It’s August 28, the second week of the semester, and I am walking to the grocery store when the firetrucks blast down Highway 54 toward the University of North Carolina, where I teach. Cops follow. Siren after siren.
The official text comes a few minutes later. “Alert Carolina! Emergency: Armed, dangerous person on or near campus. Go inside now; avoid windows.”
The university’s updates arrive slowly, so rumors spread. I check Twitter. I get texts. A guy killing people in the quad. Multiple dead in the Genome Science Center. Cops in a firefight. A full-blown massacre. Like Virginia Tech or Columbine or Parkland. It’s finally come for us, I think, and I am preparing to lose friends and students.
My wife texts, “You’re not there, right?”
My kid’s elementary school is behind the grocery store. That morning, I’d dropped him off and he was wearing a white t-shirt he loves but is badly stained. He’s just started the first grade. He told me he was excited about math and that he planned on playing basketball during recess. Instead, he stays inside all day when his school goes into a “soft lockdown.” Just in case the violence spreads, they imply. The university is a little over a mile away. They tell the kids there’s a wild animal outside. Later, my son says he was disappointed he didn’t get to see it.
In the end, it’s not a massacre. A graduate student shot his professor. In the days that follow, we read about how the victim was a great man and husband and father and the lives of the people who loved him are forever altered. We don’t say it out loud, but we’re relieved. At a certain point – when you’ve imagined dozens dead – you’ll take one.
***
The next time, I’m in the hallway talking to coworkers when people begin running but there’s no alert yet, just people yelling “active shooter” so I head to my office along with a new staff member who doesn’t know where to go because she’s in her early 20s and has only been here a month. It’s September 13th.
I text my wife. “Active shooter. I’m in my office. I’m fine.”
For over an hour, the staff member and I sit in my office, in the dark. I check Twitter. A gunman at the student union. Maybe two hundred yards away.
The new staff member is very quiet. I tell her to sit away from the window. I tell her the updates I’m hearing. She is shaky but stoic. There are no tears, no panic as far as I can tell. Our faces are lit by the soft glow of our phones.
There are fewer rumors this time. Perhaps it’s because we’re chastened by all the falsehoods spread the last time or maybe we’re beginning to get used to it. I want to ask the new staff member what it was like growing up with active shooting drills and going to school during a time when you learn to walk into a classroom and plan for where you’ll hide. My first grader has to do this, I want to tell her. They drill this into him, annually. He has to sit in a dark, locked room, far from windows, curled up really small, to hide from “the bad guys.”
I don’t say any of this to her, though. I’m the grown-up, I tell myself, and I force myself to remain absolutely calm. I don’t want her to panic or, if I’m honest with myself, for her to see me panic.
Later, we find out that an angry boyfriend came into the bagel shop and pointed a gun. No one was hurt.
That afternoon I pick up my son. He is wearing the green t-shirt with a sheep on it that I got him when I was teaching a study-abroad course in Ireland a few months earlier. I daydream of moving there. I imagine my son developing a slight accent and learning to love Gaelic football and never being afraid to approach a police officer because in Ireland even the cops don’t carry guns. I see myself walking him to school, where the doors are wide open, and I forget to memorize his outfit because I don’t worry about identifying his body.
In my classroom in Galway, there is a wall entirely made up of windows where we looked out at a parking lot and a row of trees siding up next to the River Corrib. My American students say that no one would ever build a classroom like this back home. Nowhere to hide.
Michael Keenan Gutierrez is the author of The Swill and The Trench Angel and earned degrees from UCLA, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of New Hampshire. His work has been published in The Rumpus, The Sonora Review, The Guardian, The Delmarva Review, The Collagist (now The Rupture), The Pisgah Review, Untoward, The Boiler, and Public Books. His screenplay, The Granite State, was a finalist at the Austin Film Festival and he has received fellowships from The University of Houston and the New York Public Library. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Chris Phan
Chilling, understated but powerful.
Really moving piece, and I love your tone. I’m not a parent and didn’t grow up in the US, but I felt this all the same.
Oh this is really good. I especially appreciate the time stamps so we are grounded from the the opening sentence. Also the pacing is just right, leading us slowly through the different events and giving us relief with each conclusion. The ongoing theme of the son’s clothing and colors he’s wearing is heartbreaking (“I don’t worry about identifying his body”) and the interiority of the narrator works so well – we can’t help but like and respect his character. This essay is relatable on so many levels and beautifully written. I’d love to read more work by Michael.