The Towers

November, 2001, Portland, Oregon

Sunday morning the telephone rang and answering I heard my brother David. He told me Mother had just called from Peru. Our father had collapsed in the hotel stairway and had been rushed to the medical clinic in Cuzco in the highlands just beneath Machu Picchu. Something was wrong with his memory. Mother had hurriedly ended the call before telling David all the details.

After a flurry of conversations David and my Aunt Elaine nominated me, as the most underemployed and available relative, to go down to Peru to help Mother bring Father back. Seventy-two hours later I was in the Lima airport terminal waiting for my parents to disembark from their flight from Cuzco. 

I was standing in a crowd that had gathered in front of a cordon of red velvet ropes backed by soldiers in jungle camouflage with German Shepherd dogs pacing at their sides.  This hastily organized security detail was one of a thousand jarring echoes of 9/11 reverberating through our collective consciousness just eight weeks after that dreadful day.

On my left was the taxi driver from the hotel and on my right a paramedic.  The paramedic had a wheelchair in front of him, his hands resting on the blue plastic handles.  I had found him after a long search through the terminal, guided by my taxi driver, seeking a wheelchair to wheel my father to the cab.  

The plan, which I worked out with difficulty between the taxi driver, who spoke no English, and the paramedic, who spoke little, was to whisk my father straight to the main Lima Hospital as soon as he emerged from the long terminal hallway. 

As we waited the paramedic revealed in halting English that he was there to pick up a passenger who had become very sick with pneumonia on the flight from Cuzco to Lima.  I imagined father lying on his back in the airplane’s narrow aisle, gasping for breath as his plane flew westward over the Andes.

Finally, a stream of people started to flow into the main terminal from the arrival gate. The paramedic could not get the wheelchair any farther through the crowd so I pushed past jostling shoulders to the red velvet rope. 

I saw Mother first, her eyes searching the crowd as she walked in the bobbing line of disembarking passengers. And then there was my father, not draped over someone’s shoulder as I had expected, but ambling along a step behind my mother, his carry-on bag slung over his shoulder.

I called out, “Mom, over here.”  Mother’s weary eyes registered recognition. She took my father’s arm and guided him to where I stood, behind the rope.

As my father approached I saw not even a hint of concern in his face as he gazed across the faces in the crowd.  When our eyes locked his eyebrows leapt up and he cried out, “Sam, what you doing here? Are you joining us for the birding trip in Peru?”

I was mute. I turned to Mother even as I was hugging my father over the red rope.  She said, “Sam, please tell Father why you are here.”

So I pulled back to look at him and said, “I’m here to help get you home. You’ve been very sick.”

“What?” he exclaimed.  “I’m not sick, just a little tired.” Flabbergasted, Dad looked back and forth between Mom and me.

I had no idea what to say.

Mother intervened, “Len, Sam is telling you the truth. You have been sick, and your illness has affected your memory.” Her words came calm and rational. “You are having trouble remembering what we say or what has just happened.”

Father stood bewildered. Mother’s words had no basis at all in his reality. In a spectacular display of the mind’s influence over what the body feels my father had forgotten that he was very sick, forgotten that he had spent the last night in one of the clinic’s recovery rooms, forgotten that Mother had just explained everything to him fifteen minutes before.  A cocoon of oblivion shielded him from our terror that he might be lost to us forever.

Mother, her face composed of a worn but firm determination said to me., “Meet us over there,” gesturing towards the opening in the cordon, and turned to guide my father.  I worked my way back through the crowd to the paramedic and the taxi driver and motioned for them to follow me.

When we broke free from the pool of waiting families and joined my parents my father asked, “What’s the wheelchair for?”

“It’s for you, Father”

“I’m fine.  I don’t need to sit in that thing!”

“But Father, you have been very ill.”

Mother let her head sink a moment and said,  “It’s not much farther. Let’s just walk.”

Shrugging his shoulders the paramedic wheeled away, the taxi driver ran ahead to get his car, and Mother walked by my father’s side towards the exit. I hurried after.

During the ride home in the taxi Mother told me, “Sam, we are going to the hotel to spend the night and then fly home to Asheville.”

I was shocked, “What about taking Dad to the Lima hospital? He’s so sick. Shouldn’t he see a better doctor?”

“We just need to get him home.”

I struggled to understand my mother’s decision as I listened to the words she repeated over and over again.

“You have been very sick. The illness has impaired your ability to form new memories. Your body is doing better so we are taking you home to Asheville.”

Mother believed the greatest threat was to my father’s mind, not his body.

The drive to the hotel took us through Lima’s sprawling slums and past industrial facilities hidden behind 50-foot blast walls.  The towering walls were dark reminders of Peru’s very recent, very violent past when they were built to protect against a terror spread through cities and jungles by Shining Path revolutionaries. Though the Shining Path had finally been crushed, the walls remained.

Back at the hotel Mother had time to tell me the details of their ordeal. A combination of altitude sickness pills, anti-malaria medicine, the 13,000-foot elevation and a tropical virus had brought my father down in Cuzco.  When he collapsed in the hotel stairwell my mother had taken him to the clinic, where his condition reached critical stages. 

