Wide Awake and Dreaming
Gwynne Gilson

"The one that comes to mind most, dreaming of a green pool in front of me. That was part of the radar scope. It was a pool of gel, and I reached into the radar scope to stop that flight. But in the dream, I didn't harm the plane," she says. "I just held it in my hand, and somehow that stopped everything."

. . . Danielle O'Brien, Flight Controller for American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

The photograph shows the World Trade Center towers, framed between the glazing bars of an old-fashioned sunburst-style window. The trick of perspective makes them look small, yet still they soar high above all other buildings in the Manhattan skyline. I took this photograph on August 13, 2001, from the Great Hall on Ellis Island. My mother's father was processed through Ellis Island in 1920, when he arrived in America after leaving his small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe. We were on a family vacation to New Jersey, where I grew up, and most of my family still lives. Almost everyone was there that day -- my parents, sister, brother, nieces and nephews. It was oppressively hot and we were all a little cranky. The picture was a momentary inspiration; my kids were tugging on me, wanting to move on to the Statue of Liberty. A quick click of the shutter registered an image whose significance to me was based only upon its aesthetic composition.

Less than a month after our vacation, back in California, I awoke at daybreak, anticipating another pristine September day. Frank rolled over, wrapping his long strong arms around my body, holding me tightly. Unhurriedly, we began to make love, unconcerned with time or the world outside the window. The phone rang downstairs, unusually early for a Tuesday morning. Neither of us answered, not wanting to break the spell. After, I picked up the phone to check voice mail. There was a message from Frank's mom in Michigan. Her words were hard to understand. This was not unusual. Her voice is always shaky because of emphysema and the bottled oxygen she breathes. She said something about the World Trade Center, a plane, and a bomb. I didn't understand, and felt no particular urgency to investigate. For a few more minutes, I stayed in bed, then lazily dressed and went downstairs.

Turning on the TV sparked a blaze of comprehension. I saw what millions of people had already been watching: one of the World Trade Center buildings with furrows of smoke pouring from between the vertical columns of the façade, a fire clearly beyond anyone's ability to control. Within minutes the structure collapsed in an orderly progression downward, leaving only smoke to hang in the air. Then I understood that the other tower was already gone. The smoke expanded, spread throughout lower Manhattan, rising high above the buildings and obscuring them. The seemingly impossible had been achieved -- two monumental buildings that had taken years to build -- destroyed in mere hours. I could only think of the people who must have been trapped in offices, stairwells, and elevators. I had been fucking while thousands of people died.

My thoughts turned to my young daughters who were at their father's house, no doubt getting ready for school. I called and asked him not to let them watch TV. We could not hide this obscene demonstration of man's capacity for hatred from them, but graphic TV images would only paint the scenery for their nightmares.

The news got worse. The Pentagon was also been hit, the FAA had grounded all flights, but some of them were still missing. The President was somewhere over the country in Air Force One, the Vice President was at an Undisclosed Location. A plane had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Everyday life was suspended. I waited to find out what else the people who executed these acts had planned for us. How would we know when it was over?

The doomsday scenarios of my childhood were different, predicated as they were on nuclear holocaust, not crashing commercial airplanes. After a Soviet first strike, we would be struggling to survive a prolonged winter, not helplessly waiting for another episode of made-for-TV terrorism. The terrorists seemed to understand us better than we understood ourselves, plugging directly into our fascination with electronic images. For years, our cultural icons invaded the rest of the globe; now the terrorists chose to attack one of the most powerful symbols of our capitalist economy, on our home turf, during the morning news. The behemoth of globalization had turned its head around to bite us.

The images of destruction were the only overt message the terrorists delivered. Our attention was secured by the crash of American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower, assuring live coverage of the second attack. Watching United Airlines Flight 175 on video, endlessly performing its disappearing trick, was the only avenue for deciphering the meaning of the act. No verbal claim of responsibility, no revolutionary manifesto, was issued. Its implications were presumed to be clear to us.

Eventually, Frank said "It's time to turn off the TV" and I had to agree. He didn't say much that day, though I could guess some of his thoughts. If he had been on one of those airplanes, he would have tried to stop the terrorists. I would like to believe I'd have done the same, but in reality there was nothing either one of us could do.

We'd been working on the yard, digging up plants I didn't like, cultivating the hard clay bequeathed to us by our home's builder, adding soil amendments to soften it. Going outside seemed the best thing to do; keeping my body busy with something that didn't require my brain's active participation. The sunlight and warmth reminded me that in New York the weather was the same. Out of a clear blue autumn sky came a sudden shattering of complacency. I broke the ground with my shovel like a gravedigger, but I was preparing for the planting of new life that would flourish in the spring. I do not believe in the God of Christians, Jews or Muslims, but somehow I felt this was like praying, a prayer to the god who lives in all of us, calling us to the conscious cultivation of life, if only we will listen.

We in California know the abrupt changes to the man-made landscape that Nature can inflict. On one October afternoon, a 20-second earthquake breached the Bay Bridge roadway, collapsed the Nimitz freeway, and shifted entire blocks of apartment buildings in San Francisco at a 45-degree angle. On another October day, nearly 3,000 homes were destroyed by fire in the Oakland hills. We know the feeling of Before and After, when you begin to distrust the ground you stand on. We expect these manifestations of Nature, but the world had never seen such destruction so precipitously delivered by men. Like earthquakes, these acts came without warning.

