They say your whole life passes before you at the moment of death.
They’re wrong; their timing’s way off, not even close.
Not if you count life in seconds. Not when a single second can seem to stretch for an eternity and a millisecond carry the weight of a lifetime, several lifetimes, sometimes, and the very next instant buy a subway ticket to heaven or hell for anyone within blast range. Fiat lux. Fiat nox. Fiat nex.
Latin? From a kid from Brooklyn?
Believe me, there are times it surprises even me, but you’d be amazed what you can pick up sitting cross-legged in a library; be it guarded by snow-covered lions way across the East River or one that arrives in a stack of moving boxes filled with nothing but dread sorrow.
Patience. Fortitude. Lessons carved in stone or wisdoms clawed from mountains of rubble. If life teaches you anything it’s that you take what insight you can, when you can, from wherever you can find it. Then you hold on to it by every means possible. In the end there’s nothing else. You go out with what you came in with. Beyond that first cry and last sigh, there’s really nothing else.
Smithereens to smithereens.
Illegitimum non carborundum.
I suppose I’d daydreamed of another life; not too clearly that I remember or anything very much in particular; simply a thousand and one other things for me to do than follow family tradition and don the uniform of a New York cop.
Fat chance.
My older brother had upped and escaped the inevitable and done so with rare distinction, all but barring my path out with the measure of his success and the towering nature of his achievements. Inimitable? You better believe it. On my best day I couldn’t even come close to reaching such unfathomable heights. At least that’s what I thought, no matter what Teddy did to try to ease the gap, ease the burn. A little difference of eight years between us; it might as well have been eighty; he was always the golden boy, I only ever had feet of clay.
He was the hero; I was the hothead. And so it goes.
Teddy was nothing if not all-conquering. A scholarship to Holy Cross, topped by what must’ve seemed a preordained Sanctae Crucis Award, and from there on to Dartmouth and an MBA garlanded with the laurel leaves of a Tuck Scholar. The inevitable siren calls from the big Wall Street investment banks and huge early success in the worlds of high technology and the Internet even before most people knew what in hell any of it really amounted to and all the world soon in every way his very own oyster. In rapid succession: an impossibly beautiful wife; a four-story Park Slope town house that everyone said was “to die for” even if it was only in the better part of Brooklyn; an unending passion for vintage Rolex sports watches and purple silk ties, dozens of each; a place out on the Vineyard for the summer; a private jet to call on whenever he needed to hop down to the Islands for some much-needed R&R and some time on his sailboat. And then September 11th. And all our worlds come crashing down.
And I am born again.
“You on air, Bobby?”
The voice sounds a thousand miles away, even with the amplifiers inside my blast helmet, but I give a thumbs-up, get a quick slap on my shoulder from my partner, Brad. I’ve got air coming through my respirator. I’m good to go.
All nearby buildings have now been evacuated, all nearby roads blocked off, all vehicular and foot traffic diverted, inner and outer perimeters marked by lines of yellow police tape. The outer perimeter pushed back more than double the usual distance and reinforced with aluminum barriers and faded blue NYPD sawhorses; any damn thing that can be dragged into service. The inner perimeter now a rectangle of fluttering plastic tape not one but two hundred feet from the target vehicle, doubly secured by squad cars and fire trucks parked nose to tail, three deep in some places. And I begin another Long Walk.
It’s the job of the NYPD Bomb Squad to attend any suspicious package or potentially lethal device found anywhere in the city’s five boroughs. For any number of reasons, the Squad never consists of more than thirty or so officers. Any more than that, on “the Job,” would have way too many cooks in an already overheated kitchen and to keep things focused we work in teams of two.
Two heads being better than one, it was up to Brad and me, crouched down behind our NYPD emergency vehicle, to interpret the pale-gray tones of the X-ray as seen on a laptop computer screen. Our very lives, mine certainly, depended on how carefully we read it. What we saw was an image of a complexity and level of sophistication previously only reported in terrorist bomb incidents abroad and, up to that moment, not seen anywhere on the US mainland. The X-ray images also showed additional dark spots and instances of flaring, which could indicate the presence of shielded radiological material.
