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The response elsewhere was not so gentle. A gunman murdered the Sikh owner of a Chevron station in Mesa, Ariz. "I am an American," the suspect, Frank Roque, declared upon arrest. A woman went through the phone book and made hateful calls to anyone named Abdul. A Muslim cabdriver in Manhattan kept his license out of view and didn't tell customers his first name--Mohammed--because of the fear he sensed. People asked where he is from when they got into the cab: If they are not familiar with Bangladesh, "I tell them it's in South America. And then they sort of relax," he said.
In the middle of the night, when no one feels very brave, who has not thought about escape? Uncertainty can be even harder to live with than bad news. Our therapeutic culture instructs us to seek closure, but how exactly do you do that when you know that this awful journey may be just beginning? We won't even know when it's over, so closure would just mean denial. So it was easy last week to find people--even rescue workers at Ground Zero--who said they still could not believe this could possibly have happened. We wobble between resolve and despair; the lines between prudence and paranoia blur. A three-year-old boy in Spotsylvania, Va., fatally shot himself with the gun his father had just brought home to protect his family.
There are bankers and bond traders and fire fighters and clerks with 40, 50, 60 funerals to attend; their wedding albums are full of smiling pictures of dead people. St. Mary's in Middletown, N.J., lost more parishioners in one day than the whole town did during all of World War II. At a home in a bucolic suburb of New York City, a mother of three school-age children mourns both her husband and her brother; 2,000 people attended her husband's memorial last week, spilling out onto the streets. The house is draped in a full-size flag, with bouquets at the window. Her daughter in sixth grade has not yet returned to school, but her classmates struggle to process all the bad news. "Mom," asked a classmate as they walked by the house, "do you think they'll make her do all the homework she missed? It would be awful of them if they did that."
We are all having our breakdowns, large and small. A woman accidentally took her dog's allergy medicine and had to call poison control. An Atlanta flight attendant was so afraid to fly, he called in a bomb threat to his own airline. One woman who escaped her World Trade Center office was worried she was not feeling things enough; so she got a tattoo on her wrist, a survivor's code, to help her remember what pain felt like. The tattoo reads,
9.11.01 2.54 29
The date; Tower 2, 54th floor; and her age. She had turned 29 the day before the attack.
We found solace in small adjustments. Cell-phone sales jumped, both among first-time buyers and current customers wanting extras for their spouses and kids. The FCC told TV stations they didn't need to test their emergency broadcast systems for a while, for fear of spooking people. Candlelight vigils brought people out of their homes to the town square, then a plane rumbled overhead. Inhale, look up, follow the lights till they disappear, exhale and return to the prayers. It's hard to have the perfect autumn wedding when all the out-of-town guests call to cancel. Life insurance policies were selling fast too.