30

Ghosts of the Abyss

In the large volcanic crater called Ground Zero, it wasn't just the collision, the collapse, and it's over. There was the aftermath. As Ellen Betty Phillips, Charles Joughin, and Jack Thayer were teaching us all along, the aftermath could be worse.

The mind is a monkey. Time and again, everything came back to a distinctly human way of coping with loss, to unnatural levels of stress, and to primal rage. Perhaps this explained the ghosts.

By coincidence, when I reached the Titanic's stern on September 10, 2001, Mary's friend Paddy Brown was suddenly so much on my mind that it felt as though he were somehow present hours before he died. At home, he left behind a strangely resonant prayer: “When I am gone [exploring], release me, let me go. I have so many things to see and do. And if you need me call, and I will come. Though you can't see me or touch me, I'll be near.”

The mind is a monkey, I kept telling myself—the reason we human beings sometimes see and feel things that are not actually there.

As the World Trade Center surge cloud and shock-cocoon studies came to a close and the rebuilding of Ground Zero began, all of the surviving veterans of Ten-Ten House were retiring or transferring to other firehouses. John Morabito was the sole survivor of the team that went into the North Tower that day. Morabito had survived in one of history's most inexplicable shock cocoons, with the forces diverting completely around him and even levitating him gently on a bed of dust, while people around him disintegrated before his eyes. Many of his fellow firefighters were leaving Ten-Ten House, because they had seen ghostly silhouettes and, occasionally, shockingly vivid images of their old friends appearing and vanishing throughout the building. Morabito was the only one who insisted on staying. “If something of them really has stayed behind,” he said, “then I don't want them to be alone, and I'm staying. They were my friends. They were my brothers.”

• • •

As the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Normandy approached—and as studies of rusticles and a new understanding of volcano physics that began with the Titanic were maturing—my father was fending off lung cancer. He had responded very well to the least invasive spectrum of drugs available, but with time, through a process of natural selection, a tiny minority of immunized cells had survived and begun to multiply. The only chemicals the immunized cells had not seen before were sure to leave Dad with no quality of life and might even kill him outright. He had decided to “let nature follow its course.”

This was also a time in which, during planning discussions for the next Titanic expedition, I began talking about what people claimed they had seen in Ten-Ten House during the months after the towers fell. That's when, very quietly, a few people began talking about having felt or seen similar figments at the Titanic—and especially at the stern. I did not believe that the apparitions were real, but their cause was certainly something to think about.

In late May 2004, I had just finished a filming in the seventeenth-century BC volcanic surge cloud layers of Minoan Thera (more commonly known as the Greek isle of Santorini). Dad was not yet in his second phase of sickness. I was in the process of moving my office into his house for the duration. We were both expecting that he would have at least a couple of months more of reasonably good days.

On the morning of June 1, I had appointments scheduled in New York City. The Thera filming had left me about a week behind schedule, but I was planning to make my rounds and return in the evening.

“Why don't you stick around and we'll go out for lunch?” Dad suggested. He also wanted me to look at three new car models with him.

For a moment, I thought about all of the work I needed to catch up on. Then, within the same moment, I felt (or imagined I felt) two powerful hands shoving my shoulders forcefully from behind. Paddy Brown—again. In the harsh language Brown would have used, I more felt than heard him calling me the worst kind of idiot and saying, “Forget your job. Your father is your job today!”

Perhaps my subconscious mind was able to detect a subtle change in my father's walk, in his breath, or in the way he spoke, and perhaps one's ever vigilant subconscious could put unnoticed clues together to arrive at a conclusion not ordinarily noticed (or wanting to be noticed) by conscious thought. Dad did not have as much time as we believed. I would never have consciously guessed that we had awakened to share the last breakfast of his life.

Perhaps the figment of Paddy Brown was merely my subconscious mind sending up an alarm bell of unfiltered thought, communicating an assessment that something had gone dramatically wrong during the night and that this could be my father's last day. “Perhaps,” most of my family and several of Paddy's friends said, when I explained it to them this way. “And perhaps not.”

One of Paddy's closest friends had explained that he carried a terrible burden—guilt, even—from Vietnam. We spoke at great length about what I thought (or imagined) Paddy tried to teach me at the Titanic's stern; and she (his friend) agreed that whether or not something of Paddy actually had been present down there on September 10, 2001, his “message” saved me from an undeserved burden of guilt. Now it happened a second time.

It is strange to think that I still believe the event was simply a matter of improbable coincidence. I remind myself again and again that every hand is as improbable as a royal flush. And if there are nearly seven billion people on the planet, then even the most unlikely coincidences are bound to pile up around at least a few of us. It's certain to happen, given enough people. Everything else is illusion. Yet strangest of all is to think that if what happened at the stern in 2001 had not recurred in my father's kitchen in 2004 and changed the direction of my plans for the day, I'd have carried, for the rest of my life, an unfathomable guilt for missing that last wonderful day with my father.

I do not know for certain that a subconscious perception was sent up to the front of my brain as a warning wrapped in the memory of a firefighter I never really knew. Although I have to admit that the quantum universe and cosmology are teaching us every day that we do not yet have all the science, the “evidence” of personal experience is a nonreproducible result, and scientifically, it at best provides an insight into how human minds react to the level of stress known to have generated the old expression “There are no atheists in a foxhole.”