As I worked, I thought about my trip to New York City in the 1980's, when I worked for a San Francisco office furniture dealership. Part of my agenda was to visit a customer with headquarters in One World Trade Center. It was exciting to be in Manhattan, but the World Trade Center complex made me uneasy. It wasn't a terrorist attack that concerned me. It was the sense of too many people concentrated in one place -- an eerie glimpse into the future of mankind, when we will run out of land and have to live out our lives on artificial ground. The complex of buildings was a city unto itself -- at the lowest level was the train station, above that the shopping mall, then the building lobby, and on top of it all, like a great weight, the skyscrapers rising surrealistically high. They were a challenge to the forces of nature, an expression of mankind's abiding need to test the boundaries of our world.

To reach the upper floors, one had to transfer to a separate elevator bank halfway up. The elevators ascended rapidly, then faster still, vibrating with their acceleration. Once I reached my customer's floor, I could see that the floors were vast, much larger than the San Francisco skyscrapers in which I usually worked. Each one offered an acre of rentable space. If you stood very still, you could feel the buildings swaying in the wind. This seemed like a structure you couldn't quite trust. The New Yorkers who worked there seemed to take it in stride. I was unsettled.

I worked in the yard the rest of the afternoon of September 11, then showered, and went to my daughter Abby's soccer practice. That night, she and Sarah would come back to my house. I greeted the girls with hugs and peered into their faces, searching for signs of distress. Abby, my sunny child, pulled away to join the other girls for her practice. Sarah has always been moodier, more sensitive. I asked her about her day, what was talked about at school? "Some boys were joking about it," she said, "like it was a disaster movie. They didn't seem to care that it really happened."

She went to sit in the car and do homework. My ex was grim. Like me, he is from the East Coast, having grown up outside Washington, D.C. Being able to picture the scenes of these disasters so clearly seemed to bring it even closer to the heart. We traded bits of information while watching the incongruous scene before us: happy little girls scampering around a field, seemingly oblivious to the world's evils. After practice, we decided to take the girls for pizza, to attempt some semblance of normality. At the restaurant, the big screen TV relentlessly retold the news. While we waited for our food, images of people jumping from buildings were presented for our viewing pleasure. I finally got up to ask the manager to change the channel or turn it off. The subsequent re-broadcast of some ancient NFL game was easier to digest.

That night, Sarah asked me if I was afraid. I struggled between reassurance and honesty. I could only attempt something in between. The tragedy was so fresh, it was impossible to know what it meant for the future. I told her that I was not afraid so much as sad, and angry. Angry at people who would think that this would prove anything, angry at our government for allowing it to happen. What I felt more deeply, in a way that was hard to explain, was that to make meaning out of this outrage, we would have to seek a different path. We needed to talk about love for our fellow man and mutual understanding. I am not naïve, but I hoped that the need for change would be recognized. I feared blind retribution, the primitive need to make SOMEONE pay for this crime.

In the ensuing days of September, I continued my work in the garden. The weather held, warm and dry. I thought about how the view from my kitchen window would be different the next year. At night, I combed the daily picture postings on Yahoo for scenes of New York and Washington. I tried to reconcile the altered view of the Manhattan skyline with the one I had seen in August. I read stories from the New York Times: first-hand accounts by survivors, profiles of the victims. I did this surreptitiously. Frank doesn't understand dwelling on the past, or on the negative. The continuing focus on stories of the attack's survivors annoyed him. But I was grieving. Not for anyone I knew personally, but for people who in all probability were a lot like me. This was a necessary process, to see the faces, the flowers, the flags -- the ways in which other people were trying to make meaning out of this horror. The heartbreaking images of tearful people holding pictures of their missing loved ones reminded me of mothers standing in the Plaza de Mayo of Buenos Aires, Argentina. They also hold pictures of their "disappeared" loved ones, looking for answers. We Americans like to think we can live apart from the rest of the world, but now we also must face atrocities that leave us asking why, and because of whom? We learned that many of the hijackers had been living in this country. People like my grandfather came here to seek the freedoms we take for granted. Now some immigrants come here and use those freedoms to attack us.

The announcement of bombs dropping in Afghanistan three weeks later saddened, but did not surprise me. I revealed to very few people my feelings that war was not the answer. I could not have failed to note the surge in patriotism, the disapproval of public questioning of the government's actions. My patriotism runs less to flag-waving than to impassioned remarks about those liberties that make our country worth defending. I thought of putting a sign in my car window saying "God Bless Freedom of Speech." Or perhaps "Fight Terrorism -- Trade in Your SUV." But I didn't -- I was afraid my car would become a target.

For some who survived, the events of September 11th divorced with great cruelty the first part of their life from the remainder. For me, nothing much has changed. Life goes on as it always has. It's springtime now, and the bulbs I planted last fall are bursting into bloom -- tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, in pastel colors of pink, yellow, and purple. They are cheerful to look at from my windows. Red leaf buds are erupting from my new Bloodgood Japanese maple. I no longer turn the news on first thing every morning, as I did for several months after the disaster. My bad dreams of crashing airplanes and falling people stopped a while ago. September 11th is no longer a daily topic of conversation. The fact that we are a country at war seems barely acknowledged. Today is Election Day, and less than half of California's registered voters are expected to vote. Frank -- disgusted by the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election -- said he wasn't voting. I mentioned our soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, supposedly to defend our freedoms.

Frank is an Army veteran. He voted.

I still look at the photograph from time to time. In the image, the towers have a ghostly appearance, as though they are already part of the past. I wish I could put my hands through the window to grasp them, to keep the people inside safe, to stop everything.

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