Be ready for the lightni.., p.15
Be Ready for the Lightning, page 15
“I’m okay.”
—
Al fielded most of the calls from strangers, occasionally, when the caller was from a legitimate news outlet, asking me if I wanted to talk.
I gave a lot of interviews that first day. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but when Al asked, I nodded. He said “Are you sure?” I nodded again, and he passed the phone to me. I found myself saying a lot, before it occurred to me that I wasn’t obligated to say anything.
In the evening, Al said, “Do you want to watch the news or not?” and I said I did. Part of me wanted to see the photo again.
We turned to CNN. Before every commercial break, the anchors announced they would be talking about what happened on the bus, but they didn’t do so until the end of the programme, at which point there was a long segment about it. First, there was a brief summary of what had happened, how many people had died, a call for calm, and assurance that an investigation was underway by the MTA, the NYPD and the FBI. Then there was a lot of talk about the traffic congestion the police department’s perimeter had caused. I learned several blocks had been shut down, and there had been twenty-six people on the bus other than Peter, including me. And that Ajay Kohli was considered one of the best hostage negotiators in the country. But he had commented that there was no way to negotiate with Peter, who wasn’t a hostage-taker in the traditional sense, who didn’t want anything, whose actions were both planned and illogical, an unusual combination. That he was, from a procedural standpoint, closer to a terrorist than a hostage-taker.
They said that Peter was still alive but in a coma. The anchor’s voice was neutral, like always, but the talking heads grumbled about resources being directed to keeping a man like Peter alive, doctors’ time, a hospital bed.
I learned that the SWAT team had been considering an array of options, and the frontrunner was to somehow get a compression grenade into the bus and make a forcible entry. The fact that Peter had already killed the driver had made negotiations nearly irrelevant. Ajay Kohli had to beg for the chance to try to contact Peter after the first attempt failed.
A university professor, beamed in via video feed, questioned the possibility of whether the police could have pumped gas into the bus. Whether this would have been at all effective, and if so, what sort of gas ought to be used. Nitrous oxide or another gaseous anesthetic—could enough sevoflurane or desflurane have been acquired, and how long would it have taken to get it, and how long to subdue Peter? In a space as big as the bus, it could take ages for the drug to work, if at all. How many people might Peter have shot before succumbing to the gas, if it did work? It seemed like an entirely irrelevant speculation to me, but it went on and on. And then about Peter himself, his obsession with Peter Pan, which several passengers from the bus had confirmed he quoted at length. They said that sales of the book had spiked six hundred percent on Amazon after the shooting.
Some people in fashionable glasses speculated briefly about his motivations. About people who shoot people. About other men in schools and theatres and trains and shopping malls.
Fundraising pages had been set up online for the families of the deceased. They showed photos of the moustache man, whose name was Wei, and the driver, Darren, and the teamster-looking man with the bald head, whose name was Eugene. They showed the photo of me again. They said I was a hero. At the word, Al glanced over.
“Want my autograph?” I said, and Al mimed unbuttoning his shirt.
He made a stir-fry for dinner, and we ate together at the tiny kitchen table. Marie was at a launch for some new restaurant in Brooklyn she was working with and wouldn’t be home until late.
“I’m going to find someone to handle all these interview requests for you. You shouldn’t have to deal with this, and I need to—I should get back to work.”
“Thanks,” I said. I had no idea what sort of person would handle interview requests for someone in my situation and found it weird that Al apparently knew. Would I have to pay this person? How would it all work? I couldn’t bring myself to ask Al anything.
Later, when Marie came home, she gave me a bottle of wine she had smuggled from her event. “I thought you’d like it,” she said. “And you know…” She trailed off, gesturing with the bottle, and finally finished, “It seemed like the least I could do.”
I took it from her. “Thanks,” I said. Marie nodded and looked away. “I’m going to pop down to the bodega,” I said. I put the wine carefully on the counter, and when I did, I had a split second vision of it smashing, spilling, glass everywhere, my hands cut to ribbons, blood on the counter, on the floor. But it was fine.
Down the block, I stood back on the sidewalk and looked at all the different papers, the different headlines, hung up around the clerk.
Gunman Kills Three
Woman Saves Bus Passengers
M1 Shooting
Heroine of Fifth Avenue
MTA Angel
After a minute, the man behind the counter said, “If you want to read them, you have to buy them, honey.”
“Sorry.”
Shrugging, he said, “There’s never any good news anyway.”
