Dana

A couple weeks before I left America last year, on a tepid, early summer night, I visited the Pentagon memorial for the first time. There are 184 benches laid out in opposite directions, each hovering over a small pool of water. The benches that face the Pentagon are for the people who were in the building, so that when you read their names, you see the Pentagon in the background. The benches facing the other way remember those who were in the plane. They face the sky.

The benches are arranged in rows representing years of birth. The first row represents 1998. It has one bench; Dana Falkenberg was three. When you look at Dana’s bench, you see the sky, and inscribed inside the little pool below, you see the names of her family members, the ones we also lost. Her parents were taking her and her older sister Zoe to Australia that day. Their mother, a Georgetown professor, was going to be a visiting fellow. To get to Australia from Washington, you have to fly from Dulles to LAX first. And you have to do this on American, so that you can connect in Los Angeles to the Qantas flight that will take you to Sydney or Melbourne or Canberra, which is where Dana was going. The Falkenbergs were flying from Dulles to LAX on American Airlines flight 77. Thirteen days after visiting the memorial, and nine years after I first arrived in America, I flew from Dulles to LAX on American Airlines flight 75, before catching the Qantas connection to Sydney. I was going home.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary, my kids will watch me watching the reading of the names, and they will see me come close to tears whenever a family member comes to the end of her list of about a dozen names and, still struggling to say the words, ends with, “And my father, we miss you and we love you.” My kids, or maybe on the fiftieth anniversary, my grandkids, will see my eyes well up and they will ask, were you there? Did you know anyone? Did you know anyone who knew anyone? And to all these I will answer no. So why are you crying then?

I’ve never really been sure. In the days and weeks after September 11, in the common room of my freshman suite, I could not pull myself away from the TV and the stories of survivors and the bereaved, and those still searching. There was something compelling about the heartbreak, maybe something vulnerable about this country I had thought I knew and yet just started to know, the same way you don’t want to pull away from a conversation with someone who has just or finally opened up to you, who has just or finally revealed what it is that makes them hurt; their hopes and, yes, their fears. Maybe in the ten years since, as I’ve come closer to learning about grief and loss, and maybe in the years ahead, as I am sure to learn more, maybe the names and the stories affect me more, reach deeper into my soul and squeeze tighter. There is so much to say, big ideas about war and peace, about government and religion, about human rights and civil liberties, about how we interact, how we respond to crises and how we, as people and as nations, deal with loss. How we grieve. There is so much to say, and yet I don’t know what, or how. I think if they ask, if my kids or grandkids must know why something so long ago can still make me cry, I will tell them about Dana Falkenberg. I know I will still remember her name.

STS-135

I bought the ticket.  Flew all night, drove all day.  From Hong Kong to New York to Orlando, where I picked up a rental, parked it on a sandy stretch of the south Atlantic shore and fell asleep in the back seats with the windows open and the lukewarm Florida breeze drifting through.  No room at the inn.  Jetlagged, I woke up without an alarm just as the sun rose over the Cape and the familiar figure in the distance, the size of my thumb.  As morning grew, so did the crowd around me, thousands, cars lined up along the coast as far as you could see.  A family of four stepped out of the minivan next to me and began to unload their picnic wares; the father offered me a beer.  I unfurled a towel, stepped up and onto the hood of my rental, and took a swig.  Daydreamed I was halfway to Tranquility and then, T-minus nothing at 11:26 a.m. eastern daylight time, I heard the rumble, felt the tremor before the truth, the storm before the storm, like plates shifting, grinding.  The ground shook, the people shouted, and I watched, as Atlantis rocketed into a powder blue sky.  The last one of its kind.

STS-135, the way I dream it.

I went to Space Camp in the eighth grade.  This is probably the best time to go: at 13, you're just starting to be able to understand how cool some of the science is, how real it is, how there are these invisible forces that propel us, forward, and how explosive are the chemical reactions that power our progress.  At the same time, at 13, at least when I was 13, you're not yet beset by either peer or parental pressure to get your head out of the clouds.  You get to be the launch controller during a shuttle mission simulation, you get to try on the spacesuit and bounce around on the one-sixth gravity chair, and you think, yeah, I could do this one day.  I could go to space.