The heart of the improvised explosive device appeared to be a lead-lined box—eighteen inches or so, by six, by nine—attached to a mess of wires and metal tubes, some of which would be functional, some not. All of it meant to blind us to the exact nature of the bomb and the full extent of what without any sense of irony we refer to as our “unknowns.” And with the distinct possibility “the package” could be “hot,” the ripples of concern spread further and further out, as Brad enlarged, enhanced, then wirelessly transmitted the X-ray images to ever higher and higher command posts and to other more experienced bomb techs for further analysis and advice. Yet even after everyone and his scrambled-egg-wearing brother has weighed in on how best to render the package safe and a reversal of standard protocol has given us early success, it still comes down to me taking the Long Walk armed with only a set of hand tools; knives, clippers, hooks, forceps, scalpels, crimpers, tape; your everyday toolbox.
I’ve never been sure whether my father died of a heart attack or a broken heart. He’d more than proved himself the toughest of old birds. No one made detective supervisor without having been to hell and back and then some, but Teddy going like that, out of a clear blue sky, without warning, only for it to be relived over and over and over again on television and in every newspaper and magazine, and the shock of it forever ongoing, there were dimensions to it he just couldn’t grasp or didn’t want to. It wasn’t the world he’d given his life to protect, it was something other; it was as if he’d died of what someone in one of Teddy’s books had once called Future Shock. And with Teddy having always been the apple of her eye, I’m sure Mom would’ve gone the same way, but breast cancer had already savaged and taken her. And looking back on it, a small mercy perhaps in the bigger scheme of things, but at least Teddy had been there by her bedside when she’d left us, we all were.
A bomb requires very few working parts: a power source, a switch, an initiator, explosives, and a container. The low- or high-explosive incendiary device; a mix of solid, liquid, jelly, or powder; made from over-the-counter firecrackers, propane, gasoline, and ammonium nitrate–based fertilizer; or from illegally sourced commercial and military-grade nitroglycerine, dynamite, TNT, or plastic explosives. When such a bomb explodes it can create blinding light, searing heat, toxic gas, and blast waves moving at up to 26,000 feet per second. An invisible, utterly incomprehensible force that nothing on earth can outrun and that compresses and hits with such speed and violence it’s not until a second wave follows, a few milliseconds later, that any bystanders can even hear the deafening eruption. And by then the pitiless, shapeshifting, shrapnel-filled horror is already upon them and has utterly devoured them.
My father had always held himself a good Catholic, in that he’d strived all his life to adhere to all Ten Commandments, as well as the thousand and one rules in the NYPD Patrol Guide. The fact that he pretty much succeeded in following most all of them, in spirit, if not always the exact letter of the law, said a lot for him. Not that anyone ever called him out on anything; there was never any hint of wrongdoing. It’s just that New York policing is tough business and New York City mired in politics, at every level, in every department. And ends sometimes justify means. So, Christmas and Easter and weddings and funerals aside, he’d venture into the confessional only after whatever high-profile case he’d been working on had been officially closed, as then both his desk and his conscience were perfectly clear. It was much tidier that way, for New York, and for him. He was ever a pragmatist. I think that’s why he stopped going to Mass after 9/11; God had struck out the two apples of his eye in an almost wrathful vengeance, after which there was little left worth praying for or even living for anymore, at least not in his book.
It sobers me to know that the amount of highly enriched uranium needed to build a bomb that’d bring New York or any major US city to its knees need weigh no more than seventy-five pounds, would fit inside a suitcase, and could all too easily be transported by any size car or SUV. Our worst imaginings delivered in the kind of vehicle we see on our city streets every single day and that we’re utterly blind to and can’t positively ID without inside information. So I always ask myself: Is this a “dirty bomb” designed to release a radioactive cloud that would render parts of Manhattan uninhabitable for generations to come? Or does it contain some biological agent or toxin that would spread death and disease on the wind?
