Welcome to Hell… September 11, 2001

Welcome to Hell… September 11, 2001

At 9:30 am on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the telephone rang in the office that I shared with my friend, the French teacher René Moisan. At the other end of the line was his daughter, Geneviève. “Have you seen the news?” she asked, with a peculiar catch in her voice, bordering on panic. This is when I learned about the attack on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. A strange rumbling simultaneously began to sweep along the corridors of our tiny college, amplifying in intensity like an approaching tidal wave, punctuated by disembodied phrases, such as “Pearl Harbor” and “the chickens have come home to roost.” Scurrying to the nearest television set, where the school normally posted teachers’ absences to the ecstatic cheers of the student body, an expanding throng watched, mesmerized, as unspeakable horrors unfolded in real time, followed by endless replays, as if the networks were showing highlights of some surreal demonic sports match.

During my scheduled classes that day, we spoke only of the events that were still transpiring, an ongoing conversation that lasted the better part of a whole week. Young people seared, overwhelmed, inconsolable, defenseless, unimaginably frightened, baffled, and forlorn. Where are they now, these lovely young people? What scars are they still hiding? What wounds remain open and unhealed? What is the stuff of their nightmares? What do they want to remember? What do they need to forget?

Our personal histories are mainly composed of disparate events, some of which are earth-shattering for us as individuals, but appear irrelevant and even pointless in the larger scheme of things, consigned to oblivion in a universe that that seems to loom menacingly and envelope us darkly like thoroughly dispensable motes of dust. But every so often personal and global histories intersect, and 9/11 was one of those days. Time and space seemed to crack open wide and a grotesque parade of grimacing demons emerged, writhing and shrieking, destined to haunt each and every one of us from that day until eternity.