On Friday, December 11, 1992, a blizzard buried the Simon’s Rock of Bard College campus in snow and part of this weekend before finals students spent without electricity, using flashlights to read, worrying that they'd never regain the use of their computers before their papers were due. The maintenance crew plowed and shoveled the driveway. The recreation committee cleared the pond for skating. The madrigal choir rehearsed for Monday's Christmas concert. When Monday came, I drove onto campus just as I had so many times before. Inside Hall College Center students milled about their mailboxes; Dianne smiled behind her glass partition as she answered the switchboard; my colleagues chatted near the stairs. The term was nearly over. Again the familiar structure offered us assurance that we could work hard and then rest. The lectures, papers, exams, and office hours inevitably gave way to a month of cleared space and time. I was going to paint my kitchen and write at home. Wendy was finally going to get some sleep. Nacunan was going to visit his mother in Argentina, and then finish the novel he had written last year while on sabbatical in Paris. We all had plans that allowed us an escape from the role of professor. 

That night, the Christmas concert started at 8:30. Nacunan had not gone home yet because he was having final meetings with a few students to talk about essay topics. Most of the students were at the theater listening to the madrigals; only a handful bothered to study in the library or the dorms for Tuesday's final exams. Sometime around nine, Nacunan gathered his students' papers together, stuffed them in his leather backpack, climbed into his new blue Ford Festiva, turned on his favorite Calypso music full volume, and headed home, down the long, dirt driveway toward the inviting guardhouse. Of course he didn't know that Wayne, a student he had never had, was waiting outside of the guardhouse with a semi-automatic he had bought at a local gun shop, loaded with ammunition he had ordered and had picked up that day at mail call. Of course he didn't know that Wayne had just shot the new, friendly, plump guard in her stomach and that he would fire his gun into the driver's side window of the Festiva. The bullet traveled through Nacunan's head, and he bled to death, listening to Calypso beside the frozen duck pond. 

Inside the library, students heard the noise, and a few ran out into the night to investigate. Wayne shot one of them as well, and the boy, Galen, turned, ran back into the library, collapsed, and died slowly, hiding next to the circulation desk, holding the hand of Rose, who hid there as well. Other students hid in the bathroom stalls, standing on the toilets so he wouldn't see their legs, and many others ran out the back doors and hid in the woods behind the parking lots. Finally, Wayne went into the boy's dorm and wounded two more students, took another hostage, pointed the gun to his head, and told him to call 911.  

Wayne gave himself up to the police.  

The phone rang sometime that night, and my nine-year-old daughter, Rachael, answered just as the machine began to pick up. The academic dean, Jan, was on the line, and she told my daughter to wake me. Rachael clumped downstairs to my bedroom and pounded on the door. I got up and went into the kitchen so I wouldn't wake my husband. There, sitting at the kitchen table, with Rachael beside me and my other children and my husband sleeping, I heard the news. I didn't show much emotion. When Jan hung up, I told Rachael that I had to go to work early, and I took her by the hand and led her back to bed. She didn’t seem concerned, only sleepy. Strangely, the answering machine had recorded the conversation. I replayed the tape, perhaps because I couldn't believe what Jan had told me. I heard the muffled sounds of Rachael at my door and she and I walking to the phone, and then -

“Hello?”

“Rebecca, it’s Jan.”

“Hi Jan. What’s wrong?”

“Rebecca, there’s been an accident, a shooting.”

“What?”

“Rebecca, two people are dead. One is Nacunan, I’m so sorry, and Galen Gibson.”

“Oh, what happened?”

“Others are wounded; it was a student with a gun, Wayne Lo. Do you know him?”

“Yes.”

“Are you OK, Rebecca?”

“Yes. I am coming. I’ll be there soon. Thank you for calling me.” 

Then, I woke my husband and, shivering as I sat on the side of our bed, explained that our friend had been killed and then about the shooting spree. I got dressed quickly, and left. The night was bitter cold, and the stars were shining bright. As I drove down Windsor Mountain toward the college, I could not make sense of things. I could not imagine what had happened. I thought of two photographs in the 1991 school yearbook. In the first, Galen was standing tall, smiling into the camera. His long curly brown hair was tied into a ponytail, and his lanky frame exuded confidence and charm. In the second, Nacunan was sitting in the dining hall with three other teachers, Colette, Larry and Jamie. He was handsome, earnest, listening intently to Larry, who was likely talking about music theory or some other heady topic. I thought of Wayne, how I had just met with him Monday afternoon. He had been worried he’d have a C in calculus and hurt his chances of transferring to an Ivy League school. In his soft spoken, gentle way, he had asked for my help preparing for his final exam, and the last thing I recalled saying to him was something like, “Wayne, I know you are doing your best. It will work out. I know it will.” I thought of my new silk scarf and how a few days ago Nacunan had spied it around my neck, touched it, raised one eyebrow and said, “Oooo, it is silk!” in his signature Argentinean accent. I imagined I would tie my scarf around his bullet wound and stop the bleeding. I wondered who was hurt and how badly. But, when I finally arrived on campus, I was not prepared for what I encountered. 