If the NYPD Bomb Squad is called out, all of New York City’s own prevention measures and all of the nation’s many security resources; everything from border checks to cargo monitoring at port of entry; all the countless airline security checks; as well as the entire intelligence-gathering apparatus of every department of Homeland Security; every single one has failed. One single fact alone enough to stop me dead in my tracks: nine million shipping containers enter US ports every year and only five percent of them are inspected before they get loaded onto trucks and trains and vans that head everywhere in the contiguous Forty-Eight.
The Bomb Squad is the last line of defense, the very last of the first responders. It’s only after a terrorist bomb has exploded and extracted its bloody toll that the ambulance and triage teams, the doctors and nurses, aid workers and morgue attendants, all arrive; enough officially planned-for bodies to man all the border crossings to all nine circles of hell.
I’d been gone for almost three years when my father died unexpectedly. I was with the Marine Corps, in Iraq; locked, loaded; desperately trying to seize the day; though in my heart of hearts I seem to remember I’d originally enlisted to go hunt for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. I was granted emergency leave. I don’t know if any strings got pulled by NYPD brass, but I guess someone somewhere thought it would’ve been unseemly for so respected a senior police officer not to have his only remaining family member at his funeral, especially as that same someone on high also decreed that the memorial service would take place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Over the years I’d come to realize that the death of any New York City police officer, in the line of duty, is always a big deal, the ripples spreading far and wide. The sea of NYPD officers, five rows deep in some places, marking the route the casket will take; every officer in best dress blue. Police officers on motorcycles, reds and blues flashing, leading the procession; the deep throb of their engines merging with the pipes and drums of the NYPD Emerald Society, ever resplendent, in dark-blue tunics and kilts, Kelly-green sashes and plumes.
The coffin, hidden beneath a carpet of flowers, saluted by mass ranks of white-gloved hands; the massed pipes keening “An Inspector’s Funeral” as the escorts remove it from the hearse. The casket hoisted onto the shoulders of six former colleagues and slow-marched into the church. The American flag; of green stripes, not red; tucked in tight around the coffin to ensure the deceased is correctly identified as a fallen NYPD officer all the way to the gates of St. Peter.
Eulogies from the pulpit by New York’s police commissioner and mayor; final prayers for the dead and departed’s safe passage into the afterlife offered by the officiating priest; the casket shepherded back into the street to the haunting sounds of “Taps.” Fidelis Ad Mortem. And I sit quietly through it all; the pomp, the circumstance, the ceremony; my eyes never for one moment leaving the flag-draped coffin. For I, too, am “Faithful Unto Death.”
Are the concentric circles of remembrance, the differing layers of enclosure, the only real key to the substance of one’s life, one’s death? The one true indicator of goals achieved; battles fought; honors and prizes won? One’s importance recognized, recorded, and marked by the exact number and order of veils required to sanctify what was once the all-too-human core? As when a deep moat, heavy portcullis, guarded gate, narrow passage, and stout doorway are all barriers to be negotiated before you gain entry into that sacred inner sanctum in which resides the beloved or despised king, queen, president, dictator… or father. Are the secret, hidden pathways to our hearts and minds really so very different?
Today’s package has already been recorded in multiple NYPD logbooks as a VBIED; a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. The tricked-out black Chevy Suburban; the same model sport-utility vehicle used by most state and federal agencies; displaying “official” registration plates an exact match of those on a Suburban used by the governor’s security detail up in Albany. CCTV has captured what looks to be a Caucasian male, in suit, tie, sunglasses, exiting the suspect vehicle; hair neat, no beard; same blank face adopted by security agents the world over. But that little conundrum is as nothing to the problems the Chevy presents us with since a very diligent traffic patrol officer first tagged it.
