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Night Visits

I live a very sedate and simple life of a suburban father of two. But it wasn’t always so. Back in the 80’s and 90's, I was a “road warrior”. I traveled all over the US up to 50 weeks a year going from one software crisis to the next. Our clients didn’t pay the hourly rates we demanded because things were going well at their companies. They paid us because they were in trouble, deep deep trouble and we were the kind of unique “tech mercenaries” that were sent in to turn horribly managed, under funded, overextended projects into something that could be called “a success”.

For all its glory, and for all the pay, it was actually a hard life. No matter how attractive it may sound, business travel is hard work. There’s “going on the road”, which is fun and “living on the road”, and living on the road is just hell. Because no matter where you go, you see the same four things, Airport – Car Rental – Hotel – Un-windowed Basement of a Clients Office. You work from early morning till later at night, and during crisis time, you eat primarily from vending machines and cafeterias. We lived hard, but we played hard too. Sometimes you could get out, but very often, your client was in some backwater hell hole that you didn’t want to be at any longer than possible, but there were exceptions to that. Manhattan was one of those exceptions.

Whenever we were in or around Manhattan, we always tried to find time to go into town. The thing about Manhattan is that unlike most every other town in the world, even if you’ve never been there before, you feel like you have. Every TV show and thousands of movies have been there, so in a way, the first time you go to Manhattan, its like meeting a relative that you’ve always known about but never actually met before. You find yourself familiar with it, even when you have no business knowing what you know. There’s the building Oscar and Felix lived in, there’s Central Park, there’s “Tiffanys” there’s the Rockefeller Center Skating Rink. That’s where they tape Saturday Night Live. There’s the Chrysler Building, and you remember those cool pictures with Margaret Bourke White, There’s the Empire State Building and all you can think about is King Kong.

And then you see them standing there, the World Trade Center. If you were in New Jersey, you could see them, if you were in Long Island, there they were, and anywhere in Manhattan, there they were. Usually they were the first things you could see popping over the tree line as you drove towards the island. No details, no windows, just two big grey pillars standing out above the skyline. When you saw them, you knew you were close. You knew when you saw them you were going to go ahead and go into the city that night. No hotel lobby restaurant for you. No pizza delivery to the office. You were going into Manhattan.

I am visited from time to time by a recurring nightmare. It comes about every once in awhile, usually after I’ve been excessively fatigued or stressed out by some technical problem at work.

My nightmare begins in the same way every time and yet I never see it coming.

It starts at a restaurant and bar in Manhattan up around 92nd and 3rd called “wings of fire”, great Buffalo wings, good beer, basketball hoops and loud music. In the dream, most of the people in the bar are old friends or people I’ve known over the years. They look at me and I can see them, but I can’t quite make out who they are. I’m talking but the people don’t respond, they just sit there and look at me. The music in the bar begins to go quiet, until it can’t be heard at all. Everyone continues to sit at the tables, slowly drinking but saying nothing.

Then they stop drinking and begin to stare, they are staring at me. Even though I know almost everyone I see, there is something about these people in the bar that I can’t quite figure out.

“whoa, I’m getting a real bad vibe from this crowd” I say to one of my friend Joe, who’s seated right across from me.

“Well, they get like this sometimes, especially when they think that people have forgotten them”. He says to me.

What are you talking about? I ask in a near whisper while leaning across the table to him.

“Aw, come on now Frank, You remember what you used to say, that 10 years after you’re dead most people have a hard time remembering what you looked like much less that you were ever alive in the first place?” Joe says leaning forward and pointing around the room.

“Yeah, and?”

“Buddy, look at me. You don’t see anything out of the ordinary here at all, do you?” I look at Joe, but I can’t make out his face, its there, but the details aren’t clear.

“No, not really, why?”

Joe shakes his head. “I think they want you to go down there” he says to me as he sips his beer while looking over the top of his glass with a sour look on his face. The bar is now absolutely silent.

I slide my chair back and stand up to leave. No one moves, except Joe, who watches me as I turn to walk out the door. “ I’ll see you later buddy” he says to me with a wave of his hand then returning to slowly nursing his beer. I walk outside to hail a cab, and look back to see everyone in the bar lined up at the windows, looking at me as I leave. They stare, and lightly wave as I drive away in the cab. I tell the cab driver “ take me down to Wall Street”. The cab heads down to Lower Manhattan as I sit in the back seat, thinking about what I’ve just seen. His cab license says “Mike Lee” and gives at date of some time in 1978. The date strikes me as odd, but I say nothing and the name means nothing to me. The cab driver asks, “ About where do you want to get dropped off this time?” I tell him “just drive around for a bit, I’ll let you know”.

