Posted by Ryan on September 6, 2005, 9:32 am, in reply to "Part 14: Life is Cheap" The English-teaching job was going very well for me, in addition to my part-time job with the charity organization. There were some morning classes and some evening classes. I was enjoying it, although it was so late in my term when I got started that I didn’t have very much time to accumulate much money from it. September 11, 2001. I was sitting at the meeting table waiting for them to get there, and the first executive who showed up came in and sat down, then started telling me what he had heard on the news in his car on the way over. “They said an airplane crashed into one of the World Trade Towers in New York....” I pictured a little Cessna or something and thought about how astronomical the odds were of any airplane crashing into a skyscraper. He continued: “...Then 18 minutes later another airplane crashed into the other tower.” I shook my head. “The odds... of two airplanes crashing into both towers....” “I think...” he replied, “...it has to be sabotage.” We were talking about it for a little bit, then I said, “Hey, why don’t we turn on the TV? A news story this big, it’s probably....” He turned around in his chair and switched on the TV behind him. It was alternating between images of the two towers spewing out smoke and flames, and the section of the Pentagon that had been knocked out and was still burning and smoking. The others arrived, and, as it ended up, we didn’t even have any class that day. We just sat and watched the news and talked about it the whole hour (though they still paid me for the hour). The local TV station was picking it up live by satellite from the United States, just broadcasting what the American newscasters were saying in English without even translating it. Every once in a while the voice-over of a local newsman would come on, just giving a brief description in the national language of what had happened, that some large passenger airplanes, believed to have been hijacked by terrorists, had crashed into the towers and the Pentagon, and that another had crashed out in some woods in the state of Pennsylvania, that they thought might be related to it. Hours later the other employees at the headquarters of the charity organization and I were sitting in front of the TV watching the towers still burning against the New York sky. More and more smoke kept spewing out. After some hours of it, we realized the amount of smoke coming out and engulfing the buildings wasn’t decreasing; it was increasing. The fire crews climbing up inside weren’t succeeding at getting it put out. Later I tried logging onto cnn.com to read a news report in English, but the website had been shut down. Maybe it had been run from inside one of the towers, and that was why. Several hours later I was watching the TV again, and by then smoke was engulfing the towers entirely. It was showing tiny images of people jumping out the windows from the highest floors, who had decided they would rather die from falling than by being burned in the fire. And finally, as I sat there horror-struck, mouth wide open, I saw the first tower, in huge billows of smoke, begin to split apart in all four directions, then the sections of it went tumbling down to the ground. It showed people on the streets below who had been standing there looking up watching the fire, now running for their lives as all kinds of smoke and debris came raining down on them from above. (I’ll bet some people must have been hit by some of that and killed.) Several hours later I logged onto some news website, I don’t remember which now. It was now morning in New York. I had slept intermittently for a few hours at a time in between watching the newscasts. A woman wrote something about, “This morning I’m going to look again at the New York skyline, but the towers won’t be there.” I thought, ‘She must be mistaken. I saw one of them go down, but they didn’t BOTH go down.’ Not long later I learned she wasn’t mistaken. They had both gone down. Finally, about a month and a half later, it was time for my term to end. I received an e-mail from headquarters in the U.S. telling me that it had been arranged for me to fly home. Sometimes charity organizations receive donations like that. There was probably some empty space aboard a flight, and the airline probably got a tax break for donating a service to a charitable organization. Who knows, 9-11 and the problem of fewer people flying for fear of terrorist hijackings may have had something to do with that. I wrapped up my work, went around and said my good-byes to the people I had gotten to know, promising them that I was going to return. I remember when I told N—— that my term was almost up, and that I would shortly be going back to the United States, the sad look she made. I remember thinking how she was a very kind-hearted girl, and she was very beautiful too; so pure, wholesome and clean-minded. But I said to myself she was only a friend, and that was all she was going to be. Not only did I have my girlfriend back home, but her personality just didn’t seem like it was matched, or was entirely compatible, to mine. That was what I thought about N——. If someone had told me back then that a little less than a year later, my penis would be going in her vagina, I’d have been hard-pressed to believe them. It wouldn’t have seemed like a very realistic fantasy. Oh, she was a beautiful girl. But as of yet, I was still in love with Lynnette back home. Then the time came. I packed my bags, they took me to the airport, we found my flight, I got on it and took the long flight to the next airport, then changed planes and flew the rest of the way home. But now, looking back on it, if I had known everything I was going to be coming home to, I probably would’ve decided just to stay there instead.
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(Originally posted November 7, 2003, 7:00 pm) 
