Emotional Structures (Working Title): Chapter 2
Jan 08 '03
The Bottom Line The second part. This is where I get a little worried, because I deal with some racial tension, and I get into more detail in the third part.
This is the second chapter. There will be a couple more to go. If you would like to read the first chapter, it's at http://www.epinions.com/content_3049496708
A few kids had arrived in the classroom when Joanna made her appearance.
“Hi, Miss Moore.”, said one child.
“Hello”, she smiled.
The system of transferring children from home to school was an inconsistent one. Some children would arrive long before Joanna, or many other teachers arrived, while others would only arrive much later, running into the building moments, if not mere seconds, before the nine AM bell rang.
“How are you?”, asked another one.
“Good... it’s good when I’m here with you guys.”, she smiled, leaving little room for any specifics.
Joanna observed the kids, and absorbed slices of the sentences and the phrases that they spoke.
“Have you played the new........”
“.... the graphics are awesome........”
“.......I played that game for seven hours on Saturday!!!”
“... it was so cool, the bombs and other things.......”
“..... there was real blood too!!! It was like the real thing!!”
“.... I’ll let you borrow the game, if your mother doesn’t get mad or anything.......”
She could only decode a portion of what each child said, but she could combine them all to formulate a coherent commentary on what the New York children were thinking about. Violent games that rendered the minds of youth bankrupt, and yielded their bodies solely to the basics, such as the munching of food.
Different sorts of kids played these games, regardless of how well they did in class. The top students were as equally entranced as the ones teetering on failure. The ill-achieving students would always be that way -- unless they chose not to. She had no say in the issue. The good students would, more often than not, retain their wondrous qualities regardless of the games that they played outside of class. The bad students were bad regardless of how hard she tried to stimulate their minds, and their imaginations. It was of negligible consequences.
She put her lunch, and some other belongings in the sliding drawer underneath her desk, and left the room. She was to go to the teacher’s lounge.
She did not want to think any further about her observations on these game-playing children. Such thoughts would only tear at her helplessness. She was a teacher. Her job was to teach children in this room. She was unable to, or unwilling to, control whatever occurred outside this room. She only wanted to do her job. She only wanted to help the children to get through the day, to learn a few things. She didn’t want to peer into their lives, to pry into their problems. She didn’t want to touch their lives beyond the confines of the classroom, in case she were to discover something that disturbed her.......
........ approaching the teacher’s lounge, Joanna felt a skip in her heart. She realized that in a few days she’d be on her vacation, far away from the school. It would be fun. Not all of her comrades were fully aware of the trip; Joanna would fill them in on all the necessary information.
“Hey, Karen.”, she said confidently.
“Hey!”
A number of other teachers were hovering about the dimensions of the room. Some had coffee, some had cereal bars, some had merely their morning’s workload to get them through.
“well, three more days... and it’s off to Canada.”
The flickering colors of the television, which was situated between the two blandly patterned sofas, painted a portrait of one of the network breakfast shows. Bryant Gumble, respected journalist, was cooking something..... news as entertainment.........
“Awesome. So have you decided where you’re going yet?”
“Well, all three Maritime provinces are in our sight. You know... New Brunswick. Nova Scotia. And, umm, Prince..... Edward?”
Karen nodded her head to each location. “Isn’t that place part of Nova Scotia?”
“I.... I don’t know, really.”, Joanna admitted. “I’ve never been to Canada in my life, you know. But.... I know it’d be a nice place. It’s just that we don’t know exactly where we’ll end up. All three of those places seem to have their own unique attributes........”
Karen glanced to the direction of the TV. The anchor was delivering “a special announcement from CBS News.........”
“...... Prince Edward has a lot of golf courses, so that’s... good.......”
“Oh my God, Joanna.....”, said Karen.
Karen’s hand covered her mouth, as if attempting to prevent her aural shock from infecting the entire room.
Joanna turned to the television, the source of Karen’s gasp. Joanna did not reply.... she could not. She could only frown, aghast, at the new picture on the electronic canvas.
The World Trade Center was in flames. Smoke bled from the structure, originating from a gaping scar around the entire structure. A plane had impacted, directly inside the building, apparently. The image was like that of an improperly designed smokestack.
She was baffled.
The World Trade Center was a monument to New York City. The two towers have stood for decades, emphasizing the island of Manhattan. And some stupid pilot crashed into one of the towers, with utter disregard for those inside. What would have possessed him -- or her? -- to ram into that building -- a pilot, even one who found oneself in such a desperate situation, would have had better sense than that..... don’t you think? The water was nearby...... what a damn fool!
“Jesus Christ......”, was Joanna’s first utterance, after five minutes of internal pondering.
“You’ve said it.”, Karen sighed, rubbing her face in quiet bafflement.
Joanna’s burning eyes flitted quickly to the clock. She was late for class.
