Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  He had a Chatham story, too.

  Sometime in the early to mid nineties, he told me, he was doing annual off-season maintenance there on a residential alarm system his company had installed. He had serviced the account before, he said, and just as had happened on the previous visits, the name on the account struck him as familiar.

  “The name bugged me. It stuck in my head. And I couldn’t understand why.”

  On this call, his third, he caught up with the caretaker of the unoccupied house.

  “Where are these people from?” he asked.

  “Michigan,” the caretaker replied.

  It was the caretaker, not a relative, who’d been waiting for the girls at the airport. And this was still their house. Phillips told me that he and the caretaker talked for a couple of hours. Some fifteen years had passed since he had entered the woods looking for the girls. The three were grown women now.

  “One’s a lawyer,” Phillips told me. “One went into emergency medicine.”

  “She’s an MD,” I said, “a radiologist.”

  I told him where she worked.

  “Women are always harder,” I said, “they get married and change their names.”

  But locating them had been easy enough.

  Phillips told me that the Yarmouth Firefighters and Relief Association had taken a special interest in the girls, delivering gifts to them when they were hospitalized.

  “We were sending stuff up,” he said, “on a fairly regular basis.”

  It was not unusual for firemen, especially in the summer, he said, to be in and out of the hospital three or four times a day, and the local fire-and-rescue guys would stop between emergency runs, checking with the nurses they knew to see how the girls were doing.

  Later, when I talked to Robert Jenney, the Yarmouth EMT who the night of the crash had argued outside the hospital with the Channel 5 reporter, he told me that the plight of the youngest sister was “the thing that got me most.” With her parents in Michigan when it happened, he said, “she had nobody,” and the firefighters responded to that. “Kids affect you more than anybody else. The guys fell in love with the little girl, and some of them stopped by to visit her.”

  None of the firefighters I talked to was sufficiently familiar with the girls’ medical conditions to tell me whether moving them had somehow made their condition worse.

  Phillips and I talked until just before darkness set in.

  “It’s getting late,” Paula reminded her husband.

  Everybody had left the ballpark, and it was time for him to go. If he had been home since leaving for work that day, it had been for only a few minutes. And whether baseball, the Boy Scouts, or something else, probably sooner rather than later, he would be volunteering more of his time. First, he’d be reporting to work, he told me, just as he had done after answering the call for the air crash twenty-eight years earlier. After spending all night in the woods, giving time to the one hobby for which he was paid, Phillips that Monday morning—to the astonishment of an employer who when Phillips walked in was following breaking news of the rescue—showed up at work on time.

  Leaving the ballpark, walking to my car, thinking about what Phillips had told me, I had come as close as I was going to get to knowing what had become of the three sisters in whose fate I had intervened when they and I were a lot younger. I would never know the extent of the injuries they suffered or the extent to which their injuries might have been attributable to me.

  I never did find the paramedic who treated me. But I have little doubt that, had I been able to identify him, I’d have found him pretty close at hand.

  “People on the Cape,” says Mary Ellen, who still works as a nurse at the hospital, “they really don’t go very far.”

  If this story has taught me anything, it certainly has taught me that. The circles here, when they close, turn in on themselves rather neatly, and often no farther away than the white pages. There I found the name of the copilot, or someone who shares his name. I wanted to believe it was he, and I had every reason to think so. At the time of the crash, he was identified as a resident of Vermont who had been with Air New England for only two months, but he was also said to have a local connection; he was the nephew of a selectman in the town of Sandwich. The story that the Cape Cod Times ran on the anniversary of the event reported that he was “flying again for Air New England,” and if what Suzanne had been told was true, he’d had even more cause than that to take up permanent residence on the Cape. When Suzanne walked into the airport that night, she noticed, amid the chaos, an airline employee, a ticket agent in the office behind the counter, sobbing. This distraught young woman, she was later told, was the copilot’s fiancée.

  “He was a really aggressive guy,” said Jonathan Ealy. “Helping him was sort of an odd thing . . . an odd combination of his being authoritative and emergency trained and sort of bossing me around, and his really hurting, really being in pain. At the beginning we were talking, he was lucid. By the end I was just trying to keep him awake, just making him respond to things and give me signals. His breathing was shallow, he was less lucid, he kind of got worse and worse, and I was talking to him, I was telling him stories and I was doing the freshman psychology self-hypnosis: ‘OK, we’re on a beach . . .’ And for ten or fifteen minutes I went into shock, I got real faint and I started shaking, and then I came back out of it again. I was hurting like hell after an hour and a half, and he was just in terrible pain, and I’m like, ‘Oh, don’t die on me. . . .’ He was having trouble breathing. I was contemplating helping him breathe and that was not my first choice of things to do. . . . The last half hour he was not with me.”

  The copilot and I had never laid eyes on each other. To me he was just the memory of a voice in the fog, and his recollection of me had to be that much cloudier, if he remembered much about me at all. He would have had no way of knowing, as we shouted to each other in the night, which of the male passengers he was talking to. The exchange was brief and unpleasant. Our association didn’t begin on very good terms. I would add that neither did it end that way, but in pondering the prospect of calling him—him, for some reason, more than the others—I realized that it didn’t end at all. Our association was permanent. And if we never met each other again, that wouldn’t change.

