The Shooting (25 page)

A knock on the door. He gets out of bed, opens it. Two people stand in the hall, looking around. Strangers. Nobody else out there now. A pretty, thin woman with tangled long brown hair and glasses and a young man who is short and thick with a purple T-shirt and glasses. The man takes his picture. The woman smiles at him like she has come to bestow a gift upon him. She clasps her hands, hunching her bony shoulders and turning her body from him humbly.

—
Hiiiii,
she says in a throaty, hungover morning whisper. —I work with NBC News? I'd love to chat with you about what happened.

—I don't know what happened, he tells her.

She says, —You haven't heard about the shooting?

—I know about shooting, yes, of course. But what happened, I don't know, they will not tell us.

She looks at him, trying to understand but failing to. She says, —Did you know the victim?

—Of course.

—And what were your
impressions
of him? Like, what
vibe
did he give off?

He stares at her mouth, goes in past those teeth that remind him, actually, of Clayton's when he was seven or eight and began losing his babies—yes, she has baby teeth doesn't she?—and he keeps drifting in over her tongue to the back of her throat, which is inflamed from sleep deprivation, then out the rear of the skull, exiting with a geyser spray of brain and blood and cerebral fluid all over the face of the other one, the male she is accessorized with, who, face covered in gore, continues staring back at him through the camera with the same smirk he has now, like he is impatient to get what he feels he deserves, which is everything.

—Sir? she says.

He says, —How did you get in here?

Over her shoulder he can see the answer to that himself. They found a window in the alley he forgot to lock and crawled through it. Just then at the end of the hall appears another woman, moving swiftly toward them. —Out, this woman tells the reporters. It is the woman from television. The chanter. The chantress. She is smaller, more delicate in person, but her voice is even louder and more commanding. What a voice it is. It obliterates.

The woman reporter says, —Absolutely, Jenny, but care to chat with NBC News for a story?

Jenny answers, —This man has just lost his son, can't you understand that, doesn't that mean anything to you?

The reporter looks at him anew and says, —You're the father?

Jenny says, —He will issue a statement in due time, but until then you will respect his privacy, and if you don't then you get nothing from us ever again, how does that sound?

Before they can answer Jenny takes the male reporter by the arm and leads him back to the open window, calling over her shoulder to the other, —You too, Britney.

Britney is staring at the handyman. —I'm sorry for your loss.

—Thank you, he says.

She leaves her card and follows Jenny to the window, where Jenny hurries them back out through it, saying, —Out we go. She slams it shut after them and makes sure it is locked. Then she comes to him. She embraces him. She smells like cold rain in the summer sun.

(Sheeple VII, VIII & IX)

 

The career I've ended up in, I've ended up in the only way people end up in careers they love: totally unexpectedly. What I studied in college was art history. Did art history prepare me for this? I suppose it did—the history of art is the history of grief.

I moved to New York City after college to be an art dealer and one day own a gallery. I had no reason to believe it would work out. I had only barely earned my degree and knew nobody in the art world and had no start-up capital. This was supposed to be the part in my life story where, somehow, using wit and grit, I beat the odds and made it, but within six months I was down forty-eight pounds and my money was gone and I was desperate and lonely and failing. The only job in art I could get was at a gallery in Alphabet City. The owners called it an internship but that was really a way to get away with not paying me. Hardly anybody came to this gallery. My job was to sit there behind the desk staring into space, straightening the stack of price lists that never needed straightening because nobody had touched them, and after closing sweeping up, even though most days the only shoes that had walked on the floor were mine. The owners, I assume, used the gallery to launder money. The art was wretched. I have forgotten all of it.

So I got a new job selling timeshares. Selling art, selling timeshares—after a desperate year the delineation had narrowed. I turned out
to be an excellent timeshare salesman. The company was very pleased with me, very encouraging. I hated it. I resented them for providing me work I was so easily good at. So I quit. Got evicted. Fell ill with pneumonia. Kept chasing art, it kept pushing me away. The people at the timeshare company begged me to return, offered me a higher commission, health benefits. I was disgusted with the whole universe. I was, I realize only now, very young. Homeless and sick and ridden with debt, I gave in and returned to timeshares. I made sure they all knew, every minute I was there, how much I resented them and how little I thought of them and how much I hated it. After work each day I would swing down through Chelsea to the galleries where art, my love, was slipping away. It all felt more and more unrecognizable to me, and me to it. Every time I swung through Chelsea after work, the following morning at the timeshare office—a dingy little hole in midtown—I would be even angrier and more resentful of them all. It must have oozed from my skin. I see now I was grieving. For the future that would never be, for the life I would never live.

