By Jessica Graff
Tick-tok. He thought they didn’t respect him. Tick-tok. He thought they didn’t understand him. Tick-tok. He thought they didn’t deserve him. Tick-tok. He would show them. Tick-tok. He’d been waiting for this. Tick-tok. He’d been practicing. Tick-tok. He had his gun. Tick-tok. It is time. Tick-tok. Tick-tok. Tick-tok.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Tick-tok. Tick-tok. Tick-tok.
I stride across the University of Iowa campus on a summer day with my brand new roommate and her mother, who so graciously welcomed this city girl to all the Midwestern charm Iowa City holds. The culture shock and time change are still prevalent as I gaze at my new home. As we stroll down the T. Anne Cleary walkway, my roommate’s mother turns to me, solemn for the first time today.
“Jessica, do you know who the T. Anne Cleary Walkway is named after?”
“No, who?”
“It was named after a woman who died in a school tragedy.”
“Mom!” my roommate interjects, “You can say shooting, it’s been at least 20 years since it happened!”
Her mom sighed and we kept walking to our dorm as if the whole conversation had evaporated like the humidity we were traveling in, but it kept me sweating in more ways than one.
He had come here to be successful, and here he thought he was sitting amongst lustful imbeciles, his ideas being looked past as if he was made of the papers they had him copy. He felt he was better than them, and certainly better than Linhua Shan who received the award. In China, he was at the top of his class at the prestigious University of Beijing, and it was an honor to be sent to America to study physics. He was supposed to make my family proud. He was supposed to win the Spriesterbach Prize.
For months I ignored the unsettling feelings that surrounded the T. Anne Cleary walkway on my walks to class, but one day I grudgingly decide to address the looming history that surrounded the shooting. I start by asking my classmates, but very few have heard of a shooting. I am baffled by the idea that a school tragedy that so deeply affected the generations before us is hardly recognized by my peers. It’s as if the school wants to forget everything, just as much as the students don’t care to remember.
He writes his sister back home, Lu Huimin. He encloses money he made in America. He regrets not studying a more practical subject, and the study of physics has become more disappointing than ever. He knows he is angry, and that his sister would not want him to be. But it is too late. He is going to kill himself and will not be alone in my journey to hell. He has, through careful selection, chosen some others to join him in death. He writes four other letters as the bloody dawn approaches.
My empty search now leads me to the internet. As I type into the search engine “University of Iowa 1991 shooting,” headlines immediately pop up, plummeting me deeper into the tragedy. Like bodies, the names of the five victims pile up on my computer screen, Christoph K. Goertz, Robert A. Smith, Linhua Shan, Dwight R. Nicholson and lastly, T. Anne Cleary.
I learn the facts: Gang Lu was a physics graduate student at the University of Iowa. He felt unappreciated and after not receiving a desired honor, took revenge on those of whom he felt had wronged him. On Friday, Nov. 1, 1991, Lu attended a physics research group in Van Allen Hall, where he shot Goertz, Smith and his rival, Shan. He then proceeded downstairs and shot the department chair, Nicholson. After leaving Van Allen, he ran to Jessup Hall and shot his beloved academic advisor Cleary, whom he had complained to earlier that week, and also her assistant, Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, the only survivor of the massacre. Finally, he went up into an empty conference room and shot himself.
As much as I fill my mind with information, I still don’t truly know and I find myself begging to understand the details of Gang Lu’s descent into madness. I come upon Jo Ann Beard’s essay The Fourth State of Matter and become encapsulated in the unraveling details.
Tick-tok. The clicking of his watch mimics the measured beating of his heart. Tick-tok. What if he misses? Tick-Tok. Then he will just shoot them again. Tick-tok. And again. Tick-tok. And again. Tick-tok. It is time, he goes upstairs.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Reload. He goes downstairs.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Reload. He goes to Jessup Hall.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Reload. He goes to an empty conference room.
BANG.
I sit behind my desk, feeling heavy and weighed down with sadness. I watch news clips from 1991, flinching as the newscaster announces the victims, and it’s as if I was standing in front of Van Allen that Friday morning 22 years ago myself. I can feel the chilly air sitting on my shoulders, the confused state of chaos, the anger bubbling for so long inside of the killer. I get up and take a visit to present-day Van Allen. I stop in front of the second floor room where a small bronze plaque signifies the fallen, and with the help of kindly professor I’m given access to the conference room itself. Everything is left the same from that fatal Friday afternoon, the creaky wooden chairs, the yellow-tinged books and the eerie silence that still hangs in the air.
On my way home I stop at the T. Anne Cleary walkway, dedicated in 1992 to the much-loved victim of the shooting. It’s a peacefully warm day and the air wraps around me like a hand-woven blanket. I sit on a bench nearby, reflecting on everything I now know about the past of Iowa City and how the memory of this tragedy was fading away. Tick-tok. Tick-tok. Tick-tok.
Jessica Graff is originally from Washington D.C. and has just begun her writing career as a first-year student at the University of Iowa where she is studying English and working toward receiving the creative writing certificate. This is her first ever publication.
