worried (in a superstitious sense) that her thirties were almost at an end. Donna “knew” from childhood that she would not see age forty.

Donna's sister, Sharon, was autistic and, like many in our family, did not always follow a regular pattern of sleep. Sharon's thoughts this night were mainly about the classes she would be taking, one by one, toward her bachelor's degree in journalism. When we were children, we communicated through sand castles that grew to become cities as well as through drawings—entire homemade comic books of drawings. In 2001, Sharon had an eerie picture in her head of Donna sitting on a hand-hewn wooden bench, laughing and at peace with my mother, who had passed away from leukemia just hours before the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Captain Paddy Brown often went to sleep about this time. To his friends he was known as “brother, student, teacher, Sensei, Marine.” In New York he fought what he called “the little red devil”—sometimes with such ferocious bravery that on many a day the Fire Department of New York's battalion leaders were unsure whether to pin a medal on him or bust him down a rank or two.

In the end, they assigned Paddy to the firehouse on 13th Street. He hammered together a heavy teak bench, placed it on the sidewalk in front of the firehouse, and decided, “There's no better place to be than with 3 Truck.”

Like most in his profession, Paddy was required to be part chemist, part structural engineer, and part psychologist. For a while, he had competed for command of the city's amphibious unit, Rescue 1, because he was just crazy enough for the job and was also “part fish.”

Few people had followed Robert Ballard's first submersible landings on the Titanic with greater intensity. Paddy was not merely curious about rusticles, hydrothermal vents, and the idea that the robots of the deep might be pointing the path to finding similar life under the ice of Saturn's moons Enceladus or Titan; he understood the wilderness into which science and technology were struggling to open new doors. He was also, as one close friend phrased it, “the only person I have ever encountered who could be profound by saying ‘kinda' and ‘sorta' and ‘you know?'” The robots Argo and Jake were the actual ancestors of deep space probes, and that was “really kinda cool” in Paddy's universe.

A friend had described him as “bouncing with excitement” one day as he showed off the new thermal imaging equipment that allowed him to peer through dense smoke and, for the first time, to actually see the red devil. “I never knew this was so dangerous!” he said, and laughed.

On that last night, as the line of daylight crept toward the Keldysh and New York, there were now enough moments for Paddy to look back on and call, “Kinda beautiful, you know?” He had recently helped fellow Ladder 3 firefighter Jeff Giordano carry a young woman out of a 13th Street fire. They tried twice to resuscitate her, but she remained flatlined each time.

“Keep going,” Paddy commanded, and they tried again. And again. And again.

“And then Paddy saw it,” his friend explained later. “That most beautiful sight—the light of life coming back into Jessica Rubenstein's eyes.”

“I just keep seeing those eyes,” Paddy would often say.

For years to come, I would just keep seeing the unusually clear and calm, meteor-filled predawn sky of September 11, 2001. At 3:30 a.m. Titanic time, it was just past 2 a.m. in New York. In only a few hours, Paddy would be performing his yoga and meditation exercises before getting into his daily fight with his coffee machine. The very same man who knew how to tweak the new infrared sensing equipment, who could perform undersea rescues, and who had made a point of learning exactly how to secure the emergency thrusters if the president's helicopter should crash could not get his coffee machine or his cell phone to work. He kept a more reliable landline Mickey Mouse phone at his desk.

• • •

The question “How much does darkness weigh?” led to an e-mail conference that spread almost from pole to pole, and Rip MacKenzie, Roy Cullimore, and I had eventually come around to addressing humanity's dark half. One day, someone asked, “If you were God, how would you set up justice in the universe, in terms of life after death?” If one was permitted to speculate on the subject of justice in the universe, then the idea that our present existence was merely the most recent cusp within an infinite (and possibly identical) series of cosmic expansions and contractions held a certain poetic attraction.

Justice, for me, would be for every person to live the lives of everyone else whose lives they had touched. “Mother Teresa is eventually on the enlightened, receiving end of the lives she has touched,” I explained, “and especially those who were transformed by her to spread forth into the lives of others two simple commandments of mercy and kindness.”

I did believe that in a just universe, the truly evil mind, which throughout life drew a malicious joy from the infliction of misfortune upon others, would, during the moments between dying and death, stretch time to its outermost limits and create its own eternal punishment. In such a universe, I wrote, Timothy McVeigh, the architect of the Oklahoma City bombing, after experiencing the suffering of his victims, might be reborn somewhere in the world every few seconds, fully sentient of his fate, as a cockroach about to be stepped on. “Would it really be enough for him to experience the last moments of pain he inflicted on every man, woman, and child he murdered?” I asked Cullimore and MacKenzie.

My just universe gave Cullimore the shivers. He warned that I needed to be more careful, because “Evil has a way of worming its way into the hearts of good people, turning them toward the furies of anger and vengeance.” He emphasized that the good were evil's golden ships.

• • •

Sometime after 3:30 a.m., I went to sleep, not very long before the bot team and the camera team started to work. I woke up about 7:30 a.m. to dead calm seas and beautiful blue skies. The Mir meeting was at 8 a.m. sharp.

In Maine, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al Omari lifted off in Portland's nineteen-seat Beech 1900 to fly to their connection at Boston's Logan Airport. Both carried plain shoulder bags. To deflect attention, their hair was cropped short and they were clean-shaven.

Atta's primer, or last manifesto, read, “Remember that which you were told earlier. God says that when you are surrounded by several nonbelievers, you must sit quietly and remember that God will make victory possible for you in the end. . . . Don't give the impression of being confused, instead be strong and happy with confidence because you are engaged in work that pleases God.”

