Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  The middle sister and the youngest had been seated on the right-hand side of the cabin, just aft of the cockpit bulkhead, the youngest sitting on the inboard side. Behind them, in a string of double seats, in order of proximity, sat Jon, Brian, Suzanne, and Paul. The left-hand side of the aircraft, the pilot’s side, was lined with single seats. The two people seated on that side of the cabin were the eldest sister and I. She was sitting up front. Our side had taken the worst of the impact. The cockpit on our side of the plane was destroyed. Crushed four feet back on the other side, it was crushed nine feet back on our side, torn away along with the bulkhead and a portion of the front cabin, the area in which the young woman was sitting and into which her youngest sister’s seat extended.

  The oak tree standing inside the airplane had passed through the captain’s position. Sometime during the crash sequence, his restraint system had released and he was ejected from the cockpit. His body was found twenty-five feet forward of the wreckage. The failure of his harness, triggered by impact damage to the buckle, did not influence his chances of survival. His fatal injuries, according to the government crash report, “were caused by trees impacting the left cockpit and by the collapsing cockpit structure as the aircraft descended through the trees.”

  Brian, going into his sophomore year at Boston College, survived the crash to celebrate his nineteenth birthday in July. His brother Bill was married three weeks after the crash, and at the wedding, Brian received a standing ovation.

  “It’s always what could have happened,” he told me. “It affects the people not involved more than the people involved.”

  His brother Denis had driven him to the airport that night, and seeing Brian after the crash, “he couldn’t speak” for a few seconds. “That close . . . What if?” were the first words he uttered.

  Such moments, Brian said, undercut all his bravado.

  “You say it’s no big deal, but it is a big deal. You appreciate them, the family, that much more.”

  In helping me recapture a fuller sense of that night, an appreciation of events as perceived through the prism of his experience, Brian punctuated the conversation with what he identified as “remarkable moments.” And virtually all of them concerned his family: “the love in her voice” when he first talked to Missy; his brief call from the hospital “to let my family know I’m alive”; and his father, “not a touchy-feely guy,” carrying it all in the sound of his voice, the weight of all that emotion, when he told Brian, “We’re on our way.”

  Hearing these things in the context of what I knew about the McCann family served to verify my belief in the therapeutic quality of love.

  Bob and Janice Billingsley, who spend every Christmas Eve with the Boyds, attending church with them in Manhattan, know Missy’s family not only to be close-knit but also to be very tightly tied across generational lines. “When you go to a party at Missy’s, the entire family is there,” says Bob, who has attended gatherings at the Boyds’ apartment in Manhattan. “I have met all her brothers and sisters-in-law and all the nieces and nephews, all the relatives, even the cousins.” And the familial bond is mirrored in another kind of unity that he finds remarkable. “They all look alike. Try to guess which ones are her brothers, and you’d get eight out of ten.”

  In the summer, the entire family heads en masse to the Cape.

  “Everybody, all eleven people and all their children go to Missy’s on the Fourth of July.” Missy, the second oldest of the eleven children, the only daughter, is “the family matriarch,” Bob says. “To understand the family is to understand her.” Janice describes the July get-together as a “three-or-four-day” affair, an extravaganza marked by pageants and skits in which the children are expected to perform. Missy’s orchestration of the event is a long-standing tradition that Janice sees as part of “the glue that pulls the family together.” And there is no question, she says, that “the family being so accessible helped get [Brian] through.”

  In as many ways as not, the story I was unearthing was a story about families, and what moved me most about Brian’s experience was how familiar it seemed, how accurately it reflected mine, and how for me, as for him, an appreciation of that night would have been inexpressible from any frame of reference that did not include the members of my family.

  Optimism is a blessing that was conferred on me at birth. It has been a lifelong article of faith with my mother that “Things always work out for the best.” Hearing her say it when I was growing up was as predictable as hearing “Don’t forget to brush your teeth” and “Call us when you get there.”

  I was no older than eleven or twelve when I learned the meaning of the word optimist. The first time I remember hearing the word was when my aunt Julia, my father’s sister, applied it to me. “I see you’re an optimist,” she told me, one Sunday at her home in Boston, walking up behind me and looking over my shoulder while I sat at her dining-room table solving a crossword. “What’s an optimist?” I wanted to know. “Someone,” she said, “who does crossword puzzles in ink.” I confess that, for at least a while thereafter, I believed it to be the literal definition, as if the English language were so all encompassing as to have a word for someone who did that:

  So what do you do for fun, Bob?

  I like to play baseball, and I’m also an optimist.

  You can find optimist defined, as I eventually did, in a dictionary, but you will look in vain to find a more splendid embodiment of the word than my mother. Well into my adulthood, Easter remained one of the holidays on which the entire family gathered, my brothers and sisters and I traveling to my parents’ house from wherever we happened to be to observe the occasion together. It was also a holiday on which one of the big-screen Bible epics depicting the life of Christ could inevitably be found on television, and whether it was The Robe or The Greatest Story Ever Told, it was a broadcast my mother seldom missed. It is safe to say that, on the occasion of the Easter story I’m about to tell, my mother had seen the movie in question about twenty times. And she’d been familiar with the source material since long before the film was made. It was the life of Jesus. She’d read the book.

