ISSUE 15 - SPring 2023
creative nonfiction
RUBY
Ruby lived in front of the Levi’s store.
How she got there was a mystery. Perhaps she was born in a gutter but wandered away from her mother after a few months. Or maybe she lived with a family until the kids lost interest. So their father dumped Ruby on a street far from home.
Bangalore’s 300,000 street dogs led perilous lives, dodging cars, angry people, and each other. Territorial dogs attacked Ruby. Blood and dirt speckled her fur when she arrived at Levi’s. An employee sprinkled turmeric powder over each cut. The traditional Indian antiseptic soon healed her wounds.
Ruby claimed Levi’s for home and roamed nearby to fill her stomach. Every day she turned into a narrow lane where a meat shop wedged between houses. The butcher reached into a dirty wire cage and dragged out a chicken, wings flapping and squawking in terror. A few minutes later, he tossed its entrails to the dogs waiting by the open door.
Other meals lay hidden in the trash piled at street corners and empty lots. Ruby tore through plastic bags to find kitchen scraps, leftovers, and on lucky days, a jumble of bones.
After a night of scavenging, Ruby was dozing in front of Levi’s when we saw her just after sunrise. My dog Ramona, a rescued “streetie,” strained forward on her leash. Her coloring divided her face into neat halves, like a black and white cookie. Ruby’s was a solid caramel brown, except for a narrow white streak running up her forehead. They shared spotted fur.
Ramona tugged me toward Ruby’s road every morning. Tree roots jutted from the cracked slabs of the sidewalk. I jumped over short sections of open drain. The thick black wires of defunct cable connections coiled into the branches of every tree. Dilapidation in stark contrast to the elegant boutiques and high-end eateries lining the street.
Concrete and asphalt reigned over Ruby’s territory. The only patch of grass beckoned from the other side of the street. But when Ruby scooted through four lanes of haphazard traffic, a security guard shooed her away from the half-brown lawn.
The Levi’s employees were kinder, especially the guard passing idle hours. He called her Rocky. Like many street dogs, Ruby responded to a few different names.
Ruby began walking with us, a little farther every day. At the turn-off to my house, an old black dog with cloudy eyes stood sentinel on unsteady legs. Ruby skirted past him and followed Ramona to my gate.
A flame tree fronted my building, its long branches snaking over the neighbors’ houses. Dark brown seed pods plopped to an uneven beat. Still a few weeks more until the heat kindled its reddish-orange blossoms.
Ramona ran up the marble stairway while Ruby followed me, glancing back until we entered the apartment. The spiral staircase in the back room was narrow and steep. I carried up each dog and unlatched the metal door. Afternoon light flooded the roof. Ramona ran out. Ruby paused before stepping onto the sun-warmed concrete.
The few clouds appeared solid and unreachable. Yet perspective could shift as easily as a plane ascending through the white vapor to glide above. The flame tree, towering and unclimbable from the ground, cast no shadows on the roof. Ruby peered over a ledge to the top of the tree a few feet below. Its leaves, as green as parrots’ wings, spread the width of the crown like a soft rug.
After a bout of wrestling with Ramona, Ruby walked back to the open door. I carried her down the stairs, and she left the house without looking back. Every visit ended just as abruptly.
Early one Sunday, an auto rickshaw drove us to Cubbon Park, the 300 acres of gardens in the middle of the city.
Ramona pulled me to the park gate. I unhooked her leash and she sped across a wide lawn sprinkled with the pale violet flowers of jacaranda trees.
Ruby still stood on the sidewalk. Then a few cautious steps and she stopped on the bright green grass. Copper-colored soil settled into the crevices of her paws. Within moments, she ran toward Ramona and chased her to exhaustion. Wilted blossoms cushioned them as they tumbled to the ground.
A week later, the government announced a curfew as the coronavirus pandemic escalated. The city emptied as college students, migrant workers, and families returned to their towns and villages. With far less people and restaurants closed, food for street animals dwindled. But finding a meal was not the only problem.
Barricades shut Ruby’s road to traffic. Ramona and I walked in the middle of the street. We did not meet the usual neighbors and pet dogs. A large padlock and chains secured the doors of Levi’s. There was no security guard sitting in his plastic chair and scrolling through his phone.
Ruby lay awake in front of the store. In the second before she jumped up and approached, I felt a wrenching pity but also something familiar. My family was thousands of miles away in California. Her caretaker and friends were gone. A shared isolation.
So it was not a surprise when I opened my front door the next morning to find Ruby sleeping on the landing. She stretched and wagged her tail. I fed her some boiled pieces of chicken.
