*4 ‘9–11-01. THIS IS NEXT,’ began the note included in the first of the anthrax letters, six days later (September 18): ‘TAKE PENACILIN NOW. / DEATH TO AMERICA. / DEATH TO ISRAEL. / ALLAH IS GREAT’…The anthrax letters killed five people and infected fifteen (and they cost the government $1 billion in cleanup and decontamination). Furthermore, they suffused the heart of every First Worlder with another sepsis of impotence and dread…It eventually turned out that the perpetrator was a man called Bruce Ivins, who worked in the national biodefence labs in Maryland. Ivins had a long history of mental ‘episodes’, suffering from a paranoia of pride as much as persecution (a committed threatener and feuder); he was thoroughly mixed-up all right, but he was neither foreign nor especially religious (‘penacilin’ and ‘Allah is great’ were mere chaff). Unapprehended by the law, Ivins went on a one-man suicide mission in July 2008.
*5 Beyond establishing the bare outlines, I had never really talked about it with Phoebe, either – and wouldn’t do so with any candour until 2017 (at which point she was seventy-five); as I had always subliminally supposed it must, the case history involved an additional and ulterior element of moral horror.
*6 Kingsley, whose third novel was called I Like It Here (1958), was never much of a traveller. In addition he couldn’t fly, he couldn’t drive, he couldn’t take a train or a subway unescorted, and he couldn’t be left alone in a house after dark without the company of close family or very old friends. Hence ‘Dadsitting’: his three children managed it by rotation. The system was institutionalised after Jane left him in December 1980.
*7 In Spain, at least, Parfait Amour enjoys a folkish reputation as an aphrodisiac. Whenever Hilly ordered it her husband was jovially nudged and elbowed by the waiters…That third husband of hers, my beloved and long-serving stepfather, was called Ali and he would later work as a postman. Which sounds promisingly egalitarian. Ali had no money or land or anything like that, but his full name was Alistair Ivor Gilbert Boyd and he was the seventh Baron Kilmarnock…A few months after Jane bolted, Hilly and Ali moved in with Kingsley as housekeepers, and this unlikely arrangement stood firm until his death in 1995.
Chapter 3 September 11
2: The day before the day after
The second plane
Look, now, at the filmic record of that morning. The live coverage starts just before 8.46 a.m. and what you see is a shockingly, a chasteningly bright blue sky. Yes, a strong blue sky – but an innocent sky.*1 An innocent sky, one that even in its worst dreams had never imagined anything like…
Until 8.46 that morning, or more precisely until 9.03, travellers were arriving at American airports with leisurely tardiness; and they were all right. For domestic flights, at least, they needed no photo ID; they kept their shoes and jackets on, their quarts of shampoo went unconfiscated; they strolled to the gate with non-travelling family or friends, paring their nails (if they felt like it) with Swiss Army knives, unfrisked, unblessed by the security rod…They were on the old schedule, and they were all right.
The sky humming in its blue, the leonine sun (‘Heat is the echo of your / Gold’, Larkin, ‘Solar’), the first of the two planes (they are both Boeing 767s out of Boston) – its unignorable roar, its apparently frictionless disappearance into the North Tower, ‘Holy SHIT!’ Is it an accident? This possibility, this ‘theory’, had a short life: it was noisily and gaudily refuted seventeen minutes later. And soon we see the second plane homing in like a cartoon hornet over the stocky black skyscape of downtown.
The public archive has only one shot of the impact of the first plane (hand-held, sudden, veering); by contrast, there are thirty different angles for the impact of the second (this was a component of Osama’s plan). Some are network-professional, some are semi-amateur, some are soundless, some erupt in shrieked obscenities, some just falter on…
‘Then it must be – deliberate,’ says a female voice; ‘So it’s – on purpose,’ says another female voice…‘That’s terrorist shit, man,’ says a male African American with decisive conviction. He said this on the dot of 9.03 – twenty-eight minutes before President Bush, speaking from Florida, rather more cautiously gave voice (‘an apparent terrorist attack’) to the same opinion. No, not happenstance, and certainly not double happenstance…
And one other thing. What you’re watching is mass murder, but it is also multiple suicide. We are often shown death or its aftermath (warning: some viewers may find…), but we are never shown suicide. We were not shown the atomisations of the ‘skydivers’; we are never shown suicide bombers as they self-detonate – we are not shown ‘martyrdom operations’: over suicide a veil is quietly drawn.*2
There were many suicides on September 11. The overwhelming majority were the jumpers, the leapers (roughly 200 of them) – and they were only nominal suicides; they were people who very suddenly had to choose between one form of death and another. Those plummeting figures represented the outer limits of pathos and despair. And meaninglessness, too: they were not dying for any reason they knew about…Those at the controls of the fourth plane, its black box tells us, spent their last seconds (before they ditched United 93 in some pastureland in Pennsylvania) hesitantly chanting God is great. They