  It was sometime in the afternoon that Terry and I, while we were talking, heard a cry of distress from my mother, who was busying herself in the kitchen. We turned to look in on her. We asked if she was OK. She was sitting at the table with a paring knife in her hand. The television was on, and whatever she might have been slicing was receiving only half her attention. My mother, ever conscientious, always careful not to alarm, was quick to assure us that she was fine, but from the disappointment in her voice, it was evident that something was wrong.

  “What is it?” Terry wanted to know.

  My mother sighed. She shook her head.

  She said, “They picked Barabbas.”

  They, the multitude in the movie on television, they’d shouted, “Give us Barabbas!” choosing him over Jesus when they were asked by Pontius Pilate, the empire’s man in Judea, which of the two biblical troublemakers deserved to have his sentence commuted.

  I looked at Terry, who looked right back at me. Her smile said, You’re surprised? I asked my mother the question to which Terry and I both knew the answer.

  “Did you think it was going to go the other way?”

  The three of us were laughing now.

  “No . . . no,” she said. My mother has a way of laughing and showing frustration at the same time. “But . . .”

  But nothing. My mother was really holding out hope that it might be different this year. She really believed, somewhere deep in her heart, that if things broke her way, the multitude might actually pick Jesus this time, that two thousand years of Christian history would still play out just fine if Rome, laying a foundation for what the Church would one day recognize as the spiritual acts of mercy, had slapped Jesus with a desk-appearance ticket, maybe hit him with something like a D felony, rather than crucify him.

  I know exactly what she was thinking, because it’s the way I tend to th
ink, too. Or did. Until that night in the woods. After that, I think, at least for a while, my innate optimism went south, along with some of my confidence.

  My father, a practical man, who’d come to terms early in life with the idea that Jesus had been crucified, was no less open-handed than my mother in the dispensation of positive thinking. While my mother administered the optimism, he wrote the prescriptions for confidence. That confidence translated as often as not into blissful ignorance on my part, but ignorance, I submit, of an indispensable kind, the naive sort of arrogance that enabled me, for example, to just up and write a book. It simply never occurred to me that it couldn’t be done. I never entertained the thought that I would (as I did) encounter anything that as a writer I hadn’t come up against, even though, until then, I’d never reported a story that had run much longer than five hundred words.

  But more than confidence in my ability to succeed, he gave me confidence in my ability to prevail. I cannot remember the circumstances, but at some disheartening moment in my life, I was sharing my misgivings with him, and what he said to me in response to my troubles he framed in such a way as to make the words self-fulfilling. He said quite simply that I shouldn’t worry about it too much (whatever it was that was bothering me) and by way of telling me why assured me that he wasn’t worried.

  “You always seem to manage to land on your feet,” he said.

  He didn’t say it as though trying to encourage me. He said it as though sharing a secret, the way another parent might say, “You’re adopted.” As if it were something I had no control over, something I couldn’t escape. He was simply sharing an observation, a conclusion anyone else might reach.

  There are moments in the lives of all of us when the words we need to hear at the time have an impact that is way out of proportion to their everyday throw weight, and this was going to be one of them. There is nothing—no weapon, no wind or vaccine—with the power to match the naked, instrumental might of simplicity, and that simple observation ventured by my father somehow gained the force of prophecy.

  It was not something I’d ever thought about. But to doubt it would have been to doubt his success, for he was the one who’d equipped me with whatever capability I had. It is the responsibility of all parents to instill in their children the heart needed to prevail, and my father was no doubt speaking out of a certain pride in himself when he pointed to what he perceived, and wanted me to perceive, as my ability to land feetfirst.

  But that belief in myself—and my optimism along with it—took a dark turn after the crash. I can see it now, looking back. After the crash, I found myself, when things were going well, just waiting for them to go sideways.

  Mary had a different way of looking at the tendency that my father had led me to have faith in. And her reminding me of it was a bit more left-handed:

  “Bob, you’ll always be lucky.”

  Not until after the crash was it a tendency for which I felt an apology was necessary.

  There’s nothing wrong with being lucky, and there’s a lot of truth in the belief that we tend to make our own luck. But after the crash, being told I was lucky was something I didn’t want to hear. The notion that I would always wind up on my feet, the proposition that had been my ally for so long, now presented itself as the enemy. I could not escape the idea that somehow I was just lucky, that I didn’t earn my luck or, more important, deserve it. And any suggestion that I had luck on my side—however it was intended—just reinforced the symptom. It wasn’t a symptom I necessarily recognized, certainly not a feeling I recognized for what it was. But it was a feeling that could only have flourished in the fertile soil of what I would come to understand to be the syndrome known as survivor guilt.

