The Freak 21

A journalist remarked that time will now be measured around September 11, 2001 -- as Before and After. Before, life could be considered normal. After, tens of thousands of people I'd never known nor met became as important to me as family.

Other, more personal events had long been coming by the time September 11th rolled around. My love life had been in complete stasis for a number of months, and I decided I'd had enough of being single. A girl came back into my life right about then, one I used to work with at Half-Price Books, a girl I felt was ultimately too cool for me.

Fate prevailed, this time on my behalf. I'm glad for this. Our conversations went for hours, and opportunities to go out somewhere together came and went... and One Damn Thing After Another always prevented these from happening. But finally, we pegged a date down. Monty Python and the Holy Grail had just been re-released, and she and I were both rabid fans. I had the night off from work, and she had nothing to do that evening.

The evening of September 11th.

My dad woke me up Tuesday morning, 8:30am, with news that was at first incomprehensible.

"Ken, come downstairs. Two planes have hit the World Trade Center."

I was so bleary with sleep (I'd only gotten about 5 hours of it by that point) that I misunderstood him. I thought he was referring to the Dallas World Trade Center, a building clearly visible from the windows of my house. I expected to glance outside and see pillars of black smoke.

So I was doubly confused when my dad lead me to the living room, where Peter Jennings was the voice-over for a devastating visual: the World Trade Center twin towers, the two most recognizable pillars of American economic strength, were broken and smoking. Both towers had been hit by separate jets, so there was no way this was an accident. What we had was clearly an act of terrorism.

The bad news piled on more and more as my dad and I sat and watched, riveted, unbelieving. Car bomb outside the State Department (a rumor later discounted). Planes being grounded; two still unaccounted for. Plane hits the Pentagon, driving through all layers from the outside wall into the inner courtyard. Plane hits the ground sixty miles outside of Pittsburgh with little chance of any survivors. To my shocked eyes and ears, the sky was falling.

Two planes were still aloft, and the worries of me and my dad turned to my mom. She is a diligent woman, possessed of honest demeanor and work mentality, and refused to go home. My mom is a top official for Dallas Water Utilities. My mom just so happens to work at city hall. Maybe my dad and I were simply paranoid; maybe we were just being cautious.

Finally the situation stabilized, as much as was possible. More coherent reports were coming in, and emergency services were beginning to file into the buildings to rescue those trapped inside. Though devastating, the horror seemed to be over.

Then the first tower fell, live on TV.

As I hear it, the tower simply imploded. The weight was too much for pillars melted by fiery jet fuel to stand, and the whole building fell inward on itself. The death toll would be obscene.

Eighteen minutes later, the second tower buckled and went down, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands more people. People whose crime was not calling in sick on Tuesday morning. Brokers and bankers and secretaries and technicians, mothers and fathers and siblings and lovers. People who, in their own way, mattered.

Then there were the firemen, the policemen, the volunteer rescue workers and the EMTs. People driven by nothing more than a desire to help their fellow man, who gave the ultimate sacrifice without looking back. Not even once.

The rest of that morning was a blur. New reports streamed endlessly in, some discounted mere minutes after they were reported. The situation was stabilizing. There was no way to determine who had lived and who had died, or how many of each there were. Survival seemed impossible; 110 stories of concrete, steel, glass, and office furniture imploded on itself and collapsed into the ground... who could survive that? The realistic estimated the fatality rate to be in the high-nineties percentile, if not 100% altogether.

Somehow, I unglued myself from my seat and TV to go to class. I felt almost sacrilegious doing so, but the class was a journalism class, and I knew something might come from going, perhaps some further insight.

The streets were bare and cops seemed to be posted every 100 yards, watching, waiting. Richland itself was much as I suspected it would be: tense, quiet, all TVs turned to CNN. Dozens of people of all stripes gathered around to watch the news. The gravity of the situation really hit me, then. This was global. This was painful to everyone, whether they knew anyone in New York or not. Some few Palestinians danced in the streets, but they seemed insignificant to the cries of sympathy from countries so varied as Mexico, Brazil, Holland, Turkey, Malaysia, and Australia. England, Russia, and the countries of NATO all voiced their support in finding the persons responsible, with Russia going so far as to say "if you don't do it, we will." The unity, the overwhelming support, moved me to tears.

For one day, the world was of single mind and heart, breathless and staring at the unbelievable images that came to them on TV. Thousands died; billions more watched.

Journalism class did not disappoint. With few exceptions, most people were possessed of simple sorrow; a tragedy of this magnitude cuts through the rage and the B.S. and goes right for the heart. We were numbed, one and all, but we were proud of how the media, and the people, handled the situation. For such an amazing and terrible event, we saw and we knew. Everything.

I came back home after class was over. My car is my haven, and so for that twenty minutes it was just me and my latest mix CD. I needed the break.

Urgency was beginning to leak away, slowly but steadily. No more attacks had occurred. The worst, it appeared, was over. Was I any less riveted by the news? Of course not. There was still the aftermath to deal with.

And my mind, for the first time that day, seriously turned to the date I would be having that evening.

I did not, did not, want to cancel this date (or whatever it was; at the time, the definition was still a bit fuzzy) but world events had done their absolute best, short of killing me outright, to put a halt to my plans. But we weren't to be daunted. While going to a comedy on the night of such a tragedy may appear to some to be in the neighborhood of blasphemy, we both so desperately needed the laugh.

