Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  I celebrated my birthday in the hospital, I was released at the end of June, I moved into the unfinished Cape Cod house to recuperate over the summer, and twenty-seven years went by—twenty-seven years in which I never saw, spoke to, heard from, heard of, or considered reaching out to any of the people with whom I had spent that night in the woods.

  On a day like today, looking southwest from the windows on the water side of the house, you can see the upper reaches of the Cape. You can trace the lazy arc of the tree line as it curves around the inner edge of the bay. Some seventeen nautical miles of uninterrupted ocean lie between here and the mouth of Barnstable Harbor—a long fetch, as the local oyster-men say, an empty expanse of nothing but weather—and on a typical day anything moving this way, a vessel, a vagrant memory, is going to be running straight down the wind.

  On a typical day on Cape Cod Bay, the prevailing wind blows southwest: out of the southwest, northeastward. In defiance of intuition, such a wind is said to be blowing down Cape. The Lower Cape designates the peninsula’s northern stretch, its outer stretch, the forty or so miles of National Seashore hooking around to land’s end. The Upper Cape lies to the south. This confusion owes its persistence to a peculiarity of maritime geography, the rules of which have been in force around here since the continent was first explored. Sailing from the inner to the outer waters of the Cape, a mariner navigates east, “down east” across the meridian lines, down the hours, minutes, and seconds of arc to a lower degree of longitude. Thus, the Lower Cape. The coast of Maine, which is farther north, is down east of here.

  Life here is like life aboard ship. The marine forecast is the regional catechism. Here, weather, even more than character, is destiny. You tend to forget, on a day like today, awash in the bright blue of an undisturbed sea, that some three thousand shipwrecks lie buried in the sand below the surf that breaks along the back shore. The bones of dead sailors, lost to storms over the centuries, lie scattered beneath the shoals, strung out along the arm of the outer beach like charms on a broken bracelet.

  Just east of Barnstable Harbor, which was choked by fog that disastrous night, sits the town of Dennis. A well-established Cape Cod community of some fifteen thousand residents, Dennis is one of fifteen towns on the peninsula, all of whose populations increase in the summer, in some cases by a factor of ten. Dennis stands out from its immediate neighbors, being better known to certain people off-Cape. The Outer Cape towns, out where I live, the towns of Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown, are home to a significant year-round population of what I like to think of as refugees: artists, writers, various entrepreneurs, escapees of all varieties. These are people, many of whom, when they dress up to go to the office, don’t make their way to Boston but travel instead to New York. None of the Upper or mid-Cape towns exhibits a similar connection to Manhattan, with the exception, perhaps, of Dennis. And this is by virtue of the Cape Playhouse, the venerable summer stock theater there, which for generations has been distinguished by the caliber of Broadway talent it attracts.

  Recently, I found myself at a coffee bar in Dennis. I was sitting outside, in a tiny, two-table courtyard just off the grounds of the Playhouse. I was drinking coffee and sharing a pastry with a woman who was visiting from New York. Sharing seemed to be the order of the day. We had already split a turkey sandwich at the luncheonette next door. A former retail executive, now a full-time mother of two, she lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and her family owned a summerhouse in Dennis. They had owned it since she was a kid, when as a teenager she had worked as a waitress at the International House of Pancakes in Hyannis.

  It was early in the afternoon, as clear and beautiful a summer day as Cape Cod could ever promise, and while dressed for the weather, she and I were probably dressed a little bit better than we might have been on a different day, were maybe just a little bit better groomed than the vacationers around us. She wore a casual skirt and a lightweight blouse; I was wearing my better jeans, clean sneakers, and a collared shirt. We had been talking for a couple of hours, since meeting earlier at the house, which was just a short walk away.

  “Ted Kennedy was wearing a tuxedo,” she said. “You didn’t see him walk by?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “He walked right by us when he entered the terminal.”

  “So he had flown down from the Cape,” I said.

  “He was getting off the plane we got on.”

  The last time I had seen Suzanne, in the darkness of a forest at midnight, I was on the ground bleeding, unable to move, and she was walking away, disappearing in the fog. The last time I’d heard her voice was when she told me, “I’ll get help.”

  More than twenty-seven years had passed.

  When I called, I asked if she remembered me.

  She said, “Of course I do.”

  When I asked if she would be comfortable talking about that night, the only concern she expressed was that she might not have much insight to offer.

  “I was young when it happened,” she said, over the phone. “And I wasn’t really injured. I put it behind me pretty quickly.”

  Suzanne, in 1982, three years after surviving the wreck, graduated from Rutgers with a bachelor’s degree in economics. Entering the buyer-training program at Bloomingdale’s, she moved from Teaneck, New Jersey, and the home of her parents, Pierre and Carole Mourad, to live in New York. She worked in the clothing business for sixteen years, “always in retail, always in dresses,” quitting work after a year and a half of marriage to give birth to the first of her two children. The day I called the house in Dennis, she just happened to be in town. She visited twice a year with the family, and was on the Cape for only a week. Three days later, she and I met.