We began, as always, from a suitably safe distance, using the Remotec F6A. First order of business for our little caterpillar-tracked robot: to use its steel claw to shatter one of the SUV’s black-tinted side windows so we can get a camera inside. Video shows third-row rear seats removed and, in the expanded cargo area, four large metal drums, three propane tanks, a gun locker filled with bags of fertilizer, and half a dozen large plastic tubs duct-taped together. It’s all very neat and tidy, very expertly done, and very scary. What’s equally disturbing is that the rest of the interior is a goddamn mess of fried-chicken boxes, paper wrappers, plastic utensils, and coffee cups and lids. There’s also a briefcase, several sealed file folders, a backpack, a thermos, and a short length of metal pipe capped at both ends. Any and all of which could conceal a bomb. Best case, it could all turn out to be harmless. Worst case, everything from the handle on the briefcase to the plastic knives and forks could have been molded from Semtex or C4. We plan for the worst. Multiple booby traps.
It’s as if the truck has been driven by two different people, polar opposites, one of whom must’ve Googled the long and varied history of bomb making, read The Anarchist Cookbook, or watched how-to videos on YouTube. And if anything was meant to tell us we were being taunted and played with, it was that. I think I took most exception to the cup with the I LOVE NY on it; big red heart of the Big Apple, smack in the middle; a cruel mockery of the bomber’s intent.
Six years active duty with the Marines; first tour, in Iraq, with 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines; a transfer to Combat Logistics, my EOD training at Camp Lejeune, before being assigned to 2nd MLG, 2nd Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company. Two more tours; made sergeant; a couple of medals; a return stateside; an honorable discharge; two years Reserve, no recall. There was little surprise, me wanting to join the NYPD, more than a little at me wanting to stay in EOD, as a technical officer with the Bomb Squad. Family history prevailed, though, and I was accepted and soon set about relearning the craft, as civilian bomb disposal procedures are way different from those in the military.
Homeland presents a unique terrain. Safety of the public is paramount. On home ground it’s a given everything is automated, shielded, and at a distance. There are no snipers; no one in the crowd waiting to command-detonate a hidden bomb; at least not yet. So IEDs are only dealt with by hand as a very last resort. That’s why every three years every bomb tech in the land undergoes rigorous retraining at a special FBI bomb school, in Atlanta; followed by time at the Hazardous Devices School in Huntsville, Alabama. That way every bomb tech is kept up to speed on terrorist bomb-making techniques and bombings from around the world. The one “known” that keeps us all so utterly focused: that it’s just a matter of time before some terrorist group or other is able to put together a sophisticated bomb big enough to take out an entire metro. And maybe so, but I’ll be damned if it’s going to be New York City. One thing’s for sure; it ain’t happening on my watch.
After a deal of deliberation it was decided our first task was to take out all the garbage. Clear the playing field; see what was left; and only then attack the mysterious lead-lined box. An officially sanctioned reversal of standard ops that meant us first hitting all the possible secondary devices with the pan disrupter—a weapons-grade high-strength stainless steel cannon mounted atop the Remotec, so called because it can deal with most threats. We never fail to bless all the many techs who invented, then modified it, in all the many theaters of war, as the P-D fires specialized ammunition or a high-velocity jet of water powerful enough to punch out, disrupt, sometimes even completely dismantle an explosive device before it can trigger. It was definitely our best bet. And so “Robby the Robot” went to work again, with me very happy to be at the joystick end of the business.
Fools rushing in? No. At this stage, it’s all still well within the perimeters of “knowns.” Given the improvised bomb smorgasbord spread out before us, there could be any number of mechanical or electrical triggers, even chemical sensors. A simple pull-wire; a ticking Timex wristwatch; a mix of clock timers, digital timers, cell phones, or automobile remote-entry devices, as favored in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we immediately deploy a multiband radio frequency jammer, as much to negate the OnStar RemoteLink mobile app we know is an available option on the Suburban, as to block all signals from all surrounding cell towers and antennas. We don’t want anyone to be able to start the vehicle, control the door locks, or trigger a bomb remotely, be it from down the block or a thousand miles away.
