Gently Nothing

How many deaths should we expect to face, in a given year? Of people we know, I mean. Not our nearest and dearest, but our friends-of-friends, our co-workers' wives or fathers, children we've met, or the old friends we rarely talk to these days? Of that great outer circle, how many should we expect, each year, to hear have died?

I'm also not talking about well-foreshadowed, long-time-coming deaths. Not death as a merciful end to long illness, or even as the fitting culmination to a long and good life. I mean here, very specifically, death accidental and sudden. Unexpected. Unforeseen, and unforeseeable.

I received a phone message from a close friend with whom I usually communicate only by email. So I knew he had bad news. I wondered, as I waited to call him back, whether his relationship had ended. But it turned out to be much weirder, and more horrible (not that an ending relationship isn't horrible, especially when two people, like my friend and his partner, have had so much happiness, and weathered so much turmoil, over their years together. But when a relationship ends, there's still the possibility of healing, as long as both partners live. Healing for them, separately, at least, and sometimes even for their life together.) The real news he gave me was that someone we'd both known for half our lifetimes, someone who had for some years been my very close friend, but whom I'd lost touch with in the last decade, had died in an accident. Unexpected. Horrible. Particularly horrible, in her case, because she'd been run down by a train as she sat and tried to start her car, caught on the tracks.

I spoke to her sister, when she called me some time later. And I managed a letter to her husband, months after, embarrassed by how long I'd put it off. But for weeks after her death, months, all I could do was think of her, of her name-- Janet-- run through our memories together, jobs and travels and relationships and children, a whole panoply of life changes. All those scenes were tainted by the sharp acid of her life's end, marred as old cherished photos with a heavy red DEAD stamp across them.

I've known two people killed by trains, now-- isn't that bizarre? Getting hit by a train always seems so weirdly unlikely, not to say stupid. Trains are so big, and noticeable. They don't come at you all that quickly. There's time to run, surely. But not as much time as you'd think, I guess, because every year people do die, my two friends aren't the only ones. The second one was also the most recent death, a co-worker from Barnes & Noble in Chicago: Lance. He was a good guy. He was killed crossing a street-level track of the El on his bicycle, I imagine on his way home from work. He'd taken over my job, when I left there. The last death by El train in Chicago was, the papers told us, only in November, and I seem to remember regular reports of death or injury in the New York subways, so maybe subway trains are more dangerous then other ones, or faster, or more unpredictable.

In Lance's story, there is some justification for what happened-- bystanders said one train had just passed, and so perhaps he thought the way was clear when he went around the closed crossing gates, and never saw the second train bearing down on him from the other direction. But as for Janet? That's a confusing tale: a minor rear-ender, a late realization that a train was coming, a car that would not start, or for which she could not find the key (reports are muddled.) Onlookers said she actually got out of the car to run away, but then, bizarrely, got back into it and was hit. Inexplicable, on the surface, but when I read that, it made some sense to me-- it made the whole, truly shocking incident make sense, at least theoretically. Janet had superhuman powers of concentration. When I danced with her, or, later, assisted her in choreographing a couple shows, she could disappear into her thoughts for seconds or minutes, however long it took her to resolve the problem she'd identified, or work out the step that was nagging at her. She was a brilliant dancer, and an intelligent, intellectual woman. Her baby's crying could break her focus, but little else reached her in those moments. I imagine that as she stepped out of her father's borrowed car on the train tracks, abandoning it to destruction, some sudden revelation came to her: "I know where the spare key is-- I can still save the car!" Or perhaps she suddenly realized a problem: "Wait-- I left my cell phone on the seat. I won't be able to call and tell anyone what's happened." And so she stepped back, focusing on solving the problem, and it was too late, and she died.

It's a stupid story, the one I've constructed to explain Jan's death. But it's a story, and that's the only point, the only source of comfort.

There have been other deaths, non-train-related, before and between Jan's and Lance's. Two men in their sixties, with histories of bad health-- less difficult to believe, though still unexpected, out of the blue. Two others were children, suddenly still and breathless in their beds, or even in their mother's arms. One was a dancer I worked with once, years ago, and shared some friends with, so that our paths crossed periodically as time wore on. He was discovered-- his body was-- naked, left out in the desert in Southern Nevada somewhere. I've never heard if anybody knows how he died, or how long his body lay there before someone found it, or whether there was any investigation. Knowing his proclivities for self-destructiveness, I assume this was a murder-- a drug deal gone bad? A hideously wrong choice in a pick-up bar late at night? But I know no facts, and the friend who told me didn't know him well enough to ask questions when he heard of it.

