The note’s authenticity has been disputed. Writing in London’s Independent, Robert Fisk averred that “the translation, as it stands, suggests an almost Christian view of what the hijackers might have felt — asking to be forgiven their sins, explaining that fear of death is natural. . . . A Muslim is encouraged not to fear death — it is, after all, the moment when he or she believes they will start a new life — and a believer in the Islamic world is one who is certain of his path, not ‘plagued with problems.’ ”
We’ll never know for sure, I suppose. But if the letter is genuine, it’s difficult to imagine Atta and al Omari repeating their devotions, saying their morning prayers, in a room like this, with its boxy black TV, cheap nylon carpet, and ersatz fine-art prints. It’s so chintzy, so quintessentially American. (The hijackers stayed in room 232. On my visit it was occupied by other guests, perhaps unknowingly. Simply standing in front of its closed door, touching its faded-green number plate, gives me shivers.)
But is it really that hard to picture them here? These two men may have been consumed with their mission, blind to all else but the task they’d been enlisted to complete the next morning. But they weren’t automatons. They were human beings. Detritus from their final hours reminds you of this: the crumb-speckled package of Chips Ahoy! cookies discovered in their rental car. The toothpick and crumpled Kleenex. On the final night of their lives, Atta and al Omari were . . . alive.
In “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” a short story published in the New Yorker in April, Martin Amis imagines the 9/11 ringleader’s preoccupations and cool deliberations as he embarked on his endgame. (Amis also makes a guess — somewhat unconvincingly — as to why the hijackers made the detour to Maine. You’ll have to read it to find out.) In Amis’s imagining, their thoughts were anything but lost in reverie about virgins in the afterlife. Here, Atta is cold. Calculating. He “was not religious,” Amis writes; “he was not even especially political. He had allied himself with the militants because jihad was, by many magnitudes, the most charismatic idea of his generation. To unite ferocity and rectitude in a single word: nothing could compete with that.”
Amis’s Atta is a nihilist. He hates music. He does not laugh. He’s repulsed even by his own corporeal form. In the quiet dark of the morning of September 11, we see him shaving. (“Shaving was the worst because it necessarily involved him in the contemplation of his own face . . . the disgusted lineaments of his mouth . . . the frank animus of his underbite.”) We see him yawn. And sneeze. And shit. (“Now, emitting a sigh of unqualified grimness, he crouched on the bowl. . . . he had not moved his bowels since May.”)
Absurd, a little. But that’s just it. Even as Amis writes that Atta’s face, as he sees it reflected in that mirror, is “almost comically malevolent,” we’re reminded that Mohammed Atta is not simply a symbol. A cipher. Evil incarnate. The cadaverous passport photo into which his entire 33-year life has been distilled for horrified American consumption. He was a human being. Right up until the fleeting moment, at 8:46 am, that his “body was beyond all healing . . . a panic attack at every nerve, a riot of the atoms.”
