A Lesson in History By Silence's Siren

A knock on the door and suddenly he was barreling inside without waiting for a response. I had not seen him yet this year, but I noticed that he had cropped his hair close to his head, the spike of baldness jutting from his forehead somewhat less visible now, and a slight pouch hung over his beltline, but it was a comforting sight. His socks still matched his shirt, a deep dark plum, revealed by the high cuffs above his ankles. His face was unsure, perhaps troubled, but no one took notice.
Class had barely started, but already papers were lying on our desks. Heads had turned at his entrance, scowling faces raising from their sheets of blank paper, hoping that some apocalypse might have occurred, anything to keep them from the pop-quiz. Mrs. Gode, a quick smile creasing the wrinkles around her eyes, went to greet him.
"Mr. Bailey, to what do we owe this surprise? Need to borrow that eraser again?" She had on her favorite jumper, a soft denim dress hanging about her knees, the plain white shirt beneath it matching the ankle socks that rose over the red canvas of her Keds. She was the kind of grandmother that television created for everyone to love.
"We were watching the news, current events you know," and those in the class who had been in World History Honors last year smiled at the reminder, thinking more on the way Mr. Bailey would speak of his children when he really meant his dogs and would always stand facing the window so he could watch the squirrels. Very few remembered the news shows, other than that extra bit of time it allowed to study for the daily quizzes.
"And, well, a second plane has crashed into the World Trade Center building." A titter of excitement passed through the room, students turning in their desks, quizzes forgotten, as they speculated about the cause. Who had heard anything about the first plane? When had that one hit? Most were thinking of some errant by-plane, something similar to the crash on the white house lawn seven years before, the only casualty the man flying the plane. Heads bent towards one another, murmuring quietly.
I leaned backwards in my desk, stretching to see into open door directly across the hall, but Mr. Bailey's class had their backs to us, their eyes fixed upon the monitor.
"Finish your quizzes," Mrs. Gode told us, and we groaned our mutual pain, saddened that the plane crash was not enough to escape our fate.
Then Mr. Bailey moved past her and reached up to the small school TV suspended in the corner of the room, an old gray thing with no controller, just sticky square buttons aligned like teeth along the bottom. Mrs. Gode was frowning slightly now, and Miki shifted nervously in her seat next to me as her pencil tapped the desk.
The image blinked on, like lightning before the thunder, and a burning tower resolved itself on the screen, the TV already set to channel 8, Fox news. The newscasters were solemn, and slowly it was dawning on people that something more was going on.
"-hit the south tower three minutes ago. It has been confirmed a second plane has indeed hit the tower at 9:03, only 18 minutes after the first plane hit the north tower. Officials are unsure of the cause, whether this was an accident or deliberate." Her words were heavy, soaked with professional distance, but we could see how the sweat slid down her neck under the bright glare of lights.
They repeated the image, one building choking on smoke while a video camera followed the line of another plane. The image bounced and reeled about the screen and the faulty speakers made it impossible to tell whether the noisy clutter was static or heavy breathing.
It impacted rather anti-climatically, the concrete side of the building swallowing the metal frame whole. There was no terrible rending sound, no screams, a brief belch of flame, but really the image was painless. An effortless motion, like a child sliding a Jenga block into its proper place in the tower. Smoke rose in plumes and plummeted as though a solid thing, the flames were gone, and so everything seemed whole, intact, quiet.
Men and women droned on, repeating the same words in thousands of different ways that no one heard. Occasionally a different film angle was discovered, another amateur photographer with grainy pictures that would have been artistic on any other day. And we sat, and we watched.
Mr. Bailey had left sometime while the news was showing, and Mrs. Gode suddenly reached to turn off the TV, all the different pictures already burned into our mind. A few people protested, but their voices died soon, unsure how to say they wanted to watch more of the same image shown over and over again. Thirty minutes had passed, maybe more, most likely less, but time was now told in crashing planes and nothing new had happened since the school bell rang at 8:05 central standard time, 58 minutes before the plane crashed at eastern standard time in New York. We had seen it happen nearly an hour early, why did no one stop it from happening again before the hand on the clock had moved? All around the world, would this be occurring every time that hand reached another hour?
We took longer than normal to finish the quiz. But when we finished, Mrs. Gode turned on the TV again rather than continue her lecture on the French and Indian War. It was close to nine o'clock, and class still had over thirty minutes left. No one thought of leaving.
A tower had fallen while we wrote Ticonderoga down on the paper, and the images were still displayed, repeated alongside the metal birds as they nested themselves in the side of the towers.
We had seen buildings implode on TV before, the careful work of engineers making them collapse in on themselves. The south tower fell first, smoke fanning out behind the tumbling stone as though a parachute slowing its descent. Another image suddenly replaced it, smoke billowing from a scar carved into the side of the pentagon, a section of wall had collapsed there too, which was how we learned of that crash.
Reports were coming in fast - images beginning to look identical, plane crashes loosing their novelty - of a fourth plane having crashed in Pennsylvania. It alone looked normal, the metal shell burning with orange flames and black fumes amidst a desolate area, the color that the gray towers and smoke lacked. This was the volcano of ash and fire that was meant to be.
The towers were again on the TV, though one no longer stood. Black specks could be seen falling, small dots of action against the hovering gray, and the newscaster identified them as people, jumping to escape the fires within the building. Outside, the damage looked superficial, a cut that missed the artery. They were jumping into air to escape smoke, nothing else, nothing which the cameras could see. No flames licked against the outside masonry, just that continual column of billowing gray smoke.