  Memories and what we do with those memories, how they are physiologically encoded, inform an expanding branch of neuroscience, Elissa Koff tells me. Dr. Koff is the Margaret Hamm Professor of Psychology Emerita at Wellesley College, but to me she has always been, well, just Elissa. We have been acquainted for some thirty years now, and not until recently, when I explained to her what I was up to, did I have more than a vague idea of what she did for a living or how distinguished she was academically. In the Cape Cod equivalent of an over-the-back-fence conversation one summer evening, she and her husband, Ray, a physician, saved me hours of library research.

  Traumatic events, “highly salient emotional events,” she tells me, are encoded differently from other events. They are processed by the autobiographical memory in a way that makes them unforgettable—literally. She explains the phenomenon as an evolutionary mechanism for survival. She offers the rudimentary example of a primitive human, availing himself of a particular watering hole, losing an appendage to the jaws of a predator—and remembering not to go back. Such memories are indelible, she says, inescapable “on a neurophysiological level,” because they are something you must remember in order to survive. The evolutionary viability of the species depends on the permanent processing of traumatic memories. We are supposed to remember bad things forever. It is how our brains are wired.

  As a way of understanding posttraumatic stress disorder, the Koffs directed me to the work of neurobiologist James L. McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine, a pioneering researcher into the biochemical link between emotion and memory. According to McGaugh, it is the release of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, triggering the release of another hormone, norepinephrine, that r
einforces the permanence of traumatic memories. He says that while the mechanism has only recently been the subject of scientific inquiry—he himself has been investigating it for about half a century—its effects have long been known.

  In the past, he writes in his 2003 book Memory and Emotion, “before writing was used to keep historical records, other means had to be found to maintain records of important events. . . . To accomplish this, a young child about seven years old was selected, instructed to observe the proceedings carefully, and then thrown into a river. In this way, it was said, the memory of the event would be impressed on the child and the record of the event maintained for the child’s lifetime.”

  Roger Pitman, who views McGaugh as “the leading behavioral neuroscientist of our time,” is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School whose work on understanding PTSD the Koffs also commended to my attention. Pitman believes the disorder reinforces itself. “In the aftermath of a traumatic event,” he has said, “you tend to think more about it, and the more you think about it, the more likely you are to release further stress hormones, and the more likely they are to act to make the memory of that event even stronger.”

  The plane crash is a textbook example of the traumatic events Pitman talks about, the salient emotional events Elissa Koff, citing the work of McGaugh, says you must remember to ensure your survival. For everyone who lived through it—the copilot, my fellow passengers, and me—the memory of that night is inerasable. Hence the permanence of our association, even if fate, or I, were never again to bring us together. All of us, as a result of our shared experience, are heirs to a common destiny. At those times when remembrance of the past imposes itself on the present, it is we, as ghosts on the periphery, who haunt one another’s dreams.

  Understanding this, I understood why, when sitting with Suzanne in that first hour of our reacquaintance, I felt as though she and I had known each other all our lives. It was a feeling that also expressed itself in my meetings with the others. The connection we shared had some of the outward qualities of the bond that exists between siblings, observable in, if not measured by, the things that are left unspoken.

  “You share something with these people that no one else shares with them. You share something very deep together,” Richard Morrill told me.

  I’d known Dick Morrill for years in a kind of run-into-him-around-town kind of way. I wouldn’t have said we were pals—I was much better acquainted with his brother—but I’d certainly spent enough time with him and talked to him often enough to like him.

  Recently I got to know him a lot better.

  Not only is Morrill bright, he has terrific performance skills. He knows how to command an audience. He is one of those guys who smiles when he talks, not like you and me, but like Harold Hill in The Music Man, albeit with much more sincerity, one of those engaging, outgoing characters who talk and smile at the same time. He can converse intelligently on a range of subjects. There isn’t a lot you can’t talk to him about, but it’s always more fun to listen, and he is remarkably forthcoming with information about himself. And so it came as something of a surprise when, after knowing him for so many years, I learned how much about him I really didn’t know.

  “Have you talked to Dick Morrill yet?” a friend of mine inquired, when I explained that I was doing research on posttraumatic stress.

  “Why would I talk to Dick?”

  “He’s studied it pretty thoroughly. He can probably direct you to the right sources.”

  I knew Dick Morrill as a carpenter. I wasn’t familiar with his educational background. Out here, at the end of the Cape, you stop asking questions about things like that after you run into your third or fourth Fulbright scholar with a commercial fishing license, your second or third career bartender with a background on Wall Street. These are the escapees I mentioned earlier—I can introduce you to an Eastham stonemason who can translate Virgil without breaking a sweat—the people I like to think of as refugees, men and women who visited the Outer Cape and decided they wanted to stay, learning to do, as Morrill himself would tell me later, “whatever they could that would allow them to make a living here,” learning in his case “to be a carpenter . . . and an innkeeper . . . and a musician . . . and an actor.” They show up here from all over the country, trading in their career goals for—and they all use the same expression—“quality of life,” which means that, more than punching a clock, they like living on Jimmy Buffet time. That’s the secret of life on the Outer Cape: Nobody has any money, and we’re all living as though we’ve got trust funds.