One night, the gentleman sitting at the phone next to me was reading from the script they gave us to the potential client on the other end. —Full access to the state-of-the-art gym and sauna, he said, then died. He fell forward onto his desk with the phone still up to his ear and died. Right there. He was maybe forty-five. I went with his body to the hospital. I don't know why. It just felt like I should.

At the hospital I found myself in the position of greeting his family and telling them what happened. Wife and two daughters maybe twelve and ten. When I told her, his wife screamed like I had never heard before but have heard often since. As I embraced her, my blood was surging and my heart pounding and my head was pulsating and I was in love again. Art had once made me feel this way but now it did not. Now this did, whatever this was. I prayed with her even though I was not someone who prayed. She barely spoke English and, I think, could not read, so I helped her with paperwork and navigated her through the hospital's procedures, asked questions for her, located a priest of the proper denomination to come meet
with her and the children. I became this woman's friend and helped make the funeral arrangements and, since I was doing so well with timeshares, was able to give her money for groceries and pay her rent until she figured something out, which I would help her do as well. Helped the kids with homework. Made sure they went to school and found a counselor for them.

I went back to school soon after for a master's degree in psychology, paying for it with the timeshares. Volunteered at every hospital and hospice that would have me, read all the literature about grief. In time I was hired to do this by a hospital and here I am, doing what I am supposed to be doing and what I love after all. I met my wife here, she is a nurse, and we have two children, and what I do helps people. And still on weekends I go into that dark midtown hole, which, I see now, is anything but soulless and dead and represents everything but failure and rejection, and I sell timeshares to make money I use to buy art from galleries in Chelsea. I even patron artists directly. I champion artists who need it, sell their work to make them money they need, money that changes the tides for them, brings the ship back to shore.

This is what New York means to me. What our country does.

But lately over the last few months I find myself again in a rut. No matter how much you love it, grief work will wear you down. The constant death and relentless tragedy, so much of it the same. We just do not think certain people matter. They are disposable to us. It is a virus that infects our entire society. I have been feeling like a fraud, reciting from a rote clinical script to these families, knowing there is this illness out there we are not doing enough to cure. I feel like I am selling them timeshares. I keep expecting the mother of one of these boys to stop me in the middle of my pitch and tell me how full of shit I am.

And tonight I am in bed dreading going in to work tomorrow, when I get a page from the hospital. I go in. Black boy, fifteen, dead from a gun. His neighbor shot him, a millionaire white guy. Father's the guy's super. I do what I can for the father, while the mother is sedated. In the chaos, I provide an order for him to hang on to. Papers to sign, information to provide. Things to read and do. Tangibility.
It's mostly bull, but concrete objects and tasks are vital when you have been crushed. And this man interrupts me in the middle of my pitch. Here we go. What I have been bracing myself for. He is the one who will tell me I am full of shit and I will not even wonder if he is right, because I will know he is. I will see my work for what it might truly be: a crutch that I, a luckless man, have fashioned for myself out of death and debris and desperation the way rats make homes out of society's feces and trash. And I will fall out of love with it the way I fell out of love with art. My wife will not recognize me anymore, after I've fallen out of love with it. The foundation of our relationship will become weak. We will grow apart. I will lose her and my family and never help another widow who cannot read and cannot understand English fill out paperwork or locate the right minister. I wait for it.

The man, the father, speaks. He says, —Thank you. This is very helpful.

And I am very relieved. My work feels valuable again and worth the emotional grind. I am not a con and I am not selfish. I help. The work wants me. I will not fall out of love with it. I will keep going.

I go home that morning, after he and his wife have gone back out into the city, to wash up and eat and refresh before heading back in a couple of hours to start my workday, and I have more energy for helping those crushed than I have had in months. New ideas for grief counseling bubble into my head, exciting new ways to be more effective for others. I follow these bubbles, see where they go. They take me into new universes. I apply for research funding, get it, work with Yale and Harvard; our research dispels flawed best practices, establishes newer better ones. We learn for once, at last, how to grieve. Our way works for everybody, like a vaccine. We learn how to grieve and we teach the world and at last our broken hearts may begin to heal.

 

She takes the order for the new door, writes down the address. —Hold on, she says, —ain't this where that boy got hisself shot? Tell me something, where the hell were that boy's parents, what kinda child did they raise, why weren't they watching him? Ought to lock
them
up.