What.... what should I do? It feels too ..... inappropriate to go to class..... as if nothing was going on.......
“I suppose...... I should go up...... “, she mumbled, staggering to the edge of the room. “The kids might....might get rowdy if I don’t show up. Tell me.... what happens .... okay....?”
........ god*damn it....... I’m ... I’m such a fool..... don’t know how to behave...........
Karen was no longer able to look to her friend’s direction. “Sure....”, she moaned flatly, her eyes aching from the kinetic visuals.
Joanna walked determinedly, head down, through the hallway. She felt her forehead ache, as her stomach curled and her heart raced. She felt a sickening sense of approaching doom, as she paced to her classroom. She was hoping that the only doom that would befall her was discovering, to her everlasting distraction, that one of the more naughty children put a tack in her chair, or wrote something silly on the blackboard, or threw things around the......
“Oh my God!!!!!”
It was a scream of blood, an echo of utter darkness. The scream of someone who witnessed an indescribable act of cruelty. An act that could never be erased from the mind.
Joanna’s breath quickened. She knew that the scream came from Karen. It was unmistakable. But it did not sound right. Joanna never heard her in this way, ever.
Joanna rushed in her direction; her potentially futile attempt at rescuing her from whatever happened in that room. She no longer gave the children in her class a second thought. Most likely they were probably more safer unattended than that poor soul who screamed........
She ran into the room, breathless, feeling her eyes water.
“Karen, are you......”, her jaw shuddering, “...are you okay?”
Karen silently looked to her, as other teachers and employees of the school had congregated, in a mass of confusion, sighing and chatting ominously with each other.
“A.....another plane..... it hit the other tower.”
“Huh? What???”, Joanna stuttered. She did not believe this. She did not see this supposed event. She did not want to believe it. “I ... I doubt that very much. It’s... it’s an instant replay. You know how those news channels behave. They replay things until the tape snaps. Don’t... don’t be crazy, please! You never see sh*t like that live..... it’s impossible.”, her voice growing in a crescendo of nervousness.
“No..no, Joanna! I saw it... it happened right in front of everyone..... we were standing here, watching the coverage, just .... just discussing what they’re going to do to rescue the people, how the plane could be... so unlucky to crash into the Trade Center... and .... then it happened.....it crashed into the other building. It’s ...it’s as if there was a plan! It seems too perfect! It didn’t even try to avoid the building......”
A suicidal pilot.......
“......... it just... flew inside the building..... like a missile or something...”, Karen continued. “I’m gonna have to phone home, Oh my god.... just to see if everyone is safe....”
Joanna noticed that most everyone else in the room were speaking on their cell phones. Her mind toyed with the idea that this was not an average day, with an average tragedy to discuss around the water cooler.
She stood, her eyes analyzing the generalities of the screen image, then studying its particulars. Two buildings... on fire. Plumes of smoke smothering the structures, and the sky scape. People falling out from the buildings , thousands of feet to the ground......
...... did she know anyone in those buildings? Any friends, any acquaintances? She didn’t know. The visceral nature of the image wounded her memory. Her conscious was flooded with panic, drowning all other thoughts........
Her instincts became aware of the truth. Today, September 11, 2001, was not going to be a good day. It was possibly a life-changing day.....
She phoned home.
She knew. She knew that Richard was safe. Today was the first day of his vacation. He’d be watching television... watching some hopeless rerun of an already contested sporting match..... or some worn rerun on TV Land........
She dialed the numbers more rapidly than she ever needed to at any time previous, even when she had to phone home to tell Richard that she was in painful labor, or even when she had to phone the ambulance to take her mother to the hospital.
All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later. This is a recording.
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. The negation repeated itself within the audio of her brain. She attempted dialing again. She attempted dialing again. Different announcements, but the same result. All circuits are busy. All circuits are busy. Don’t bother trying your call again later, she concluded. Nothing was going to get through........
“Joanna?”, the voice came from the principal.
Fifteen minutes had passed since Joanna last tried to phone home. All of the teachers who had stood in this room before the first plane hit had remained, and other teachers arrived to witness, and to fear together.
“Oh... hi... hi.....”
“Nobody’s able to get through on the phone.”
“I... I know.”
“I don’t know what to say about this. The news reports are suggesting... that this is no accident.”
Joanna’s eyes widened. Her instincts had considered such an awful scenario, but it wasn’t until the principal had spoken this phrase that suddenly that irrational suggestion became all too real for her. Old clips of the bombing of London in World War II, firestrikes in Bagdad during the Gulf War, ran through her brain. New clips, the New York Blitz.... she imagined other jets, other missiles.........
“What... what’s going to happen?”
“Well... I’ve no idea what’s going on. All I know is that we’ll have to go back up to class. The kids can’t be left alone all morning... although I know that it’s difficult... to tear your eyes from the screen.”