As one of the very few unmarried NYPD bomb techs, I get a lot of ribbing from the other guys in the squad. It’s just them urging me to follow in their footsteps and let some woman make an honest cop of me. As, if I do say myself, I do seem to attract more than my fair share of pretty women. Women far too good for me, I’m then told. I’m always surprised, though, when a woman knowingly dates a police officer; I know firefighters are supposedly top of the ladder; but, hey, who am I to complain if one of them decides to hook up with me? I tell them, statistically speaking, it’s far safer being a NYPD bomb tech than a regular NYPD patrol officer, as some of the people at large on New York streets can prove far deadlier than any bomb. Even so, when we’ve all met up at some function or private party, I’ve always been impressed by the wives of the other bomb techs; how they shut out any and all talk of danger; how they know it, but don’t think it; which I think is its own very special kind of bravery. My mom always said that about the spouses of all serving NYPD officers. As a Marine, I came to think the same about all the husbands, wives, children; the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters of all those who serve in the military. They also serve who only stand and wait. There are times I think waiting for a loved one to come home, safe and sound, is the toughest duty of all.
We do it by the numbers. Send in the Remotec; gain entry to the target vehicle; and, one by one, disarm all objects flagged as secondary devices. Locate, identify; aim. “Fire-in-the-hold!” Retreat a ways, reassess; reengage. Until every potential IED has been rendered safe, save for the lead-lined box wired to God-knows-what. We have no idea how many layers there still are to “the package” or how multiple or varied are its hidden depths. We’ve assessed the explosive profile as best we can; taken every kind of precaution; expended all known “knowns.” It’s the remaining “unknowns” that continue to gnaw at the soul.
My father died in an automobile accident, responding to a call for extra backup from a rookie cop going to the aid of his partner. It was happenstance my dad was in that neighborhood, on his way uptown to some official function. So he radioed in, set the mag-mount flashing atop the car’s roof, and did what he’d always done, went off in pursuit of bad guys. It was later determined that a man and his two little boys had just exited a crosswalk when the younger boy dashed back into the roadway to retrieve a toy he’d dropped. The older boy turned to pull his little brother to safety, the father turned to gather them both back up, and suddenly there they were the three of them, dead ahead. I wonder whether my dad saw them or us—himself, Teddy, and me—as we’d once been; the three of us; him, his little hero, and me, the hothead. Only, his one-and-only Teddy was gone forever and I wonder if it broke his heart anew. Whatever it was he saw or felt, he hit the brakes too hard, swerved too violently, the car skidded, a piece of metal in the road blew out a front tire, the Crown Vic bounced against a parked car, rolled, and slid first on its side, then on its roof, for some hundred yards or more before a delivery truck slammed into it. The Vic spun round and smashed into a light pole. The impact broke my father’s neck. He was dead before the paramedics got to him. He was posthumously cleared of any and all charges of reckless driving or of endangerment; the accident officially recorded in the books as being the result of him having suffered a massive heart attack. And so it goes.
All that’s left now is for a hooded man inside a bulky green bomb suit weighing ninety pounds, fingers bare beneath cuffs of Kevlar armor, fingerless spandex and leather gloves already edged with sweat, to start walking downrange from “the package,” and all without the company of a friendly robot on an electronic leash. “Where are you, R2-D2, when I need you?” I whisper, as the words of a stern-faced FBI instructor come to mind: “Start remote. Stay remote. Be remote.”
If only. Only, not today; today’s little problem calls for the personal touch; a closer, hands-on inspection, in the vague hope of producing more “knowns.” A process that will have me kneeling down and saying numerous Hail Marys while I attempt to locate, then cut, the correct wire or wires, sever the right circuit or circuits, and oh so carefully remove the blasting cap or caps, and defuse the bomb or bombs that still remain “unknowns.”