There were police cars everywhere and reporters with cameras skulking near the main entrance. Nacunan was still in his car. I could see part of his silhouette, but the police wouldn't let me past the guardhouse. I turned around and went in the back entrance. The students were all in the cafeteria shaking, sobbing, and holding each other. Some were drawing pictures with crayons and markers. Some were singing. Most were just sitting, staring. Many other teachers and staff people were there as well, and throughout the morning the entire campus was filled with confusion, terror, disbelief. Bullet holes peppered the library atrium; blood soaked the carpet. Students came up to me and began to tell me their stories. I learned slowly, throughout that day, the details of the shooting: where students had been; what they saw and felt; how Nacunan and Galen had died; where the wounded boys were taken. At some point, somehow, the coroner came and removed the two bodies. The first student to reach Nacunan after he was shot told me that his eyes were open, his face calm, his skull mangled. Another told me that the way the music blared and the streetlight shone on him, it seemed like a movie, like the right sort of death for Nacunan, who had been a favorite teacher: handsome, articulate, post-modern. Rose, who had held Galen’s hand until he died, would not speak. One of the boys shot called me from his hospital bed and told me as he ate Lucky Charms, his favorite cereal, about the bullet that passed right through his leg. He bragged that it didn't even hurt and that his friend had rescued him, run right in front of Wayne after he wounded him, picked him up, and carried him to the Resident Director's room. He didn’t know all of the details, didn’t realize anyone had died. He even asked if he could have extra time to finish his final essay for our First Year Seminar class. At the time, it felt right to simply tell him to rest, that we could worry about the work another day. He seemed so very young, so innocent. 

Hall College Center was in chaos. Students, faculty, staff, and strangers (likely clergy and counselors, experts in Trauma) sat on the stairs, wandered through the halls, waited outside. Some of us held office hours, and students streamed in wanting to talk. Liz, one of Nacunan’s Sophomore Seminar students, came to me and asked if I would look at a paper she had been working on for him, one he had been helping her with in the library moments before the shooting. It was about Derrida's deconstruction of Rousseau's "The Essay on the Origin of Languages." She had printed a fresh copy for me because the original was still in his car. She said that Nacunan had urged her to think about the concept of an original language, one all people could understand, one that transcended difference. As she sat in my office, she looked at me with a sort of pleading, a desire to understand what Nacunan expected from her. “I don’t want to disappoint him,” she explained.   

Nacunan had also sat in that chair, many times. We had shared secrets, gossiped, and listened to each other's hopes. Once, he showed me a bit of memoir he had written in a writing workshop we took together. It was about his first love, a girl with deep brown skin and long black hair whom he had kissed beneath a mimosa. Later, he told me that as a boy he believed that mimosa trees were magic and that he longed to see the mimosa of his first love. Days before he died, he showed me the Christmas gift he had found for his mother. He had discovered the perfect red leather heels in some shop in Northampton, and he had wrapped them in white tissue paper and hidden them on top of his file cabinet in his office. What would he have expected from Liz?  

Her request for help left me bitter and despairing. This man who had loved a girl, who had bought red leather heels, and who, only hours before, had been wondering about a language that transcended differences, and who inspired his student to think deeply and to love writing, was in a body bag, expecting nothing.    

Most students spoke of Wayne in the past tense, as though he were dead as well, one of the victims of the shooting. Indeed, I couldn't help think, as I listened to their stories, that they were sitting in the very chair Wayne had sat in only a few days ago. I even wished Wayne would come to me now and explain. I listened to the students, but I could not make sense of anything. 

Nothing made sense for a long time. The day after the shooting, some experts came and did a workshop on Trauma Management. I recall walking into the lecture center, being handed a big, thick workbook, and thinking that I had to go through all of this before I would be over the trauma. The experts said many of us would suffer aftershocks. Some of us would experience divorce, abortion, substance abuse, depression, and physical illnesses. Of course, they couched it in different terms, named us survivors and secondary victims. They used words like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and healing; they offered charts and diagrams. 

I moved from shock to shock, memorial service to memorial service, story to story. After a few weeks, the students went home, and the campus quieted. The police returned the student papers that were in Nacunan's car, and Jan gave me some on Kafka and Woolf to grade. The pages were musty and damp, having spent so long in an abandoned car. Can papers carry death? I smelled them, ran my fingers across their pages, carefully. These essays sat beside my friend as he bled, and they remained for weeks, in that Festiva, impounded. Some had Nacunan’s marginalia. His handwriting was distinctive-- looping and collected. In the end, these essays were the closest things to him. I felt a sort of jealousy and a reverence. Still, I read them, graded them, and handed them back to their rightful owners.   

Christmas must have come and gone; I must have cut and decorated our tree, bought and wrapped the presents, signed "love, Santa" to the best gifts, filled the stockings, roasted the Cornish game hens. I remember painting my kitchen just as I had planned and then deciding to paint the entire downstairs. I spent the month of January listening to Neil Young tapes and painting the walls of my house with Eggshell White latex. 

After a while, there was no physical evidence of the shooting. Before the start of spring term, having secretly listened to it over and over, I erased the answering machine tape. The ice and snow melted. The college driveway remained. The guardhouse had a fresh coat of paint. The ducks paddled in the pond. The bullet holes in the library and dorm were patched, the walls whitewashed, the carpets replaced. The reality of last December hid behind spackle and paint, and we returned to school. 

Now, seventeen years later, someone else occupies Nacunan's office. I became a Dean and moved to a bigger office. For many years now, the anniversary of the shooting has come and gone. The first one was bitter cold, and I was near hysteria. We lit candles, placed them first in a circle and then at the spots around campus where Galen and Nacunan had died. Each year since then, the ceremony to mark the anniversary has grown easier, in a way, and time has soothed the jagged sensations. There are no students left who remember. Many newer faculty and staff members have come, and some who lived through the shootings have gone. Still, each year, as the days darken and chill, and as December returns, somewhere deep inside my body I feel the power of the assault rifle as though it were waiting for the fourteenth.