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From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

Thursday, February 14, 2002

Eileen Simon, the American flag still dominating her front porch, sat in her living room looking at a dozen arrangements of Valentine's Day flowers that had been delivered by noon, half from strangers. On the coffee table were boxes of cookies brought over by the Girl Scouts. On the credenza, where Michael used to keep the family's financial records, were five checks she had received recently, many from strangers, such as the members of a prayer group in Illinois who had gotten her name off a website and sent $100.

On the mantelpiece, next to two unlit candles, there was a small antique box that held the bone from her husband's skull. She had put it there in December, without ever looking at it or telling the kids what it was.

Simon sat on a couch under the mantelpiece trying to explain how much all of the generosity meant to her -- the flowers, the letters, the community organization that had paid for a tutor for her daughter, the counseling groups, the kids who played ball with her kids, the random checks that arrived in the mail. The outpouring made her love her country, she said. "Who wouldn't love a country filled with people, even perfect strangers, who are capable of this?" Yet at the same time, she had begun to fear that her government, in the person of Ken Feinberg, was going to disappoint her. Every sentence mixed tears with laughter, as if to broadcast both sides of her at once. This was a woman who loved to laugh, who had resolved not to be bitter. She wanted so much to see the bright side of everything and not be confronted with the opposite that, she said, with that laugh and a tear, she had "liked it much better when I didn't think Michael's death could be anyone's fault but the terrorists. I hated it when I started to hear things like how maybe they could have escaped from the roof, or maybe the buildings weren't designed right. I don't want to hear that."

So, she hated, too, that she couldn't shake the feeling that her government, the government of a country with such generous people, wasn't dealing with her fairly. "If I can even end up with just $500,000, I think I'll be okay," she said. "That and the life insurance [another $500,000] will let us live okay. I'm just counting on him [Feinberg] not to give me zero."

InVision put out a press release announcing that the FAA had ordered $13.7 million worth of equipment for the San Francisco Airport. However, as Sergio Magistri knew, this order was not only minimal, it was a leftover item from the FAA's pre­September 11 go-slow program. It had nothing to do with the TSA's plans to meet the deadlines. In fact, Jackson and a go team that had been assigned to deal with explosive detection systems were holding firm on not giving any orders to InVision until they negotiated a deal to license the company's intellectual property, so that others could also build the machines. So far Magistri wasn't giving in. He hated the idea of licensing away his chance to make it big, in return for the immediate sales orders that he needed so badly.

Copyright © 2003 by Steven Brill