Thoughts of one’s own mortality not unnaturally turning to what makes life so sweet; what about all those pretty women who at different times have chosen to walk into this NYPD bomb tech’s life? Haven’t they filled me with joy; given life purpose? Well, yes, but maybe not in the way you might think. And, sadly, there’s no getting around the truth of it, because after only a couple of months or so of us getting to know one another, it’s always me that seems to come up short in any relationship.
It’s not that any of my girlfriends has ever come right out and told me I can’t or won’t make a proper commitment, but in one way or another they all tell me there comes a moment, as if out of the clear blue sky, when I look horribly, terribly afraid. Me, the man of action trained to take bombs apart with his bare hands. They all seem to stumble for the right words, but in one way or another they tell me the look on my face literally terrifies them and then starts to haunt them. Even the memory of it fills them with dread. And in the end it’s the growing chill inside that kills it dead. Cold always kills. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s fear, and so all the pretty women become ever more frightened. And when people get frightened, and don’t know why, they get angrier and angrier and they lash out. Things fall apart. The heart cannot hold.
It confused the hell out of me the first few times it happened, but deep down I suppose I always knew there was no real mystery to it. It’s the look my brother’s wife, Jackie, had on her face, the day she saw the TV images of the terrorists flying those commercial airliners into each of the Twin Towers, over and over and over again, and the buildings bursting into flames and slowly collapsing, over and over and over again, and her Teddy gone forever, having simply gone off to work that morning. The horror deep-etched into her face from looking over the edge, into the abyss, seeing the tortured mass of steel, concrete, and glass still burning white hot; still spewing dust clouds that plastered tears to cheeks and threatened to choke the life out of every living New Yorker. The look of horror thousands upon thousands of people woke up to every single day for weeks and months and years afterward. Yet, over time, even the deepest pain fades to distant memory; both a curse and a blessing; and people forget and they move on. There are those, though, that can’t ever let go; they just learn to mask it. And with me, it seems, there are times when the mask slips and the full horror of that September day is relived anew. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
I take in the truck’s interior. The backpack, briefcase, cardboard files, the bits of plastic rubbish; only ever intended to confuse and cause a bomb tech’s heart to flutter; have all been blown to pieces by the P-D, but not all; the pipe bomb remains intact and I see for the first time it’s spot-welded to one of the wheel arches. The landscape of threat has been radically altered but is no less deadly. I look at what remains of the primary device and see that the lead-lined box has been split open at one end; enough to reveal the rat’s nest of wires inside. I close down that part of my imagination that fears for my own mortality; look without focusing to see if anything else presents itself as unusual; and try to see inside the mind of the bomb maker. My only task, at that precise moment in time, to identify something, anything, that might clue me into some “known.” The different bomb-making techniques used in Northern Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan; in Israel, Spain, Russia; and almost every other country around the globe; are all known. Bombs that have exploded and brought bloody terror to London, Madrid, Belfast, Baghdad, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Mumbai, and Kabul have all left unique signatures and every scrap of knowledge has been gathered and recorded; all of them now “knowns.” I wonder which of those “knowns” now await me here.
Some years later I bumped into Jackie, on Fifth Avenue, outside a grand hotel, steps from St. Patrick’s. She was with her new perfect husband and their two perfect little boys; the perfect husband, to my eye, no match for Teddy, but by the look of him, a definite contender. Even I couldn’t damn her for that; everyone does what he or she needs to do to survive. She saw me see her trying to avoid seeing me. Then she looked at me, deliberately, and stared for what seemed an eternity. She ushered her new perfect family further up Fifth, in the direction of the park, and turned and walked toward me. Still impossibly beautiful; tall, slim, willowy; camel coat, shoes, handbag; so chic, so elegant; her expensive silk scarf a perfect complement to her shoulder-length blond hair; as flawless as ever I’d seen her; the uptown girl of every man’s fantasy.