Ruby turned in circles to lay down again. I thought about spreading a bath towel for her on the cold marble floor. But I didn’t get one. Instead, I called her name and stepped aside. She walked through the open door and I nudged it closed behind her.
—Mary-Rose Abraham
A SUMMER IN PAKISTAN
Recently, I dreamt of Islamabad. It was a view of Faisal Masjid at night and as I looked at it, a shudder of recognition went through me as if it was a place I had forgotten but still knew on a chemical level. Since then, memories of Pakistan have been catching me in unexpected moments—at the sound of the athan from my phone, the smell of burning wood, or the taste of a guava. And I am carried back to the last time I was there, so long ago now, that every memory is a teaser clip with no beginning and an abrupt end.
~
It was after taraweeh. The city wouldn’t slumber completely on a Ramadan night, but it was settling down enough that the stars were starting to appear in the black sky. I was standing on the balcony on the roof of my grandparents’ home, looking out to the horizon. Where the sky met earth, the dark outline of Margalla Hills was visible at the footpath of the Himalayan Mountains, somehow a different black from the black of the sky. A patch of lights twinkled in a hollow of one of the hills—Monal Village— and then abruptly blinked out; routine load-shedding to reduce the strain on the power plants. Moments later, scant dots of lights twinkled back on in places where there were generators. The road winding down from it was lit sparsely and although I couldn’t see it, somewhere a few miles down, was Daman-e-Koh, the hilltop where the monkeys begged for snacks at the pakora stall.
Pools of darkness stretched down from there until suddenly, the triangle of Faisal Masjid rose out of the clouds, glowing white stone and light from the four minarets. All night the mosque would be filled with the recitation of Quran by representatives from every region of the country and televised, nationally.
And then, the rest of the city, under the cover of the night, sparkling showers of open shops draped in celebratory strings of light, and naked light bulbs over street stalls, the homes of the residents of this city, the streak of red and gold as cars and taxis went by.
Under my own balcony, the street was quiet, the houses dark except for the street lamps. The occasional sound of the crackle of radio in a car driving past, the smell of its fumes, the footsteps of two people walking side by side, sometimes one mass, sometimes two as they came together then apart, distinguishable as a man and a woman when they came under the beam of the lamp, by his flat rolled brim hat and her dupatta.
It was August and the heat of the summer still lay heavy but the air moved, stirring my white, cotton dupatta, freeing a strand of my hair from under it’s confines, rustling the pink bougainvillea creeping over the railing and from behind the house, I could hear the patter of jamun fruit as they fell, bursting on the brick of the driveway below.
On the other side of the screen door, I could hear my grandfather’s TV and the voices of my cousins, rising and falling, rising and falling.
Tonight, was one of the last ten nights of Ramadan, some of the most blessed nights of the month and I was outside to be closer to the heavens, so that maybe peace would find me sooner as it fell on earth.
~
We went Eid shopping. Crowded inside a men’s clothing store, picking out Eid clothes for the boys, it was a while before we noticed that Noor, one of my youngest cousins was missing. In a panic, we rushed out and pulled up short, to find her sitting on the curb next to a little boy.
At home in the US, the English word for someone who asks for money in the streets is “panhandler”. But for a little Pakistani boy who roams Jinnah Super, the English word is “beggar”. He was wearing the uniform of street children in Pakistan, a brown shalwar kameez and cheap plastic slippers on his grey, dusty feet. He had brown spots and streaks against his cheeks from sun exposure and vitamin deficiency and his hair was brittle, an unnatural copper color, heavily bleached by the sun. His eyes were green, the violent stamp of Alexander the Great’s army or a British colonist, which perhaps was the beginning of his descent to the streets.
Noor, bored with the shopping, had noticed the boy passing by outside with a bag of chips and had wandered out to ask him for some. In sharp contrast to the boy, she was well-fed and well-dressed, headband in her shiny curls, gold in her ears, but she didn’t know that she shouldn’t be asking him for his food. He did know though, despite looking the same age as her and this unprecedented reversal of roles in which someone was asking him for food had him puffed up with importance. She was sitting a few respectful inches away from the goods, holding out her hand as he deliberated over which chip to give her. They munched side by side, swinging their legs until her mother snatched her up, scolding and the kid vanished, one last backwards glance at my strange cousin.
