Nothing moves beyond Sept. 11

Patrick Cartier is not at home. Call his Everett number, you’ll hear a chilling message:

"You have reached the Cartier household. Patrick is unable to take your call at this time due to the recent tragedy and the loss of his brother at the World Trade Center on September 11. Patrick is requesting privacy to mourn with his family during this difficult time."

I didn’t feel good about it, but I left my number.

My phone rings all day. A call Monday was unlike any other. The voice was hushed, guarded, at times about to break. I heard anger.

"This is Patrick Cartier — senior," the man said.

I froze, didn’t know what to say, finally managed this: "I’m so sorry." There was a long silence.

This was not the Everett man I had tried to reach, but his elderly father calling from his home in Queens County, N.Y. They had checked the messages in Everett.

"Patrick is here with his children," the elder Cartier said. "We’re gathered together so we can try to get through this crisis."

On the West Coast, separated by the breadth of a continent, we have some sense of moving on, at least to a new phase. We look away from death in Manhattan and the Pentagon and Pennsylvania to military action in Afghanistan.

For this family, there is no next phase.

"We’re not any closer to a conclusion on this day than we were on Sept. 11," the elder Cartier said the day after U.S. and British forces first unleashed airstrikes on Afghanistan.

"We’re just stuck," the older man said. "There’s no emotional movement, no spiritual movement. Nothing moves beyond September the 11th, nothing."

"But people have already forgotten," Patrick Cartier Jr. said by phone from his parents’ home. "Those firemen are still in there digging. There’s a stench of death blocks away from the site. We can’t forget."

James Cartier will never be forgotten.

"Beautiful kid," his father said.

He was 26, single, one of seven siblings in a devout Roman Catholic family, an apprentice electrician who on Sept. 11 was working in the World Trade Center’s Tower Two. He is listed among the missing, among the thousands.

"My brother James was never angry. He never even got in a fight — he was that type of man," said Patrick Jr., who is 38. "When I was in the Marines, I’d call and he’d say, ‘When is my hero coming home?’ He loved his family, that was the most important thing.

"This man was taken from the Earth at the wrong time."

Patrick Jr., his wife, Hiroe, and their four children took an Amtrak train to New York Sept. 25 after struggling to raise train fare.

Former state Rep. John Koster, an Arlington Republican, made a call to the American Red Cross of Snohomish County to help the family obtain the travel money.

"They wanted validation," Koster said of the Red Cross. "They’d had lots and lots of requests for help.

"He’s a good guy, and they’re in a tough spot right now," said Koster, who first met Cartier during his congressional race. "I just made a call on his behalf. He was certainly grateful."

The Everett family will stay in New York at least through Oct. 20, when a memorial service will be held at Our Lady of Fatima Church in Jackson Heights. Patrick Jr. may ask his employer, VoiceStream Wireless, for a transfer to the East Coast.

Patrick Sr. takes comfort in a family bonded in pain, and in the fact that their tragedy might have been worse.

"We almost lost three children," he said, proceeding to tell one of countless tales of bravery played out that awful day.

"My daughter Michelle was in Tower One. In a very heroic moment, James called his brother John to go get his sister. Michelle managed to go down 40 flights and ran into her brother’s arms. He (John) was running into that cloud and they spotted each other. He got her on his motorcycle and brought her home."

Ask either man about the attacks on Afghanistan and you’ll hear no political correctness. You’ll hear no mercy. In their eyes, nothing is enough.

"When I hear my wife calling for her baby, you cannot imagine the anger that boils up inside of me," Patrick Sr. said. "I’ll live the rest of my life trying to find a way to avenge my son.

"That bombing in Afghanistan is too surgical, as far as I’m concerned. Were it possible for those people to have killed not simply 6,000 but 600,000, they would have done it."

"It’s not only my father," Patrick Jr. said. "Millions of people in this city feel the same way. It’s time not just to rally around a flag, but around 6,000 people."

They are men of great faith, Patrick Cartier and his father, but they have been done great harm.

"I find consolation in nothing," the older man said. "I don’t want to be consoled. I died with my son."

"To my mother and my father," the Everett son said sadly, "it is Sept. 11."