Death in The Eternal City

The five hours it took me to drive from Savannah Beach to Atlanta was shortened by the listening to books on tape that had been loaned to me by my friend Brenda to ease the monotony of the drive.  The miles slipped away and I hadn’t bothered to turn on the radio.  I was mellow from the soft waves kissing the shore and the gentle whisper of the wind.  It had been a wonderful week.  I had no reason to believe earth-shattering news was being played out in New York as I made my way up the deserted highway toward Atlanta.

I took I-75 out of Macon north.  My plan to avoid the afternoon traffic when I-75 merged with I-85 just north of the airport was perfectly orchestrated to miss it.  I encountered a slight build-up after the I-20 exit, and smiled in contentment as the sign announcing my exit loomed ahead.

My small white cottage sat nestled among the time worn oak trees that shade the patio in summer, but cover it with an abundance of leaves in fall.  I had long ago stopped raking the leaves, just called a young man working his way through college to mulch the leaves, and felt I was contributing to a very good cause.  I fed him on the Saturdays that he would come, and was delighted with his obvious pleasure in home cooked food.  He always left with a bag of goodies to snack on while studying.  My grass protected by the mulched leaves that naturally fertilized the soil insured a lush growth in spring.  He came twice a month in summer to cut the grass and trim the bushes.  His handiwork pleasured me as I drove up the drive toward my carport.

Walking through the back entrance, I could smell the lingering fragrance of cinnamon from the jar candle I had left burning through the night before I left on my vacation.  I unloaded my luggage, put the dirty clothes in the wash, took a shower, put on a soft housedress and settled on the sofa to watch the Oprah show.  I raised the remote, clicked, and was greeted by a narrative of, first one commercial aircraft, then another crashing into the twin towers in New York.  The Towers crumbled, smoke rolled, people ran for their lives before the awfulness of the scene.  I sat riveted as the pictures went on and on.  People were running, helpless in the ghastly happening.  The towers continued to crumble.  The skeleton of the buildings reached upwards in the midst of smoke, fire and rubble.

The narrator ruminated on and on like a muffled voice from another room dressed in a shroud of the hopelessness of firemen, policemen, and unfortunate people who had come to work in the towers.

I knew those people, like me, who came to work every morning like clockwork.  Some of them made coffee some timed their arrival just as the pot finished making, got a cup and went to their desk.  They turned on the computer, adjusted the keypad and checked their in-box for unfinished work from yesterday.  That was when one of the airliners flew past the Statue of Liberty right into the front yard of America and slammed into the first tower.  Next thing they knew, the other tower was struck, and everyone was running for their lives.

Suddenly, I heard a word that broke my trance, and dropped me into an abyss far greater than the fire and concrete dust.  I was thrown back to Rome.  A day that I had blocked from my mind so completely that I lived for more than ten years without allowing my mind to conjure up the memory of his life blood flowing down the gutter into the storm drain.  The word terrorist sent me into what seemed a hallucination.  Shadows of a man lying on the ground bleeding, pulling at his collar for air, then slowly his hand fell limp upon the bloody sidewalk.

“No” I screamed as I shut down the picture and threw the remote across the room.  I was so frozen in fear that I couldn’t get off the sofa.  I had to get away, but I couldn’t move, I closed my eyes only to find the memory hiding behind my eyelid.  I slowly slid sideways and curled into the fetal position drawing my legs up tightly, as if to protect my vital organs.  I awoke in the night, cold and disoriented, and then I crept to my bed which was fresh, sun-dried-scented.  I closed my mind and settled into a fitful sleep.  The report of a pistol, and the scent of gunpowder, the fear that numbs the mind filled my dreams.  I opened my eyes, but there was nothing there.  I sniffed the air for the Turkish tobacco smell, but there was only the smell of sunshine and cinnamon.  My heart was pounding, my throat dry, but I was afraid to get out of bed.  I dozed again and walked through the nightmare over and over until the shrill of the alarm clock that I must have activated from habit in the night, brought me out of that awful night of terror.

Like a zombie in an old time movie, I moved about getting myself ready for work.  I drove to the office and had breakfast in the cafeteria, then took the elevator to the forty-first floor.  The room full of offices and cubicles was eerily quiet.  The few people who came to work walked softly, taking care not to disturb others as they dealt with the tragedy of our nation.

Sitting in my office, I stared at my inbox but did nothing.  Turning to the window, I studied the city of Atlanta from a bird’s eye view.  There was traffic bumper-to-bumper down on the freeway.  People poured out of the subway station, and the vendor across the street was hawking fresh fruit.  From my vantage point, Atlanta was conducting business as usual.  The closer the people got to me, the business as usual went away, as somber people got off the elevator in front of my office and w