nmah4299.xml

nmah4299.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

I sat down to lunch in my school cafeteria when a girl slammed her bag lunch down in front of me, eyes welling with tears. She demanded to know if what I thought happened was funny. Startled, I asked what happened, and she glared. "They crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. People are laughing."

Other kids came to the table and backed the girl up on this. "One plane hit one tower of the Trade Center, and then another one hit the other tower. And the Pentagon, too. Everything's in flames."

"The towers fell."

"They're watching it in all the classrooms."

"People are laughing."

No one ate. We left the cafeteria as one, threading our way down a hallway crowded with huddles of students and teachers whispering, crying, sometimes praying. Not a one was laughing. When we rounded the corner into the library I could see over the stacks of books and parititions alike to the gaping TV perched in a corner of a history teacher's room. The captions were too far away to read, the spoken words to soft and choked to hear. I wouldn't have heard them anyway, though. Sight, sound, speech--all senses succumbed to the smoking hulks of steel and glass pictured on the screen. We approached the entrance to the classroom--nobody knew the teacher--like pilgrims, tentative and afraid, and the teacher stood heavily at the door like a man beaten, ushering us in with an all-encompassing hand to join the dozens of others already packed into the room. "Come on in, come on in," he urged sadly, then added, "There are tissues on that side table there."

We sat and the room with its crying eyes and confused teenagers faded away; all faded away save the struggling voice of the news anchor and the images slamming into us like the very planes we watched again and again: people falling; no, jumping from 100 and more stories up, people holding hands, people screaming. "They haven't fallen yet," the girl next to me whispered. "You watch. They'll show them falling."

They did. "And this is the footage of...of..." the news anchor trailed off. Rigid steel and plexiglass popped apart as if pricked with a pin; angry clouds surged up and out and barreled through streets hunting people who screamed for mercy from a God who didn't appear to be listening. We watched as the dark cloud overtook the cameramen and drove the picture to fuzz, watched as ashes of ghosts leaned on each other and found no voices to cry with, watched the twin smoking spires topple and crash, from a different angle every time, every one the harsher.

And then, before we could even draw breath to splutter a protest, refuse everything that was blaring plain as death across the screen before us, the screen wrenched itself into another embodiment of horror, this one lower to the ground and far more familiar to the hundreds of military kids attending Lake Braddock Secondary School. "My dad," the girl next to me hissed, taking the words right out of my mouth. "Oh God, my dad--"

"No." I looked around at all the faces, tearful and stonily indrawn alike, and clawed for anything that would keep it from being true. "No." A banner danced across the bottom of the screen almost too fast for blurry eyes to catch. "Look! Look there!" I cried, reading, "All 4,000 workers evacuated from Pentagon." Even as I read it the ruinous wreck of security on the screen above the words made them false. I didn't care. "Look, see? Your dad's fine. He's fine. They say so." She too, chose to believe the impossible, and sat back down from when she'd shot to her feet.

The numbing effects of the footage were beginning to wear off, and all that I didn't dare think about crashed down. "I think...I'm going...to call home," I managed, and had to stammer and stutter my way out of a doorway jammed ages ago. Everyone I passed looked away; no one wanted to see their fears reflected in others' faces. But at the same time I passed not a smirk or a smile. Where had all the jokesters gone? Where were the people who had laughed at the idea of two planes smashing into twin towers, one right after the other? I'd wring their necks.

At the pay phones as everywhere else in the school, kids stood around helplessly and talked to their shoes. Sometimes they received answers from passersby who knew as little as they did--who did it? Why? What's next? My hands shook as I dropped the coins in the slot, praying--not for the first or last time, that day--for the phone to be working, for someone, anyone, to be at my house.