We passed by a jewelry stall where bell shaped jhumkas caught my eye. They are completely out of fashion now, but I love them because my mom wore them when we were small, and I thought they were beautiful. These little stalls hold a mishmash of cheap and expensive jewelry. The inexpensive ones are made of cheap metals and plastic gems and the expensive ones are made from semi-precious stones and minerals, mined locally. In the States, they would sell for tens of dollars, but these men sell them for pennies.
As I searched through the jewelry for what I wanted, my uncle chatted with the stall owner, an Afghan refugee. He’d been a professor of Physics in Afghanistan, but his documents had been lost in the war. He told the story without any self-pity. This was his fate, Allah ki marzi, God’s will.
This astonishing tale coming from this nondescript uncle in his white shalwar kameez and black vest, drooping mustache, hair neatly parted on the side, looking as if he’d dropped out of the 80’s, was nothing new. Everyone here had an astonishing story—the jewelry stall uncle, that boy who had shared his chips with Noor and that other boy crooning a cover of a Nur Jahan song at the street corner. Everyone here was astonishing and no one was special.
~
On Eid, the cousins gathered their gifts of Eid money and headed out to spend it, traveling in a mob for safety and for fun. The old shopkeeper in the convenience store behind the house, muttered a prayer into his white beard as we descended upon his store for chips in masala flavors, ice cream cones, and fizzy drinks. Noor, three feet off the floor, earnestly laid out her case to him for receiving one of the packets of chips for free—the case consisting mostly of the fact that she didn’t have the money.
Hamza flushed in embarrassment and sent Noor outside with her loot including the extra chips. I looked at my kid cousin fondly as he paid for Noor’s snacks and my ice cream as well, over my protests that unlike Noor, I did have the money. He is a respectable engineer now, recently married, but I always remember him as he was back then; a shy, lanky university student, handsome in his chivalry and his Eid best.
We, American-born and Pakistani-born cousins, had a contentious relationship. There is a total of thirty of us and most of the Americans are on the older end of the spectrum. Culturally, that makes us senior in rank. But anyone with a childhood knows that some cousins that came from America once a year, speaking the language of the colonizer and Urdu with an accent and bad grammar, had better not pretend seniority over anything. But we also knew how to quickly erase drawn lines and unite against common adversary.
The summer I was thirteen, my aunt was getting engaged and one fine afternoon, her fiancée’s family came for tea. There was a lovely spread of samosas, tea sandwiches, cookies, chaat, dhai baray, kabobs—strictly forbidden to the kids although we were promised the leftovers once the guests were gone. It isn’t as if they weren’t feeding us, but naturally all other food lost its appeal when there was forbidden food to be had.
It’s a wonder the guests didn’t choke on the sandwiches we’d resentfully cut the crusts from that morning. And because waste not, want not, we’d eaten those crusts dipped in egg sandwich filling, which by the way, I loathed then and can barely tolerate, now.
We were then processed into being neither seen nor heard, mostly achieved by shoving us all in a room upstairs. We weren’t at full capacity that day with only twenty of us, but it was still a full house.
Before I was sent upstairs, I was instructed that I was in charge and to tell my aunt to come down to greet the guests. My aunt twenty-eight at the time, was only fifteen years older than me. She was emerging from the shower, wearing yellow, hair in a towel when I passed on the message, but she didn’t hear me and ever so slowly reached for the hair dryer and brush.
I watched her for a bit then repeated my message a little louder and more slowly. Perhaps it was the bad Urdu.
“OK!”
“GOD!”
“I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME!”
I stomped out, offended.
Now that I’m of the same age, I understand. How many times have I wanted to wipe the knowing smirk from a niece or nephew’s face as they check out my makeup, my clothes, excited by the romantic image of me about to meet some potential’s family?
I went off to join more sympathetic company. Out came the contraband. In our case, this was packs of playing cards and Uno cards, completely forbidden in my grandmother’s house because it smacked of gambling. Unsurprisingly, this meant we spent hours squatting behind trees or sheds, playing games of Uno and War, shuffling cards expertly, like hardened gamblers.
Eventually, we got bored, so we got out Waaris’ tired old set of Jackie Chan bootleg DVDs and hooked up his DVD player that he’d actually brought with him in his suitcase from Florida to the ancient TV in the room. We had become quite good at connecting American and Pakistani incompatible devices by cobbling together our collective supply of converters and adapters and amazingly, we only set a computer on fire once. We watched a lot of Jackie Chan that summer. I can still quote Rush Hour to you, 20 years later. (“Wipe yourself off, man. You dead.”)