She looked me up and down; took in my shoes, clothes, and wristwatch. She shook her head, the curtains of her hair moving in perfect time, and told me in no uncertain terms it was a heinous crime for me to spend my whole life trying to be like my brother. I shot back; said I was very much my own man, thank you; and that I’d fought long and hard, every single fucking day, for years, in the Marines, in pursuit of the very people who’d carried out the attacks on 9/11. For some reason I even felt the need to tell her I’d joined the NYPD Bomb Squad, the moment I got back from Iraq, to continue with the fight. The bitch didn’t even miss a beat. “You still won’t be better than Teddy, you facing death, on purpose, Bobby, every single time you go try to dismantle some stupid asshole bomb,” she said. “Teddy’s gone forever, Bobby. He’s never coming back. Get over it. Go get a life, why don’t you, before it’s too damn late?”
She fucking blew me away. And as I watched her walk out of my life, again, I just stood there blinking, like a stunned survivor of a bomb blast, my mouth opening and closing, gasping for air, still not believing what’d just happened.
It’s true. I worshipped Teddy. I hated him. I envied him. I loved him.
I needed him. I wanted to be like him. And, like him, I’ll never know when it happens, not even as it happens, the blast will move much too fast for me even to register, let alone respond to. And it will happen, one day; I know it will; it’s simply a question of when.
But I ask you—is it a crime to walk in a dead man’s shoes?
As I walk the Long Walk, nothing but the scratchy noise of the respirator in my ears, the world reduced to what I can see through my visor, it’s not for me to ponder why someone has built this bomb whose only purpose is to spread terror. I have no time to curse or hate. It’s not for me to condemn anyone. Whether “the package” represents present danger from enemies foreign or domestic; from without or from within; my only task is to defuse and/or demolish any and all rogue explosive ordnance brought into my city, my homeland; that and nothing more. The rest I leave to the politicians and to fate. You go mad otherwise.
I know I can face the very worst the world’s worst terrorists can conjure up and even contemplate the beginning and the end fused into a single moment again as happened that fateful September day. And I can do so without giving way to fear. Love may conquer all, but not all fears. Love opens you up to fear in ways unimaginable before that love ever took hold of your heart. I can walk into the mouth of hell every single day, but I will not take a woman or child I love in there with me. Nor will I ever put a woman in a position where she believes her only path to continued happiness is by my side. For me that’s a nonstarter. So I’ve chosen to live alone and alone I will stay. It’s my battle to win or lose, then, even though I admit it’s not at all a path I ever imagined I’d seek out for myself.
And so my entire life; the best of times, the worst of times; all the people and events that have formed and framed my life within its sudden-seeming all-too-brief span; comes down to a lead-lined box, not much bigger than the one my last pair of Nikes came in, split open at one end to reveal a digital timer with its face smashed. And beneath the tangle of wires, which after some gentle twisting, pulling, and prodding I see are attached to nothing but themselves; I come at last to an exposed blasting cap connected to four different-colored electrical wires; three if I count the yellow one I’ve just cut; two, once I’ve cut the green. Two wires, then, red and black; one the color of life, the other of death; and the eternal clock still ticking down; digital or analog; sand falling through an hourglass; it’s no matter at all to me now, as all time is relative. And I feel the wire hot in my blood; taste the stale air in my face mask; and catch the salt tears starting to sting my eyes. Are we our memories? Is that all we are? Ever were? Will ever be?
What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that. I know. I must’ve read that old quote a thousand times on the tiny brass plaque on the bookcase that stood next to my father’s armchair. Even though there was no way, back then, I could fully understand the true wisdom contained in those words, they always hit home. And never more so than when I was a teenager desperately trying to find my own way out. The words still hit home. When all else is dead and gone, it’s what lies within that truly counts. How else can you ever know why you are, who you are? Why you do what you do? Why even though what you do may appear as a crime to others, those same events, when seen from where you stand, point to the only possible path open to you? And you must always be true to yourself. Right?
One day, after one of my visits to the New York Public Library, on Fifth, I visited with my dad, at his office, at One Police Plaza, in the hope I could get a ride home; he wasn’t in, but on his desk, another brass plaque, more Emerson: He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
Truly, is there really any other way to live?
