“That’s not 1995,” Marsh said. “That’s happening right now.”
I ran up to the fantail and could scarcely believe it. Viola confirmed for me that this was a very rare atmospheric phenomenon, requiring a low-hanging fog of just the right density, with the sun burning through at a very low angle. She had seen the white rainbow only once before.
The talon of time, reaching out, I thought, and tried to shrug the thought away. The Titanic might never truly let us leave, especially now. During the September 22 dive, I had come to accept (though I was not at peace with) the hellscape I would soon encounter in New York. About four hundred feet from the surface, I remember rolling onto my back as we ascended toward the Keldysh, with eighty-nine years and the wreck of the Titanic behind me, receding farther with each passing second.
The human brain really is a time machine of sorts. Through sojourns of the imagination, time became elastic to us, and full of echoes. The white rainbow glittered in eight-minute-old sunshine. The sunlight of almost an hour and twenty minutes ago was just reaching Saturn and its moon Titan. It was 11:40 p.m., April 14, 1912, and the Titanic had just struck the iceberg. It was September 10, 2001, and William Murdoch’s cranked-in boat davit was still standing before me on the starboard boat deck from eighty-nine years ago. It was late September 2001. It was 11:39 p.m., and our civilization had just glimpsed the iceberg. And whatever we were coming to, we were almost there.
26
Coming Home to Shock Cocoons
SEPTEMBER 29, 2001
All three of my children drew welcome home books for me. One of the twins drew a picture of Grandpa. Kelly-May drew pictures on four pages: a smiling family, houses, hearts, a tropical tree, a bowl, a rocket ship, and dinosaurs. Her sister Amber added the towers cracking and falling under an airplane.
As the threat of a war that was sure to stretch into the next decade projected itself toward us and as my cousin Donna’s memorial service was scheduled, Donna’s older sister, Sharon, retreated for a time into her autistic world. During my months at ground zero, there would be days when I envied Sharon her access to that private world.
The crater rim was strewn with objects and twisted shapes that could catch your attention and stop you dead in your tracks. In my case, the first sight that froze me in place was a mass of tangled beams from the North Tower, embedded in one of the Verizon building’s lower ledges and arching down toward Vesey Street. I realized that I’d seen this awful geometry before, from precisely this angle: the shape of twisted ribs of steel arching down toward the Mir-2 from the Titanic’s stern on the afternoon of September 10.
As with the Titanic, surge effects and shock cocoons were everywhere. FDNY captain Paul Mallery found it hard to believe that the greater part of his firehouse seemed to have been shock cocooned while a Greek Orthodox church nearby was carried away by the South Tower surge cloud, and the steel frame of the Deutsche Bank building across the street was cut in half. In the midst of a tsunami of dust and debris that started out at 120 miles per hour, slicing through steel and appearing to have turned everything it touched into dust, it seemed inexplicable to Mallery that more than two hundred injured evacuees from the South Tower were safely cocooned in his firehouse, so near to the core of the collapse.
The “miracle of Ten House” arose from a reinforced corner of the South Tower, which was pointed directly at Mallery’s firehouse and acted somewhat like the prow of a ship cutting through a wave. At each floor, the “prow” needed only to survive and offer resistance for 1/20th of a second in order to put the firehouse safely behind the V-shaped wake of a diverging force.
The squat, nine-story building called WTC4 was also directly in line with the wake and absorbed a substantial proportion of the remaining force like a giant airbag. Outside the Ten-Ten House shock cocoon, nearly three blocks south along Washington Street, the surge cloud separated living muscle from bone.
Within the surge clouds of dust and debris that raced horizontally through the ancient Roman towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii in AD 79, the air flowed liquid, almost exactly like the surge that cratered the Titanic’s stern and spread out over the seabed. The superheated tsunami that swept through Herculaneum was eerie and provided only glimmers of understanding about how complex eddies and flows simultaneously converged and diverged, destroyed and preserved. In the “Mansion of the Bicentenary,” an offering of frankincense in a bowl on the second floor was shock-cocooned and flash-fossilized atop a small wooden altar while nearly half of the mansion burst apart and was flung out to sea. Such findings were strangely consistent with Edith Russell’s cup and Paul Mallery’s firehouse.
As the eruption column of Vesuvius collapsed and sent forth its first surge, the cloud entered the large arched boathouses of the Herculaneum marina with such paradoxical gentleness that here and there it might barely have riffled a child’s hair. Were the dust and the air in which it traveled not heated to five times the boiling point of water, the people who took shelter under the arches would have survived within a shock cocoon. Instead, the cocoon fossilized whatever was left behind, faster than nerves could begin to register pain, exceeding even the speed of astonished thought.
The relatively cooler steam from vaporized flesh triggered a simultaneous implosion and drew contracting air and crystallizing dust inward against people’s bones, freezing perfectly articulated skeletons within the shock cocoon and producing what archaeologists eventually came to call “the dead-alive effect.” In one of the marina shelters, adults were seated in a circle, sharing food, while children slept in the center of their circle. The adults died in midswallow and midword. The children never stirred. The bones of one child, yet to be born, lay caged beneath his mother’s ribs.
The column collapse and surge clouds of 9/11 were capricious. The same physics that swept half of a room away from Herculaneum’s House of the Relief of Telephus, yet left a table setting intact on the other side of the same room, had killed two men instantly in the lowest level of the World Trade Center. Fifteen feet away from the two casualties was a shock cocoon that could have saved them. A broad section of steel-reinforced ceiling had survived. A table still stood intact beneath the intact ceiling, and chairs and lamps remained completely undisturbed in the midst of utter pulverization.
27
The Long Night of Ellen Betty Phillips
When I sailed with Robert Ballard and Haraldur Sigurddson to the volcanic spreading centers of the East Pacific Rise in 1985, the first photographs and videos of the Titanic wreck site were brand new. At night, discussions about popped rivets and separated seams as the final cause of its sinking sometimes seemed irrelevant. The more we studied its watertight compartments and construction, the more we appreciated the Titanic as a beautiful machine, abused by people who drove it at psychopathic speed toward a fleet of icebergs on a moonless night.
From a certain point of view, the Titanic was the metaphor of a beautiful child born full of promise and then abused. In the dynamic by which the cycle of abuse continues through subsequent generations, Ellen Phillips, the baby born to Kate Phillips as Mrs. Marshall, would have to become a true survivor type—not only in the sense of surviving in the shadow of Titanic, but also surviving a mother driven insanely cruel by the Titanic.