“You cant keep putting it off you know, so why don’t you let me just take you there?” the cab driver says over his shoulder.

“Ok, I suppose its time”, I tell him this like I have said it to him a thousand times before.

We turn the corner and begin to drive up to the World Trade Center, and as we do, the cab slows. I tell the cab driver to stop and let me out. Unlike the normal day-to-day life of that part of Manhattan at this time at night, the street is now absolutely quiet. I step out of the cab and look up to see the buildings, still standing solid and in place. I’m awestruck at their beauty. It’s as if they have never fallen and never would. They are solid and standing in wait for the next days work with no hint to their eventual fate. I cross the street and walk over and stand outside the fountain in the central plaza and look out over the whole area, the two towers standing in their rightful place lit from below by the lights that illuminated those great tree like street level columns. Concrete, steel and glass, the lobbies, the security guards, the cleaning staff shuttling cleaning carts back and forth, the floor polishers busy at work. Each of them waves at me as I go by and I instinctively wave back. I stop and walk up to the wall of the south tower and touch it, running my hand over the cold smooth glass of the lobby windows.

I hear a tap on the glass from inside. It’s the security guard tapping his flashlight to get my attention.

“ We knew you wouldn’t forget us” he shouts to me through the glass, muffled both by the sound of the floor polisher at work behind him and the thickness of the glass. The floor polisher gives a wave and a nod, but I cant quite make out either of their faces, just as I couldn’t quite make out Joes face either. They are familiar, yet unclear.

I start back for the cab and turn at the street to look back. They are still there, standing high in the Manhattan sky, marking their location from all directions.

“And what did you forget this time” the cab driver asks me.

“ I forgot how beautiful it all was. I forgot how quiet it is at night down in the plaza” I say as I look at the cab driver. He’s leaning over his steering wheel, looking down at his dashboard, talking to me though his window while he slowly smokes a cigarette, its cherry end the only light in the cab.

“You still don’t get it do you?” he says to me. “ Those are just buildings, and yet you can remember most of their details although you only visited them twice, but what about the people you’ve known in your life who died, do you remember them even people you lived with or worked with for days on end? Do you even remember what they looked like?

You don’t even remember me, do you”?

Then it hits me. I suddenly remember who “Mike Lee” is. And I wake up.

Mike Lee was the first person I ever knew who died. We went to High School together. He drowned in the American River one summer when I was 17. I remember his brother Greg, I remember his Uncle Max, I remember the house they lived in, but I can’t really remember what Mike looked like and it bothers the hell out of me. Each of the people in my nightmare back in the bar on 92nd and 3rd, including Joe are people I’ve known who have died. And yet even for Joe, after a time they all fade. It isn’t until I wake up from this nightmare that I find myself going through yearbooks and photographs to remind myself of those who are no longer with me. For some of the people I’ve known who died, I don’t have photographs. I have to construct what I remember about them from memory and I know that every year, I forget just a little bit more of what was once a person who lived who touched my life in some small way.

It’s not death itself that bothers me; it’s the way that time tends to erase people from our memories that I find frightening. 10 years after we are dead, most of us wont be remembered by people outside of those who are in our own families.

No matter how significant the works we might accomplish in our life, unless someone who still lives remembers us, the memory of our existence will be lost forever.

This year is the 4th anniversary of the massacre of 9/11. I’ve always had a difficult time looking at the pictures from that day. I’ve never understood why that is exactly, I just don’t. There’s something so repulsive to me to see those pictures, something I’ve never ascribed to the worst concentration camp photos, pictures of Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima or Nagasaki and I know that 9/11 is nowhere near as bad as any of those things, but something about it has always bothered me more than all the other things. As near as I can tell, it’s because of the fact that unlike the Concentration camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki or Pearl Harbor, I was at the World Trade Center before it became a place of death. It still lives in my mind; it still fills the skyline of Manhattan.

Sure, I see an occasional picture, and every once in awhile I use one to make a point on the blog, but I’ve never bought a book about 9/11 and I’ve never watched a single television show about that day.

Something changed in me on that day. I am not the same person I was on September 10th but I have never forgotten what I saw on that horrible day, not one small piece of it.

I will never forget what it was I saw before that day.

They were beautiful.

Update: Neo-Neocon has a rememberence that I quite enjoyed, and is not at all metaphysical.

Posted @ September 11, 2005 02:53 AM | Current Affairs

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