  “You look different,” she said.

  It took me a few seconds to fathom this. More than a quarter of a century had gone by, after all. What had she expected? And what an odd way to greet anyone under the best of conditions. Even under the worst of them, were I moved to say anything at all, I think I would be tempted to lie, to bow to chivalry and what I presume to be good manners, regardless of how dramatically someone had aged, and say something as time-honored and innocuous as “The years have been very good to you,” or “You haven’t changed at all.”

  Perhaps she was just uneasy, I thought. What else would serve to explain so strange a conversational gambit? Especially strange given the rather immodest belief on my part, justified or not, that I really hadn’t changed much at all, or not so much as some of my contemporaries. In twenty-seven years, if only through an accident of genetics, I had managed to keep all my hair, much of which had maintained its color, and I’d gained only ten pounds or so.

  And then, of course, I understood. She was not talking about the way I looked, she was talking about my look. Her recollection of a young man seen moving in flashes, in and out of the darkness in the flare of available light, and never seen again—an image illuminated as if by snapping strobes, if her memory of that night were anything at all like mine—was of a man with unruly, almost shoulder-length hair and a mustache that arced down to just above the edges of his chin, attributes that intensified the dark cast and severe contours of an angular face. I looked less like the typical New York author and more like an outlaw back then. The swelling above my eye and over my cheekbone that night, in evidence when she’d last seen me, had done nothing to soften my appearance. Even on a better night, you’d have taken me not for a writer but for maybe a downtown musician who hadn’t eaten in a while.

  That’s what she’d meant. I did look different—clean-cut, better fed, and more mainstream by an applaudable margin, in addition to being older—and before I could respond, she said as much. In one way, I had the advantage of her. If I remembered her face at all from that night, my memory had been reinforced, or the image itself entirely displaced, by her photograph. Various photos of her had appeared at the time in newspapers that I’d recently reexamined. She was twenty-seven years older now—an adult version of the teenag
e girl in the photos, in the best of which she had been smiling—and her hair was measurably shorter. Most of the growing up she had done was visible in her eyes.

  Our visit that day lasted only a couple of hours, and we passed much of the time the way people do when getting to know each other. Which proved vaguely disconcerting. For though we had spent no more than an hour together some twenty-seven years earlier, in certain ways, in ways I was unable to define, it was as though we had known each other all our lives. The time we spent together had everything and nothing in common with that which passes oftentimes in the course of a blind date. That which was most unnatural was the sense of familiarity, the ease of being together, that settled in almost at once. It was like sitting down with a stranger who knew how you took your coffee.

  Looking back on the night of the crash, Suzanne solved a couple of mysteries. First there was the arrival of the tuxedoed Ted Kennedy, entering what she described as the “eerie” atmosphere of the Marine Air Terminal earlier that evening, dark and airless and virtually barren but for the plastic chairs on which we sat waiting. It was she who conjured for me the memory of that solitary candy machine. She also remembered assisting me, she said, as I worked the door through which we’d escaped the downed airplane, though her recollection of the details was unclear. In reconstructing the episode to the best of our ability, we concluded that at some point she had taken the briefing card from me, presumably to free up my hands, and had read the instructions aloud.

  The persistence of inconsequential memories at the expense of memories utterly profound is a phenomenon worthy of more serious study than I’ll ever be prepared to give it. To say that the mind can play tricks on you is just a polite way of saying it. Memory, in the inconstancy of its affiliations, is more than simply capricious, it’s downright irresponsible; mine is characteristically irresolute, and that day when it came to revisiting events, it was as reckless as a two-year-old. As I sat there talking to Suzanne, certain significant moments danced around the edges of my recollection waiting to be invited in, while other, immaterial incidents imposed themselves with the kind of stupefying force that only trivia seem able to sustain.

  One such incident presented itself as a question that continued to baffle me, a question Suzanne alone could answer, and just one more of the various mysteries I would ask her to solve that day. Why, I wanted to know, had my car been of so much interest to her? It was all I could remember of our conversation in the minutes leading up to the crash. Suzanne said she remembered the conversation, and she remembered the make of my car. Answering the question with the hint of a smile, she reminded me that her father, back then—he was now deceased—had been in the business of selling and servicing secondhand BMWs.

  Seeing our conversation as the first of several, I tried to limit my questions to the night of the crash, postponing inquiry into its consequences, not only as a matter of courtesy, but also in keeping with investigative habits I’d developed as a reporter. There would be time to probe more personal issues after we’d been working at things a while longer. And so we merely skimmed the periphery, though not by name, of posttraumatic stress. Suzanne, reinvigorating the assertion that her recovery had been swift, told me that she was back on an airplane in a matter of weeks, having accepted an offer made by Air New England to help get her flying again. Accompanied by her mother and an Air New England employee, at Air New England’s expense, she flew to Nantucket one morning that summer, traveling in a “small six-seater” on the scheduled flight of another carrier (probably Provincetown-Boston Airlines), stayed for lunch, and flew back to Hyannis.