Our conversation was flat. I refused to cry.
"Mom? It's me."
"Hello. Is everything all right?"
"Where's Dad?"
"He's on his way home."
"He wasn't giving a brief at the Pentagon or something?"
"No, but he'll probably be pretty late getting home since all the roads are clogged up."
Silence. My father was safe, which left God knew how many other people jeopardy. An insidious threat that had been prowling at the back of my mind since the shot of the shattered five-sided figure reared.
"Do you know what part of the Pentagon that was?"
"What?"
"You know, who worked there? What military branch? Navy or Air Force or--"
"No honey, I don't know."
"Did Dad say anything? Doesn't he know?"
"I don't know. We'll have to wait 'till he gets home. Are you okay?"
"Yes." No one was okay.
"I'll see you when you get home, then, all right?"
"Okay."
"Bye."
"Bye."

I whirled from the phones onto the uneasy bunch of teenagers gazing out at the sunshine with mixed drinks of expressions. "Do you know what part was hit? Anything? Who worked in that part of the Pentagon or..." I trailed off. All I got were shrugs.

"The cellphones stopped working," a boy offered. That was all he had.

Then the real praying began. My father had retired from the Navy last June and now worked for a firm in the Navy Yard; the chances of his being at the Pentagon had been slim from the beginning. Who did I know that still worked there, then? Who was there to--

My teacher. My eighth grade English teacher, the best teacher I ever had--I was dead sure (and snarled at the words) that her husband was in the Air Force. Did he work at the Pentagon? I didn't know. But chances were...I stopped in the hallway in the middle of my flight to nowhere. What could I do? What use would I be to her, to anyone, if a loved one died? Images I hated boiled in my mind; images of tears I couldn't help and gaping maws in souls I couldn't ever fix. Damn me, I thought, I'm a freaking 15-year-old! What use am I to anyone?

None. I could do nothing.

Except hope.

I was not religious for many reasons, but hadn't quite joined the "God is dead" crowd that thronged my school. So as the lunch period wilted I wandered around the libraries, the televisions, trying to pray--one step at a time, I told myself, one step at a time--for my teacher's husband's safety. But I couldn't even do that. The words ran away from me; were chased away by those instant replay videos from a thousand angles, mulitplying in on themselves until even the patterns in the carpet and the tilie floors twisted themselves into visages of falling figures and glinting plane wings and dark eyes staring out of gray faces that don't know who they belong to anymore. I ran out of cursewords for myself, even, when faced with this blatant show of worthlessness. Hell, I couldn't even pray, for God's sake.

So I wrote, instead. I went to math class early, took out the notebook I was supposed to reserve for creative writing, and gripped the pen as I had been able to grip no one, embrace no one, since the seemingly ancient world collapsed. "Lord God," I wrote, telling myself that I'd better make it pretty formal. "--Jesus Christ," I added, trying to think back to Sunday school classes I'd never attended to see if my wording was offensive. I didn't know, and plunged onward anyway. "Please let her husband be okay." That was all I wrote. For twenty-six pages. When class started we made a half-hearted attempt to factor polynomials, but no one could see the paper through their tears. Some went to the phones, some buried their heads in their folded arms and wept, while others gathered close in little prayer groups. I sat and glared back tears, and wrote. "Lord God Jesus Christ, please let her husband be okay. Lord God--" The bell rang. In creative writing we were slammed with the pictures again; another hefty TV occupied a corner of the room. We were instructed to write about today, and I complied as did the rest of the class--always in the shadow of the Pentagon. Or the towers. Or the even crueler shadow of the lack thereof.

Could I make face-to-face inquiries? No. The same walls that kept me from crying out to my mother over the phone kept me from putting myself in the path of tears. I was terrified--as was everyone, of more things than we could ever imagine--of actually seeing confirmation. Tears, sobs that I would never be able to alleviate or, most likely, even mention...I couldn't face it. So I went home directly in a silent carpool driven by my friend's mother, where the only words spoken were her few husky Spanish syllables, "It's a sad day."

