“Carl was the expedition leader,” Johnston continued. “I spent two weeks bobbing around the Aegean while divers took experiments back and forth to the wreck. During that time, Carl took the time to learn what we were doing—which sparked his interest in bacteria and the power that they have, combining his love of diving with science.
“I thought,” she wrote to her friends and to Spencer’s family, “maybe if he hadn’t had to get the experiment that day, things would have been different. We will never know.” What she did know was a lasting habit: “I have gone innumerable times to call or e-mail Carl about the latest adventure, or news [of a new discovery], only to realize that he is gone. How do you say good-bye? It’s a question I am unable to answer, or choose not to, for now at least.”
30
Ghosts of the Abyss
In the large volcanic crater called Ground Zero, it wasn’t just the collision, the collapse, and it’s over. There was the aftermath. As Ellen Betty Phillips, Charles Joughin, and Jack Thayer were teaching us all along, the aftermath could be worse.
The mind is a monkey. Time and again, everything came back to a distinctly human way of coping with loss, to unnatural levels of stress, and to primal rage. Perhaps this explained the ghosts.
By coincidence, when I reached the Titanic’s stern on September 10, 2001, Mary’s friend Paddy Brown was suddenly so much on my mind that it felt as though he were somehow present hours before he died. At home, he left behind a strangely resonant prayer: “When I am gone [exploring], release me, let me go. I have so many things to see and do. And if you need me call, and I will come. Though you can’t see me or touch me, I’ll be near.”
The mind is a monkey, I kept telling myself—the reason we human beings sometimes see and feel things that are not actually there.
As the World Trade Center surge cloud and shock-cocoon studies came to a close and the rebuilding of Ground Zero began, all of the surviving veterans of Ten-Ten House were retiring or transferring to other firehouses. John Morabito was the sole survivor of the team that went into the North Tower that day. Morabito had survived in one of history’s most inexplicable shock cocoons, with the forces diverting completely around him and even levitating him gently on a bed of dust, while people around him disintegrated before his eyes. Many of his fellow firefighters were leaving Ten-Ten House, because they had seen ghostly silhouettes and, occasionally, shockingly vivid images of their old friends appearing and vanishing throughout the building. Morabito was the only one who insisted on staying. “If something of them really has stayed behind,” he said, “then I don’t want them to be alone, and I’m staying. They were my friends. They were my brothers.”
As the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Normandy approached—and as studies of rusticles and a new understanding of volcano physics that began with the Titanic were maturing—my father was fending off lung cancer. He had responded very well to the least invasive spectrum of drugs available, but with time, through a process of natural selection, a tiny minority of immunized cells had survived and begun to multiply. The only chemicals the immunized cells had not seen before were sure to leave Dad with no quality of life and might even kill him outright. He had decided to “let nature follow its course.”
This was also a time in which, during planning discussions for the next Titanic expedition, I began talking about what people claimed they had seen in Ten-Ten House during the months after the towers fell. That’s when, very quietly, a few people began talking about having felt or seen similar figments at the Titanic—and especially at the stern. I did not believe that the apparitions were real, but their cause was certainly something to think about.
In late May 2004, I had just finished a filming in the seventeenth-century BC volcanic surge cloud layers of Minoan Thera (more commonly known as the Greek isle of Santorini). Dad was not yet in his second phase of sickness. I was in the process of moving my office into his house for the duration. We were both expecting that he would have at least a couple of months more of reasonably good days.
On the morning of June 1, I had appointments scheduled in New York City. The Thera filming had left me about a week behind schedule, but I was planning to make my rounds and return in the evening.
“Why don’t you stick around and we’ll go out for lunch?” Dad suggested. He also wanted me to look at three new car models with him.
For a moment, I thought about all of the work I needed to catch up on. Then, within the same moment, I felt (or imagined I felt) two powerful hands shoving my shoulders forcefully from behind. Paddy Brown—again. In the harsh language Brown would have used, I more felt than heard him calling me the worst kind of idiot and saying, “Forget your job. Your father is your job today!”
Perhaps my subconscious mind was able to detect a subtle change in my father’s walk, in his breath, or in the way he spoke, and perhaps one’s ever vigilant subconscious could put unnoticed clues together to arrive at a conclusion not ordinarily noticed (or wanting to be noticed) by conscious thought. Dad did not have as much time as we believed. I would never have consciously guessed that we had awakened to share the last breakfast of his life.
Perhaps the figment of Paddy Brown was merely my subconscious mind sending up an alarm bell of unfiltered thought, communicating an assessment that something had gone dramatically wrong during the night and that this could be my father’s last day. “Perhaps,” most of my family and several of Paddy’s friends said, when I explained it to them this way. “And perhaps not.”
One of Paddy’s closest friends had explained that he carried a terrible burden—guilt, even—from Vietnam. We spoke at great length about what I thought (or imagined) Paddy tried to teach me at the Titanic’s stern; and she (his friend) agreed that whether or not something of Paddy actually had been present down there on September 10, 2001, his “message” saved me from an undeserved burden of guilt. Now it happened a second time.
It is strange to think that I still believe the event was simply a matter of improbable coincidence. I remind myself again and again that every hand is as improbable as a royal flush. And if there are nearly seven billion people on the planet, then even the most unlikely coincidences are bound to pile up around at least a few of us. It’s certain to happen, given enough people. Everything else is illusion. Yet strangest of all is to think that if what happened at the stern in 2001 had not recurred in my father’s kitchen in 2004 and changed the direction of my plans for the day, I’d have carried, for the rest of my life, an unfathomable guilt for missing that last wonderful day with my father.
I do not know for certain that a subconscious perception was sent up to the front of my brain as a warning wrapped in the memory of a firefighter I never really knew. Although I have to admit that the quantum universe and cosmology are teaching us every day that we do not yet have all the science, the “evidence” of personal experience is a nonreproducible result, and scientifically, it at best provides an insight into how human minds react to the level of stress known to have generated the old expression “There are no atheists in a foxhole.”
All I can say, Paddy, is this: whether you were simply the memory of someone I wished I had known better, kept alive in some corner of the subconscious, or whether you were actually there, changing my direction that day, the words do not exist to express how much I thank you, Paddy Brown, wherever you are.