The names help.  Discovery.  Endeavour.  Atlantis.  Heavy with gravitas, built to inspire.  They would be corny if they weren't imprinted on the wing of a spacecraft that launches itself 200 miles into the sky, can make a three-point turn while in orbit and dock with an international space station or parallel park near a super space telescope so its astronauts can do a spacewalk and pull out some tools and fix the telescope.  In outer space.  And then this 200,000 pound machine makes its way back to Earth, burning through the atmosphere, landing like any other airplane on a runway.  How is this for real?  Spacewalk.  Space telescope.  Space station.  Spacecraft.  This is the stuff dreams are made of; even just the idea that there are wings on the thing and we are talking about flying.

I could've gone, could've been on that flight to New York tonight.  I have the money, even the time.  But I can't.  It's a step too indulgent, a stretch, like if I did this I would be messing with my karma.  I've gotten to go to a lot of awesome things in my life, to the Olympics in Beijing, the Inauguration in DC, and so many, many places that are the stuff of other people's dreams.  I'm scared of pushing my luck, that that rainy day will come and I won't be able to afford an umbrella.  You can't have everything.  You can't be everywhere.  Some things in life you just miss; you miss them because you never had them, or you miss them because you had them and lost them.  I'm lucky enough, so very lucky, that I don't miss much.  If I'm 13 and I want to go to Space Camp, I go.  If I want to go to the Olympics, or the Inauguration, I go.  If I want to be a lawyer, or a writer, I go.  But you don't get everything.  Some things in life just suck; some things you just miss.  I wish I was going to watch the last space shuttle launch tomorrow.  I wish I could see the crowds, feel the earth shake like no other way there is.  I wish I could feel my dreams rising with the shuttle, the closest realest thing we have to seeing ourselves go to infinity and beyond.  I wish.  We are promised as children that we can go wherever our dreams will take us, and no wonder some of us dream to be astronauts, so we can go as far as we can go, dream as far as we can dream.

I will never have the space shuttle.  Even if I left right now, I wouldn't make it in time.  I will never have in my eyes its smoky trajectory burning through the sky, or the rocket fumes in my nose, or the thundering in my ears, the trembling at my feet.  I will never have the space shuttle.  I will only ever be able to dream it.

Which is probably just the way it should be.

22

Kamikaze

I remember very little of the history of modern Japan, even though it was one of the last classes I took in college. Words like "Meiji" and "Kamakura" start to evoke something in my mind, but I'm not exactly sure what, and I definitely cannot recall when.

But there is one story that stuck, a story that isn't even about modern Japan. It was probably covered in that first lecture, the one that begins all modern history classes: how we got to this point.

How did we get to this point? A tsunami swallowing up the land--and the people--that named it. Nuclear meltdowns in the country best prepared to prevent them. And elsewhere, thousand-dollar-a-day mercenaries hired by a crazed dictator who has sworn to fight his civil war to the last man, the final drop of blood. The Saudi army marches into Bahrain. An American spy shoots and kills Pakistanis in downtown Lahore before an unmarked van speeds by to rescue him. Carnage, even on the I-95, a Chinatown bus accident so gruesome the Times report reads like a horror film. They were coming home from gambling, from Mohegan Sun. That one, more than any other, could have been me.

How did we get to this point? It is 2011. I can check the weather on my phone--I can watch live video of the weather, anywhere in the world, from anywhere in the world, while I am on the move, with the flick of my finger, on the same pocket-sized screen of a phone that I use to videoconference with my mother five thousand miles away, for free--and yet a great nation--by any measure, one of the greatest--holds its breath for fear which way the wind blows.

Over 700 years ago, at the height of its dominance, the Mongol empire unleashed on Japan--twice--the largest naval attack the world had ever seen. The second attack would remain the largest naval attack ever attempted until the Allies stormed Normandy more than 650 years later. After conquering parts of Europe and South Asia, all of Central Asia, China, and Korea, the Mongols went after Japan. The Mongols sent 4,400 ships, and 140,000 men. The Japanese prayed for the wind.

The wind came. 130,000 men died. Hardly any were Japanese. And the Mongols never attacked Japan again.

That's the story that stuck.

I doubt I will ever know what it is like to be truly exposed to the elements. It is not only because I tend to live in places less prone to natural disasters and war. It is mostly because I will always have this, this privileged cocoon from which I write, a life blessed with the comfort of knowing that wherever I go, whatever dangerous situations I might come across, I can always go somewhere else, because I have the passport, and the money, and, always, the choice. This, I think, is what it means to be sheltered.

The world feels frustrated, almost panicking. In Japan today, in Libya and in Bahrain, and in the Bronx hospitals where bodies are being left unidentified because those who know them are afraid to come forward, people seem to have little choice. They seem to be only able to leave things to the way of this sometimes too trying world, in the hands of someone or something else. And we, with them, we pray for the wind.