EIGHTEEN
There were a lot more interviews in the following days. Some of the interviews were over the phone, some in person, and two of them were on television. The first TV one was filmed at a glossy, intimidating building in Midtown. I checked in with the guard on the ground floor, and someone came down to march me through a series of doors and hallways, until I was settled on an expensive-looking, extremely uncomfortable chair across from a television host I’d watched from home before.
During the pre-show run-through, the host asked me a lot of questions in a voice that sounded entirely different from her TV voice. She read the questions from a sheet of paper.
“I don’t really remember everything all that clearly,” I said. The host looked older and thinner in person, almost gaunt.
“Was there a place you were drawing strength from, when you stood up to him? Do you consider yourself a spiritual person at all?” She cocked her head to the side in a manner that I had usually interpreted as empathetic, when watching her on television, but it seemed more spastic, twitch-like, in person.
“Um—” I said. Then I started to cry.
I’d been doing that a lot, not because I felt sad but because I felt shaky, the way I might have after falling off my bike when I was little, only now the feeling didn’t go away. I didn’t cry loudly or much but enough that when I dabbed at my eyes, the extra makeup they had put on came off on my fingertips. The man who’d done my makeup had clipped my hair back while he worked, and when he saw my ear, he’d flinched. When I asked, he promised he’d keep it covered for the interview, and his fingers were soft when he arranged my hair over the lumpy scar tissue.
“I’m sorry—take your time. I can’t imagine how difficult this must be to speak about.”
I took the tissue an assistant producer handed me. This was just the pre-interview; they would fix the makeup before they started filming, the AP assured me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Still,” said the host. A crafty look had come over her face. “We want you to be yourself during the interview, so don’t feel like you need to hide your feelings. If you need to let it out, let it out. I can only imagine how much you’re still processing.”
“No. No, it’s all right. I’ve been talking about it. And the NYPD referred me to a counsellor, and we talked on the phone yesterday, and that, that was helpful.”
“Okay.” The host looked down at her notes, getting back on track. “So. Veda. How does it feel? Knowing that so many people are alive because of you?”
“Some people. Not everyone.”
“Of course. Of course.” The woman, who despite the gauntness was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen in real life, paused. “Still, I think for others, for us, average Americans who heard about the situation after the fact, there was a real sense of—oh, I suppose, vindication that one of these lunatics was finally stopped in the act.”
“I’ve been getting e-mails from people.” I didn’t add that I’d barely read any of them yet.
The techs had arrived and were checking levels. Bright lights pricked at me, and the floating stuffed-animal shapes of boom mikes bobbed above. The host leaned in, the swell of her perfect breasts just visible above a tasteful blouse. She waited for me to elaborate.
After a moment, during which I didn’t speak, she said, “You gave what witnesses describe as a speech, told a sort of story, that seemed to lull Juric into a less violent state. How did you come up with such persuasive words under that kind of pressure?”
“I just made it up as I went along. I guess I thought maybe if I bought some time, the police would figure something out. We could hear the negotiator sometimes, so we knew they were out there.”
“And is it something you’ve always been able to do? Talk to people, calm them down, get through to them, when no one else can?”
I stared at her. The woman was leaning forward, her eyes narrowed slightly, her head nodding, a small thoughtful smile finishing the look.
“Not really, no. I mean—I’m more of a science person. I’m not that good at talking. I’m not very wordy.”
The woman stopped nodding and leaned back into her chair. “I see. Now, I do know that other passengers mentioned you talked about a dream. Is that something you made up on the spot?”
I picked at my new manicure. Al had found a woman named Janet, who was now handling the interview requests. I wondered if I could tell Janet I didn’t want to do any more. If that was selfish.
“Yes,” I said. “I made it up.”
—
The interview didn’t air for a couple of days. I watched it when it did, curled up on Al and Marie’s couch.
It was quite short. I had a feeling the host, who had read off a screen prompter rather than her paper during the interview proper and on television looked very much like she always did and not gaunt in the least, had given me up as a bad job. I didn’t cry again, when the cameras were rolling.
The next morning was Saturday, and all three of us slept in late. Once we’d all gotten up and assembled in the kitchen, however, Al made a production of cooking pancakes for Marie and me. He wore an apron over his pyjamas and griddled our initials in pancake batter, V and M, but not A, because it was too tricky. For himself, he just made a regular pancake.