“The doctor spoke English, and she was a good doctor,” Mother told me. “But the nurses did not speak English, so when the doctor went home I could not understand much of anything.”

At the clinic, father endured three rounds of kidney dialysis. Finally the fever broke and my father’s organs stabilized, but his memory did not return to its normal function.

The movie Memento, where the main character is similarly afflicted with an inability to form short term memories provided a frame of reference for events that otherwise were utterly without context in my life. In that movie, the character tattoos essential facts onto his body so that he can know the truth of his past and therefore who he is.

Until these quiet moments in the hotel room I had been able to talk to Mother only minutes at a time because the only phone that she could use to call the United States was down the clinic’s hall and up the stairs. Once, when my father woke up without Mom by his side he ripped out the IVs that were stuck in his arm, so baffled was he by his confinement in an unfamiliar institution. Because of that Mom had hardly left his side for days and we had gleaned only scraps of information.

Even now I could not get every detail out of Mother. 

“Sam, I am very tired after five days of sleeping in a chair next to your father’s bed,” she told me.  “I need to sleep.  He needs to sleep.  We can talk more when we get home.”

I could see the exhaustion etched around Mother’s eyes. 

Then Mother said, “Why don’t you go see if they have something good in the hotel’s gift shop.  The guide book says it’s very nice.”

With that I wandered down to the lobby to find the store and check on our flights for the next day.   The airlines were flying almost empty in those weeks right after 9/11 so we had had no problem arranging three seats together on the next day’s flight. 

Despite my fears my father endured the voyage from Lima to Atlanta, Atlanta to Charlotte, and Charlotte to Asheville well enough. His good spirits buoyed him and I began to realize how much time I spent each day remembering the things that worried me.  Freed from such mooring he remembered nothing troubling but it felt like he might just float away from us up into a misty sky. 

After the exhausting flight my father slept on the car ride from the Asheville airport to my parent's house and then he slept late into the next day. Mother took him to the hospital, brought him home, fed him, and put him to bed for more sleep. All the time we told him, again and again, how he had collapsed in Cuzco, endured five days in the hospital and then a two-day voyage home. It was Saturday, one week after it had all begun.

On Sunday morning I walked down the stairs wearing my father’s red and black plaid bathrobe and found him at the kitchen table, wearing the tan cardigan sweater I had given him for Christmas the year before. He was eating breakfast and reading the paper.  Mother stood, washing dishes.  She asked me if I wanted eggs. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down next to Dad.

His head was buried in the Sunday New York Times, as it always was on Sundays. But as he flipped the page and read the headlines, the newspaper started to flutter in his hands, and he cried out, “What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan!”

Mother and I looked at each other, she nodded to me, and so I told him, “Father, on September 11, terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center. They destroyed both towers. Thousands of people died, and so the United States went to war in Afghanistan, because that’s where the terrorists were hiding.”

“They destroyed the World Trade Center?” he gasped.

As he asked this the horrific video footage of the two airplanes slamming into the sides of the towers replayed for the thousandth time inside my head, yellow flames and black smoke pouring out of the gaping wounds in the silver towers’ sides.  Then the terrible collapse, when one floor dropped onto the next and the next and the next and the next in an accelerating cascade of flame, glass, concrete, dust and human bodies plunging towards the earth. 

“Father, I know this is terrible to hear, but it’s true.  Terrorists have destroyed the World Trade Center.  Thousands of people died.”

His eyes rimmed with tears and so did mine. “Both towers are gone?  Just gone?”

 I swallowed agony as I groped for the words that could convey the utter horror of that day and the twisted new reality that had emerged in the weeks since 9/11.

“Father, I am so sad to tell you this, but it’s true. The towers are gone. We have launched a war all the way over in Afghanistan to strike back at the terrorists who attacked us.”

“How many people died?”

“It was over 3,000 people. They also attacked the Pentagon.”

“The towers collapsed and all those people died?” As he said this, his head sank slowly into his hands.  “My God, my God.”

After breakfast Mother took him upstairs for a nap she and I talked quietly in the living room.  She sat on the blue and white sofa, a cup of tea warming her hands.

“Mother, are you sure this is the right thing to do?”

“Yes.” 

“How long will this go on? 

“We just don’t know.“

“Will his memory ever come back?”

“We must hope and pray that it does, and we must do what the doctor has told us, and keep repeating things again and again until memories begin to register.  We must make his world familiar to him again.”

As she said this her upright posture on the sofa slumped a bit, and she shrugged her shoulders. 

“How much has he lost?”

“The past six months seem to be completely gone, along with his ability to form short term memories.”

“So he does not remember my wedding?”

“No, I’m afraid that’s gone.”

I had married Eugenia on September 15, 2001, a marriage then just eight and a half weeks old. My parents had been in the air flying to Portland from Asheville on the morning of 9/11 when their flight was grounded in Cincinnati.  My father had worked the phones furiously to get on one of the first flights back in the air after the four-day aviation shutdown. Improbably, the chain of flights from Charlotte to Atlanta to Denver to Portland had delivered them to our wedding location in the foothills below Mount Hood just minutes before our wedding was to start. 

