Walking through the opened door, I mustered a crisp and confident good morning. As I placed my bag on the desk, I took out a piece of chalk from my bag, and wrote my name along with the course code on the blackboard. Taking out the student list, I told the half-empty room,
“My name is Professor Hiraldo and this is College Composition and Research. I will be your professor for the semester.”
I walked around the instructor’s desk and sat on the front edge. Stretching a nervous smile, after looking at the wrist watch I used to wear, I informed the students,
“Let’s wait ten minutes to give your classmates time to arrive.”
I knew the first day of class was marked by many latecomers, especially in a freshman course like English 101. Every September, on college campuses all over America, fresh arrivals tried to find their way through strange corridors to their new classrooms. One student, an enthusiastic and brilliant young black mother, who would become that first semester a whirlwind of intellectual energy and curiosity amidst a tranquil sea of indifference, raised her hand to ask,
“Professor, did you hear the news?”
I replied,
“Yes, a plane crashed into the Twin Towers.”
***
For over a decade, I had worked to become a college professor. I switched from a Communications major in my sophomore year after realizing that to succeed in that field I needed to schmooze and be outgoing in a manner I couldn’t muster. My freshman English professor had encouraged me in the idea of becoming a professor if I wanted to write. He argued that the pay was good, the teaching load was light, and one had the time and duty to write. At eighteen, I didn’t know that while his was a reasonable depiction of life for a tenured professor at an institution like Boston College, it ignored the precarious existence of those who do most of the teaching in America’s higher education institutions, adjuncts. This view of professoriate also erased Community Colleges, those working-class institutions of higher education where even tenured full professors have a heavy teaching load and barely time to think, much less write. Still, that conversation provided me with purpose. I was going to be an English professor.
The journey to becoming a college professor was riddled with happenstance, deviations that could have changed the destination. These points of possible derailment included one terrible year of teaching at my old high school in the South Bronx after the top tier graduate programs my professors had encouraged me into applying for had rejected me. My professors, all well-meaning white males who went beyond the call of duty to help me, were convinced that my decent GPA and writing skills combined with my clichéd hardscrabble Latino background would get me into programs like those of Yale or Chicago University. But true to my socio-economic background, my GRE scores, like my SAT’s before, were middling at best. Chastened, I applied to more realistic programs, receiving in 1994 a small teaching fellowship to attend a mid-level graduate program out in Long Island.
I spent five years of penury out there, intermittently fantasizing about dropping out and joining the military. When I completed my dissertation, I moved back to New York City. Heeding the advice of my graduate program director, who had welcomed us by describing how tight and precarious the job market was and strongly recommending that if we hadn’t found a job within two years of completing our dissertations we should give up on the prospect, I applied one last time for an academic job in the Spring of 2001. To my surprise, by the end of the summer, I had been hired as an Assistant Professor at a community college within the City University of New York.
***
That crisp Autumn morning, as I stepped out of my gentrifying building on 172nd street and St. Nicholas Avenue, my dream was about to become reality. A path that had begun during the spring semester of my freshman year in college had finally reached its destination. I stepped into the Arab smoke shop next door. The cover page of the Daily News had pictures of the big primary day. Mark Green was the predicted winner in the Democratic primary and Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire newcomer to politics, had the Republican nomination already locked up with the endorsement of incumbent Ruddy Giuliani. After handing over two quarters, I folded the paper under my arm and continued towards the C line entrance of the large, shabby 168th street station. My steps were deliberate. More than the first day of teaching, it was the first day of a new life, one I had struggled for eleven years to reach. Yet, I was not nervous. I couldn’t unplaster the smile off my face. The clear blue skies and the autumn air enveloping my descent on the sloping blocks of upper Manhattan presented a fortuitous omen.
***
I don’t remember the train ride. I don’t recall reading the paper. I don’t remember getting into my office or preparing to teach my 9:15 AM class. What I remember is being at the school early enough to take the forms needed for direct deposit to Payroll. An elderly Latina at the front desk had a small radio with metal antenna playing 1010 WINS on low volume. I had stepped into one comfortingly anachronistic scene. Portable radios were still common then, but already seemed like relics. 1010 WINS, the all-news station, took me back to my K through 12 years when my father would pick me up from school every day in his livery cab, radio always tuned to the news. The lady took my documents to one of the back offices and while I could barely make out what the newscaster was saying over the ambient noises of a work area, it was clear something extremely serious was taking place. She returned to tell me that everything would be in place for my first paycheck.
I hesitated, overcoming my reluctance for small talk by asking,
“What’s going on?”
She explained,
“A plane hit the World Trade Center.”
I asked,
“Was it a small one?,” confusing the B-25 Bomber that crashed into the Empire State building in 1945 with a Cessna.
The lady shrugged and declared with an impassive expression,
“I don’t think so.”
Seeing as no more information would be forthcoming, I shook off my confusion, thanked her, and turned to go teach.
