Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [45]
Everyone sat stunned into complete silence, as we waited for the captain to explain what had happened.
Finally he spoke.
“Folks, there’s nothing wrong with the aircraft,” he soberly declared. As we were circling the city that it seemed we had nearly crashed into, the captain assured us that we had “only” been caught in a wind shear, an aggressive type of turbulence caused by an abrupt shift in the wind’s direction.
On September 10, 2001, I was on a plane with my mother, returning from a ten-day trip to Japan. My second book, a collection of short stories titled Krik? Krak!, had just been published there, and I had been invited to give a series of talks jointly sponsored by the American and Haitian embassies of Japan. The trip had gone quite well. In addition to work, my mother and I had done a lot of sightseeing, including at the world-famous Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. On the flight back to the United States, however, I had been anxious to get home. Home being my first apartment in New Rochelle, New York, what I called my artist colony of one, in a town that had taught me the true value of writerly solitude, a town where I knew no one. The flight from Tokyo was long but uneventful. My mother read and reread the twenty-third psalm. (The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.) Every now and then she stopped and marveled at how much we were fed, even in coach. I made her walk every other hour to avoid blood clots in her leg.
We landed in Chicago and after a brief layover changed planes there. My themed reading for both flights was Wole Soyinka, anything I had not yet read by the Nigerian novelist, memoirist, poet, and playwright. Because New York City was our final destination, I lingered over a poem of his titled “New York, U.S.A,” which had been published more than a decade earlier.
Control was wrested from your pilot’s hands,
And yours, mid-Atlantic, hapless voyager.
Deafened the engine’s last descent
To all but disordered echoes of your feet.
An evening thunderstorm forced us to circle over the city for some time, making us land later in the evening than we should have. I spent a sleepless, jetlagged night at my parents’ house and the next morning around seven a.m. I drove my tiny Toyota Echo to New Rochelle. Traffic was light. A better driver now, I drove assuredly, routinely, over the Whitestone Bridge and into the tree-lined streets of New Rochelle, where people were heading out for work. Then I walked into my sparsely furnished apartment, crawled onto my mattress on the floor, and fell into a deep sleep.
When I woke up a few hours later, I turned on the television hoping to catch my midday soap opera, but my television was not working. There was only television “snow,” a sign that my signal had been lost. Later I would learn that it was because the tower that sent this signal to my home had been destroyed when the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. I did not have cable and, knowing nothing of what had happened, I went back to sleep. I woke up at 2:00 p.m. when my phone rang. My father had been trying to reach me, but phones were also down.
“The World Trade Center has been attacked,” he said. “The towers don’t exist anymore. Thousands of people have died.”
I wanted to rush home, to my parents’ house, but the White-stone Bridge was closed and no trains were running. I would have to process this horrifying news for long empty hours by myself, with no one I loved within physical reach. I was alone and my writer seeking solitude was of no use. A friend’s wife, who had escaped from the second tower, had temporarily gone mute from shock. My pregnant cousin had walked home to Brooklyn from midtown Manhattan, barefoot. My brother Karl, who worked near Grand Central Station, was still unaccounted for. Still, I didn’t think I knew anyone who’d died in the towers, or in Pennsylvania, or in Washington? Or did I?
The next