Was I simply an opportunist? Or was I a psychopath? Had I always been one?
I remember reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, where in an early chapter one of the heroes, Hari Seldon, is arrested. He explains to a protégé that he wasn’t worried about being put to death. The judge in the case was too smart. The judge knew that while he couldn’t reverse the decline of civilization, he also knew that he could speed it up by acting stupidly. In this I considered George Bush, who thought that acting stupidly was a high calling. The global dominance of the United States was not a guaranteed thing, and there were a number of indicators that it was ending. I could guide it into a soft landing as the first among equals, or I could allow George to crash it into the ground at high speed. The changes he made over the next eight years took us from global power to international laughingstock in twenty years.
And yet I knew my plan would work. It was too simple. We had roughly six weeks until then, and I knew somebody would talk. Sure enough, the following Monday I got a call from George Bush asking me to step into the Oval Office, where he and Karl Rove were sitting and chatting amicably. Did I have something planned as a fundraiser in New York in a few weeks? No, George, of course not! I’d never go around you like that! This is just something for the future. So you wouldn’t mind if I joined you? No, of course not! Love to have you along!
While we all sat there smiling at each other, I pulled my phone out and called the VP at Cantor Fitzgerald I had been talking to, and gave him the good news. Not only would I be there, but the President of the United States would be making a visit!
From there it became even simpler. By mid-August I was off the trip, assigned to a grade school library visit that morning in Sarasota, Florida, followed by a visit to a high school in Tampa in the afternoon. This was all part of Bush’s big initiative to revitalize education. All I had to do was to wait for the inevitable.
I lost ten pounds that late summer, horrified and sickened, half by what I was doing and what I knew would happen anyway, and half because I wasn’t sure it would work! What if things had changed because I had recycled? What if they attacked on Monday or Wednesday or Tuesday afternoon? What if they attacked but hit something else?
What kind of a monster was I? How could I just allow this to happen, and send people I knew to their deaths? George Bush wasn’t a criminal; he was just criminally stupid! Did he deserve to die for that? The only thing I could see was that no matter what I did, the assholes in the caves and training camps in Afghanistan weren’t going to stop because of what was happening here. All the people that died that day would end up dying anyway. There was nothing more I could do to stop it.
And so on September 10th I flew to Tampa and stayed the night, and then on Tuesday morning we drove down to Sarasota. At 8:45 I was sitting on a very short chair in a circle with a group of first-graders, debating the merits of The Cat In The Hat versus Green Eggs and Ham (Please, Green Eggs and Ham wins going away!) At 8:46, the Secret Service agents standing in the corner and by the door suddenly looked serious and pulled Uzis from under their jackets, while several more busted through the door to the classroom. Without even saying ‘Excuse us!’, I was grabbed by each arm and lifted off my feet and run down the hallway and out a door. When I say lifted off my feet, I mean every word. My feet didn’t touch the ground until I was at the open door of a black GMC Yukon. Behind me I could hear the screaming of little children as we ran through them, knocking them to the floor. I was tossed into the back seat of the Yukon, hitting my head on the door frame of the vehicle, and before I could even get a seat, I was slammed backwards into a seat as we tore out of the parking lot. A siren was blaring before we ever hit the street. Behind us a small convoy was racing behind us, also with sirens blaring and lights flashing.
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?” I demanded. Up in the front the agent in the passenger seat was speaking into a microphone in his sleeve but otherwise ignoring me. I repeated the question to the one sitting next to me.
His head swiveled to me for a second, and then he yelled back over the sound of the siren, “WE’RE UNDER ATTACK! THE PRESIDENT IN NEW YORK HAS BEEN ATTACKED!” Then his head turned back to the window.
I tried to ask what he meant, but I was ignored. About thirty seconds later we bounced over a curb and drove across the grass into a small park. Just settling down in front of us was a helicopter with the markings of the Florida State Police. We drove close to it and I was dragged out of the Yukon and over to the helo, where I was thrown into the back and three agents climbed on after me. The bird had never stopped its engines and seconds later we were airborne.
I grabbed the arm of one of the agents and asked the question again. “What’s going on!?”
He took a deep breath and said, “We’re under attack! We’re flying to Tampa and getting on Air Force Two! That’s all I know for sure.”
“Who’s attacking us?” I asked. I grabbed his arm again, and repeated it louder, “WHO’S ATTACKING US!?”
He shrugged me off and said, “We don’t know yet. We’ll know more on the plane!” That was all I could get from him.
By the time we landed at the Tampa airport the entire airport had been shut down to all traffic. We landed on the tarmac directly in the taxi area next to the 757 and everybody hopped out. Guns drawn, the agents surrounded me and ran me to the plane and up the stairs. The engines were already running, and as soon as the stairs were pulled away and the hatch was shut, the plane began moving. We were airborne within seconds.
For the first time since this began, the Secret Service agents around me began to relax. They put away their weapons and sighed and sagged into their seats. “WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON!?” I demanded.
An agent came out from a compartment in the front and stepped in front of me. “Sir, a short while ago, at 8:44, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center, the North Tower, where President Bush is. A short while later another one hit the South Tower.”
Memories from my first life came rushing back to me. I think every American who was alive that day remembers where they were and what they were doing when they learned the horror of what was happening. When the news began hitting the airwaves at about 8:50 I was just pulling into the parking lot at Lefleur Homes, and thinking that it was a small plane, a Cessna or Piper. I sat there listening to it for a minute, and I remembered that back during World War II a B-25 had flown into the Empire State Building. That couldn’t happen anymore, though. Modern planes had radar and all sorts of navigational aids. Then, a few minutes later the news of the second hit, and that they were airliners, not little planes, meant it was terrorism, not accidents.
I remember afterwards sitting in my office listening to the radio all day in shock and disbelief. I got nothing at all accomplished. I was so shocked by it all that a day later I apologized to my brother-in-law Gabriel, my boss in sales at the time, for not getting anything done the day before, even though he had already told me he hadn’t gotten anything done either. None of us did that day. Around lunchtime, one of my fellow adjunct teachers over at MVCC drove over and told me classes were shut down for the day, and I didn’t have to teach that night. We were both stunned, and we both mentioned that it must have been like when our parents heard on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. It was the closest thing anybody could come up with.