I remember sitting there slumped and ineffective, as only an advanced calculus problem can do to a sleepy New Yorker early on a golden Tuesday morning. Our math teacher had given us first period alone to combat a problem set, and it must have been around 8:48 or so when the two-dozen of us boys all looked up at the clock in the front of the room, frustrated and lazy and clamoring to get out of there rather than help each other get through the next integral. Some 18 minutes later I remained there at a desk in a classroom, unaware of most everything just then except the book in front of me—much like another prep-schooler spending the morning down in Florida. And then, finally, we were allowed to make our way out of that quiet little space. It was 9:11 on 9/11, and all I wanted was to take it easy.
As we congregated for an all-school assembly second period, I was about to ask the senior classmate next to me to turn down the rap music blaring through his headphones when he pulled them off of one ear with, of all things, a smile. Some idiot had clipped a wing into the World Trade Center, the radio station had said in between songs. I brushed him off and rolled my eyes over to my high school’s headmaster, who looked about as pale as the men and women looking up downtown. Something terrible had happened, he told us. Something very terrible.
The school broke off into sections rather quickly, and all the doors to the outside world were locked even faster. I watched from the back row of our basement auditorium as some Upper Schoolers took off their ties, others climbed over chairs to reach for a friend’s cell phone that might be getting service, and the rest just sat there slumped and ineffective, listening to the radio on a boom box placed on the stage. I couldn’t even see what was happening on Sept. 11, 2001, not even when the lady on the radio gasped her lungs in and the man’s voice said, “My goodness, the south tower has just collapsed.”
Upstairs—that dreaded upstairs—in a science classroom with my smaller advisory group, a junior who I only knew fairly well stumbled about trying to make his cell phone work and fell into my arms. “My f---ing dad works on the top floor of the World Trade Center,” he cried.
Eventually we all made it back downstairs (and so did my friend’s father, after sliding down several stories of rubble). We hugged and we listened and we helped each other hug and listen like we never would have in math class or in anything just an hour and a half earlier. And I’d never been so happy to see my mom in my entire life. She had walked straight toward me from a meeting way downtown, and then I joined her and hordes of helpless New York zombies trudging further up the sidewalk, the fighter jets whizzing toward the plumes of black air behind us.
I watched TV for the rest of the afternoon because I was so scared that I needed to take it easy. But I woke up the next day with, of all things, a smile. I hadn’t dreamt even half a nightmare, and I knew that in a half hour I’d be meeting a dozen of my best friends to collect donations for rescue workers at Ground Zero. And even as I passed the “Missing!” flyers plastered on the apartment building walls and as the New York zombies passed my apartment building holding candles on their way to the firefighters’ monument on my corner, I smiled.
After the most unforgettable day of any New Yorker’s life, it was as if we all forgot how to be the smarmy, self-involved creatures we’d always been. We all wanted to be a “we,” from the 40-year-old driving me and a bunch of food and flashlights to a local church, to the 50 boys from my school cheering on the rescue workers headed down the West Side highway. We didn’t tell anyone to turn their music off, and we did all our math homework.
But when I woke up as a Duke freshman on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks, I’d soon be furious. One war-torn and complacency-worn year later, it took me an hour and a half to hear someone talk about it. I thought maybe it was shock or awe or fear or the University’s dearth of activities keeping everyone quiet, but I decided by the end of the day that not that many people really cared.
As I looked up at the Twin Towers on the oversized skyline mural in my apartment here Saturday, I shuttered to think that we might care even less three years later. I wondered how the country, my college, my city had become more divided than ever before in my lifetime. They had fallen further from the America that wanted to be united so badly than the buildings had from the sky. And I wished everyone around me could remember our darkest day and just hug and listen... and smile.
Matt Sullivan is a Trinity junior and News Managing Editor of The Chronicle.
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