“Why did it happen?” I asked.

“Dr. Evans believes that your father either suffered something similar to a stroke, due to low blood pressure, or that the failure of his kidneys led to toxins building up in his blood. When that happens, the toxins can accumulate in the brain and damage its functions.”

I nodded, wondering about toxic crystals clinging to neurons like some terrible hoar frost.

At lunch we gathered in the kitchen for sandwiches and I braced myself for the painful task of helping my father weave back together the torn shreds of his past.

Half way through his turkey sandwich he asked me “So Sam, what are you doing here?”  I once again told him but he did not want to believe me and disputed the idea that he was ever sick, that he had ever even gone to Peru.

Thinking again of the movie Memento, I thought at least a note would help so I asked my father to document the recent events of his life. He took the pen and the notebook from my hand and began to write down the story as I told it, “I became gravely ill in Cuzco, Peru. I spent five days in the hospital,” and so on through all the strange happenings of the last eight days.

After we were done with our sandwiches, he asked once again, “Sam, what are you doing in Asheville? Are you going to Peru with us?”  I handed him the notebook and since the story was written in his own hand he began to believe it.

But we were not out of treacherous waters.  Any subject at all, if stripped of the context of recent memory, could become a snare of confusion. 

He then asked me, “So what have you been doing with yourself?”

“Well, I quit my job at Intel so that I can start a company, write a book and help Eugenia with her art career,”

My father sat bolt upright in his wooden kitchen chair, “What? You quit your job at Intel?  What are you going to do about healthcare?  How will you take care of yourself and Eugenia?”

As he said this he pulled his navy blue beret off of his head and rubbed his fingers through his hair.   I lowered the newspaper to the table and began two hours of uncomfortable and sometimes embarrassing explanations of decisions I did not fully understand myself. I had leapt from a coveted post-graduate job at Intel into a completely unknown and unplanned future. It was difficult for me to explain how my Taxi-tracking business, as clever as the idea might have seemed, would make money. The book idea seemed absurd even to me as I tried to describe a half-baked, science fiction plot. 

The idea of helping my wife’s art career was great of course but I could not convince him or my Mother that there was any way to support ourselves in art. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders and we moved on. 

We were all just too exhausted to talk much at dinner and afterwards father collapsed into bed not understanding why he felt so utterly spent.

The next morning, I walked downstairs in that plaid bathrobe and once again found my father at the kitchen table reading the morning paper. After exchanging a glance with my mother I sat down for a bowl of cereal. 

I knew what was coming. 

“WHAT THE HELL ARE WE DOING IN AFGHANISTAN?  Has Bush taken us to war?  What’s the meaning of this?”

Once again it was my grim task to help him relive the terror of 9/11, my duty to restore this pain into the fabric of his mind. And I as I told him that the towers collapsed floor after floor after floor, killing all those inside, his head sank down into his hands and covering his eyes with his fingers he bowed down under the weight of it all.

After breakfast he slept again, and I sat on the front steps wondering if there was a path he could follow out of the mists that filled his mind. As horrible as 9/11 was if he could not come to understand the central facts of our lives then we would never share the same reality again.

At lunchtime we sat down for sandwiches, and when he asked me what I was doing in Asheville, I handed him the notebook. He struggled to understand, but with Mother, his own writing, and me all telling him the same thing, he told us that he believed us.

And then, after our sandwiches were finished, he asked me, “So, Sam, what are you doing with yourself?”

I paused, looked across the table at his expectant face, dreading another two-hour explanation of my life choices. Then, suddenly in that moment I was Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, looking across the kitchen table into the same expectant face as the day before, but realizing that I had a chance to rewrite history. 

I weighed my words, and then told him, “Father, I have taken advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pursue my dreams. Intel had a downsizing and I got a sizable severance. I want to start a new business. There is a book inside of me that I want to write. And I want to help my wife succeed in her art career, so I am going to help her.”

This time, he looked into my eyes and told me, “Sam, I am proud of you. I hope you get all these things that you want.”

I had been given a very rare gift; the chance to turn time back to make things right, and out of that brief exchange between us came clarity. I suddenly understood how much care I should take when shaping my thoughts into words. One combination had sowed discord, the other invited my father to share my dreams, and he had. 

In the days that followed my father kept writing out the story of the events that started with his collapse in Cuzco and the grim truth about the terrible attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.  As he wrote down those words the document became the bridge that he slowly crossed, back into himself, always helped along by my Mother’s firm, patient guidance. As the days passed we began to see early signs that the mists were clearing from his mind as new memories formed strand by strand, weaving together an image of reality that would retain its coherence across time.

Over the past 14 years my father and I have shared experiences that have formed new memories that we now hold together. The silver towers will never be rebuilt and my father’s memories of that time will never return but I hope this story can hold the place of some of what he lost.