September 11 didn’t just happen. He did it. How can we truly excavate an enigma like him? Maybe humanizing Mohammed Atta — even if only as a grotesque caricature — is the last best way to finally apprehend him, to somehow grasp the evil he wrought.
Eve of destruction
The Pizza Hut where Atta and al Omari ate what was probably their last meal is closed now. Deserted. Its parking lot a barren patch of dirt. The iconic red roof is still there, but its white shutters frame empty black windows, like a haunted house.
Once upon I time, I used to eat here. I know Maine Mall Road well. I’ve been coming here my whole life: attending birthday parties at the Dream Machine arcade, killing time in the record stores as a teenager, going on frantic shopping jags when home for the holidays. It’s a busy place where nothing much happens.
And it’s strange to think of two of history’s most notorious mass-murderers spending time here. Driving this road now, it’s weird to imagine these two dour, other-worldly, purpose-driven Middle Eastern men navigating their rental car through this garish valley of American commerce, past the IHOP, the McDonald’s, the Toys “R” Us, the Scrub-a-Dub car wash, the Sheraton Hotel where Elvis Presley was due to check in the day he died in 1977. Did they ponder how different Maine is from Florida or New York? Did they notice the seagulls circling incongruously overhead in the gorgeous late-summer sky?
The Pizza Hut shuttered, I grab dinner at Pizzeria Uno just a half mile up the road. Atta and al Omari did not eat here, but, at 8:41 pm, they did withdraw money from a self-standing bank machine in this parking lot. It’s a small, claustrophobic room, underneath a capacious black awning that seems funereal. The four frames made public from the ATM’s security camera captured al Omari grimacing, then smiling broadly.
Weirdly, they also hit another ATM, a branch of Key Bank, just 10 minutes before; the two machines are right across the street from each other, barely 200 feet away. It’s chilling, in a way, to withdraw cash from that machine, touching the same keys Mohammed Atta touched, staring into the same camera that recorded his grainy, ghostly image. That might sound silly. Imagine, after all, how many thousands upon thousands of transactions have taken place at that same machine since. How many fingers have pressed those buttons. But there it is.
Inside Pizzeria Uno, the shelves above the bar are lined with colorful plastic replicas of fruity tropical drinks. The menu is enormous. Weighty. And lavishly illustrated. Next to me, a waitress — young, pretty, white — talks to another waitress about a trip she’d taken recently, from Colorado to Maine, where she was stopped, pulled aside, and searched by airport security. On September 10, 2001, that was one conversation Mohammed Atta certainly did not overhear.
At 9:22 pm on September 10, Mohammed Atta went to Wal-Mart. Walking around this cavernous, chilly, antiseptic box, flooded with harsh fluorescent light, I imagine what he must have thought while strolling the aisles of this American behemoth. Past the customers in camouflage hats and patriotic sweatshirts. Past the signs advertising back-to-school savings, the gargantuan bags of Cheetos, the SpongeBob SquarePants alarm clocks, the Lonesome Dove DVDs, all while serenaded by bad country music and bland R&B.
