by Brett Steelman ('14)
I was nine and on a blacktop. School hadn’t started yet at Northwood Elementary. On the side of the basketball court, straddling the freshly-painted white sideline, I watched my classmates dunk on the lowered basketball hoops. Some made it, some didn’t. Those who made their dunk hung from the rim. Suspended. Not even the tips of their blue knock-off Jordan’s from Payless touched the ground. I thought it was ungodly.
The night prior the first frost settled on the surfaces of Ames, Iowa. It was a bit early, and “unexpected,” my mom told me. On every tip of grass was a silver freckle of ice. It was like looking over the top of a field of old people. Branches of trees were lined with frost, too, and their leaves. Silver linings. Regularly the backboards of the basketball hoops on the playground were see-through. Clear. But that morning they weren’t. Wings of frost stretched across their glass. I couldn’t see through to the other side.
So it was chilly, wasn’t forty degrees yet, and of course no elementary schooler dresses suitably for cool weather—besides, we all thought it was going to warm up anyway. The bell hadn’t sounded yet for school to start. At 8:05 a.m. the bell would go off. At 8:03 a sixth-grader ran from where his mom dropped him off in their tan minivan and announced to the playground a terrorist attack happened in New York: I stood over the sideline, my classmates were suspended from rims, lines of frost stretched across the court, and we all were underdressed. Unprepared. No kid stopped playing. No kid knew what terror was.
I was nine and on a blacktop. School hadn’t started yet at Northwood Elementary. On the side of the basketball court, straddling the freshly-painted white sideline, I watched my classmates dunk on the lowered basketball hoops. Some made it, some didn’t. Those who made their dunk hung from the rim. Suspended. Not even the tips of their blue knock-off Jordan’s from Payless touched the ground. I thought it was ungodly.
The night prior the first frost settled on the surfaces of Ames, Iowa. It was a bit early, and “unexpected,” my mom told me. On every tip of grass was a silver freckle of ice. It was like looking over the top of a field of old people. Branches of trees were lined with frost, too, and their leaves. Silver linings. Regularly the backboards of the basketball hoops on the playground were see-through. Clear. But that morning they weren’t. Wings of frost stretched across their glass. I couldn’t see through to the other side.
So it was chilly, wasn’t forty degrees yet, and of course no elementary schooler dresses suitably for cool weather—besides, we all thought it was going to warm up anyway. The bell hadn’t sounded yet for school to start. At 8:05 a.m. the bell would go off. At 8:03 a sixth-grader ran from where his mom dropped him off in their tan minivan and announced to the playground a terrorist attack happened in New York: I stood over the sideline, my classmates were suspended from rims, lines of frost stretched across the court, and we all were underdressed. Unprepared. No kid stopped playing. No kid knew what terror was.
That day marks my memory greasily and it marked literature, both American and global, similarly. 9/11 was a point of finishing and starting. Benjamin Percy, a large and growing name in the community of fiction, said at his reading at Dragonfly Books in Decorah in September that his newest novel Red Moon (May 2013) is a post-apocalyptic 9/11 novel. This makes sense: battling societies, conflicting world paradigms, and a fear of one becoming the other. It is a hint that the first scene of his novel takes place on a plane, where a lycan slaughters everyone but the pilots and the protagonist, who saves himself by playing dead underneath a dead body. How much bigger of a hint can we get? He gives us a glimpse of what terrorism inside a plane might look like and its murder.
At his reading Percy mentioned Cormac McCarthy, who since 1965 has delivered works of fiction that set the new standard for the genre; a writer second to none. McCarthy’s most recent novel The Road (2006) is about a boy and his father who try to make it to the coast after the Event, the catalyst of the post apocalyptic setting. They live in a world where cannibalism is the towering fear, where starvation is solved by an unopened Coca-Cola can, where people kill with bows and arrows, where all of your possessions fit inside a shopping cart, and where lines are drawn in society between the good ones and the bad. The good carry the fire. McCarthy’s world in the novel is bleak and morbid, but the boy and his father are moving on and that is the goal. Isn’t that the goal? It is a grounded work.
Another piece of fiction, also by a McCarthy (unrelated to Cormac), is Remainder (2011) by the British novelist Tom McCarthy. His protagonist, an unnamed man, was hit on the head by a falling piece of debris, “Technology. Parts, bits”, and about his accident he can say nothing. The narrative, told by the protagonist, is about his reorganizing and reassembling of the world he inhabits so that he can get back to where he was before the accident. He hires an unlimited amount of people to staff his reenactments and play them out. It is a theatrical work: a series of stagings take place so that the protagonist can feel what it was like to be real again. Authenticity. This novel comments on memory and the residue of memory: the remainders. The man does not have whole memories from before the accident. His slate was almost wiped clean. What the hell can we work with if we don’t remember?