All I can say, Paddy, is this: whether you were simply the memory of someone I wished I had known better, kept alive in some corner of the subconscious, or whether you were actually there, changing my direction that day, the words do not exist to express how much I thank you, Paddy Brown, wherever you are.

• • •

Sixty years earlier, my father was joining the fleet that would send him and the rest of the 82nd Engineer Battalion ashore at Normandy, on June 6, 1944. He was written down for a Purple Heart and apparently at least one other medal that he made me promise never to accept for him or allow the children to accept. I knew he had lost much of his hearing. I knew that when a truck came through during the final “mopping up” operation, he had run up to the vehicle seeking help for friends whose legs were blown off and who probably would not live through the night. There were no medals for them. Everyone who ran up to the truck was written down for a medal. It was simply the nature of bureaucracy.

By August 6, he was caught up in the battle of Vire in France, and the tattered remnants of his team were awarded the French Croix de Guerre—the only medal he allowed me to accept on his behalf, saying only, “We earned that one.”

Somewhere between Vire, the Battle of the Bulge, and the liberation of Buchenwald, he was captured by the Germans and, according to my mother, had survived being buried alive, evidently in a mass grave from which he dug his way to the surface. Dad had been claustrophobic ever since. He once said there was no way he could imagine crawling inside one of the Mirs and dropping two and a half miles down through black water to the Titanic. “You're a braver man than I am,” he said, to which I replied, “Are you nuts? You were on the beach at Normandy! No one was shooting at me in the Mirs.”

On June 1, 2004, we had gone out to lunch together, looked under the hoods of three cars, and spent much of the afternoon talking about engines. In the evening, I drove to my office, put my clothes from the Thera expedition in the wash, then headed back to Dad's place with some fresh clothes, a stack of notebooks, and my laptop. Forty-five minutes to an hour before I returned, he had died from sudden heart failure. Although I knew that if I had arrived an hour earlier and been able to resuscitate him, I'd only have been saving him to begin suffering the most claustrophobic effects of advancing lung cancer in the weeks to come, that night was nevertheless the beginning of the inevitable, corrosive if only.

Although my father had actually said at lunch that he could not believe what the next couple of months would bring and had wished that an almost instantly fatal stroke would intervene, a darkness began to grow in my heart during each day of the next month in which I fixated on this thought: If only I had arrived in time to save him.

All of that changed on July 1. I was driving toward a family get-together at the home of Bill Schutt, whose son and my children had become the best of friends and who happened to be the zoologist who first identified the lamb bones in the Titanic's soup-tureen concretion. The ride on the Long Island Expressway to his home was a straight line with only one turn, in Riverhead, and that day there was neither traffic nor any other reason for me to make a sudden wrong turn off our usual, well-traveled path—except for Paddy Brown, again.

I felt his peculiar presence (or imagined it again) just before and during my wrong turn off the expressway. As soon as I was off the highway, a man came running into the middle of the road, waving his arms and screaming for help. No more than a minute earlier, a car had struck an eight-year-old boy on a bicycle.

If only I had arrived in time to save him.

Scratch any cat; might you chase out a flea? Look into any coincidence too deeply; might you find a reason? Put any person in a moment of grave stress and in a moment of coincidence, and he might begin to wonder if the universe, Paddy Brown, or something else (call it what you will) is consciously teaching him a lesson.

The boy's name was Joseph. He was not wearing a bicycle helmet at the moment of impact. I could feel at once that the damage to his skull, his brain, and his upper spine was severe. I started compressions, and a woman who came running out of a car identified herself as a nurse. As she took the boy's wrist, she told me that she was beginning to detect a pulse. In this instance a pulse was horrifying news: the light of life was coming back into his veins but not into his eyes.

This time (a month, to the day), I had arrived in time; but now, by every indication, if this child lived, I would be saving him for a fate far worse than the final claustrophobic effects of lung cancer. Whether or not the universe was giving me a lesson, I felt in that moment as though Paddy were showing me what I already knew in the so-called logical left hemisphere of the brain but what I had failed during the past month to feel in my heart. “Here you are, Charlie,” Paddy seemed to be saying, “just in time to save someone. Now, is this a good thing or a bad thing?”

In my mind, in what some might call an agnostic's prayer, I said, “Okay, kid. If this is not as bad as it looks and you think you can still use this body, then stay with me. But if it's as bad as it looks, it's okay if you go away.”

I kept working, even after I felt him go. Perhaps the mind creates strange illusions under the incomparable stress of a child dying under your hands, but illusion or not, I felt a child's laughter (completely innocent and even soothing laughter) passing directly through my right shoulder. As little Joseph passed, it felt as though a gentle hand, almost as an afterthought, reached into my chest—to my heart—grabbed the darkness that had been growing within me for a month, and took it away with him. I never haunted myself again with if only about my father.

I never distinctly felt the presence of Paddy again, either. Inside, I had a vague feeling that he had seen what I needed to see, put me where I needed to be, taught me what I needed to be taught, and then either gone on to other errands or to peace.

Science is based on doubt—on trying to explain everything away and seeing what still stands afterward. I have maintained my agnosticism, but I often still wonder about what some of us have seen or felt at the Titanic, and especially at the stern.