***
When I broke the news of the plane crash, many students gasped, and murmurs filled the half empty classroom. Cellphones were not ubiquitous at the time. Like me, most students had none. A very few had black or grey flip tops with a small screen that only received written texts, glorified pagers. I tried to assuage the class and assert my intellectual authority by speculating,
“The plane was probably a Cessna, like the one that crashed into the Empire State Building a long time ago.”
A Latino student with a cellphone corrected me by explaining that it was a big, commercial airliner that had crashed into the towers. A loud gasp went through the room again. Incredulous, I asked him,
“How do you know?”
He explained that his mother had just texted him the information. Students raised their voices. Many started talking to the young oracle sitting in their midst, as impressed with his ability to keep in touch with the outside world as they were concerned with what was going on out there. The young mother raised her hand again and asked,
“Professor can we cancel the class? I am worried about my kids.”
There is sometimes a flimsy authoritarian resolve demonstrated by those who have positions of middling power and feel insecure in their roles. The certainty of being undeserving leads us to overestimate how much power we indeed have, and how much control we exercise over circumstances. Besides, I was as confused as millions of others at that moment. I insisted on my day one plan of having us introduce ourselves to each other and of introducing the class to the basic outline of the course. I promised that in any case I was going to dismiss them early on the first day.
As things unfolded, I quickly realized I had made a mistake. The students were supposed to converse and find three things to share about their partners with the entire class. But I mostly overheard talk about the plane crash. When students reported out of their pairings to introduce their partners, there were moments of embarrassment as there always are with these first day activities. But a particular low point came when two other female students expressed a desire to go because they were worried for loved ones in the city. One for a kid of her own; the other for her younger siblings in junior high school. Confused, I asked if anyone had relatives or loved ones in the World Trade Center area. When no one responded, I wondered out loud why everyone was so worried for the well-being of friends and relatives over a plane accident. A student who had arrived late chimed in,
“Sir, there were two planes that hit. They are saying it is a terrorist attack.”
Fending off renewed gasps and murmurs, I pleaded with the students to let me distribute the department’s introduction sheet as well as my syllabus. I had wanted to go over these documents with them, but finally overwhelmed by the nervous energy in the room, I only handed them out. I asked the students to read the documents for homework and promised to go over crucial information when we met again in two days. Less than an hour after I had arrived, I stood at my desk, watching the students leave. Most had expressions of relief, but not exactly the joyous smiles students usually exhibit when a class is unexpectedly cut short. A couple of them stayed behind. They had typical questions, like how many papers they would have to write, how long each would be, and how much of the textbook they actually had to read. These students were seeking refuge from a budding horror in mundane concerns.
***
As I made my way to the English department, the corridors were streaming with shock and confusion. My attention was drawn to a tall, slender, middle-aged woman with a denim rag on her head, more hippie style than devotional display. She spoke so loudly to the smaller, younger, dark-skinned woman walking impassively next to her that it seemed as if the older hippie was berating the younger South Asian. She was almost screaming,
“Don’t you understand we are under attack! We are under attack here! Under attack!”
She punctuated every iteration of “attack” by smacking her right knuckles into her left palm. I would come to know her later as Donna, the mellow, long-time assistant to Brett, the even more mellow long-time director of the school’s Writing Center. I would also come to re-interpret that scene as Donna expressing her frustration with Brett to the young lady. It came to me years after from a colleague I was dating that until the school was officially closed later on that day, Brett was still planning to go on with the Writing Center staff meeting that took place on the first day of every semester.
***
When I got to my office, I called Kelly, a colleague from my previous job at a small publisher. Their offices where located in the Flat Iron district. I believed she would have a better read on what was going on than those of us in Long Island City. She sounded horrified as she explained what the office had seen. From a south window, they had witnessed one of the twin towers collapse. My reaction was an incredulous,
“That can’t be!” At this, she expressed gentle frustration and told me to find a news source.
We hung up and I finally moved the mouse on my clunky, desktop computer, awakening the screen. I stared for a while in disbelief. I could not make sense of what I was seeing. On the Yahoo page, a picture of the second tower collapsing.
I walked to the reception area where the department’s support staff sits, and asked of no one in particular,
“What’s going on?”
Lenore, one of the few colleagues who treated me with any friendliness during my first year at the school, told me while not taking her eyes from the computer screen,
“We are being attacked everywhere. New York, Washington. One plane hit the Pentagon and they are trying to find planes that are headed for the White House and the Capitol. Though some are saying the Capitol building was already hit.”
I must have come across like that frustrating character in every horror or mass destruction movie who refuses to believe the worst and most accurate interpretation of what is happening until it is far too late to escape. I simply said,
“That can’t be” […?]
It’s hard to punctuate that statement. Part of me was in disbelief, thinking that when something bad is happening, too many of us will tend to make it sound as if something even worse is taking place. But another part of me was simply asking, can something like this really be happening? How many planes could possibly have been hijacked to hit all the targets I had heard people speculating about as I walked to my office? These included the new Staples Center in Los Angles and the Sears Tower in Chicago. Lenore responded with a sharp rebuke,
“Well, it is! It’s happening all over!”