  I also talked to Suzanne’s brother that day. Pierre, her only sibling, is two years older than she and now a professor of applied physics at the University of Washington. At the time of the crash, Pierre had been very protective of his sister, and he remained justly proud of her heroics. Without being specific, he politely contradicted the notion that she had recovered from the experience immediately, but he was quite specific in arguing against the assertion that she was largely unchanged by the incident.

  “Before it happened, you were a typical narcissistic teenager,” he said. “Afterward you were a different person, a mature, outer-directed, caring individual.”

  Within minutes afterward, apparently. I later talked to a lot of people who had met Suzanne that night, and not one of them recalled anything typical about her. She was deferential, not defensive, in the face of her brother’s contradictions.

  Suzanne was unsure how long after the crash she had shown up at the airport, and Pierre said the person best qualified to answer the question would naturally be their mother, who had been waiting for Suzanne at the terminal.

  Suzanne, shaking her head, said no. “I don’t think you should talk to my mother.”

  Her mother had been upset by my phone call, she said. The crash, understandably hard on her, was a part of the past she preferred not to dredge up.

  Suzanne’s mother, despite her misgivings, had been gracious that morning when I arrived at the house, and when Suzanne and I returned in the afternoon, as I picked up my car keys to leave, I went out of my way to thank Mrs. Mourad and to apologize for any discomfort I’d caused.

  Suzanne, by way of explanation, said to her, “I told him you don’t like thinking about that night.”

  We were standing in the entryway of the house, Suzanne, Pierre, Mrs. Mourad, and I, and I was getting ready to step out the door.

  “It was a difficult time,” Mrs. Mourad admitted.

  I told her I understood how she felt. It had been tough on my family, too, I said, more difficult, in many ways, for my parents than it had been for me. And it was a tribute to both her and her daughter, I added, that Suzanne had been able to move beyond the incident so fast.

  Mrs. Mourad nodded. She had been thankful for that.

  She said, “The first two years were the worst.”

  Just like that. Like hitting an artery.

  And now I have to ask myself, did I really think it wasn’t there? Or was my willingness to take Suzanne at her word—“I put it behind me pretty quickly”—just a symptom of my unwillingness to ask certain questions of myself?

  Such questions first occurred to me when, searching through files recently, I came across my financial records for 1979. I don’t actively save such records, I just neglect to throw them out. They’re stored in cardboard boxes that over the years have piled up in the basement. Stored with each year’s records is a calendar or appointment book maintained on the advice of a tax accountant for the purpose of supporting my annual itemized deductions. The calendars, collectively, comprise a kind of penciled-in autobiography, an adventure story that commences just as I’m growing out of my twenties.

  My appointment book for 1979 was in pretty lousy condition. It looked as if it had soaked for a while, presumably in standing water that had found its way into the basement, though the entries themselves were still legible. The fact that the ring binding was bent out of shape and the vinyl cover had somehow been slashed did not escape my notice, but failed to impress me until I began paging through the entries I’d made that year. Encountering the remains of oak leaves and pine needles trapped within the book, I suddenly understood what had happened. It had been damaged not by water but by jet fuel, hydraulic fluid, and human blood, abetted by the same violent forces that had shredded the leather briefcase in which I had been carrying it.

  It must have been five or ten minutes before I came to this realization. How could I have been so slow to conclude that the book had been with me that night on the plane? Answering that question will probably explain a discovery I find even more intriguing. The calendar entries I made in the book stop on June 16, which is certainly understandable. The plane crashed the following night. But they stop only temporarily. The entries pick up again on July 27 and continue through the end of the year.

  For the next five months, I used that book, entering information daily. Itemized are visits from family and friends, an appoi
ntment with an orthopedist in Boston, dealings with carpenters and other subcontractors, progress on construction of the house. There are expenses related to my second book and a screenplay I’d contracted to write. There’s a reminder to renew my passport. I returned to New York in the fall for a while. There were meetings there with my literary agent; there was an editorial conference at Rolling Stone. I kept an appointment with the lawyer handling my settlement. I wrote a book review for the Washington Post.

  For five months, in its damaged condition, the appointment book sat on my desk, just one more in an assortment of necessary office supplies. Was it some kind of keepsake? A good luck charm? I doubt it. I think my consigning it to the everyday was my way of depriving it of significance. And I believe it was out of the same impulse that I put off calling Suzanne.

  After deciding to make the call, I put it off day to day, week to week. I managed to put it off for over a month.

  “I don’t know,” I told her over the phone, when she asked what it was I was looking for.

  “OK,” she said, seeming to understand perfectly.

  And I took it to mean that she didn’t know either but that she knew there was something to find.

  “What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?” is how Prospero put the question to his daughter.

  Had he asked the question of Tom Waits, The Tempest would have been shorter.

  “You can’t really look in the mirror that much,” is how Waits answered when I put the question to him.