Not OK. Not Yet. Maybe Not Ever.

At the Foul Tip Restaurant and Lounge outside Stoystown, Pa., where they sell hot wings at the bar and glow-in-the-dark condoms in the bathroom, Terry Butler is hunched over a beer, trying not to let the boys see him cry.

At most, Butler is explaining, he was on the periphery Sept. 11. Born 42 years ago in a hard-luck stretch of Pennsylvania strip mines, he never left. He’s never been to New York or Washington. He’s never been on a plane. But he did jerk his head out from under a car hood that morning, about six months ago, just in time to watch a United Airlines jet plunge into a nearby field.

For Butler, like many others, even those far removed from the centers of power targeted that morning, the lasting impact of the attacks has become as surprising and maddening as the attacks themselves.

These are the portraits of four people, in four cities, touched in very different ways by Sept. 11. Immediately after the attacks, they brushed themselves off, wiped the soot from their eyes, sometimes literally, and announced that they were going to be OK.

Only now do they know that Sept. 11 was not a singular event but a boulder in a pond. The ripples are still there, washing over a world that doesn’t look that different but can be topsy-turvy--a world where a man who wants to forget remembers everything and a boy who wants to remember fears he’s forgotten too much.

“I’ve got to try to get over it,” Butler said. “But I can’t handle it. It takes something like this to bring a man down.”

And so, they are not OK. Not yet.

Not Butler, a hulking man who doesn’t look like he’s afraid of much, but is quaking with fear, wishing he’d just closed his eyes and turned away.

Not Lingling Sun, a World Trade Center survivor, who ducks into a Manhattan building after a pigeon flies by her head, mistaking it for another terrorist attack.

Not Randy Hamud, an attorney who has been helping coordinate the defense of three men imprisoned in the government’s dragnet, and was shunned by the San Diego legal community.

And not Chris Beaven, a freshman at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who is still searching for his father, who died aboard United Airlines Flight 93, about a quarter of a mile from where Butler was standing.

Randall Hamud, in his trademark burgundy cowboy boots, is click-clunking across the marble floor of downtown San Diego’s Westgate Hotel, talking so rapidly one wonders if he’s going to pass out.

“Charles Manson was entitled to a defense. Ted Bundy. Joe Dahmer.”

Jeffrey Dahmer.

“Right. I’m just a podunk lawyer no one ever heard of, and here I am in the middle of a constitutional crisis. All I can do is use the media, the Fifth Estate.”

Fourth Estate.

“Right. And if you are unwilling to take on an unpopular cause you shouldn’t be a lawyer.”

Hamud, 54, doesn’t have much time to catch his breath these days. An Arab-American of Lebanese descent and an attorney who has long operated in obscurity, Hamud is organizing the defense of three men the government jailed in connection with Sept. 11--Mohdar Abdallah, Yazeed Al-Salmi and Osama Awadallah, students at San Diego State University and Grossmont College. The three were arrested on suspicion of being material witnesses, three of more than 1,100 people detained in the government’s dragnet.

Hamud said he took on the cases because he believed it was his patriotic duty. The integrity of the legal system depends largely on the notion that everyone accused of a crime deserves a sound defense, he said, and never has that been more of a vital notion than now. “I’m sitting here arguing for human rights,” Hamud said. “I mean, where am I? The twilight zone? We’re back in the dark ages.”

He agrees with some legal scholars who believe the government has gone too far--whether claiming the right to secretly listen to conversations between lawyers and their clients or authorizing secret military tribunals.

Those are lonely convictions these days.

San Diego lawyers run an Internet chat group where they seek legal assistance from each other. Hamud, who specializes in civil litigation, not criminal defense, wrote seeking help with his cases. He was met with silence. Two lawyers responded, he said, not with advice, but complaints that he shouldn’t abuse the chat room to represent terrorists.

One attorney said he wanted to help but that his wife, afraid for their safety, wouldn’t let him. The death threats began a short time later. He returned to his office one recent afternoon to find this on his voicemail: “I have people that are going to bring a bomb by for you.” He didn’t help matters when he called the attorney general “Adolf Ashcroft” during one interview. He’s been labeled a publicity hound, a traitor and worse.

“This wasn’t exactly the 15 minutes of fame I had in mind,” he said.

Eventually, Hamud found a couple of lawyers willing to help. The cases are lumbering through the justice system. Al-Salmi was released without being charged with a crime. Awadallah has been released on bond and is back in class at Grossmont. Abdullah remains imprisoned. Hamud says he can’t raise any bail money among Arab-Americans, who fear they’ll be persecuted if they join his campaign.

“The waters are still roiling,” Hamud said last week.