Fiction is an immersive art form in which people’s lives are realized as well as their position in this world. As a reader we get to observe that people are still experiencing trauma, moving on from the Event, and reorganizing their lives after it. No single work will be able to fully embody today’s overwhelming aftermath. The pieces are too scattered, dispersed and deep. But each work lends bearing.
Other works of in the vein of post-apocalyptic fiction include: Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Don Delillo’s Falling Man, and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. All of these works are about people working with what they have either during a catastrophe or just after one. It is also important to acknowledge today’s cinema. How many superhero movies came out in the last decade and are still coming out? The Lord of the Rings trilogy slayed the silver screen. Gravity, the movie with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, just came out. It is super recent and relevant: it is about one person’s getting back.
Now I am twenty-one. A couple of weeks ago I saw for the first time some footage of that day in September in 2001, footage of the second plane crashing into the south tower. I probably should have looked into it years ago. The terror came from beyond the margins and dismantled an American, and one might say a global, foundation. Leaving a void. Now that I am older and more immersed in modern culture, I should have more bearing and understanding. But no. I still rely on my memories from when I was nine on that blacktop. Although, I will say: I understand today that terror bleeds. Our politics, our billfolds, our schools, and our relationships are stained because of the permeating effects of the terrorism that day. We owe writers today like Benjamin Percy and Cormac and Tom McCarthy for elaborating on the individual’s struggle. Because in these people we see ourselves. With these stories in mind, maybe we can get somewhere.
At his reading Percy mentioned Cormac McCarthy, who since 1965 has delivered works of fiction that set the new standard for the genre; a writer second to none. McCarthy’s most recent novel The Road (2006) is about a boy and his father who try to make it to the coast after the Event, the catalyst of the post apocalyptic setting. They live in a world where cannibalism is the towering fear, where starvation is solved by an unopened Coca-Cola can, where people kill with bows and arrows, where all of your possessions fit inside a shopping cart, and where lines are drawn in society between the good ones and the bad. The good carry the fire. McCarthy’s world in the novel is bleak and morbid, but the boy and his father are moving on and that is the goal. Isn’t that the goal? It is a grounded work.
Another piece of fiction, also by a McCarthy (unrelated to Cormac), is Remainder (2011) by the British novelist Tom McCarthy. His protagonist, an unnamed man, was hit on the head by a falling piece of debris, “Technology. Parts, bits”, and about his accident he can say nothing. The narrative, told by the protagonist, is about his reorganizing and reassembling of the world he inhabits so that he can get back to where he was before the accident. He hires an unlimited amount of people to staff his reenactments and play them out. It is a theatrical work: a series of stagings take place so that the protagonist can feel what it was like to be real again. Authenticity. This novel comments on memory and the residue of memory: the remainders. The man does not have whole memories from before the accident. His slate was almost wiped clean. What the hell can we work with if we don’t remember?
Fiction is an immersive art form in which people’s lives are realized as well as their position in this world. As a reader we get to observe that people are still experiencing trauma, moving on from the Event, and reorganizing their lives after it. No single work will be able to fully embody today’s overwhelming aftermath. The pieces are too scattered, dispersed and deep. But each work lends bearing.
Other works of in the vein of post-apocalyptic fiction include: Jay McInerney’s The Good Life, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Don Delillo’s Falling Man, and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. All of these works are about people working with what they have either during a catastrophe or just after one. It is also important to acknowledge today’s cinema. How many superhero movies came out in the last decade and are still coming out? The Lord of the Rings trilogy slayed the silver screen. Gravity, the movie with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, just came out. It is super recent and relevant: it is about one person’s getting back.
Now I am twenty-one. A couple of weeks ago I saw for the first time some footage of that day in September in 2001, footage of the second plane crashing into the south tower. I probably should have looked into it years ago. The terror came from beyond the margins and dismantled an American, and one might say a global, foundation. Leaving a void. Now that I am older and more immersed in modern culture, I should have more bearing and understanding. But no. I still rely on my memories from when I was nine on that blacktop. Although, I will say: I understand today that terror bleeds. Our politics, our billfolds, our schools, and our relationships are stained because of the permeating effects of the terrorism that day. We owe writers today like Benjamin Percy and Cormac and Tom McCarthy for elaborating on the individual’s struggle. Because in these people we see ourselves. With these stories in mind, maybe we can get somewhere.