A neighbor came by, just back from a cross-country visit followed by a cruise. She went to Pennsylvania, then the Caribbean.
In Pennsylvania she visited Johnstown, the flood museum, and the site of Flight 93's wreckage, where there's a memorial manned and maintained by volunteers.
She said there were forty flags in the ground to represent the passengers and crew, but "not the other four".
Her whole affect darkened considerably when she said that. Later when she was talking about her fellow visitor reading the sign-in book, she didn't read it she said, she said there was a transcript from the black-box recording, and she described, through the experience of her friend, the transition from sorrow and grief to anger of his reading it as the words of the terrorists including "Allah, Allah" came through the narrative, mechanically precise and truthful.
She told me about being in the Caribbean, how nice that was, though she stayed out of the sun for the most part.
They went to St. Thomas and St. Vincent and San Juan, Puerto Rico,
And Labadee, Haiti.
When she said Haiti I must have raised my eyebrows, like you do, because I saw her reaction to it, and then I asked her how was that.
She said it was great. She said the cruise line owns three beaches there in Labadee, and there's a big, you know, building with all the shops where the locals sell things tourists might buy and there's dancing and things.
Labadee.
Allah.
How clean I imagine those beaches to be, and someone, a small crew of security-proven Haitians, to sweep and prune and trim and pick up litter, and probably some kind of tractor to make the sand nice, and what the police would be like, checking the sellers in the morning before they come in to the building where the shops are that sell things that tourists might buy.
And earlier for a second I had this immersion in the moment of the plane that was Flight 93 coming in low over the fields of Western Pennsylvania and the fear and rage pheromones in the heavy close air of the cabin and the electric noise of the Arabic from those four men like static like knives in the air and their accented English the plane in the air but that's outside inside there's no more than this nothing but this a room this room they all were in together suddenly like a place complete into itself like heaven almost something eternal about it but you had to wait and then there was a problem someone wasn't waiting there was a disturbance someone was making trouble and then the trouble was all there was and then the light.
You can't put that in the sign-in book just like you can't put the naked hills of Haiti and the long legs the skin and bones the big-eyed with hunger all those skinny french-speaking black people from who knows what and where who only want something from you the ones who get on those boats that are like a bathtub race filled with the desperate and the dying to cross the ocean to Florida remember that camp they put them in in I think it was Georgia or it started with a 'G' anyway they were landing like grunion on the east coast or hoping to back in the 70's or was it the 80's or more recently on the southern coast of Florida refugees from what who would tell us and their relatives there now in Labadee well no but near it but they haven't figured out how to get what they want from you and you can't see them anyway because there's a fence so far back into the real Haiti that it doesn't show in this little paradise of clean sand and safe food and trees et cetera we made for you as part of the package tour you paid for and we have delivered to you as promised in our brochures.