  Morrill could easily have been an academic in an earlier life, a psychology professor like Elissa Koff. He was clearly a studious fellow, and he certainly had the visual attributes of at least one notable scholar. Lean and bespectacled, ranging over six foot three and exhibiting the excellent, upright posture that teachers and parents encourage, he brought to mind, somewhat vaguely and minus the lugubrious trappings, the classic renderings of the schoolmaster Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

  The first time I saw him, I was new to the Cape, and he was rising to address the town meeting, calling for a vote to direct the federal government to recognize the community as a nuclear-free zone. “As I remember, some other people wrote it and asked me to stand up and make the motion,” he told me, when I reminded him of it recently. “It must have passed, since there is not one single nuclear weapon in our town.”

  Before calling him, I asked my friend where it was that Morrill came by his expertise.

  “It’s something Dick’s been into forever,” he told me.

  Well, not quite forever, I discovered, but at least since 1968.

  In 1968, Dick Morrill was twenty-seven years old, living in Saigon, and working as a flight mechanic for Air America, the civilian airline owned and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency that supported covert military operations in Southeast Asia.

  “We did stuff the military couldn’t do,” Morrill told me, when he and I sat down to talk. “As far as we were concerned, there were no rules. Our motto was Anything, Anytime, Anywhere.”

  In June of that year, the year of the Tet offensive, he was aboard a helicopter training flight with an instructor pilot and two first officers being checked out for promotion to captain, one of whom was sitting with him in the back of a Bell 204B, known in its military configuration as the UH-1 Iroquois, and more famously by its GI nickname, the Huey. They were practicing emergency landings between Saigon and Long Binh, “not an area where, if you went down, they’d come and shoot you,” Morrill said, so there was no fear of that when the helicopter crashed.

  Morrill isn’t an academic. He is a graduate of the school of horrible experience.

  “It was really flaring . . . knees up . . . the tail rotor was hitting . . . at sixty miles per hour, it took only about eight seconds . . . the chopper flipped . . . No, no, no, no! . . .” The helicopter went into a skid. “No, this can’t happen . . . I don’t want to die . . .” pinning him facedown beneath it.

  “I automatically went into prayer. . . .”

  There was no pain, he said, but there was terror.

  “I knew I was gonna die, I knew it was gonna explode. . . .”

  He knew the fuel in the line would keep the machine running for three minutes, and he kept yelling instructions on how to shut the engine down, screaming out the location of the emergency fire handle to his fellow crew members. Only two of them were alive, and the one who was conscious was in far worse condition than Morrill.

  “I was trapped, and I was pissed. I was so pissed at God. . . .”

  What if it’s not Jesus? What if it’s Buddha? Morrill found himself wondering, excited in a strange way that he was now about to learn the answer. All the while shouting instructions.

  The engine quit after three minutes, and he remained pinned for another twenty, until he finally heard the voices of the U.S. military patrol that saved him.

  His posttraumatic stress was severe. “Fo
r a year, I could never be alone,” he told me. “I could never be above the fourth floor in a building.” It stayed with him, in one form or another, for twenty-eight years.

  “Whenever I talked about the crash, I could feel tension,” he said. “I spoke in a way that was different. It takes energy to suppress these things.” In an innovative acupressure procedure, he found a trauma therapy that finally cured him.

  A final word about memory and emotion:

  Memories laid down in detail during significant emotional events have a vivid, photographic quality that has led psychologists to coin the term flashbulb memory. Every memory is slightly altered every time you retrieve and refile it; not only are you calling up the original memory, but you are also calling up the last time you remembered it. The difference between normal memory and flashbulb memory is not accuracy, but perceived accuracy. People believe their flashbulb memories to be more accurately and vividly laid down.

  “They’re vivid,” says Elissa Koff, “but not necessarily accurate. The information you put in is not the same as you pull out.”

  My memory of the crash is of coming around kneeling on the deck with the seat strapped to my back. I also remember, immediately after the crash, describing it that way to others: the seat coming forward with me, ripping free of the fuselage. According to the NTSB report, “The seat in position 1A [that of the eldest sister] was separated from its aft floor and wall attachments when trees penetrated the area,” a failure due to impact damage. “The tie-down chain . . . was actually severed at only one seat location due to decelerative forces,” and that was where Suzanne had been sitting. “Seat unit 4BC was found collapsed on the floor,” its anchor bolts “sheared in a forward-inboard position.”

  In the report, no mention is made of my seat collapsing. I asked Suzanne what she remembered. She told me her seat “collapsed into the seat in front of it. . . . When I stood up, you were still in your seat . . . I do not remember you being on the floor.”