Janet, Lance. Mitch, Michael, Anika, Max, Sheridan. I wish there were some overarching moral here, some meaning, lesson, insight. But the inherent point to these deaths is that they are pointless, unredeemed by romance or pretty reason or proud-chested nobility. These are meaningless deaths, devastating to their families and friends and, as one in their ever-widening circles of influence, me. And while Death has always been a particular source of terror for me, a kind of horrifying fascination, I date this new role it's playing to one particular incident, and what I remember as a particularly gruesome and unsatisfying death, which I witnessed.
On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when I emerged from the West Fourth Street subway station in Greenwich Village, stuck and struggling to get downtown to work; and when I found myself facing the hordes of silent people strewn up and down 6th Avenue, staring hopelessly south (famous from pictures in Time and Newsweek, you've all seen them, haven't you?); and when I turned to look over my shoulder to discover that great, terrible, unreal, unmatched pair of gashes, spewing smoke and flame, in the Twin Towers; and when I dodged around the statue figures and ran to 7th Avenue to see if the 1 line was running, and then turned to go down 7th instead, to Tribeca, to work, thinking all the while, "What the hell can I do?", dialing and dialing my cell phone, trying to get through to anybody; I experienced a series of perceptions, like progressive clicks through a telephoto camera, in increasing magnification.

Click: Look at all the paper flying out of the towers. They look like birds flying around a cathedral.

Click: Those can't be papers. I'm much too far away to see papers so clearly, and they're much too high. I'm seeing whole pieces of furniture, probably chunks of wallboard torn to pieces, chairs and tables and whole desks sucked out to flutter like a flock of pigeons.

And when I heard someone on the sidewalk say, as I ran past-- a male voice, but I never looked to identify him, have no idea who it was-- "There goes another one",

Click: That speck has arms and legs windmilling wildly. That is a human being flying, falling there, fluttering with the falling chairs and tables, screaming probably, falling, falling.

And I looked down at the street in front of me, and didn't look up again.

Who was that person? I knew one victim of the 9/11 disaster, but I doubt it was her. Her name was Pam, and she was a client at the studio I managed then; an executive with Aon, and a lovely, pleasant, and always professional woman (which many of our clients in those days weren't, so she stood out.) Whenever I've read about different survivors' experiences in the towers, I've wondered about Pam, what happened to her, how she died.

But who was that person I saw falling? There were many that morning-- the voice on the street said "there goes another one", and we've all seen the footage of victims clinging to the building, letting go, leaping. Was the person I saw falling, or jumping? Was what I saw deliberate? Hopeless? Hopeful? Did they hope to survive, somehow, or were they only choosing to escape the smoke and the horror of being burnt alive? Were there others with them inside, before they went out the window? Did they all discuss it? Debate the options, and then line up to jump?

Did they think they might survive?

What is that person's story? What was his or her name?

My single clear, coherent thought on the morning of Tuesday, 9/11/2001, as I watched the North tower disappear into a gut of flames and smoke, the South tower still standing there, to collapse less than an hour later, was, "We'll never feel safe again." I meant my generation, which had been just young enough to miss the draft for Viet Nam, who had been spared immediate, present violence and the death of our friends, brothers, and neighbors in war. I was raised with the profound conviction that life was safe here, good here, that although humans could do awful things to one another, that was in other places; it wouldn't happen to us so long as we exercised reasonable caution, locked our doors at night, and avoided drugs and bad parts of town after dark. As we walked uptown on Tuesday, 9/11, me and the other refugees from the studio, and a friend who'd been caught downtown at jury duty, we scanned the skies for other errant airplanes. We stayed as close as possible to the river, where no skyscrapers could fall on us. We joked about these things we were doing, but we did them. And we talked of news footage we'd seen, that our walk seemed to palely reflect: refugees from destroyed villages in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Holy Land, trudging vacant-eyed away from utter destruction and into... what? Leaving their ruined homes and the bodies of their neighbors and loved ones, not knowing what they were walking into. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

In our case, it never has. There has been no new attack, no war within our borders. But the thing that has stuck with me even as I've left New York, moved twice to different cities and become comfortable again living and moving among tall buildings, is my loss of faith that the world will make sense. That life will. That death does.

The thing about 9/11 that was most difficult for me to come to grips with was that it was intended, those nearly-three thousand deaths were meant to happen, people planned it. But still, the manner of those deaths, the specific chain of circumstances that ended all those lives, that part was not planned. Osama bin laden, the man who inspired in me a newfound belief in violent execution-- I prayed that he would be captured and brought to this country so that we could publicly stone him to death as the opening of the Salt Lake City Olympics, and that's not a joke, and I think I would have flown there to take part-- did not designate how many deaths by smoke inhalation, how many by crushing, how many by... whatever other means. Those means, those stories, were accidental.

And in that, the nameless, arms-windmilling human being I saw falling or leaping from the Twin Towers on 9/11-- I can't even remember which tower it was now-- stands out as the leader of a parade of accidental death victims I have known since. Pam, Mitch, Michael, Anika, Janet, Max, Sheridan, Lance, and others less closely connected to me. There is no real story, only individual, uncompleted endings.

And where's the comfort in that?