By this time, we were getting restless. Then someone had a brilliant idea. If we sneaked onto the terrace of the roof, we could watch the proceedings in the garden down below. I thought it was brilliant too—until belatedly, I remembered I was in charge.
I voiced a half-hearted objection.
Twenty pairs of sullen eyes turned on me. They’d listen if I insisted but I knew I’d be ostracized, and the rest of my trip would be miserable.
I weighed the decision briefly then shrugged and got out of the way as a horde of kids stampeded to the door and army crawled across the terrace to peer through the bougainvillea growing along the railing. It was obscuring the view though, so one by one, we popped our heads over the fencing.
“I think the samosas are finished,” I heard a disappointed whisper.
“What’s the guy’s name?”
“Baqar.”
“What? Like a goat?”
“That’s bakrah, stupid.”
We snickered.
One of the tinier specimens of our clan was still having difficulty seeing and had hooked himself by his ankles and knees over the railing. Unfortunately, he was now also dangling nearly upside down over the garden. The movement caught someone’s eye down below and an adult looked up, jaw dropping as she saw the twenty of us silhouetted against the sky. Prudently, her eyes snapped down again. Two of us quickly hauled up the suspended child while the rest dropped back down to the ground and crawled hastily back inside. When someone came to check in on us next, we were innocently watching Rush Hour 2.
~
The day after Eid, we took a bus to Lahore, where my paternal grandmother lives. It was a four hour drive and by the time we passed Jhelum, it was starting to rain. At first it fell slowly and then so heavily, I was afraid that the mountain roads were going to be flooded out. The bus slowed and began to crawl. We were getting closer to the Chenab River, where millions of tons of Basmati rice are produced annually and we were surrounded by rice fields, waterlogged normally, but now flooded. We passed by a house at the edge of a rice field and two boys burst out, clad only in shalwars. Even as they ran, they were already soaked, their brown legs showing through the wet, white cotton. They stopped at the edge of the fields, kicked off their slippers and dove in, two graceful arcs. Even from a distance, I could see the white of their teeth as they laughed and splashed.
That is one of the last memories I have of Pakistan. We drove past them slowly and I could see them for a long time and it looked like something out of a storybook; the emerald fields shimmering around that old farmhouse, the boys swimming in the square pool of water and rainbows shooting through the clouds of mist rising up as rain evaporated as soon as it hit the hot ground.
~
It has been eight years now since I have visited Pakistan. As I was leaving, my grandmother faltered over to me, put her hands on my shoulders and asked me to stay another week. That grandmother is gone now, taken in the pandemic. The youngest cousins will not recognize me and some of the older ones have children now that I have never met. There is a different shopkeeper in the convenience store behind my grandparents’ home and I do not even remember how to get there anymore. I have been busy, too busy to miss it.
But as I get older and the world gets more complicated my thoughts turn to older, simpler times. I feel the desire to once more stand on my grandparents’ terrace and hear the rustle of the jamun tree as the call of the athan floats over the city and echoes back from the Himalayan Mountains. If I close my eyes, maybe I will hear the echo of the laughter of the children of my family, the creak of the basket swing on the porch, and the mewls of the stray cats asking for scraps at the kitchen door. And maybe, for one moment I will once more be back in my childhood, in a summer in Pakistan.
—Mariam Ashraf
LOSING
I lost the matching sock, the single earring, the writing contest, my beloved Rapidograph drafting pen. I lost track of my best childhood friend, Carmen, the girl who could sew anything and always wore the pair of loafers I coveted. I lost the eighth grade “Spelldown” contest on TV: after spelling 99 words correctly, “tarantula” was my downfall.
I lost the ninth-grade cheerleader election, I lost arguments, I lost boyfriends. I lost my nerve atop the high dive. I lost my first dog, who ran away, and every dog I loved after that, save one. Someday I will lose him, too.
I lost my bearings, lost my perspective. I lost opportunities by silencing myself, too fearful to speak up on my own behalf, too afraid of not belonging. I shed my strong Southern accent while spending my sixteenth summer at a Montana social justice camp filled with New Yorkers.
I lost my way in college, mislaid my ambition, squandered three years in the high desert of New Mexico, sacrificed my self-respect to a man, underestimated myself while trying to learn everything my parents had neglected to teach me, raising myself into adulthood. I left behind a nearly completed degree in elementary education to pursue psychology. I lost my first dissertation advisor to narcissism (his), surviving to earn a PhD and a career I love.
