Did you hear?"
Yes. We all did.
The first sound was a knock on the bedroom door - soft, tentative - as though it could simultaneously wake the intended person while allowing the other roommate to sleep.
Next, the voice inside your own head: It's only 9:30 a.m. ... don't have class until 11 ... why am I being woken up?
Because. Because your Mom says as you are handed the phone: Turn on the news.
Then you hear why - in that same there's-been-an-accident tone mixed with an inflection of calm gravity that parents always know how to use.
Oh, God - the first of many invocations of that holy name during that long, long day.
You hang up and the phone clicks with an unrealized finality. If only you knew how long it would be before you could re-establish that voice connection again.
In between now and then lay hours of dial tones, busy signals and the sing-song pitch of one plus the area code plus another seven digits - 10 numbers that boiled down into the short syllabic mantra of mom, dad, brother, sister, friend: safe?
So until you could get through, until Sprint or AT&T or SunCom gave in to your relentless button-pushing, you watched. And listened.
Oddly enough, those first images were devoid of sound.
As if steel, concrete, glass, drywall, business suits, high heels, wristwatches and socks crashed, exploded and collapsed in symphonic silence.
No camera or boom microphone could capture it. No Oscar-winning maestro could have dreamed it up.
The screams were silent, too. Those horrible, gasping, choking, desperate, scared screams were glazed over with teleprompter-trained news speech.
So you clung to those voices instead. You didn't think about the screams, only the one-sided dialogue of broadcast-land where objectivity overrides emotion, but where dire concern still trumps objectivity.
Paradox of sound and silence
At some point on Tuesday's timeline a strange shift occurred - no more strange, but perhaps more tangible - than anything else that occurred via television, radio or Internet. Here, in your apartment, on the Lawn, in Newcomb, familiar words took on new sounds and familiar sounds took on new meanings.
When would you hear the words "World Trade Center" or "Pentagon" or "hijacked" or "terrorism" without "September 11" resonating in your whole body?
When would laughter, no matter how benign, not sound harsh, grating and disrespectful during this period of mourning?
When would a complaint not sound trite and unimportant?
Here, in your dorm, on your porch, in your church, nowhere was loud enough, nowhere was silent enough, to convey the enormity of grief, shock and anger shouldered by the entire nation.
A strange contrast between noise and silence arose.
For the remainder of the week, blaring TVs and FM radio stations thumped out the jarring bass in the background. But instead, your ear craved updates and special reports.
Walking through Grounds, sound-bites of conversations you overheard registered with the rhythmic repetitiveness of d
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