A Dedication to those lost in the recent terrorists in the
United States...
Today was, by far, the most fearful day of my life. Those
that haven't been hiding under rocks on Mars know what I'm talking about.
There have been several terrorist attacks during the past few hours (I'm
writing this at 1:35 PM on September 11, 2001, also known as 911.).
This is how my day's gone since the beginning of it all, every bit true.
Theatre class at the School
of the Arts is going normally. A few people gossipping back and forth
about the newest celebrities and how much they all hate the new Musketeers
movie. We start working on a scene from Shakespeare's Richard III,
and we are stopped so that one of the teachers, Mr. Wood, can talk to us
about our senior thesis. A little later, another teacher, Mr. Locklair
(we call him "Lock"), walks into the room with an unusually worried, yet
serene, look on his face. After Mr. Wood is finished with his lecture,
Lock stands up and says that the president has just delivered a message
of emergency for the United States. A few minutes ago, the World
Trade Center's Twin Towers were crashed into with two jet planes.
About ten thousand people are trapped inside. We stare at each other
for a moment, and Lock walks out of the room back into his office.
A few of us, including myself, walk into the office as well to listen to
one of those AM news radio stations.
Many of us leave the room
after hearing so much of the carnage that is going on, and just as I am
about to leave, I hear another anouncement. A large bang has been
heard and felt at the Pentagon. Rumor has it that a bomb was placed
near the helicopter landing area. A girl, either in seventh or eighth
grade, rushes in to listen to the radio, as her class has taken a break.
She hears something about the Pentagon, and I tell her the rest.
She runs out and tells the rest of her class. About ten minutes later,
I hear sobs coming from the hallway. I run out to see a crowd of
people huddled around Mary. Her uncle works in the Pentagon, and
she's scared to death. The girl I talked to earlier asks her where
her uncle could have been at the time, and she answers, "What, do you think
I put a freaking tracker on him so I can tell where he is all the time?!"
and runs into the bathroom in tears. Angela runs out of the office.
"There's a fire in the Washington Mall."
The bell rings for our next
class, and I meet up with my good friend Deas outside. I tell him
what all has happened, and he doesn't believe me at first. "It's
one of those 'War of the Worlds' programs, Caroline. Don't worry
about it. You are joking, aren't you?" "No, I wouldn't
joke about that sort of thing." "Well, we'll just have to see about
that." We walk to yearbook class, and I still try to convince him
that it's all true. The yearbook advisor, Ms. Tisdale (we call her
"Tizzy") is a history teacher, and always has a radio handy, mainly for
news like this. We go into the classroom, and already Jessica and
Tizzy are sitting by the radio. Deas looks at me, then the other
two. "Whoa, this was no joke, huh? Sorry I doubted you!
Now I really feel bad. I went to New York City and never got to go
into either one of those buildings. Now I never will." "Me
too," I respond, "but I'm really glad I didn't, considering that I'd be
really weirded out by now." Tracy walks in and is wondering why we
all look so worried and are listening to AM radio. Angela walks in
behind her. "There's been, like, at least three or four terrorist
attacks in the past hour." "Really?! That's insane!"
Ms. Marshall walks in to listen as well. It's her break period, and
she has no class to take care of. "This is absoultely incredible.
Something we'll never forget." Another radio announcement.
A plane has crashed in a small town in Pennsylvania.
Tizzy speaks up. "I
wish this stupid television had an antenna hookup. I swear, if any
classroom had one at all, it should be a history classroom!" "I think
Ms. Phillips has one," someone says. They run out to check, and sure
enough, her class is sitting in a darkened room, watching the Trade Towers
collapse. The yearbook staff makes their way into Ms. Phillip's trailer.
She teaches French, and they're watching terrorists rip the United States
apart. Deas, Tracy, Jessica, Angela, and I gasp as we look in horror
at the Twin Towers crashing down and a dust cloud covering the entire city
of New York. "My God..." It's the only thing we can say.
"I think it's that guy with the long name we can never catch," Ms. Phillips
makes a remark. "You know, abbadabadaba something or other."
There are plenty of speculations saying that he is the cause of it all,
and his name is Osama Bin Laden. I don't think it is. It's
just too obvious and far too big for him to be a par off. He's bombed
one thing at a time, usually foreign embasies and the like. He wouldn't
do this. At least, that's my viewpoint of it all.
A short while later, I can't
take it any more. They keep showing those towers falling. The
Palistinians are celebrating in the streets, or so I hear. They had
a video tape of it earlier, but I missed it, thank goodness. I walk
out the door, with a stomach ache that almost makes me throw up.
One of my freshman friends, Rachel, waves at me from across the campus.