Joanna nodded her head. “I’ll do my best... to keep everything under control.....”
“I don’t want any kids to leave the building, under any circumstance. Nobody knows what’s outside ..... “
Joanna imagined terrorists surrounding the school.
“I just don’t want to take any risk...... ,”, the principal continued. “I’m sorry. Don’t.. don’t worry if you’re too distracted to teach. Whatever was on the agenda today... pales compared to what all of us will be learning this afternoon..........”
She returned to the class. All of the students had arrived. Naturally, once they saw their teacher, they all scurried to their seats.
But Joanna wasn’t feeling up to being authoritative.
She looked around at all the faces. She didn’t know a lot of detail concerning the lives of most of these children. She didn't know what their parents did for a living, where they were this morning, who they were related to..........
......... the girl on the fourth desk in the third row, giggling with the girl beside her, might have had a father working for the Pentagon, who just happened to be delivering a file to a particular section of the building. The boy sitting in the back right hand corner, flipping through a silly comic book, might have had a cousin in Boston, boarding a plane to the other end of the country. The girl sitting at the second desk on the first row, stacking her schoolbooks for the day, might have had a mother who was no longer living in the house, having divorced from the girl’s father; the girl may have had few opportunities to see her mother, who was busy working at an office at the World Trade Center........
......... Joanna had no idea. Which only made her reflection grow even heavier with sorrow.
She found herself helplessly drawn to the sympathetic portion of her soul, the portion she had successfully avoided at all costs in this room.
A teacher, supposedly a powerful influence on the minds of such impressionable children. But she, this teacher, was helpless in front of her children. Perhaps she always was.
Her job, her life, suddenly became pointless, futile, a waste.
“Miss Moore?”, sighed a voice.
....... her eyes watered......
“Miss Moore?”
“oh...... “, suddenly aware of the voice.
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh..... nothing, sweetie. Just trying to hold back..... a... a sneeze. My, my eyes got pretty watery there. “
She laughs desperately.
As time passed, it became aware that there was little point for the schools to remain open. Today was a day similar to Pearl Harbor, or any other day of national crisis. What was the point in continuing on with the school day when virtually everybody was wondering whether people closest to them were safe? Everything else was no longer important.
It was announced that all the schools in the area were to be closed. Joanna wanted to get home as quickly as possible. So did her daughter, although her reasons weren’t as compelling, at least not at this time.
“We’re going home, isn’t that awesome?”, Erica glowed.
She and Danny were near the front doors, changing their indoor shoes into their outdoor ones.
Danny smiled. “yea, it’s cool. But why are we going home?”
“I don’t know. There’s some fire, I guess.”, she shrugs her shoulders.
Danny looked worried. “Here, in the school?”
“No.. I think it’s somewhere else in town. There’s all this smoke coming from somewhere, didn’t you see it?”
“No.... I heard stuff about smoke... but I don’t know where it came from.”
The two looked at each other, trying to piece together the information.
“Well... why would we have to go home if the fire is far away?”, Danny asked, baffled.
“Don’t know. Maybe it’s burning down all the houses, and it will get to us....”, her eyes widening in wicked humor. “....and set your hair on fire!”, playfully clenching her friend’s head, before messing up his hair.
“Stop it!”, he squealed, unaffected. He smiled shyly afterwards.
The two children began to walk to the doors, and became swept inside the wave of children leaving the building. It was as if a fire drill were being performed, only without the imposing sound of the bell filling the air, bellowing at the children to get out quickly, yet calmly.
Every child opened the glass doors, bringing them into the full brunt of the outside environment. The morning air still lingered amid the clear sky. It felt unusual to be sent outside only two hours into the school day, especially as this wasn’t the winter, where the occasional snowstorm might force the children away from their desks and into the wondrous winter playground.
The sky on this day, however, was crisp, warm and pleasant. There wasn’t any semblance of cold or snow anywhere. If this moment were the beginning of morning recess, it would have been a good moment to loiter about in the playground. The surroundings did have one glaring difference from other previously nice playground mornings, however. The sky was torn with that strange, smoldering cloud down Manhattan way......
Erica and Danny became aware of the atmospheric canvas.
“Look at that!”, she gasped, in naive curiosity.
“Wow, where’s that coming from?”
“Must be the fire......... it’s a big one!”
Faint but distinctive sirens came from what seemed like every possible direction.
“There must be a lot of fire trucks driving down there. How big do you think the fire would be?”
“Very big!”, Danny replied.
They looked at each other, not having any other words to describe what they saw.
Erica and Danny weren’t able to walk to the bus at a leisurely pace. Hundreds and hundreds of children were being herded out from the school and down the paved walkway like livestock being quickly removed from the openness of the field and crowded into the claustrophobic isolation of the barn, and into individual pens.