Becoming a mother, I lost sleep worrying about my sons. I lost my mind to postpartum depression after the birth of my second child, Sam. Night came on and stayed for months, while I lived underwater in the darkness, unable to surface. When Sam was 8, I lost him on a wooded bike trail when he rode ahead and took an unexpected turn. Ten minutes of heart pounding terror until he appeared again.
I lost track of time as my sons grew like saplings, spread their branches, became a mighty oak and an elegant willow. I lost my own rootlessness, the sharp edges of judgement, the emptiness inside. I surrendered my shyness, freed my voice, reclaimed writing, found community.
I lost my rare, valuable Star Wars Lego figures to a fatherless child with cystic fibrosis. Our therapy session ending, he stuffed Yoda and Darth Vader into his pocket, insisting he’d brought them from home. His mother arrived, I challenged his ownership, tears ran down his cheeks as he stared silently into the distance. I got lost in the power of his longing. What did I know then of foreshortened futures?
I awoke in menopause, surveyed my losses: working memory, perfect eyesight, hearing, hair, joint mobility, muscle mass, gray matter, billions of skin cells, an inch of height I couldn’t spare – all gone like sand being sucked from beneath my feet by ocean tides.
I lost the beautiful boy who made me a mother, when he was only 23. Along with Benjamin, I lost my hope, my life’s meaning, our expected future. I forfeited my innocence about life and death, and enrolled in the school of impermanence. Waves of subsequent loss broke over me: a brother, a mother, a father, two child patients, another dog.
I lost my fingertip in an encounter with a knife and an onion.
I just lost the old man on the corner, the one I waved to for nearly 10 years, passing his house while taking my dogs on long walks, a practice for soothing my grief over Benjamin. A bald man who listened to Benny Goodman outside on warm days and lived alone in his pink rambler. I watched the gradual erasure of his long presence on this corner: first his homemade sign (“My Hermitage”) disappeared from above the garage, then the dilapidated office chair where he gazed out from his porch. When the blazing red “For Sale” sign appeared, it was plain that I’d lost my hope of talking with him one day. Despite political yard signs I disagreed with, I’d always thought I’d walk up his driveway and say hello. Where do they go, these actions we mean to take, our imagined futures, our best intentions? What becomes of our undeclared attachments?
Befriending death, embracing grief, my emotional armor peeled away. The fear lurking underneath all my life dissipated; I had no more patience for human cruelty, smallness, or the trivia of this world. I’d survived the loss I dreaded most. No one will mess with me again. Apprenticed with the darkness, I dismissed grudges, watched old wounds soften, surrendered self-judgment, uncovered deep gratitude. I fed my soul.
—Lucinda Cummings
NAMING THE DEAD
I was at my desk in Philadelphia on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, when my email went down.
It was about a quarter to nine. Email was hosted in our New York office, and it was not unusual to lose it briefly when a server dropped its network connection or had to be restarted for some reason. I growled and went to the workroom for coffee.
There was a television there, tuned to CNN. It showed an airliner being driven through the window of my office in New York.
I called my boss, Brad. Like most of our more senior people he had a cell phone. (The rest of us were getting a new form of cutting-edge communications tech: AOL Text Pagers.) I reached him at his home. I told him, "A plane just flew into the north tower of World Trade."
"You’re kidding. Which building is that?" he asked.
"That's World Trade One. That's us." I answered.
Ordinarily at that time on a Tuesday I would have been on a PATH train approaching the World Trade Center station, but I had changed my schedule that week. I had gone up on Monday instead, to start Scott, a new employee. Scott was in his early 30s, infectiously energetic, eager to get through the first-day-of-work formalities and dig into his new job. He had a big smile that crinkled his eyes; in a job that consisted largely of convincing people to prepare for things they didn’t even want to think about, I knew he would excel. He asked my permission to start his days early, at 8:00, so he could leave work early enough to spend time with his two- and four-year old boys between preschool and bedtime. I was glad to give him that permission.
So I was in Philadelphia on Tuesday morning, and Scott was murdered by terrorists on his second day of work. Dead, just like that.
The other two members of my small team died with him.
Joel was about ten years older than I, with many more years of experience in the field than I had. He didn’t hanker to lead the team, but he helped me get my feet under me. He looked, and was, studious. Soft voiced, bald on top, his wire-rimmed glasses often hid glints of mischief, and his gray mustache masked how often he smiled. Dead, just like that.
Carol was an administrative assistant who supported our small group and several others. She was kind, diligent, and quiet. She talked with me sometimes about her mother, who was old and failing. I learned much later that Carol was a third order Franciscan, but even not knowing that I recognized her simplicity, the joy she took in small things. Dead, just like that.
