A Story in Three Parts or Why We Shouldn't Forget

Over the past few days at school, it's been a recurring conversation amongst faculty--the students we are teaching today are approaching the point where they don't remember the attacks. I asked my literature students how old they were when it happened and I heard a chorus of "Third grade." "Fourth grade." And then we sat down and talked about the role of literature in dealing catastrophe, and we read poetry. And though I spoke eloquently about literature stemming from the real world, literature as an attempt to re-shape the world into something that gives us meaning, literature's role in recording, processing, outliving tragedy, all the while I kept thinking to myself, you're trying to give them perspective on something you were barely old enough to fully understand yourself.

And here I'll slip out of my narrator's voice and address you directly: What follows is my narrative of that day. It's also my attempt to coax my narrative into something that says something, that makes sense of something, even though ten years later, words aren't entirely up to the task.

1.  That Day

On September, 11, 2001 I was fifteen, and I ripped my pants in health class. The desks were shoddy--mine had a jagged piece of metal that snagged on the denim, causing a one-inch tear on my right thigh. Usually I was quite careful getting in and out of the desk, but on that particular day, the principal had just announced the terrorist attacks at the end of second period. My first instinct was to talk to someone I knew, and so I hastily abandoned the desk and chased a friend out of the classroom.

As the day wore on, things got stranger at school. Teachers had stopped teaching. In third period History, the 6'4" history giant dubbed "Lord Nelson" reverted to the old-school and turned on the radio. We sat and listened for an hour. In fourth period English, our teacher was unable to secure a television for us to watch, so we spent the hour writing poems and talking in small groups. As I walked with a group of friends towards fifth period lunch, we found the missing televisions--they were set up in a ring outside the bank of Vice Principal offices where the lights had been dimmed. Some students stood with blank faces while they watched the feeds. As much as I wanted to stop, it didn't seem to be the aim of my friend group, so I followed them into a lunch line.

I don't remember the conversation at lunch, but I'm sure it teetered between nervous humor and dark hypotheses, skirting the issue, tentatively putting a toe in here and there but ultimately unable to fully engage the subject. While the structure of our day--a rigid skeleton of classes and passing periods marked by a polite electronic "tone" instead of a bell--had remained the same, the content had dissolved. We didn't know what to do with ourselves, we didn't know quite what to think. As we sat at the table, the lights started to dim and flicker--waves of fluorescence cascading across the ceiling high above our heads. I thought someone was playing with the light switches, maybe trying to alter the lights around the TVs, but then the lights in the whole, cavernous cafeteria went out at once. Idiots, I thought. We got up, discarded our trays, and made our way towards the central 900 hallway where people usually sat in friend clusters waiting for the next period to begin. At the intersection of the 600 and 900 hallways, we had moved far enough away from the outer doors that things were getting very dark.

The lights continued to flicker on and off and, what had appeared as majestic waves in the sprawling, high ceiling of the cafeteria, manifested in the narrower hallway as violent crashes of light slamming from wall to wall. Amid this chaos, I saw a classmate standing in front of a TV, legs apart, arms crossed, eyebrows hunched over his face in search of understanding. Then I saw Mrs. Homer running down the 600 hallway with a flashlight--the hem of her jumper swishing against her ankles. "Get out of the building! Get to an exit!" I quickened my pace, heading down the 900 hall towards the front doors. What was happening? Outside, the air was crisp as a flood of 600 students--half the student body--made its way out of the building, across the drop-off lanes and teacher parking stalls, over the mound of green surrounding the flag pole, clotting against the fence ringing the softball field. One of the Vice Principals jogged out of the building with a crimson red clipboard--"You're too close to the building! Get into the field!" Some people caught the sense of urgency in his voice and tossed their backpacks and stacks of books over the fence, hopping over after their possessions like a leapfrog game. I found the gate and walked through. I wasn't about to rip my jeans again.

We stood there for a while. The conversation careened into the land of terrorism--"Is there a school plot as well?" "Do you think it's all related somehow?" "Oh come on! As if they are sending little men in turbans around to all the schools in the mid-west." But, at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, it was hard to stop the thoughts from going there--a simultaneous take down of two of America's greatest assets--it's financial center and it's network of democratic education. So we stood. And we talked, nervously, inappropriately, sometimes insightfully.