Danny noticed his mother waiting for him. The woman was standing in front of her car, parked alongside the gravel grazing the pavement of the parking lot.
The woman’s eyes were haunted. She would try to act her best in front of her son, but the quiet worry in the whites on her eyes would play a treasonous act upon her. Her son would soon be able to discover her touching deception.
She would have had little choice but to pass the truth to him. The truth would be difficult to deliver, for a number of reasons...............
“Erica, my mom’s over there. I better go. See ya later.”, Danny said quietly.
“Bye, bye.”, Erica said.
Danny found himself bumping into the other children, trying to break free from the melee of aimless bodies. Some of the children stopped short, forcing the children behind to halt, to attempt not to knock over the kids in front. Danny finally escaped the storming herd and ran across the grass, to greet her mother.
Her mother betrayed her feelings with more than the gloomy luster of her eyes. She began to hug him, but disguised her emotion by guiding him with his shoulders to the back seat.........
........ Erica was on the parking lot, close to her bus. She noticed that a lot of teachers from the school were standing about close to the buses. The teachers were apparently watching the smoke, and talking about it in alternately shocked and hushed tones.
She slowly approached them, not willing to grab their attention. Erica wanted to see over the teachers’ shoulders. She thought that they seemed to be looking beyond the smoke and the fire.
Bravely, she stepped away from the children filing into the bus. She could hear snippets of verbal stanzas from the opinionated educators.
“..... they say that it’s people from the Middle East.......”
“It’s those Arabs......”
“..... they should be all held in quarentine......before their beliefs infect some poor hopeless saps in the inner city or something..........”
“....... back in 93, it was the same thing... although those were like firecrackers compared to this......”
“.... those people are savages..... all they think about is sending the wrath of ...... God.... or would it be Allah ....... to anyone who doesn’t live in a shack and carry an automatic weapon in the middle of the Arab wasteland...........”
Erica was confused. Her friend Danny was Arab. The word wasn’t something commonly tossed about when he and Erica met up on the playground, or went to each other’s houses. If you were to ask her what an Arab was, her answer would be that a kid she knew very well, named Danny, was an Arab. She didn’t know, she didn’t care, about the background of that term. It wasn’t important to her.
“......... Erica????”
Danny was an Arab. What would he have to do with this fire? Erica didn’t understand the lyrics to the teachers’ gloomy song..........
“Hey, Erica..... get on the bus, please... we’re about ready to leave......”
It was the bus driver, who noticed Erica’s deviation. Erica became aware of her duty, and entered the bus.
His car was not in the driveway.
Joanna didn’t see Richard as she entered the house. She knew exactly where he was. He was called into duty. Somehow, she believed it was unlikely that Richard could have avoided being torn away from his vacation.
The evidence. A piece of paper shred from the spindle of a notepad.
The paper said:
“Got called in. Don’t know when I’ll be home. Hope we’ll be able to get thru this alright. Richard.”
Joanna felt her eyes water. She suffered through an hour of traffic jams, and came home to an empty house. She looked up to the air, feeling wounded. Her family was scattered, at the worst possible moment. She felt alone, deserted.......
The television was still on -- the image was of a smoky inferno -- Manhattan became a secular vision of Hell.
Richard never even had time to shut off the television....... at least he never used the oven............
He probably sat on his chair all morning, pangs of guilt aching his limbs and his softer organs as the morning unfolded.
Poor man....
.......... or, more like, poor her. She knew he was safe. She knew where he was... but his lack of presence was something she did not want, not now. She wanted to feel secure in his arms, in his embrace.
She wandered, as if a zombie, to the living room, to get a better focus on her television. She sat down, allowing her eyes to dampen, her focus to warp. She never felt her defenses crumble like they did right now. Now that she was alone, in this house, with only the television images, the screams, the genuine images of smoke from outside, floating in her mind. She had ample time to focus on the sheer terror. The sheer empathy with those experiencing pain. Unheard of physical pain. How would it feel to see a jet approaching you, while sitting in a high-rise office building? And feeling it crash against you? Feeling the flames, the heat, against the flesh? Not being able to escape... unless jumping out of an 80th floor window, feeling the cold rush of air tearing your burning flesh from what held it together, as you approaching the inevitable, sickening thud of the pavement, was your idea of escape. Maybe it was........
Joanna could only sob. Her eyes were so wet and sticky that her eyes were unable to make a distinction of what was on the screen. It looked as if the building was no longer intact, as if it had disintegrated into a grainy, sandy, rocky mass. But surely, that wasn’t the case.... she cried many tears and didn’t think she could let out any more...........
The third chapter is here: http://www.epinions.com/content_3051921540
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Member: David Macdonald
Location: Prince Edward Island
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About Me:
Alice, a story in nine parts, posted on Sept 24, 2008 - http://www.epinions.com/content_5241348228
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