And laugh we did. Whether it was a simple release of tension, or whether the movie really is just that funny (my vote goes for the latter), we got what we came for: a release, an hour and a half away from the outside world where we could just be happy and be okay again. Our world was shattered in a few short hours that morning, but laughter could start the process of bringing it all back together again.

After the movie came burgers at Goff's, just down the street. Goff's is a funny little place if you've never been there, and serves the best overpriced burgers in town. Only at Goff's did the outside world begin to intrude on me and the girl, and even then we mostly avoided looking at the TV directly. Body counts and speculation were too much for us to handle at that moment. After all, the date was supposed to be about us.

The girl? The girl. And what a girl she is. This is someone I don't think I could ever get bored of, someone with so much depth and complexity that she will constantly intrigue me. Every conversation is a new revelation on her depth, every spoken word one more light into her ever-more fascinating mind.

We pulled up to her house about 10:30, though we felt rather than said that she wouldn't be going in right away. With the windows rolled down, we talked. And talked. And talked. We talked for ages and could have talked for ages more. Books, poets, music, movies, high school, some things so personal you rarely share them on a typical first date. We bonded.

A few hours and several cigarettes later, probably around 3 am, a black and white cat that couldn't have been more than four or five months old came meowing up to the car, and after some coaxing, hopped in and joined the conversation. He (or she) swapped laps between me and the girl for awhile, purring like mad and generally soaking up all of our considerable attention. That span of time sticks out as something particularly special, though for reasons too abstract to assign words to.

Around 3:20 my dad left a message on my cell phone telling me to get home right away.

Like hell.

Eventually the cat, perhaps sensing something we did not, hopped out and hung out alternately on the roof and hood of my car. Conversation between me and the girl continued, never lulling once.

About 4 am, excuses for tickling became spontaneous cuddling. It felt so good I was at a loss for words. She made the occasional joke, as is her style, but we held each other like that for a long time.

And we kissed. Did we ever. Sweet and slow, fast and intense, alternating as naturally as the tides. For an hour or more we were like this, making quiet confessions, recounting so much time spent together at the bookstore. The floodgates, while not obliterated, had opened up. The line had been crossed, from maybe-date to certain-date. Many other lines, all positive, had also been crossed. We were both quietly pleased with this.

The date had to come to an end, much to the chagrin of me and her (probably the cat, too). By 5:30, 21 hours after I woke up to Armageddon, I was back at home and curling into bed for a few measly hours of sleep.

Twenty-one hours after the world turned upside down, I fell into sleep, and out of the most extraordinary day of my young life. "Juxtaposition" was the key word here... So many conflicts, so much sorrow and so much happiness. How could I justify feeling so personally good when so many lost their loved ones? How could I comprehend going through the entire range of human emotion in one long day?

That day I was two people, spinning around the axis of sundown. Ten hours of uncomprehending horror, a horror that cut deep, right into every human's psyche. The event was a poem written by blood and shrapnel, peppered by tears and anguish. Thousands of dead souls scream out for vengeance, for meaning, for something... And no one, at least not now, can provide what they want. That was day.

Night was eleven hours; it began with comedy, continued with good food, and flowered into intimacy in the front seat of my car. Two people connected in such a way that the outside world, both good and bad, was completely left behind. The only intrusion was from a single, friendly cat... And even he (or she) was a point of bonding between me and the girl. The night was a poem written by smiles and kisses, peppered by laughter and purring. Two people reached out to each other, for comfort, for solace, for something... And they got it.

How to reconcile the two parts to one day? Both were different worlds. One was empathy, the other intimacy. One was global horror, the other personal bliss. The two pieces of one span of time were as different from each other as the night and day that separated them.

A curious sense of guilt wormed its way into my consciousness; it was quickly stamped out by common sense. Yes, the tragedy is beyond description. Yes, the words and images still make me cry. But life must go on. If it does not, if we halt our lives and mourn forever, then the terrorists would have truly won.

A thousand clichés come to mind: Every cloud has a silver lining. Hope springs eternal. That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Et cetera, et cetera. Hollow words, maybe, but with a ring of truth. Tragedies are ultimately not about death -- they are about what comes after. Similarly, funerals are not for the dead, they are for the ones left behind. It is appropriate to mourn, to weep, to put your head in your hands and ask "Why?"

What is not appropriate is to let such an event stop you from being human. Our senses are numbed, our conscience burdened by the unbearable weight of lost life. Does this mean we stop loving, stop connecting? Should our sorrow so overwhelm us that we leave no room to feel what is good and right with the world?

A few nameless human monsters start a domino effect that tears at all civilization, just as a few nameless humans can connect with each other and start the rebuilding of what was so violently taken from us. What is large begins small, the proverbial mountain from the molehill.

On September 11th, the world shattered. Screams rose as buildings fell. The day was nightmare and grief from sunrise to sunset, but for those of us not personally involved, night became the reprieve that we so desperately needed. The world got a little smaller, a little less scary. Burgers and movies and all-night talks reasserted themselves as the stuff life is made of. The tragedy never left, and indeed will not leave for several months, or perhaps several years yet... But for a short while, the last 11 hours of the freak 21, the shadows of the fallen twin towers receded.