Meanwhile, the attorney who once advertised his specialties as dog-bite cases and medical malpractice is debating civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz on Court TV and becoming a hero in the Arab-American community. He recently won an award named after Alex Odeh, the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee who was killed in 1985--assassinated, some would say--by a pipe bomb that exploded outside his Santa Ana office.

Hamud has taken to calling the local Arab Americans “my people,” though his Spanish is considerably better than his Arabic.

Meanwhile, he’s attempting to keep his solo practice going. Business, he says, is slow, which he attributes in part to a backlash from the community.

Relaxing recently in the comfortable home north of San Diego that he shares with his girlfriend, Hamud gazed at one of his prized possessions, a framed photograph of his hero, Gen. George S. Patton, urinating in the Rhine River. Another native Californian. Another man whose conviction often left him isolated. Another contrarian.

“I don’t want to trivialize soldiers, but I’m fighting just as hard as they are right now, for the Constitution,” he said. “This is my war. I believe that I am fighting for my country.”

The World Trade Center towers were almost identical. One was a bit taller because of its needle nose, so you could tell them apart, the same way you can tell the difference between twin brothers when one has a cowlick.

When they were still standing, Lingling Sun, 46, went to work each morning at 1 World Trade Center, overseeing distribution of a Chinese English-language newspaper. Back then, before there ever came a day so preposterous that she would compliment a gentleman’s tie after he had given it to her to use as a dust mask, she bounded home each night with a sprightly confidence, her shoulders straight and true and parallel with the tops of those buildings behind her.

The Beijing-born Sun had arrived early that morning when she felt the first attack. Her husband, who lives in Jamaica, called. He was watching on CNN. “A plane hit the building,” he said. “Be calm. Go down.”

She stumbled down, past people whose hair had been burned off. She made it outside, where she saw the bodies of those who had jumped, and she emerged into lower Manhattan as the south tower collapsed, enveloping her in ash.

“It was like melted chocolate, so soft,” she said. “I looked back. A man said, ‘What are you looking at? There’s nothing left.’”

Today, six months after she escaped the terrorist attacks, when she walks next to a skyscraper, her shoulder closest to the building rises sharply and instinctively to shield her from new attacks, from the debris she escaped that day, from the bodies that were falling around her. For months, Sun didn’t sleep well, and when she did, she dreamed of germs that infiltrated everything, even her socks.

Troubled by the anthrax threat, she sent gloves and a letter opener to her 16-year-old daughter, Jenny, a student at the Taft School in Connecticut. Jenny opened the package, laughed and asked if it was part of a Halloween costume.

She’s been hunting for a new office, but that hasn’t been easy. She no longer wanted to work downtown and didn’t want to be high off the ground--no small request in New York City. In early October, she met a realtor near Columbus Circle, on the Upper West Side, and stepped into an office suite. Sun had just one question: “Where are the stairs?” There were two sets, she was told, both nearby. Still, she hesitated--she’d learned that several prominent businesses were planning to move into a swanky new complex across the street.

“They could be a target,” Sun said.

Neurotic? Maybe. She’d be the first to admit it. But it’s the new reality, one that now touches every corner of her life, from the houseplants she lets wither to the mail she won’t open because of anthrax.

Struggling to recapture her “old life,” she’s finally signed a lease on a building--not too close to Wall Street, not too high off the ground. She’s beginning to sleep more soundly, as the nightmares fade. But recovery hasn’t come fast enough, and she said last week that she has decided to leave her Manhattan apartment for the safer shores across the river, in New Jersey.

“Yeah, I’m moving out,” she said. “I’m one of the chickens. I guess I just want to try to forget it. And I can’t do that here.”

As Chris Beaven took his seat in a front pew, the mourners reached the peak of Nob Hill in San Francisco and spilled into Grace Cathedral--academics with elbow patches on their jackets, lawyers in suits, aging hippies in tie-dye.

It was Oct. 13, more than a month after his father, 48-year-old Alan Beaven, an environmental attorney from Oakland, died on United Airlines Flight 93. Mourners walked past a statue of Saint Francis--his outstretched arms a symbol of God’s love, even for the wicked. Ushers passed out programs that didn’t bill the service as a funeral, but a “Thanksgiving for the Life of Alan Anthony Beaven, October 15, 1952--September 11, 2001.”

Associate Pastor Janet Dobrovolny addressed the mourners. She chose the words of the Persian poet Hafiz: “Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment.”

As if I have a choice, Chris thought.

For years, Alan Beaven had hopscotched the globe--from Scotland Yard, where he was a prosecutor, to New York, where he was a trial lawyer and where Chris lived as a boy. Alan Beaven helped launch a Bay Area law firm in 1992. He quickly became a stalwart of the environmental movement, taking on oil drillers and sugar companies.