Yet no one asked my brother, Teddy, if he could take the worst; nor was it asked of anyone else who died in the Twin Towers, or of any of their surviving family members; or of anyone else in New York. Death was visited, on all, from above; without warning, without pity, and without remorse; by unforgiving strangers from strangely unforgiving lands. It’s no way for anyone to die.
After that first dreadful year, following 9/11, Jackie went out of her way not to see my father or me. We’d always been worlds apart, anyway, but her putting distance between us—and events in New York—was, I’m sure, the only way she thought she could take back control of her life. So she relocated to another city, on another coast; found herself a new husband; and had the children she never had with Teddy. The falling Towers broke her into a million pieces, too, and the dense clouds of grief smothered and killed whatever love she’d once had for Teddy. Everything became dead ground.
That’s why, once she’d sold the house in Brooklyn, she got rid of everything of Teddy’s that would in any way remind her of him. That’s why she let me have anything of his I wanted; any and all of his personal things; and I took everything, literally. All his books; his CDs and DVDs; all of which arrived at my Brooklyn apartment in stacks and stacks of neatly lettered moving boxes. Everything of his for me to read and/or listen to; at last for me to know the secret heart of him; so he could live again, inside me. I even inherited his collection of vintage Rolex wristwatches; his purple silk ties; his suits, his shirts, his sweaters, most of which fit me, for a time, anyway, until I bulked up a bit. His shoes still fit. Like his suits, they were the kind of shoes I could never have afforded. English. French. Belgian. Handmade. I know there were women who had given me a look, then a date, only because of those shoes, those clothes. I never minded that. In fact, I wore it well.
What I do still mind, though, every single second of every single day, is a big brother gone forever, blown all over the island of Manhattan. Knowing that the emptiness that followed can never be filled; no bedrock ever solid enough to build a future upon; only shifting sands, no matter how deep you dig down. So, yes, it’s true, I did rush to fill the hole inside me; my own personal Ground Zero. All I could do was try to fill up the huge gaping hole with the best of him and the worst of him. His was a different generation; different hopes, different dreams; different music; different rock stars, film stars, sports heroes, but they all became my heroes, too, just as he had always been.
There are times when I can do nothing but rip off my blast helmet and push down the protective collar and go throw up before I can even start to remove the rest of the bomb suit. Afterward, I always seem to catch myself, for an instant, reflected in a vehicle’s wing mirror or blacked-out window and I just stare and stare and have to really think hard whose face it is. Is it Teddy? Or is it me? And when death comes, as it does to us all, will it honestly really matter?
I saw for myself that Teddy never let anyone or anything stand in his way. In everything he ever did, every goal he ever set himself, he was single-minded, fearless; he just went for it, hell for leather, damn the torpedoes. He was like that in high school. I know, because I went to Bishop Ford, too, and they were still telling stories about him when I was there. He was the one to emulate, the one to follow. I’m sure he was just the same at Holy Cross and Dartmouth, and then on Wall Street. I didn’t need my father to tell me that staying focused was how Teddy always succeeded, but he did, at every single, sad, sorry opportunity.
And me? I was always the big disappointment. I was hotheaded Bobby, hot-tempered Bobby; always-getting-into-hot-water Bobby; no hell’s kitchen ever too hot for our damn Bobby.
And maybe that’s the one thing that ever truly separated us.
We were fire and ice. Eternal opposites.
Though I do admit I seem to have grown so very, very, very much colder since the Twin Towers fell.
For the inescapable truth is I chose the road I traveled by; it was not the road that Teddy took, but it might just as well have been.
They say your whole life passes before you at the moment of death.
They’re wrong, even if by no more than a few milliseconds; for I am already dead before I cut the bloodred wire. Blown to smithereens by the blast triggered by what lay hidden deep inside; my fate forever sealed by the lie beneath the lie; the falsehood now fully revealed; the father, the son, the brother, if never quite the twin; my death mask, but a momentary reflection of what lies inside the ever outwardly expanding heart.