It’s been four days since Half and Susanne Zantop were murdered, and their faces are everywhere. I didn’t know them. I’m told that they were gentle and kind. People tend to be made noble when they die. It seems like the professors Zantop didn’t need any exaggeration. I’ve read their biographies a half dozen times since they died and heard their tributes. These were good people.
I think they would wonder at the circus.
Dartmouth has about 5000 people. It’s big enough so that you don’t know the name of everyone that you see, but small enough that you get a sense of people. Like the boy who introduced himself to me the other day. “I see you every day. I know who you are, I just don’t know your name.” Little things like that.
I’m told Dartmouth the most subdued Ivy. For all of the grand tradition, the insular feeling of the Ivy tower… we’re just a bunch of kids. Most of us you wouldn’t even think were Ivy students. We are not the Greens of old. Alumni barely recognize the campus anymore.
Every day on the green you can see the news trucks. Some reporters are just doing their job. Some have been arrested for harrassment. This is the Upper Valley, where last year the major news stories were Civil Unions and the new adornments on the bridge half a mile from my dormitory.
We’ve made newspapers in Bulgaria. I’ve been getting letters from people I haven’t talked to in almost a year, asking how I’m doing. I wish I knew how to answer.
Nothing’s really different. Today there was freezing rain- the Green was glare ice that we all had to duck-walk across. The paths were endless, muddy slush. I slipped a few times. Every once and awhile at night, there’s the gunshot sound of a tree simply giving from the ice. Life simply goes on, and it’s the same life.
Nothing’s really different, except that we’re running scared. Someone found a bloodstain on a chair in the Mid-Mass basement lounge. Strange to me, because I was in that particular room with my friends from eight at night until two in the morning on the night the Zantops died. It was cleared quickly as having nothing to do with the investigation.
But it’s still in the papers. Our campus rag, a study in mediocrity, went from covering the blood drive to banner headlines on a double murder that nobody seems to know anything about.
Yet… there’s something silly about how scared people were about that, because there’s no sense in someone going five miles to the basement of one of the most public dorms without leaving any evidence on the way only to put a bloody handprint on a chair.
We’re scared, so we cling to it. Murder doesn’t seem to have any sense as is… but we want it to. We want this to be a disgruntled student, or someone who held a grudge. Or even a random killing for no reason at all. We need closure.
We want to go back to our reality. Our reality that doesn’t include grand, tragic statements about how we really feel.
I once met a student from the University of Wyoming. I asked him about Matt Shepard. I remember the glazed over look he gave me. It’s the default expression for us now.
Yesterday, I felt foolish for nearly breaking in to a run while walking to my far-away dorm at night. Today, making the same walk, I realized that I couldn’t be afraid. If I’m afraid to walk alone or to have my friends walk alone, or afraid to do any of the millions of mundane things I do in my life, I will become crippled.
Things will settle down. With or without a name and a face to say, “Yes, that one. That is the person who shattered our illusions,” we will continue our sleepless nights, homework, and slightly over the top parties.
I’ll never forget Susanne and Half Zantop’s faces, though. None of us will.