He had also become deeply involved in Eastern philosophy, joining an ashram, meditating and practicing yoga. With his second wife and 5-year-old daughter, he was preparing to take a year’s sabbatical to volunteer for a humanitarian organization affiliated with his ashram. He was on the East Coast, preparing for the trip, but needed to finish one last case, a dispute over water pollution in a Sacramento-area river. He was headed back to the Bay Area for the case on Sept. 11, and boarded United Airlines Flight 93 that morning.

Aboard the plane, many passengers had time to make phone calls, and investigators believe that some learned of the attacks in New York and Washington and elected to revolt against the hijackers.

Alan Beaven, though, never even used a computer--he did all of his legal work with a pen and a yellow pad. He despised cell phones.

The truth is that no one really knows the details of what happened aboard that flight, and the Beaven family doesn’t really know whether Alan Beaven was involved in the passengers’ revolt against the terrorists.

But Chris, 18, a freshman at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who had started classes just three weeks before the attacks, believes. He has to believe, he says, that his father did not die in vain.

Weeks after the attack, the cherub-cheeked, 6-foot-6 Chris opened one of the many letters he received, some from friends, some from folks who “just came out of the woodwork.”

It read: “Sorry your father died in such a pointless way.”

Chris bristled.

“It wasn’t pointless at all. He died a hero. I think it’s fair to assume that,” Chris said. “The people on that plane realized they were going to die. Of course it took courage, but at the same time, it must have been perfectly clear. What choice did they have?”

Meanwhile, Chris, who is applying to transfer to Stanford this spring to study international relations and be closer to his family, has had to cope with the fact that he didn’t really know his father. How many 18-year-olds do?

He knew Alan Beaven as a wonderful father of three--two sons and a 5-year-old daughter from his second marriage. He was a dad who hit balls high in the air with a tennis racket for his boys to catch, who took Chris scuba diving off Catalina Island, where they darted through kelp forests and met seals that looked them straight in the eye.

But he didn’t know much about Alan Beaven the man. So he’s been quizzing friends and relatives, learning about how much his father gave up professionally so he could move to California to be closer to his sons, about his father’s passionate work at the ashram, about the rivers that are cleaner today because of his father’s work.

“I’m still kind of piecing it together,” he said. “But now I know so much more about him. It has raised an awareness in me. I’ve seen what he did with his life. There’s something to be learned here. I might as well pay attention.”

Terry Butler met his wife-to-be when he almost ran her over. True story: He was driving through an alley 24 years ago when he almost ran her and her three friends down. She asked if he would give them a lift.

“Patty sat up front,” he said. “That was it.”

It was, it seemed, the last moment of serendipity in his life.

Straight out of high school, he started working for a boot factory, shaping the leather on an assembly line. But the work began to dry up, so Butler got on at Stoystown Auto Wrecker, a magnificent compound stuffed with thousands of smashed cars, ringed with “No Dumping” signs that seem incongruous and known as “The Yard” to locals.

Butler went to work on Sept. 11 like he does six days a week. A customer had asked for a radiator, and he’d been asked to fetch it from one of the wrecks. It was an easy job--four bolts, two hoses. He was working under the hood just before 10 a.m. when heard the jet. He jerked his head up and saw it soar low just a few hundred feet over his head, past the red silo and the clothesline behind a farm, then wobble and veer sharply into a nearby field.

“It was like I could have just reached up and touched it,” Butler said. “All of a sudden it made a right turn, like if somebody grabbed the wheel of your car while you were driving. Five seconds later, it was down.”

The first days after the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 were a blur. The town in southwest Pennsylvania, population 389, was in a frenzy, setting up a memorial on bales of hay, collecting so much food and blankets the Red Cross made them stop. Strangers hugged each other on street corners.

But the good times--it seems odd to think of them like that--wouldn’t last. Folks started locking their doors. You couldn’t buy a gun, because they were all snatched up.

Butler was too scared to go to the spot at work where he was when he saw the plane go down. He was scared to go home too. He was a mess.

Worse, he was a local celebrity. One of a handful of eyewitnesses, the media descended upon him. A television crew making a documentary about Flight 93 even asked him to re-create the moment. He hated it--and then his part didn’t even make it into the piece.

Back at the Yard, one of the largest businesses in a stretch of Pennsylvania built on strip mines and cow fields, it’s a tough crowd. Co-workers accused him of getting rich off the interviews. No one had offered him money, he said. But they were jealous of the attention.

They pick on him even now, tell him he’s crazy. He’s starting to think they’re right.

“They say I’m not all there. And I ain’t,” Butler said. “I just wish someone else had seen it. I just wish I had turned my damn head.”