Month: September 2011

I re-post this every year on this date. It is the first piece of fiction I wrote after 9-11-01.

There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. “Come aboard,” I say. “I will take your coin for passage.” One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

“Please,” a young man says as he turns to me, “I have to go home to my daughters.”

“You are going home now,” I reply. “To the home where all eventually return.” Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

“This can’t be,” a woman cries out. “My mother needs me.”

“She will be with you soon enough.”

“When?” Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

“I cannot say,” I reply. “The Ferryman has no hand in Fate.”

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

“Where will you take us?” someone asks.

“To the place you are promised,” I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. “What is that?” he asks.

“It is the City of Dead Works,” I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

“I don’t understand,” someone else says. “The City of Dead Works?”

“Aye,” I reply. “Behold!”

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

“That one looks Egyptian,” a woman says.

“The Great Library of Alexandria,” I tell her. “Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead.”

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

“The Temple of Solomon,” I say.

“There are ships in the harbor,” says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

“I don’t understand,” a young man says. “Why this City? Why here?”

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

“Who lives in that city?” It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

“No one lives there,” I tell him. “The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires.”

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

“We will be there soon,” I say. “Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold.” No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

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Ten years ago this morning, I was driving to work. My job was in a telesales office for a pharmaceutical distributor. I liked the people in the office immensely, and for what it was, the job was about as good as it could have been; I probably should have realized a lot sooner — say, before I was fired after a year and a half — that I’m just not temperamentally suited to sitting at a desk and talking on the phone all day.

But anyway, on that day, I got in the car, turned on the radio, and started driving. I was listening to NPR, and they had broken in to discuss something that had happened fifteen or twenty minutes earlier: an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Details were sketchy at that point, and my first thoughts were “Wow, what is it with that building’s bad luck!”, remembering the bombing in the parking garage eight years earlier, and that it had to be some twit in a little Cessna or something. It took a while before I realized that it was a passenger jet, which was appalling enough.

Minutes later, the second plane hit, and the already sickened feeling I’d had over a massive calamity already unfolding doubled, not just at the scope of the calamity (two buildings burning now, with no way to stop it), but at the nature of it. Two planes couldn’t be pilot error, faulty flight data, or mechanical failure in the worst possible airspace to fail in. By the time I was walking into the office, I knew that my country was under attack.

Everyone already had the radio on, and we stood around, listening in stunned silence. The last guy to arrive at work that day, the guy with the longest drive, walked in five minutes later, and saw everybody standing around; he shot me a puzzled look, so I beckoned him over and told him what had happened. He’d been listening to CDs in the car, had no idea.

Over the next two hours, the news coming over the radio was chaotic, filled with half-reports urgently read by newscasters who said things that later turned out to be false. There was a car bomb that exploded outside the State Department. A passenger jet had been shot down. There were unconfirmed reports of many more missing flights. The President’s whereabouts were unknown. And then, a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. That one, alas, was all too true. So were the unconfirmed reports of a plane that had gone down — nobody was yet sure why — in rural Pennsylvania. And, about an hour and a half into our work day, a horrified announcer saying, “One of the twin towers has just collapsed.”

We made our sales calls that day, but nobody was really much into it. The woman at the desk next to me was a very talkative type, and she spent the day calling her regular customers just to commiserate on the shocking events. We had no teevee in the office, so the radio was all we had. Another co-worker actually went out to lunch with one of her most reliable customers that day, and she came back from Applebee’s looking deeply shaken. She’d seen the footage that the rest of us wouldn’t see until 6:00 that night.

I took the next week off. We’d scheduled a trip out to Iowa to visit the Wife’s extended family. Our paychecks, though, were delivered via FedEx from the home office in Baltimore, so when all air traffic was grounded for days after the attacks, our checks were stuck in Baltimore. My office supervisor came through for me, taking money from her personal savings to pay me the amount of my paycheck. What I remember most from those days after the attacks was looking up and seeing no contrails in the sky.

A lot of my liberal brethren have criticized President Bush’s response in those first days after the attacks, from his sitting in the classroom for a few minutes to his flying to Strategic Air Command instead of returning to Washington immediately. I never had a problem with any of the things he did in those first weeks, though, and in all honesty, I think he handled it all as well as a President could have. I found his speeches — particularly the one before Congress — masterful. I don’t have any illusions about the bipartisanship that briefly came out of 9-11-01; such things cannot last, and I’m not one to sing the praises of bipartisanship much anyway. I tend to think that partisanship is a good thing, because it’s through disagreement that constructive conflict can arise. And in any event, what I wish had been sustainable wasn’t so much the “bipartisanship”, which tends to mean “everybody agreeing on the same policy”, but rather that sense of collective Americanism that was too short-lived. “We may disagree, but we are still Americans.” I wish we’d kept that spirit, somehow. But again, I don’t think we could have.

We hear a lot about how we can “never forget 9-11”. It won’t be forgotten, but it won’t remain vital in our memory, either. It won’t, because it can’t. It’s how things work. The Daughter was just over 2 years old when it happened; she has no active memories of that day, and for her it will always be something somebody told her about. For her, 9-11-01 is history in very much the same way that 11-22-1963 or 12-7-1941 are history for me. Over time, tangible connections to that day will be lost, until all that will remain are chronicles of what happened, and historians will continue to debate why, and what came after. Time and history are relentless. They always have been, and always will be.

Here is a video I made yesterday, using images of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania, from before, during, and after the attacks. The music here is a piece that has been deeply personal to me since I performed it, as a member of the Wartburg College Concert Band, during my freshman year. It is also the first piece of music I was able to listen to after the attacks.

Those of us who were alive can, and must, remember. Those who come after? Theirs is to hold and honor the history of one of America’s wickedest days.

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