Deep discomfort
The Comfort Inn at 90 Maine Mall Road is drab and shabby, even by budget-hotel standards. The lobby is poorly lit. The piped-in smooth jazz, mixed with the crisp smell of industrial cleaning supplies and faint tang of a summer’s worth of human traffic, almost makes me queasy. Checking in, I wonder what Mohammed Atta might have thought when doing the same. Was he preoccupied with the task he’d be carrying out in the morning, or did he take time to notice the tourists in tacky clothes dawdling around him? Did he look at the dowdy front-desk attendant with the friendly voice and think of her as an American citizen? Someone he wanted to murder?
Outside, towering above the hot tarred parking lot, is a letter-board sign: COME CELEBRATE SUMMER WITH US. I imagine a similar sign was posted there the week after Labor Day five years ago. I think of Atta and al Omari chuckling at its sunny obliviousness as they pull into their last stop before decisively ending the summer of 2001 — and life as we’d known it up to that point.
Inside the room are more signs. On the back of the bathroom door is an admonition to run the vent when showering because “steam and heat may set off the smoke detector.” There’s another on the other door: a diagram of this box-shaped, four-story brick building, mapping its emergency exit plan with arrows and a walking-not-running stick figure. Did they look at these signs and think of the mammoth conflagration they were about to unleash, the people who’d be seeking escape via endless stairwells or upper-story leaps? Within minutes of my check-in, a low-flying plane rumbles loudly overhead. Did they hear it? Did they think of it with queasy foreboding, or did their hearts quicken with excitement?
ATTA AND AL OMARI: visiting an ATM on 9/10 |
Forgive us our trespasses
More than two weeks after the attacks, the FBI released details of a handwritten note found in Mohammed Atta’s luggage, which never made it onto Flight 11 at Logan Airport. (Similar notes were found in Nawaf Alhazmi’s rental car at Dulles, and, incredibly, in the almost nonexistent wreckage of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.) In the upper corner of page three of Atta’s note, written in Arabic, it says, “The last night.”“Remind yourself that in this night you will face many challenges,” it reads. “But you have to face them. . . . You should pray, you should fast. You should ask God for guidance, you should ask God for help. . . . Continue to pray throughout this night. Continue to recite the Koran.” It goes on:
Purify your heart and clean it from all earthly matters. The time of fun and waste has gone. The time of judgment has arrived. Hence we need to utilize those few hours to ask God for forgiveness. You have to be convinced that those few hours that are left you in your life are very few. From there you will begin to live the happy life, the infinite paradise. Be optimistic. The prophet was always optimistic. . . .
Everybody hates death, fears death. But only those, the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, would be the ones who will be seeking death.