All that, and it was time for me to get to work.
I am a disaster recovery planner. I had been recruited to lead disaster recovery planning at Marsh USA in June 2001. Marsh is the insurance services subsidiary of Marsh McLennan, or MMC. My previous position had been at MMC’s reinsurance services company, Guy Carpenter. In Philadelphia, the Marsh and Guy Carpenter offices were a few floors apart in the same building. In New York City, Guy Carpenter had offices and a medium-sized data center in the World Trade Center, about halfway up Tower Two (the south tower), Marsh had a larger office and a major data center near the top of Tower One, and MMC’s headquarters were in midtown. My role at Marsh was “IT DR,” that is, Information Technology Disaster Recovery. When Something Bad happens, the Business Continuity folks worry about the people, and I worry about the computers. My work required frequent trips to the World Trade Center, and I had a cube there in the Marsh office in Tower One.
Brad asked me to try to get hold of someone on site, to get some kind of an impact assessment. He told me later that he thought it had been one of the light aircraft that fly tourists up and down the Hudson, and that often passed our 97th floor offices at eye level.
Fifteen minutes later, the second plane flew into Tower Two. Ian Fleming’s phrase flashed through my mind: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence … “Twice is enough,” I thought. “This is enemy action.”
I tried, and of course failed, to reach Joel in World Trade. But other status checks took place spontaneously.
My son, Alex, called from his middle school to make sure I was ok. I told him I was safe in Philadelphia. My wife was taking a week’s beach vacation in Delaware before starting a new job, and I was unable to reach her. I asked Alex to keep trying. Once he succeeded, it took him a while to convince her what he was telling her was real. She gave Dover Air Force Base a wide berth on her way home.
During that first day, I went downstairs from the Philadelphia Marsh office to Guy Carpenter, to talk with Chuck, their Operations Officer, about what we would need to do to support the Guy Carpenter recovery crew. My friend Mary Ivy passed his open door and, without either of us consciously crossing the intervening space, we were in each other’s arms.
This was not typical for us. A couple of weeks later, The Onion would report “Hugging Up 76,000 Percent.” (The Onion, volume 37, issue 34, p. 1.)
It takes about 30 seconds to go down one floor – two flights of stairs – in an office building’s fire tower. After 20 floors, even an active person begins to feel it. After 50 floors, you have shin splints. Call it an hour to get down from the top of World Trade, half an hour from the 50th floor. Within an hour and 42 minutes of the attack, both World Trade Center towers had collapsed.
That did not leave a lot of time to evacuate from an upper floor, even with stairways not blocked by flame and debris. But that is exactly what Paul, the Guy Carpenter CIO did, walking down from the mid-50s of the South Tower to ground level, and then heading grimly uptown, on foot, to the assembly point at corporate headquarters.
The Guy Carpenter people in Tower Two got out safely, in part because they were below the impact area, but mostly because many of them had been through the first terrorist bombing of World Trade in 1993. They knew the attack was real, and ignored instructions from the Port Authority to shelter in place. I have heard more than one story of an older colleague taking a younger one by the hand, and saying, “You’re coming with me.”
That evening, Paul held a teleconference for his entire staff. He conducted no business until he had heard the voice every single person. I don’t think Paul could imagine handling things any other way. We cheered when the last, embarrassed, attendee dialed in. We were all alive and safe.
Other corporate responses were less humane than Paul’s. Although HR later created web pages on which we could post sightings (“I saw Fred and talked to him.” “I talked to Jean on the phone last night.”) we were told not to name the dead, and for weeks there was no list of them. I was happy to comply. It protected me from realities I did not want to face, like Scott’s wife with her two young sons on Brad’s lawn that night, screaming to be told what had happened to him.
Brad and I agreed that I should stay in Philadelphia to help with the Guy Carpenter recovery, since I was more familiar with their systems and their people. Shortly before my transfer to Marsh, I had determined that a lot of Guy Carpenter’s essential software installation media were not kept off site. Maintaining copies of such vital records in a second location is a disaster recovery fundamental, so I begged, wheedled, whined, and made myself an unbearable nuisance until I had collected software CDs for all our critical systems. I crammed them into my overnight bag and took them to Philadelphia, where we stored them in the computer room. With this background, it just seemed to make sense for me to be there with the people and systems I knew.
Nevertheless, before I went to work with the Guy Carpenter team in Philadelphia on Wednesday morning, I packed a bag. Once at work, I got a loaner mobile phone issued to me. Sure enough, Brad called me from the Marsh recovery site in North Jersey. He needed my help there.
