Adventures in freakdom.
No entry about Fred today. Today is about you. I hope you enjoy playing.
Sunlight paints the wooded hillside in a patchwork of light and dark, green and brown, as you pick your way through the heavy undergrowth that has overrun the rarely used path. Mosquitoes hum all around in the moist and heavy air, their high-pitched whine grating on your nerves. You swipe at the sweat running down your forehead in another vain attempt to keep it out of your eyes. Do you really want to climb all the way to the top of this damn hill just to find another geocache? What will you get for your effort? Another crappy plastic kid’s toy, if past geocaching experiences are any guide.
You pant and struggle and fight your way to the top of the hill, where you’re rewarded with no kind of view. Just more trees. You check the GPS in your hand. You’re almost right on top of the waypoint. Good. As soon as you find the damn thing, you can get back home to a nice beer and an afternoon in front of the television.
Back and forth you go, working the area as a grid. You wish your GPS were a little more accurate, wish it were able to narrow down a spot better than this. A plane drones by overhead, a small one, and you look up to see if you can see it. You can’t. Your foot catches on a wedge of rock poking up out of the ground and you stumble, nearly dropping your GPS as you flail your arms to catch yourself.
You land on your hands and knees and that’s when you see it from the corner of your eye. A brilliant flash of light, like a camera going off. You turn your head. There’s something laying in the dead leaves, about five feet away. It looks like a walkie-talkie, only where you would expect to see a speaker there’s some kind of shiny crystalline surface.
Sunlight reflecting off that, you think. That’s what I saw.
You crawl over to the walkie-talkie thing and pick it up. Upon closer inspection, you decide it doesn’t really look like a walkie-talkie at all. It looks like one of those miniature TVs everyone but you seemed to have when you were a kid. Well, kind of like one of those. The shiny part looks like a screen, but there’s no antenna for reception, and there’s only a single button below the screen. What an odd place for something like this! It’s almost like someone left it here to be found.
Left it for you to find, maybe.
Maybe this is the geocache. It’s a damn good one if it is.
Knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that the thing probably doesn’t work, you casually press the button on the front of the device. The screen lights up, then fills with characters you don’t recognize. It beeps, and you jump. It beeps again, then again, faster.
Like it’s counting down.
You stare at the odd characters on the screen. You listen to the beeps coming faster and faster, and you have time for one final thought—oh God I hope this thing isn’t about to blow up—and…
The world
goes
white.
You’re standing in the middle of a concrete jungle. Heat bakes up from the asphalt beneath your feet, giving everything a shimmer. The air reeks of exhaust. Tall buildings surround you, towering over you like giants.
Holy shit, am I in New Yo–
A car horn blats right behind you and you hear the scream of rubber on road as brakes are locked. Without thinking you leap to the side, out of the path of the sliding death you sense bearing down on you. The device you’re holding slips from your fingers and falls to the ground. As the unseen car slides to a stop, you watch the device smack the asphalt, see the shards of glass explode out of it like diamond splinters, tumbling end over end in that bizarre syrupy slow-motion time seems to take in a crisis. It bounces once and lays like a dead thing.
What the hell am I doing here? How did I get here? And then, I should get a souvenir as proof I was here.
“Get outta the fucken road,” a voice belows from behind you. It jerks you from your reverie. You turn.
A florid-faced man glares sullenly at you through the windshield of a yellow taxi. A frayed toothpick pokes from the corner of his mouth and as you watch, he rolls rolls it across his lower lip to the other corner. He waves an impatient hand at you to finish getting out of his way.
“Sorry,” you call, then something beyond the taxi catches your attention. Something that makes you forget all about the pissed off man, and about the fact that less than a minute ago you were in the woods halfway across the country.
Jutting up into the clear blue sky, the twin towers of the World Trade Center sparkle in the midday sun. Their beauty takes your breath away. Something rips in your heart.
The taxi driver honks his horn.
“C’mon buddy,” he yells through the open window. “Get a fucken move on!”
You backpedal to the curb, unable to look away from the towers. People flow around you like water, oblivious to the miracle around them. They’re acting so goddamn normal that you wonder for a minute if you’ve gone crazy.
“Excuse me,” you say to some stiff in a gray suit. He looks like an accountant.
He doesn’t slow as he passes you. You try another, this time a woman.
“Can you tell me the date?” you say to her. She looks over the top of her glasses at you as if you’d just taken a dump on the sidewalk.
“September tenth,” she says, her disdain evident in her voice.
“What year?” you ask, though you think you already know the answer.
“2001,” she tells you, and gives you a look that says I have mace in my purse and I’m about two seconds away from giving you a faceful.
It hasn’t happened yet.
You realize you’re less than 24 hours from the single worst terrorist act on American soil. Less than a day from the defining point for a generation. From the event that led to American invasion of two countries and thousands of human deaths.
And you know it’s going to happen.
What are you going to do?
If you want to get notified whenever Fred writes a journal entry, this link will do the trick.
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Good one Fred! I would drag myself off to the studios and TRY to convince people I wasn’t nuts. I would call the White House, I would keep making noise louder and louder until somebody listened or it happened. I would not give up warning people. Oh, and I would tell people not to go into work on the 11th if nobody listened to me the day before. I’d probably be thrown into the looney bin for all my trouble too
I’d call in a detailed anonymous bomb threat the morning of the eleventh, about an hour before the jets were to hit. Hopefully they would evacuate the buildings. maybe also call in bomb threats at the airports from which the flights departed.