My father was there when I came home; the entire family was closeted in the family room with the shades drawn to keep the glare off the TV. I fled the tomb-like closeness for the false security of my bedroom, but not before firing off an email: "Are you okay?"

Ten pages later I received a reply--yes, her husband was fine. And home. And he didn't even work for the military. And...I was a good person? I ignored that. I had lied to the girl whose dad worked at the Pentagon that morning; I did not need to start telling lies to myself as well. Tipsy from relief, I read another line.

Her dad's nephew and his pregnant wife worked at the Pentagon. No one had heard from them.

And so it began again. I came down into earshot of the television if not eyesight; listened to crying fathers searching for daughters, husbands searching for wives, and the breakdown of one woman who knew she wouldn't find her son. He had called her from his cellphone, and she knew. I cursed myself for being lazy but begged for the safety of her "extended family" now; I was desperate for quantity large enough to combat what I was seeing--even though it was a losing battle--and actually ended up falling asleep, alone, in front of the spot-lit Pentagon that provided its own light through flame. If whoever led me to bed saw what I was writing, I never heard about it. No one touched anyone in my family that day or after, and it stood to reason that emotional walls would follow the physical ones.

There was no school September 12th. I staggered into the computer room, my hand still in the shape it took to hold the pen, and read an email. Yes, everyone she knew was okay. Whether I had been of any use or not, they were okay.

Which left how many people who weren't?

Yes, my life has changed. I don't believe there is an American life that hasn't. I feel, if not closer to the church that binds, more isolated from the sneering, jeering crowds who claim all existence is pointless. The big questions aside, I feel a deeper responsibility to and, since college and afterward the "real world" looms closer, a shame in face of, my dad. If he hadn't retired when he did, he would be dead. Most of his friends are. I remember sitting in this office, sinking into that leather chair on Take Your Daughter to Work Day, and still can't visualize those familiar things Not being there. I remember being led through the change in area, having the renovation pointed out to me. "Can you tell the difference?" I could. And if that plane had hit anywhere besides the freshly-redone side it did, hundreds more would have died.

My father is a hurting man, and I don't think any of the uselessness I wrestled with on September 11th will truly go away, because there is no way I can "fix" Dad. I will never be able to live up to his expectations because I'm not built for them and am too foolishly selfish to bend myself in the right ways; I will never be able to bring his friends back for another Christmas Open House. But the guilt is still there. And no matter how aloof my family members are with each other, I don't think I'm alone.

We were on our annual family road trip in the Appalachians of Maryland and Pennsylvania when the strikes on Afghanistan began. I stood in a Wal-Mart in LaVale, Maryland, with a pile of socks under one arm and a fleece blanket under the other due to the unseasonal cold the region was facing at the time. All at once all the TVs switched off the shoppers' channel disappeared, to be replaced by the carefully manicured countenance of a new reporter. Everyone froze until the words came over the announcement system that had just been plugged into the channel: "The U.S. has begun targeting specific sites in Afghanistan and launching attacks..." And we broke from our trances and came toward the TVs in wonder, and the sliver of ice that had grown over "community" since the One America attitude of September 11th shattered. I asked a woman twice my age with a baby in her cart was happening and she told me; a man who could have been my grandfather came up soon after and I gave him as much infomation as I knew. There were no social boundaries or inhibitions; for those few minutes in a Wal-Mart we weren't New Families or Wayward Suburbanites but an excited clot of Americans cheering our boys on. That bond is what I think should be remembered about September 11th, no matter what the cynics said when they finally crept out of their we'd-better-keep-quiet-'cause-we're-still-in-mourning holes. For a time, brief though it may have been, we were whole, whether in grief or hope or triumph. And that doesn't deserve to be forgotten.

I flew the American flag then and I do now. I used to wish I'd been born a generation earlier so that I could have been "part of something", but that wish has faded to the here and the now and the knowledge that that scrap of cloth flapping outside my front door means I'm just that. Part of something. And I think it's worth it.