The primer was far removed from what Islam's founding prophet taught, just as the murderous Jim Jones and the burning Ku Klux Klan crosses were far removed from everything Jesus had tried to teach. As daylight crept nearer, the plotters hid themselves and blessed themselves in the shadow of the ancient enemy: humanity's dark, reptilian core, which, as always, held commerce in depths of evil most people could hardly guess at.

At daybreak, three days with a very bad summer cold had changed Mary Leung's usual route to work, via the World Trade Center. Before what would normally have been the morning's quick, jump-start coffee break, two women from Mary's office would be fatally burned by a jet engine crashing down near them, trailing a quarter-mile slipstream of blazing fuel.

At 9:30 a.m. Titanic time, the Mir meeting was over. The launch of the Mir-1 toward the rescue of our bot Elwood was scheduled for 10:30 a.m., with the Mir-2 to follow an hour later. History's first rescue of one robot by another was being eagerly awaited in science classrooms around the world. As an added bonus to this bright and beautiful day, the International Space Station, also with an American and Russian crew, would be passing overhead and making e-mail contact.

Lori Johnston and Lew Abernathy were planning another swim in two and a half miles of water, and this time I would join them, once the second Mir was away.

An hour and a half behind Titanic time, in New York, Paddy Brown arrived at 3 Truck's engine bay and wrote, “0800 Capt Brown RFD [reporting for duty]” in the journal.

Half an hour earlier, at 7:30 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 had prepared to take its position on the Logan Airport runway in Boston. The California-bound Boeing 767 was specifically outfitted with extended-range fuel tanks, for a total capacity of twenty-four thousand gallons. Aboard was Paige Farley-Hackel.

Farley-Hackel was a spiritual adviser and family counselor who had achieved some fame in California with a radio show titled Spiritually Speaking. Before traveling to the East Coast with her best friend, Ruth McCourt, and McCourt's four-year-old daughter, Juliana (who was also Farley-Hackel's goddaughter), Farley-Hackel sent twelve unusual letters to people she counseled, saying, “You're doing well. We've accomplished everything we need to accomplish together.”

Farley-Hackel's letters, according to her mother, Marjorie, had caused some recipients to wonder if she were recently diagnosed with a serious illness; Marjorie assured (then and later) that her daughter did not know anything was going to happen to her. “She had no premonition, just a sense that it was time for them to move on.”

“I'm just like a butterfly, Mom,” Farley-Hackel had said. “So even if anything ever should happen to me, and you see butterflies around, just imagine it's me.”

After the 9/11 attacks, Marjorie planted flowers that were known to attract butterflies. They brought a measure of comfort and closeness, the always present butterflies in “Paige's garden.”

Just before 8 a.m. in the New York and Boston time zone, while Mir-1 was sealed and prepared for hoisting from its bay on a crane, Farley-Hackel could have looked across the runway from her plane to United Airlines Flight 175, where her friend McCourt was on board with Juliana.

Juliana was a “miracle baby.” McCourt had been told it was unlikely that she and her husband would ever be able to have a child. But Juliana was conceived and born perfectly healthy and cheerful.

So far, this had been a morning of what were supposed to be only brief good-byes. McCourt's husband was being delayed in Boston by a new series of business commitments, and he had kissed his wife and his daughter good-bye at the airport. For Juliana's sake, McCourt and Farley-Hackel had taken some of the sting out of the little girl's missing Daddy by promising a visit to Disneyland after they arrived on the West Coast. Then Farley-Hackel had said good-bye and boarded a separate plane in order to take advantage of a frequent-flyer upgrade. The two women planned to meet again at the airport in Los Angeles.

At 7:58 a.m., two minutes before Paddy Brown signed in, and while Mir-1 prepared to hit water, Flight 11 was accelerating down a Logan Airport runway. It was airborne at 7:59 a.m. Flight 175 followed at 8:14, and lifted off at 8:15.

On this morning, the temporary separation, brought about by a frequent-flyer upgrade, meant that Paige Farley-Hackel would die within the same one-fiftieth of a second as my cousin Donna in the North Tower and nearly seventeen minutes before Ruth McCourt and her little girl, Juliana.

• • •

About the time that Flight 175 became airborne, Lori Johnston emerged from the communications shack, and we made sure that the two Titanic crosses were secure in the Mir-2's specimen basket. The Mir-1 was now set for launch in forty-five minutes. The Mir-2 would follow an hour later, and then we would take our two-and-a-half-mile swim. The swim was planned as a sort of decompression break for Johnston, who had spent a particularly long shift in the communications shack, monitoring my dive the day before.

I had volunteered to “take the coms” (the communications desk) after the Mirs were on their way down and give Johnston a long-overdue break. In addition to monitoring my dive, our endless debates about such arcane matters as precisely where, in rusticle biology, a line could be drawn between geochemical structure and truly biological structures, were bound to be tiring even for übergeeks.

I did not feel tired, but I must have been, for I did a rather dumb thing, I can say in hindsight. Scientists collect samples; scientists do not leave them behind. During the last three minutes, before it was time for us to depart the Mir bay, I ran back to the lab and filled a cloth bag with our reference samples of rope and microsamples of “bio-wedged” wrought-iron railing—all of them—and placed the bag in the “return to Titanic” tray.

“No,” Johnston said, but she and Abernathy both saw that my eyes were full of tears. I did not know why. Johnston asked me again about hearing the silent voices, and I did not answer.

We put the bag in the tray with the crosses and sent it down.