  Hospitals, I guess, are like prisons. One of the things you pick up from convicts, an observation you’re not apt to make if you’ve never done time yourself, is that in lockup, they never shut off the lights. Not all the way. It’s how the people keeping an eye on you keep an eye on you at night. Inmates, who by definition don’t see much of the sun, never enjoy the benefits of darkness either. You have to wonder if there’s a flourishing market in a hellhole like San Quentin in those little courtesy packets they hand out on airplanes that contain sleep shades and earplugs. I didn’t notice it at the time, or let’s say I didn’t find it conspicuous, but as I lay in bed in the hospital, comforted by narcotics, there was no part of the ward or the hallway beyond it that was not at least dimly illuminated. So it wasn’t until nightfall of the day I was released that I discovered I was afraid of the dark.

  When you say it like that—the Dark—it has an almost metaphysical ring to it. It smacks of eschatology, like something out of Revelation, something unknowable hiding in the second law of thermodynamics. I mentioned it to Suzanne. Yeah, she said, me too. She just said it. We didn’t discuss it. It passed. It was like the flu. Me, I slept with the lights on for a few days and was careful for a while thereafter not to be outdoors at night. Brian said he experienced it also. It seems to have passed as quickly for him. What didn’t pass that quickly, he told me, were the nightmares.

  “I had nightmares through college,” he said. “I still have dreams about planes crashing.”

  But the nightmares were not the worst of it.

  “The magnitude of something like that,” he said, “that you could get up and walk away. I didn’t think I was supposed to be here.”

  By which he meant, to be alive.

  “I had survivor guilt for several months,” he said.

  Survivor guilt, once a specific diagnosis, is now recognized in the medical literature as an associated symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Diagnosed in those who have escaped horrors in which others have been killed or seriously injured, it expresses itself in feelings of sadness and shame, a debilitating sense that one really shouldn’t be alive. Because it is largely limited to mortal events, the term can be misinterpreted. Or so my experience suggests. It is not always the death of others for which you necessarily feel guilty. Death is just the fundamental reminder of what was supposed to happen to you. It triggers the Why not me? response that leads you to believe you should have died, the weird notion that in some way you had an obligation to do so, that you don’t really deserve to live. Not only is your survival unfair to the dead, it is unfair to the living as well. You have no right to be that lucky.

  “Why am I still here?” was the question Brian asked himself when his nightmares awakened him.

  It was not an ontological question, but at least he gave it voice. I don’t remember asking it. I just remember being prepared for the worst. However well things were going, there was always something to fear.

  “I’d wake up in the middle of the night,” Brian said, feeling that “I dodged a bullet. There’s another around the corner.”

  The feeling, he said, lasted through Christmas.

  Kevin Roberts carried the same feeling around with him for just about thirty years.

  “Why am I constantly in fear that the bottom is going to fall out, and I’m going to end up tomorrow on skid row?” was the question that haunted him, convinced, as he was, that “whatever the worst is, it will happen.”

  Kevin is the friend who told me that when he and fellow veterans talk, they never talk about combat. We were sitting on the beach in Eastham below the vacation cottage he and his wife had rented, as they did every summer with the kids. It was the middle of the day, and the tide was in, pushing us back to the edge of the dune on which the two-week rental was situated. It was a perfect day to be on Cape Cod Bay, and while everyone else was enjoying it, he and I had found a quiet spot to discuss all the terrible things that keep people up at night.

  I knew precisely what Kevin was talking about when he mentioned asking himself why he was always in fear of the worst. The answer for him, as it was for me, was, Well, because you deserve it. It’s that metaphorical bullet you dodged. But Kevin’s PTSD was complicated by more than survivor guilt.

  “I was never afrai
d, all the time I was there,” he told me, of his tour of duty in Vietnam. “That’s a symptom of PTSD. Not talking about it is a symptom of PTSD.”

  He waited thirty years before seeking therapy, and had been in therapy for a full two years, when his therapist said this:

  “Wait a minute . . . you were in Vietnam?”

  It had never occurred to Kevin to mention it.

  “I hadn’t gotten over the nuns yet,” he told me. “And a whole lot of other things . . . ‘Oh yeah, Vietnam, maybe that too. . . .’ By the time you’re in your fifties, there’s stuff in there that’s pretty hard-wired . . . ‘I’m not special.’ It goes back to the nuns. ‘I’m not special, why would you be interested in me . . .?’ ”

  Oft told is the ancient Arabian tale of the servant in Baghdad (probably best known as recounted in a play by W. Somerset Maugham, whose version is paraphrased here):

  There was a merchant of Baghdad who sent his servant one morning to market, where the servant, buying provisions, was jostled by a woman in the crowd. The servant turned to see that it was Death who had jostled him, Death, in the disguise of a woman, looking directly into his eyes. Recoiling from a threatening gesture, the servant ran from the market, returned home pale and trembling, and reported to his master what had happened. The merchant loaned the servant his fastest horse, and the servant fled the city to escape his fate, racing to Samarra, where Death would be unable to find him. The merchant went down to the marketplace and found Death standing among the crowd. “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” the merchant wanted to know. To which Death replied: “That was not a threatening gesture. It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”