Saviors and monsters

I woke up with rapping and beeping, the stereo percussion of the morning. I opened my eyes and saw dim gray light. My dad was standing in my doorway.

“Carli.”

“Yeah?”

“The U.S. is under terrorist attack.”

“Heh?”

It was early—too early for history to make sense. But on TV, it was full-blown day. New York had been awake for some time, though I supposed it seemed like a dream world there or, as we told ourselves incredulously again and again, a movie. Something that happens only in a movie.

I watched the first tower collapse on TV. Driving to Truckee Meadows Community College to teach an 8 a.m. English class—it was my first semester as a teacher—I heard shaky voices on a radio morning show tell their listeners the other tower had gone down. Something about seeing New York in terror and on fire through the eyes of someone else, experiencing that emotion through the voices of usually flippant radio show hosts, made my heart understand what my head could not.

It was my third week teaching, and in class we’d been talking about lost innocence, studying authors who wrote about their childhoods dissolving. We read from Langston Hughes. In a piece titled “Salvation,” Hughes remembers how, at age 13, he came to be “saved"—though the moment of his salvation turned out to be the very moment he lost his faith. He waited for Jesus to come, Jesus didn’t come, and without God there in the flesh, there was nothing to do but disbelieve.

“I was left all alone on the mourners’ bench,” Hughes writes. “… The whole congregation prayed for me alone in a mighty wail of moans and voices. And I kept waiting serenely for Jesus, waiting, waiting—but he didn’t come.”

The students, new to college, and I, new to teaching—I think we all felt like something had been lost. There in the classroom, with our faces looking, as one student put it, “quiet and sullen,” I felt a strong undercurrent of disbelief. We’d all been written into the script of some apocalyptic flick in which the world starts burning and no one knows why.

I asked my students to write about it.

“The radio sounded like a movie review,” wrote one student. “I kept listening. To my dismay, I found out it wasn’t.”

“In the first tower that was hit, there was a big hole in the side,” wrote another student. “It looked like in those Godzilla movies, when the monster scratches a building.”

In this case, the monster was harder to imagine, a shadow. In fact, he had no face at all at first—and a faceless enemy is the scariest. The monsters were not the hijackers; the monster was not a governmental organization. If we were losing our innocence, we didn’t know to whom we were losing it; if we were losing faith, we seemed unable to remember whom we’d been trusting in.

That afternoon, I drove to my part-time job at a department store. Employees who’d been there since five that morning, prepping for a busy day, knew only the bare bones of the story, because management had decided the radio would be too distracting to employees. Inventory was coming up, and things had to be in order.

Of course, the world wasn’t in order.

Later that week, I interviewed Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, over the phone. I was writing an article on the Great Basin Book Festival, for which Banks was to be keynote speaker. Banks had been in New York on Sept. 11, watching the whole thing unfold from the airport, where he was waiting for a flight. With power outages and busy phone lines, those at the airport knew nothing of the disaster but what was before their eyes. Banks called his wife in upstate New York on his cell phone; she told him what was on the news. He narrated the information to those around him.

“It was very postmodern,” he told me.

Banks said he believes that, in any narrative, the villain’s account is as important as the victim’s in understanding the whole story.

“We’re all capable of terrible deeds, and we’re all capable of noble deeds,” he said. “You can’t tell the human story unless you tell both.”

It’s something our president won’t do, he added.

By that time last September, shock was turning to anger. The hunt for the evil-doers was on. We were determined to label terror, give it a face, then erase that face from our hitherto peaceful, organized society. In Hughes’ narrative, 13-year-old Langston needed to see a savior in the flesh. We need a fleshly enemy.

We’re all capable of terrible deeds, and we’re all capable of noble deeds.

The weekend after Sept. 11, I was in California for a wedding. On Sunday morning, I went to a Bay Area church, where a beautiful, powerful African-American preacher got down on her knees before the small congregation and wept. She told us, “Before I get angry, before I assign blame, I have to be in a place where I can say, ‘Lord how have I been a part of this? How am I to blame?’

“And in that place, there is power.”

I felt the tears well.

To believe in salvation, it helps to believe there is a monster in the dark from whom you need to be saved. You can invent one if you must. In the last few months, I heard a quote that goes something like, “Maturity means learning to live with ambiguity.” That means, sometimes, living in chaos. And chaos, in turn, can feel a lot like loss of faith.

After Sept. 11, I found it harder to believe in big things—leaders, “homeland security,” the very concept of justice. Somehow, though, it was easy to believe in small things: a firefighter’s courage, the beauty of a women’s prayer spoken aloud with a trembling voice. The shivers you get when you see a pastor in tears at the altar, praying for peace.

And slowly it becomes easier to remember that you can’t tell the big stories without understanding the little stories, and that you can’t have faith in the big things again until you learn to believe in the power of the small ones.

And, hardest of all, maybe we need to learn that the monster scratching at the building has a story too, and we are part of it.