I thought to myself as I saw it happen that there should have been a crack, some great horrible splintering noise, but the only noise was as the camera was jostled roughly until it was focused on the top of the north tower. The top few floors were sliding away from the middle ones like an avalanche, the tower creaking open to reveal its hidden innards. The base then collapsed within on itself before the top floors ever reached the ground. Another column of smoke rose up in place of the two towers. And we watched this one image as it happened in a displaced hour in New York.
The voices coming from the gray box were just as surprised as the rest of us. Mrs. Gode had moved her swivel chair from behind her desk to the front of the class where she could sit and watch the television, but she was standing now.
"-collapsed. Completely collapsed. Reports now confirm that neither building was completely evacuated. Local officials were still attempting to clear the stairwells of the building's occupants and several people were seen jumping from windows to try and esc-"
The bell sounded in the hallway, its angry peals echoing disjointedly around the sharp corners, and the voices from the TV were drowned out. I nearly fell from my seat. Students emerged slowly, the normal chatter littered about them sparsely, small pockets of noise amidst the stillness.
I was slowly putting away my pens and paper with the rest of the class. Thirty minutes before our next class started and we were unsure what to do. Mrs. Gode had left immediately at the sound of the bell, but it was the tutorials period and perhaps she had something to do. The TV was left on. Several students stayed exactly where they were, papers strewn everywhere and eyes still glued to the corner. Others drifted more slowly. I picked up my bag and slid my history textbook within. Miki was waiting for me by the door.
We left the classroom together, and I could not help but think, how ironic. How ironic that I had to be sitting in my U.S. History class when this happened. And then I wondered if people knew when Pearl Harbor was hit that we would be reading about it from a textbook.
Out of the classroom, the courtyard was oddly deserted for the free tutorials period, but anger and confusion were predominant and loud enough for the empty space.
"You think it was a terrorist attack?" Brandon asked, a frown settled about his face. The three other boys towered above his short, wide frame.
"That's what the news was saying. They think it's that bin Laden guy. The one the CIA helped out." Jeremiah was a wraith compared to the others, his arms skinny gangly things sprouting from a sunken chest.
"Hell, we should just nuke all the Middle East. Get rid of all those damn terrorists." The parody of a smile ghosted along Caleb's face.
Miki and I hung back from our sometimes-friends, Matt sitting between us on the concrete bench. C.J. with her back to the arguing group slouched over her knees on the ground so that I could only see the top of her blonde head.
"Why waste a nuke, I'll go over there and mess 'em up myself. All I need is my dad's 12 gauge. There's a bounty on bin Laden's head. I'll just hop a plane over to Saudi and hunt him down myself. Ya'll are welcome to join." Caleb laughed, and Miki slumped against Matt as the chuckles drifted to us.
"Maybe later, George. I got church tomorrow. We'll probably have some sort of memorial service or something." Caleb picked up his bag from its spot on the ground, readjusting it on his shoulders. A frayed black and yellow 'Go Army' patch that had been passed out at lunch by two recruiters was brandished proudly along the strap beside an ichthys.
"Yeah, I know my church will probably say something about today. Ya'll want to come to St. Michael's tomorrow?" George offered.
"Naw, I'll probably be going with my parents to United Methodist. I'm sure my church is going to do the same thing as yours." Brandon said, giving a small shrug.
"Yeah, we got youth service tomorrow night. But we're all going out Saturday with First Christian to go play some paintball. Just tell me if ya'll want to join and I'll write down your names." Jeremiah said affecting the same shrug that he had seen Brandon use.
And when the bell rang at ten, the four boys went their separate ways. Matt's pale hand still rested against Miki's dark skin as we walked with one another to our different classes as well.
Miki and I walked into the physics classroom, its lab tables were already filled with students. Their faces were blank, eyes wide as they stared at the images that swept past and away from them on the screen, the same screen that rested in the corner of Mrs. Gode's classroom, that small, cramped monitor where there was no place for anger.
The daily announcements began to play over the intercom, and our new principal's voice began to speak. Mr. Sheek moved to mute the news program.
"Let us take a moment to think of those who have suffered today, those who are still missing or gone, and their families. Several students were affected by what happened in New York today, and let us always lend them a supporting hand. In respect to those who lost their lives today, the tower's occupants, the plane's passengers, the policeman and firemen, men and women, Americans. let us observe a moment of silence and pray that God will see us through this."
Miki bowed her head beside me, fingering the silver cross at her neck, shiny black hair falling to obscure her softly rounded face. The people around me ducked their heads, and I turned to watch the small screen at the back of the room, the same images from earlier this morning repeated over and over again even though the sound was muted.
Lectures continued in my classes for the rest of the day, but in the background we heard the hushed noises of the replayed images: the silence of the plumes of smoke, the quiet murmur of newscasters in their monotones, the pleading voices of families, mothers, brothers, people searching for someone else to cling to. They were hoping that those they were searching for would emerge from the smoke like conquering heroes. But it was the firefighters and police officers who stumbled out, faces black with soot and bloodied individuals on their shoulders or falling from stretchers. People wandered lost amidst the broken rubble, smoke making their eyes stream with tears.
But our seats faced away from the TV and we listened about vectors, or read the Scarlet Letter, ate our lunch, or sat in American history. In the back of the class, a girl was crying, but our backs were to her, and we heard the sound throughout the day, the pleas of those trapped within that small gray box suspended from the ceiling.
Different images were on the TV when I finally came home from practice after school, images of great hulking stone, steel columns still linked together reaching up several stories from the rubble. Broken metal was twisted into a graveyard of skeletal remains, the great ribcages of stone giants protruding from wet earth. The soil was damp from burst pipes and the sky black from soot and smoke, a blotted sun and the remains of giants stripped bare, such a small collision, such an unexpected meteor, and I wondered if this was how the dinosaurs understood what extinction would mean.