Good food for thought.
I believe that everything plays out exactly as it should, and there are no mistakes, even when thousands of lives are lost. There is a bigger reason out there for all things that happen, and who am I to fuck with it? I mean, my purpose is very shortsighted and very self-centered. Who knows what kind of Pandora’s box could be opened by changing that very significant part of history. Would I like to be the one that finds out? No. And who are we to say that something like your scenerio hasn’t already happened and the resulting effect was 9/11? Wouldn’t that be a bitch?
I really appreciate your provocative and thoughtful post, Fred. I’m a bookish sort and post-9/11 have read fairly extensively about the event and its aftermath, including Gail Sheehy’s book “Middletown, USA” which is a bedroom community in New Jersey that housed many people who worked in the Twin Towers, and whose lives and families in Middletown were deeply impacted. I also read A Mighty Heart - The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl, et cetera.
The awesome responsibility of such weighty knowledge as advance notice of a world changing event is to be considered so tenderly in the heart and mind, hopefully mingled so that any flashes of intellectual insight are tempered with sensitivity and caution and love. Post-9/11, so many people in the industrialized nations of the world have developed strongly held opinions and outlooks about safety, security, privacy, terror, sovereignty, and similar concepts.
Your post brings up a very interesting question for me — what were we like as individuals prior to September 11th? Were we more trusting? Or have we maintained our basic hope and trust, in spite of the horror of twisted steel and heroic jumps choosing — rather than a certain flaming hot death — the death of a long fall into the passionate and freedom filled air of a country much beloved.
Your post I think brings your readers face to face with the fear we all share of losing that which we hold most dear, our freedom and liberty and sense of personal safety.
For myself, if I were armed with the foreknowledge of what could happen the following morning, I would make a sincere effort to warn people in government and the media. Then, more importantly, I would look at each precious hour and moment and cherish it. Without becoming a maudlin freak who people would eventually run from, I would take opportunity as frequently as possible, to tell my friends and family that I value them and love them.
Thanks for writing and for being Fred, and sharing yourself with your readers!
Wow Fred, awesome question…
My first thought was that I would try to do something to get media attention…since I was in New York, maybe go to the Today Show set and pretend I have a gun or a bomb and demand to be heard but really, I don’t think that anyone would listen or I should say BELIEVE me.
Maybe I could call the FBI?
I’d be interested in hearing your opinion…
I would contact Richard Clark and tell him what I knew . . . and hope for the best (possibly). The reason I would choose him is he appeared to be one of the few people in our gov’t who was already on ‘high alert’ at the time of the attack. He might actually listen to you if you could provide facts (hijacker names, the facility the hijackers trained at, etc). The kicker of it is you wouldn’t have any resources to double-check your info. Although most of us know the hijackers names when we hear them, could you name them off yourself if you didn’t have anything to help you? Maybe, but probably not. You would have to handle your knowledge delicately if you want the right people to listen and act on your knowledge. Then, how do you give him that knowledge without sounding like you are part of the plan????
I’m afraid no matter how you handle it, people will not believe you, including Richard Clark. For one, there is no known form of time travel. How are you possibly going to explain to rational people that you have knowledge of future events without coming off like a nut job. You have to inform people without letting them know you have knowledge of the future. If you give that away, you’re sunk. Plus, lets say someone acutally has the power to believe you and stop a tragedy from happening. If it doesn’t happen . . . guess what . . . I hope you like straight jackets because you will be wearing one for awhile. Unfortunately, stopping that event would only prove you are insane or at the very least that you may have terrorist connections.
That all said, while I believe Von has a very valid point (who’s to say it won’t happen later on and 10X worse than 9/11), but I probably would try to save those people if it were possible . . . even if it meant I was shipped off to some horrible CIA secret prison. I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t try to stop it. Plus, one of the reasons to not stop it would be if there was somehow a ’silver lining’ to the events of 9/11. Unfortunately, I have not approved of the way my gov’t has handled middle east affairs since the tragedy. In my opinion, we have made matters much worse (especially muslim public opinion). To me, there is no ’silver lining.’ I would try to stop it somehow.
Good question . . . . I may actually go nuts just thinking about all the possiblities.
I’ve often thought about this one…what if they had had a massive fire drill or evacuation procedure that day and it started right before the planes hit….some people might have blown off coming in so early so they wouldnt’ have to deal with it…that would have saved a lot of people…the planes, what to do about the planes…you could have always called and said there was a bomb on the plane and in the meantime gotten any evidence you might have possessed out there to the powers that be, but they probably would have looked at you like you were crazy and then thrown you in jail and put you on trial because some how you knew about it ahead of time….if you stopped it at all….there are so many times you wish you could go back in time and change things, make the bad things not happen, but for better or worse those profound things happen and in the process they mold and shape those that are touched by them…it’s not always hard, but they are defining moments and they have to happen…..
I meant easy not hard……
I would do nothing out of fear that if that event were changed something even more catastrophic might happen, something involving more people in more cities. Because as bad as 9/11 was it could have been worse.
I think I’m going with the bomb threat tactic. I might risk going to jail for it, but that might be worth it. Very thought provoking.
This does sound like a description of a strange dream, so when I picture the scenario of being transported to NYC on 9/10, just like in a dream, I’m trying to deal first with the fact that I’m naked, and second with warning the city of terrorists.
When I think about it, I have to keep repeating to myself: I’m not naked. I’m not naked. I’m not going to jail naked for calling in a bomb threat.