Instead, they send sections of it touring around the country, and people volunteer to read the names of the people who are remembered in that section. We drove down to Canisius and the quilt was filling the entire gymnasium. They had it divided into panels of about 4 meters by 4 meters, separated by places for people to walk. There was a pretty big crowd there when we arrived, strolling past the panels and lingering when they saw a panel that was particularly interesting.

I walked around a little looking at the panels, wondering a little bit what the people were like. I don't know anyone who's died of AIDS, and I was sort of feeling a little bit like I didn't have a right to be there. I mean, my grandfather died when I was in fourth grade, but I hadn't really seen him in a year or two and I didn't really know much about his life or anything at the time, so mostly it was just an experience of how to go to a funeral and be polite.

I was thinking about why AIDS deaths seem to be such a tragedy, and I think one reason is that AIDS tends to kill people in their prime. Death is sad at any age, but there is at least a naturalness to it when the deceased is older. We even call it their sunset years. A lot of people do their sexual experimentation when they're teenagers, early twenties or so; the disease knocks them off about eight or ten years later when they're just about to really start producing.

While people walk around the quilt, a volunteer stands at the podium with a microphone and reads off the names of people who have died of AIDS. I listened for a bit and it sounded kind of like a roll call for some big military operation, like when there's a huge crowd of random troops in transit somewhere and they assemble everyone in a hangar and read off the names one by one for people to pick up their orders or meet their unit.

When a soldier dies in battle or in training, they have a solemn ceremony where an honor guard fires a salute to the deceased. A formation of aircraft flies over and the left wingman makes a vertical pull-up into the clouds, and the others continue on in the missing-man formation. It's not for the benefit of the guy who bought the farm; I'm sure if could you ask him he'd much rather not need such a funeral in the first place. It's for the benefit of the wife and kids, who need to know that their husband and father died for something bigger than himself. It helps to give the death meaning and closure, so the rest of them can go on with their lives.

Then I got to thinking about Charlie Cargill. He was a freshman in my high school when I was a senior; he was in the orchestra (violinist) and I was in the chorus. I think he was concert-master, or maybe he and Alice Fan were co-concert-masters. I remember Alice telling me once that she and Charlie were having a grade-fight in math, where the winner gets higher grades. I thought that was a quaint kind of Chappaqua overachievement.

My mother wrote me a letter during my senior year of college telling me that Charlie had been accepted at UC Berkeley, or maybe it was Stanford. Now I don't know how this really happened, but this is how I think of it. This is the story I have in my mind, and I don't really know if it was different for the actual participants.

Apparently Charlie's first semester didn't work out at all well, and one month into it he called up his dad and said he was really unhappy and wanted to come home. His dad said, "It's ok. Just come home." and called up the airline with his credit card, and had a ticket FedEx'ed to his son the very next day. The way my mom explained it was that his dad didn't grouse lost time away from school, tuition, or last-minute expensive airtickets. He just paid for a California-New York flight and sent off the tickets.

Charlie didn't make it home. He hung himself in a men's room in O'Hare Airport.

And then I started thinking about another friend of mine who attempted during high school. I was thinking of all the moments that I've spent with this person and I felt kind of sad; if that attempt hadn't failed I never would have known this person who I think is one of the most brilliant and talented people I've ever met. It would have been a colossal loss, and I never would have known it.

I sat down in the corner of the gym and held my head in my hands, while Leah stood at the podium reading off names. I just felt really sad, because the people who died of AIDS were at least unwilling. It seemed really sad to me that sometimes problems seem so bad that life itself isn't good enough any more. It's a crime how sometimes parents can care so little and they drive so many nails into their child that the child begins to welcome the nails, in fact decides that the nails are what's real and the love is what's not, and that life is just nails and they start driving nails into themselves, the belt hung over the door or the razor in the bathtub or the bottle of pills or the window and pavement.

Leah finished reading and we were on our way outside. I started to explain to her what I was thinking about, and I broke down and cried.

American Airlines keeps a staff of engineers on 24-hour standby; it's a kind of emergency help desk for crews that get in trouble. There's also a team of experts on call at McDonnell Douglas; these are people who have years of experience maintaining DC-10s, fixing every possible subsystem on the aircraft; in some cases they're the very people who designed the plane in the first place.

When the ATCs described the flight emergency to the maintenance specialists, at first they didn't get the true magnitude of the problem.

``They've lost their hydraulics. They don't have any flight controls. They're fucked!''
``Oh, ok, have them extend the ram-air turbine.'' (This is a fan that you crank out into the slipstream; it windmills and drives a compressor that can pressurize the hydralics even if you've lost all your engines and electrical power.)
``No, they've lost _all_ their hydraulic fluid.''
``There are three separate systems, there should still be fluid in the backup systems.''
``You just don't get it. All three hydraulic systems are bone dry.''
``But then they don't have any flight controls at all!''
``Yeah!''
``...wow, they are fucked."

But Sioux City has a hospital that is the regional trauma center for that part of the state. The trauma center was just going through a shift change at the time, so they had double their normal staff on hand. The emergency services departments in the area had recently (like two weeks ago) been through a major exercise where they planned to handle a surprise load of hundreds of major trauma cases, such as from a building collapse or airliner crash. Most telling of all, the captain had buttloads of hours of flight experience, and had been flying DC-10s for ages and ages; essentially this guy had like a senior professor's Ph.D. in flying airplanes.

They managed to control their heading by using differential thrust on the two remaining engines on the wings, and they were able to manage their descent rate with throttle settings. The control cleared them in, saying "American heavy cleared runway 22" and the captain replied "Oh, you want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"

It would have been a miracle if one person made it out alive. Thanks to that man's flying experience, though 242 died, 131 people survived that crash.