I kept quiet. I couldn’t blame her.
In normal times, I tend to believe the worst about people and circumstances. But when actual tragedy strikes I have a tendency towards a restfulness that can be confused with indifference. I reveal a skepticism towards the worst interpretations that instead of being encouraged as a rare sign of optimism by those who know me gets rejected as a manifestation of grave naiveté. Depending on who you are, dear reader, I could be the calm person you want around to lead you out of an emergency or the idiot you quickly leave behind because you are certain something large will eventually land where he stands, ruminating.
***
I went back silently to my office to gather my things. I only had one class to teach that day and I was sure no one would come to my office hours on the first day, certainly not on that first day. As I returned to the department’s reception area, a group of professors stood around talking quietly. Some I knew. Others I was introduced to. They told me I shouldn’t leave because the trains were not running. There was talk of faculty, staff, and students having to sleep on cots in the atrium. Though I found this improbable, and desperately hoped it wouldn’t be so, dreading that my first day of work would extend into an overnight stay, I was sensible enough this time to stay quiet. We stood and sat on the small sofa where students usually wait to be received by a recalcitrant staff member or a busy professor. Faculty from other departments wondered in as well. We made small talk about the event. When they found out it was my first day at work, they asked me about how the class had gone, offering a lifeline of normality in a sea of surrealist horror.
***
Sometime after 12:00 PM, after more than an hour of discussion about what had happened, where we would sleep, and who lived close enough to walk home, we were told by a school security guard making the rounds that the trains were running. A small group of us took the elevated number 7 line into Manhattan. Around Queens Borough Plaza, we could see in the distance two pillars of smoke where the Twin Towers had stood that morning. When I said goodbye to the last of my colleagues at Times Square, I worked my way through enormous crowds to get the Uptown 1. The platform and the subway car I eventually got into were dangerously packed. A sign of alarm, a rush, a stampede could have caused further chaos and death in many similarly crowded locations all over the city. But the usual hustle and bustle of New York subway crowds, let alone their surface hostility, were completely absent. People made way for each other, whispering excuse me, please, and thank you. They didn’t seem to mind the occasional rub from a backpack, shoulder, or elbow. New Yorkers had been terrified into politeness.
When the train crawled its way into the 96 street Broadway station, the conductor announced that this would be the last stop and those wishing to go further uptown could avail themselves of any MTA bus for free. No one grumbled. I walked uptown, looking at the crowded bus stops and the packed buses that did or did not stop, depending on whether the driver had anyone to let out. My plan was to walk until I saw a bus stop that did not look as crowded as they usually do in movies depicting apocalyptic disasters. But I never found one. So I just kept walking.
***
The mind is an ocean. Its contents, perceptions and thoughts, in constant motion. Some are ripples leaving little trace behind. Others submerge us, overwhelming our concentration for hours, days, if not years or on rare occasions, a life time. These, I guess, are what we commonly call obsessions or, more positively, goals. Yet other thoughts we can fight, try to dispel, before they fully form. I arrived at my building at 3:45 PM. The small, narrow lobby was empty as usual. The elevator was there. Like the empty lobby, that also was a familiar sight in my building. Gentrifiers don’t loiter. At least, not until the new neighborhood is safe. A thought had been brewing amidst the confusion, the packed subways and buses, the sights of crowds walking on sidewalks and curbsides with distant, stunned expressions. A monstrous self-concern struggled for release. Throughout much of the day, this germ manifested as tightness on my chest. The idea now sought articulation. I got into the tight, upright rectangular box. Pressing the number four button, I stared at the dirty floor. The doors creaked close. As the elevator rose, I shook my head and thought, “Don’t make this about you. This is not an omen. This is not about you.”
The suffering of millions would not be turned to self-involved foreboding over the path that now stretched before me. I would not countenance the insane thought that my nation’s tragedy was the penalty for a dream fulfilled. I had worked on becoming a professor diligently, if not obsessively, going from GRE preparations to two phases of multiple graduate program applications, to the writing of seminar papers semester after semester, and years of exam preparations and dissertation writing in the final phases of my Ph.D. program. These tasks were completed throughout my twenties. While many friends initiated careers and travel adventures, and a few even started families, there were spans of time, months bleeding into years, where I sat in dingy rooms reading and writing, avoiding contact with family and friends. I would not indulge speculation about an alternate universe where I did not pursue this career path with such single-mindedness and this date had no great significance for me and millions of others. The propensity to solipsism that would have me interpret tragic events as punishment for my obsession or determination was one that I would continuously fight as my mother died in 2002, my father followed in 2004, and my own health declined in the years to come. But the moment when the small TV in my studio apartment displayed the full carnage in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, thoughts about me dissipated.