We had contracted with a recovery services company, COMDISCO, for what are called “shared recovery resources.” That means that multiple companies contract for the use of the same computers for DR, on the assumption that it is unlikely that they will all experience disasters at the same time. That proved to be a bad assumption.
The contract addressed the possibility that multiple clients would declare a disaster concurrently by promising to assign resources based on the order in which the declarations were received. One of my first actions on Tuesday morning was to get on the phone to declare a disaster on each of our contracts.
The declaration process broke down under the volume of calls, and the order in which declarations were received was lost. We did eventually get all the servers we needed. They never gave us all the user workstations we wanted.
The Marsh recovery process was managed from England, since they were not hampered by the loss of systems, infrastructure, and people as we were in the U.S. Thirty or more people would meet on conference calls several times a day, where progress would be reported, and next steps identified and assigned. I left these calls with a legal pad on which I had written out my own list of actions, and then went from room to room in the recovery site, passing instructions and getting status updates and resource requests from the various recovery teams.
Once a janitor stopped me. “What is on these pads you all carry?” he asked. I looked around the corridor. Easily twenty people from different companies were doing exactly what I was doing.
“Lists,” I told him. “Lists of things to do. Lists.”
But there was no list of the dead.
Our wide area network connected our global user population to the servers at the COMDISCO IT recovery site. However, there was only enough bandwidth to run a few test sessions on the recovered applications, not enough to support a full workload.
Even in 2001, email was among our most critical applications. By Thursday we had recovered the email servers at COMDISCO. But how could we get around the network problem?
Our corporate headquarters in Midtown Manhattan had both upgradable network bandwidth and enough raised floor space to host the email servers, if we could get them there. We solved the network problem by buying the servers and moving them to midtown.
By this time the Lincoln tunnel was open, though security was tight, and the police were nervous. So was I, when I signed a purchase agreement for just over a million dollars’ worth of uninsured equipment to be transported in a cheap rental van into New York past heavily armed police.
Grief did not stop John, an IT project manager, from renting the van and driving it. Like me, had previously been issued an AOL text pager. So had his best friend, who worked in the data center high in Tower One. There was no route down. “I’m standing on a wing!” his friend had texted. And later, “The smoke is getting pretty bad.”
John and I now both had cell phones. After we loaded the servers onto the truck and secured them, I told him, “You will call me when you enter the tunnel. You will call me when you exit the tunnel. You will call me when you reach the loading dock.” My log shows that on Friday September 14 at 00:45 he entered the Lincoln Tunnel. By 01:00 he was at the loading dock.
There were less grim moments. On a teleconference late on Wednesday, one of the Guy Carpenter tech leads said to me, “Remember how you were after my ass to get you software, and got me really pissed, and just kept after me anyway?”
“Yes,” I said cautiously.
“Thank you,” he said.
Another member of that team told me years later about going into the Philadelphia computer room and finding all the software they needed. “Chests full of CDs,” he said. I like that word “chests.” It transforms a drab computer room into Ali Baba’s cave.
The headquarters building did not have the resources to host all the servers we needed, but we had a data center in Massachusetts that had a large number of servers that were just about to be decommissioned. Although they did not have enough tape drives to perform the high volume restores we needed for recovery, they did have plenty of network capacity, power, and HVAC.
We restored the servers’ data from backup tapes at COMDISCO in New Jersey, compressed it, and transferred it across the network to Massachusetts, where it was decompressed and brought on line.
Thursday or Friday night I walked into the console room at COMDISCO. The lights were off, and the only illumination was from the consoles themselves. Five or six red-eyed system administrators were there. Each step in the process was slow, and had to be monitored. While they waited and watched, they browsed websites. Although the company did not publish a list of the dead, newspapers and the City did. They were looking for the names of their friends.
We had a lot of survivors from World Trade who needed a place for their desks. We found it in a new building, being built across the Hudson River in Hoboken, NJ. We moved into the new space in 2003.
The World Trade Center Memorial was dedicated on September 11, 2011.
In December 2014, a colleague invited me to guest-lecture at his business continuity class at NYU. On the way, I visited the Memorial for the first time. I entered the plaza where the towers had stood, and my heart was taken away.
The memorial for each tower is a pit, evocative of the foundation for each building. A wall of water plunges down each side to fall in a pool that covers the floor. In the center is a hollow square, and the pool rushes down into that; you do not see it reach bottom. The words to describe it are also the feeling it evokes: bottomless sorrow. The names of the people who died in each building are cut in metal plates mounted on the walls around the pits. My fingers found their names.