Hangs up. She's so angry. That poor child. Thinks of her own son. Giving birth to him, breast-feeding him, him pointing at cars and dogs and airplanes, how good he was at Legos, thought he would be an engineer for sure. Single mom, had to work. Not home enough. He grew up, put away the Legos, started running around the neighborhood. Didn't know what he was getting up to. She heard things, didn't believe them. He followed a young woman into her building, tried to take her purse. It was on the stairs. Young woman fell over, cracked her head. He ran off with the purse while her brain swelled through the crack in her skull. Coma, then death. Son put away. Could not look at herself. Knew it was her fault. So she looked elsewhere. Whenever she sees a black boy get in trouble she sees her son and sees herself failing him and she gets disgusted, has no forgiveness for the parents who failed him, as she has none for herself.

She has never let her son know she is harder on herself than she is on him, makes him think she hates him for what he did to that
girl. When your mother hates you you hate yourself and everyone else too. So he gets in fights, inside. Fucks with the guards, gets his ass beat. Does not do school or anything inside, only fights. Will get himself killed. Doesn't give a shit, for he thinks his mother hates him.

Next day on the way out to Rikers to visit her son, she is still fuming about the boy who got hisself shot. She tells her son about how she got an order at work to replace the door where that boy on the news got himself shot. She says, —His parents got him killed, oughtta lock
them
up. Where were they for him? Where was I for you? That boy needed them and you needed me. I been making you feel like dirt for what you did, but I want you to know I was only talking to myself, you understand? Everything mean I've said to you I meant it for myself so I shoulda been saying it to myself. Every harsh coldblooded thing I've done, it was me I should have been doing it to. I love you endlessly, baby, it's myself I hate. Understand? From now on I'mma be different to you. I'mma be different.

And from that day, she is. And he stops fighting, stops hating himself and everyone else. Gets interested in school, completes GED, then bachelor's, then master's, then law degree. Finds Islam, the love of God. Peace. Paroled. Leaves prison a better man than he entered. Does paralegal work for the Innocence Project. Has a brilliant attention to detail, a methodical relentlessness that leads to full exoneration of dozens of men on death row for things they did not do but were convicted for because they were not born with the ability to defend themselves. Saves these men's lives.

 

Jenny Sanders throws the reporter out the window, she lands atop her partner in the alley below, does not get anything useful to report, cries—she will be fired, this was her last chance, her boss told her so, and fired she is, cannot get another job in news, goes broke, starves, is evicted, wanders the city digging through trash to eat, ridden with worms and lice. Family will not help, they are disgusted with her, always have been; they are luminaries and genius capitalists, looked down on her for going into news out of Princeton instead of international commerce like them—money and power are important, not "infotainment," as they call it—that she has failed at it disgusts them further, cut her off, all alone, winter coming. Has developed a tremor in her left hand from the trauma, rides the subway begging for money, no one gives because the tremor is disturbing, it looks like she is making male jerk-off motions at them, riders try to ignore her walking up and down the aisle making her male jerk-off motions at them until she passes through to the next car where they try to ignore her too. She used to ignore as well, when beggars on the subway said it could happen to anyone; one in particular she remembers now,
Please, mang, I been out since six o'clock this morning, mang, looking for a job, mang. I'm tired, mang... this ain't no joke, this could happen to anybody, mang.
She did not believe his spiel, decided it must be a hustle; now she believes it, and going between two subway cars
she falls, lands on the tracks, train slices off her legs at the knees. At hospital an infection, dies, meets God, God sends her back, staggers out of the hospital, or not staggers, because she does not have legs below the knees, must roll, rolls out of the hospital, in a wheelchair, cruises into a chain burrito place, gets a job—should have done this a bit sooner maybe, she realizes—moves into a spare room in a Queens apartment with seventeen undocumented Guatemalan men, only place she can afford, they teach her Spanish and how to cook Guatemalan food, she teaches them English and how to cultivate news sources. Soon she is cooking the food better than they are, no kitchen, has to do the dishes in the bathtub; on a wall someone has scratched
MR. + MRS. + BABY KABEDE
and a date sixteen years earlier. From the back office of the burrito place she steals the direct lines of the chain's corporate executives, calls, pitches them a Guatemalan restaurant, they bite, so to speak, invest, very successful, becomes a national chain, millions of dollars, tens of millions, gets artificial legs, gives much of her new fortune to subway panhandlers, especially those with unfortunate tremors, and helping undocumented people avoid deportation by funding an underground railroad for them to get to safe haven in nations friendlier to the poor huddled masses, for example Iceland. And whenever she sees Wayne LaPierre of the NRA on TV in the aftermath of a school shooting praising the glories of guns and tsk-tsking that no kids or teachers had one and saying the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, she donates another million dollars to Jenny Sanders and Repeal the Second Amendment, for throwing her out the window so her life could go so well.