I meet up with her, and she throws her arms around me. "Caroline,
I'm so scared!" "Yeah, I know." She finally lets go, and I
ask her what she has heard so far. She only knows about the Twin
Towers and a high school bomb threat in Washington. "You haven't
heard about the Pentagon then?" Her friend runs up beside her as
she almost collapses. "The Pentagon?!" "Don't throw up, Rachel,"
her friend jokes. "I've got to sit down." Rachel sits on some
steps on the side of a trailer, and her friend gets their teacher to comfort
her. I talk to her, trying to figure out why she is so upset.
Her mother's best friends work there, and so do a few of her distant family
members. Her teacher arrives, and she is taken to Ms. Phillip's room
to watch the television coverage. I stay for about two minutes, and
I hear and see the same footage over and over again. The towers fall
again.
I tell Rachel that I can't
watch this any more. I go back to Tizzy's classroom where Deas, Jessica,
Angela, and Tizzy are listening to the radio. Everyone with a cell
phone is calling their friends and family members to see where they are
and to tell them what is going on. Here we are, in South Carolina
so far away from all of it, and we're scared to our wits end. The
bell rings again, and I go to Statistics class where Mr. Smyth is the teacher.
He asks my view on all of it, and he starts to joke that one of our assistant
principals, Mr. Shaw, has a strange resemblance to Osama Bin Laden.
Thirty minutes later, the dismissal bell rings. (We had a half-day
today, thank goodness. Nothing else would have been learned or done
that day anyway.)
On the bus, Perry finds
me and sits down. We start talking about the tragedies that have
been occurring through the day, and he tells me about that high school
bomb threat in Washington, and continues speaking saying to not worry since
it is probably a joke. There's also been another plane crash in Philadelphia.
Things just keep getting better and better. Mom picks me up at the
bus stop. We listen to the radio and turn on the television when
we walk through our front door. Searches are being conducted, and
the same information is spit out at us. Nothing else is happening
in the world, apparently.
And I sit here now, typing
on the computer. "Today was, by far, the most fearful..." I type.
I listen to one of my favorite CDs, Dream Theater's Metropolis Part Two:
Scenes From a Memory, and on track twelve, a voice over a speaker says
"...And as you can imagine, as the skies have grown darker here over Washington,
the mood has grown darker as well, and people here are beginning to resign
themselves to the possibility that they are witnessing yet another tragedy
in a long string of misfortunes. Reaction from everywhere from Washington
and certainly from around the world has--" and it cuts off.
--CB
UPDATE: 9/15/01 One more thing. About
two months before all of this happened, I had and still have a strange
reoccurring dream. A city, looking very much like New York with most
of its buildings leveled to about ten stories high, is dark. The
skies are dark grey and black, as is its water. A young boy sits
with his back against a wall. A knife is in his boot. Suddenly,
a shadow passes quickly over him, and he looks up. He reaches down
into his boot, where his pocket knife is kept. He attacks the creature,
a fur-covered beast, and kills it. As he watches in horror, the beast
turns into a human. The boy backs away and runs.
The last time I had this
dream was about a week before the tragedy. I didn't think about it
again until I talked with some of my eighth grade friends. One of
them described a dream that was very similar to mine, and I remembered
the one I had been having. That night, I had the dream again.
This time, it continued. A girl was walking in the streets, scared
and alone. Another beast came up to her and tried to attack her,
but the boy killed it in time. He stayed there for a moment as the
girl asked him "What's your name?" and "Where are you from?", but never
answered. "Good," he finally said. "That one didn't change."
The dream ended with the girl watching him with wide eyes, wondering just
what he meant.
When I first had that dream
a few months back, I thought it would make a great new story. I drew
out the character as he was in my dreams and named him Jundea.
I started writing a script (I named it "Jundea: Apocalypse")
for a comic or Shockwave presentation and lost interest as the dreams became
more and more infrequent. With the tragedy that has made America
fall, or perhaps become anew, I doubt I could get it off the ground with
so much ridicule about how it points at the terrorist attacks. Therefore,
the project I was working on this time around is called off. Maybe
I'll have another dream, maybe I won't. But right now, it just doesn't
seem fair to be working on something so frighteningly similar.
On a lighter note, I'm working
on something with fighting rabbits. Don't worry. It's not as
strange as it sounds. You have to agree, its a lot better than a
synical account of the future of New York City.
UPDATE: 12/6/01 Well, the way I see it,
there's no reason why I can't put up the Jundea script.
I see no reason to hold it back from the world. I've told a few people
about it, and they all say that there is no reason why I shouldn't publish
this. So if you're ready, here it is.
Feel free to say whatever you want by emailing me at usagisailor@yahoo.com.
And the rabbit thing... I don't know what the heck I was thinking.
It was a dumb story that could be done with humans anyway.
Do you have something you'd like to add to this section? Maybe
some strange dreams or an explanation of mine? Email
me and I'll post it if I think it's presentable.