Carol. Scott. Joel.
—Walter Lawn
IRREVERSIBLE
CONTENT WARNING: SUICIDE BY FIREARM
Dogs bark as I ring the bell, but they quiet when the key turns. I open the door to my brother’s house, and they rush outside to pee. They’re alert and alive, so I think I’ve made it in time.
The next sound is silence. Then my feet crunch over brokenness—lamps, pottery, shards from overhead lights. I tiptoe over the wreckage and cry out, hoping to hear a deep, familiar voice.
No response.
Nine months prior, my brother and his wife had moved overseas, leaving my nephew in charge of their home, the mail, two family dogs. Now, they couldn’t reach their son. When my brother called me, I told myself, Whatever it is, I can handle it.
This is who I am, the family fixer, wrestling skewed situations back onto their rails.
So I descend the stairs to their basement, repeating a monologue I hope will turn dialogue. I’m here. Are you? When I pause, the air grows heavy.
There are two bedrooms in the basement. One door is open, and the other is closed.
The pressure in my chest threatens to suffocate. I want to be the hero, turn depression and despair into treatment, and eventually, triumph. I believe in my nephew, envision a future of happiness, friendships, love.
The open door reveals a cherished guitar, smashed; dresser drawers, pulled off their hinges; his mirror, shattered in a million jagged pieces; Coors Light, Silk Milk, Taco Bell, discarded clothes, dirty dishes, and all the emotions and tears that I imagine underlie this chaos, strewn across the floor.
Fear thumps in my head and I push it away. I haven’t found anything, yet. Not really.
So I’m daunted by the closed door’s flat surface. At this moment, this fragile, tentative moment, possibility still exists—the idea that I can act, do something, save him.
Cold metal chills my hand when I turn the knob, inch that door open. As I do, my eyes drift down, find my 23-year-old nephew, curled like a child on the floor. I see his whole life in that posture—baby, toddler, a lanky tween sleeping till noon. And an innocent, sad, frustrated young adult turning inward, regressing, wanting to rest.
Except he’s too still, too silent. And I’m too late. Blood pools on the floor and he’s lying on top of a shotgun.
A. Shot. Gun.
The gap between the potential I saw in him and the life he couldn’t envision for himself explodes in an unfathomable instant. The trajectory of his despair, a bullet train I couldn’t reroute.
I dial 9-1-1, and the operator struggles to decipher my hyperventilated words. My body stutters as I inhale, repeat the address.
Paramedics arrive but there’s nothing they can do. One of the medics hugs me before directing me to the police, who want me to talk to the detective assigned to the case, and eventually, the coroner. I repeat and relive with each new arrival, etching the sights, sounds, odors, and emotions into my mind, my psyche, my faltering sense of stability.
I rub palms down my face as a collage of memories collides—standing back-to-back with my nephew, measuring his growth against my steady height; the way he’d shrink in stature, but expand in spirit as he’d hunch over his guitar and strum melodies he’d composed himself; his subtle, sly humor that would make his mother laugh and laugh and laugh.
My stomach seizes as I make an unimaginable call, one that spans oceans.
I’ve failed the family.
Street sounds whoosh in one ear; my brother’s silence swells in the other. Then his wife’s voice pierces the void, filled with insistent disbelief. “No. No. NO!”
And I wonder if he’s disappointed, if she’s angry. Because I was unable to intervene; because I hadn’t prevented this tragedy; because it’s my voice on the phone, instead of their son’s.
Loneliness stifles outside noises. My brother, my sister-in-law, my sweet nephew, they’re all so far away. The distance pulls, expands, threatens to snap.
When I return to my own home, the smell of their house remains. I blow my nose, wash my face, shower, throw my clothes in a big black bag and dump it in the trash.
Yet the scent lingers.
The detective had labeled the scene, “Rage.”
The psychiatrist I will later see diagnoses, “Trauma.”
I call it heartbreak.
And I slog through life differently.
Every waking moment viewed through a filter of pain as I ache for the past—wind on my face, during bike rides in crisp autumn air, with my nephew, just a few months ago.
Every instant of stillness expands, and I dread my mind’s return to that motionless room—no breeze, no familiar voice, no interaction. Only echoes.
And every evening, as darkness shrouds light, I writhe in bed and wait—for a newly prescribed sleeping pill to still my mind, fog the vivid images of my nephew’s irreversible choice.
Suicide Prevention (US): call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention https://www.afsp.org