As it turns out, there were electrical issues in the building that day. Some wires were crossed or every television in "on" mode overloaded a building notorious for cut-corners and shoddy contracting. Someone somewhere saw sparks and someone somewhere else smelled gas and then another someone somewhere else put the two together and assumed the building would explode. On a day when skyscrapers were collapsing, when fighter jets were in the air poised to take out commercial jetliners, when the Pentagon was on fire, an exploding school in central Illinois didn't seem out of the question. But there was an electrical issue, and they did let us out of school early.

Later my Aunt Lisa would report that we had made the news in the northwest corner of the state. I took the bus home, and immediately turned on the television.

2. That Afternoon

The first thing I saw was a reporter on a dusty street talking about a man shuffling his way past. "This man, in his $1000 Armani suit, covered in the ash of the World Trade Center." His suit? Who cares about his suit? And what ash of the World Trade Center? Where did it come from? What happened to that street? It was only later, after I watched the endless feedback loop of planes hitting the towers, that I understood the never-ending fireball and the collapse of buildings--floor after floor crumbling like the ash off of a cigarette--and the ensuing cloud, gushing around the buildings, chasing those who had made it out alive. I went into absorb mode. I sat in the overstuffed chair with my eyes fixed and mouth open.

Five hours later, my mom arrived home from work. She spent her days working with developmentally disabled adults and had not yet seen the images of the day. She sat down in "her" wing-back chair and we waited for the picture to cut back to images from earlier in the day. I had seen the pictures, so I watched her face instead. When the second plane disappeared into the tower opposite the accompanying fireball, her face jumped behind her hand as a rushed "Oh my God!" fell from her lips.

I remember being jarred by her reaction. My dad, when he arrived home from his teaching job, had seen the events as they unfolded. Any mark of surprise or fear had long since vanished, was already firmly burrowed deep in his spine when he walked in the door. But in my mom, I saw the full effect of shock and disbelief and fear rip across her face in one instant. It was deeply unsettling.

In a way, I was waiting for her reaction. Waiting to judge the severity of the events. Even then, cable news hyped up events all the time. Maybe 9/11 would turn out to be no different. Maybe mom's face would betray not nothing out of the ordinary but not as much out of the ordinary. Maybe this was just another part of the ever-present big, bad world outside of high school angst that I was only beginning to discover.

Every single one of those thoughts vanished the second I saw her face change.

3. Today

On Friday I ended my teaching day with a really fantastic class--we were talking about the power of sentences to contain complex ideas. It went over really well. I used that positive energy to clean my desk and dive in to a pile of grading. But it wasn't long before I was drawn into a conversation on 9/11 taking place between colleagues in the hallway. We talked about the experience, about what it was like in Illinois, about what it was like to be stranded in an airport, about what it was like in central Kansas, about what it was like at the college where they opened the theater and had students watching TV on the news. We talked about public reactions and personal reactions, about visits to New York City at various stages in the recovery and reconstruction. We just talked. It was a sobering subject but it was uplifting to have space and a time to connect over these issues.

While I remember very vividly the events of September 11th, I don't remember the day before. Looking back, it's strange how the events of that day and everything after seem to have popped into existence with one "beep" of the intercom and Mr. Wainscott's gruff voice announcing a "terrorist attack on our nation." The whole new modern world birthed out of that silver speaker in the wall just as Mrs. Brockshcmidt paused to take a breath from her lecture on the respiratory system or sexually transmitted diseases or cancer.

But that wasn't everyone's experience. For some, the new modern world came when a plane was hijacked. For others, it happened when that plane showed up next to their desks at an impossibly low eight hundred feet. For my new coworkers in Kansas, it happened as the air national guard mobilized jets that shot back and forth across the skies of Cloud County.

For my dad it happened early in his workday, huddled around a television. For my mom it happened at five o'clock while her youngest son watched from the sidelines.

The value of that conversation in the hallway is immeasurable because we still haven't come to grips with the way 9/11 changed our country, our lives, our liberties, our sense of self. We sit around today comparing stories, trying to fit our timelines together, trying to connect the separate parts of an event into a seamless narrative as if constructing a narrative will make it okay again, will bring back a sense of peace to the world. It might be inadequate, but it's what we do.