We ate in the living room, and things felt almost normal. We turned on the TV and watched a Seinfeld rerun and laughed with our mouths full. When I went into the kitchen to get more, Al leapt up and said, “I’ll wait on the beautiful ladies.” He looped an arm around me and gave me a half-hug.
Then we laughed at a line we’d all heard before, and I sat down, realizing the jittery feeling in my joints and the mild nausea that had been a constant companion since the shooting had been dialled down from ten to four.
—
Two weeks after the incident, the mayor of New York City held a reception for all the people who had been on the bus. It was at a small restaurant not far from the Angelika movie theatre, which I liked, where you could feel the subway rumble by during screenings. It was about a half-hour walk from Al’s apartment.
I wore a new pair of shoes that I’d bought with some of the money I’d been paid for a TV interview. Now that I had Janet, they gave me money for doing some things (“women’s things,” Janet called them, by which she meant magazines and shows edited and hosted by aging blond women), though they hadn’t before. When Janet had first casually mentioned that I’d get paid, the queasy feeling it gave me showed on my face.
“It’s just how it works,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
I’d taken out the old, ruined pair of shoes, with the red splotch that was now brown, from under the couch and put them into my empty suitcase.
When I got to the restaurant, there were two police officers standing outside, trying to look as if they just happened to be pausing there. When I walked up, they nodded to me, and the younger officer said, “Hey,” as if he were about to tell me something. The older officer looked at him, not with a glare or a frown, just a neutral look, and the younger man fell silent.
“Go on in, miss,” said the older one, and he held the door open.
A hostess took me to the private dining room, where about fifteen people were milling around with wineglasses in their hands. The mayor of New York was standing near the back wall, talking to the teenage girl who had wet her pants on the bus. Her boyfriend was beside her, and two young men I didn’t recognize, who seemed to be the mayor’s aides, stood nearby.
Closer to me, the man whose cell phone had rung on the bus was talking to a tall woman I only vaguely remembered seeing. “I was gonna do something,” he was saying. “I was.” But he fell silent, as did everyone who was talking, when I walked in.
The small woman who had spray-painted the windows with me was there. She was dressed in the same sort of eccentric but elegant clothes; this time a zebra-print blazer fitted close around her little waist and a knee-length black skirt, with a yellow hat like a box with one flap open. She came right over to me.
“Hello, dear,” she said. She had a faint accent. “I’m Seon-Hwa. And I know who you are, of course.”
“Nice to meet you—” I stopped. “Well, I guess we’ve met.”
The woman laughed. “Yes, I suppose we have.”
My shoulders, which had been up nearly around my ears without my realizing, came down a little. I liked this woman. She reminded me a bit of my mother, round-faced and slim, with sparse eyebrows. Though, my mother never would have worn anything like that.
Seon-Hwa stationed herself beside me, guard-like. The mayor and his aides left the teens and approached. One of the aides introduced me, which surprised me. I shook the mayor’s hand. His handshake was very firm, and he looked me in the eye. He was shorter than I had expected, and nicer looking. I’d seen him on TV before and thought he looked like a hedgehog before meeting him in person.
“You did a brave thing,” he said simply. “I hope you’re holding up as well as can be expected. If there is anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to ask. It’s an honour to meet you.”
“Thank you.”
The mayor reached forward and gripped my shoulder for a second. It was a fatherly sort of gesture. The aides looked at each other.
To Seon-Hwa, the mayor said, “Thank you for coming. I’m so sorry for your ordeal.”
He excused himself and made his way over to a woman who had sat beside me in the back of the ambulance. Though the way he touched my shoulder had seemed genuine and kind, I got the impression he was glad to tick off the task of speaking with me. A small premonition of how people would see me from now on, maybe. Awkward to speak to. Odd, marked, unlucky.
Seon-Hwa and I drifted around the room. Wherever we went, conversation faltered. After what felt like a long time, I noticed Ajay Kohli, whom I recognized from the news, coming in. I went over to him, Seon-Hwa by my side.
“I wanted to thank you,” I said.
Ajay smiled, looking apologetic. “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “You did.”
“You said he wasn’t a regular hostage-taker.”
“No. You don’t usually get someone with delusions that advanced who can plan like that and yet who doesn’t seem to want attention.” There was a pause in the conversation around us, as several people turned to listen to what Ajay was saying, but he either didn’t notice or didn’t react, continuing to look at me, his face calm, almost impassive. “As far as we know, he was a perfectly normal kid, till he ended up in foster care after the parents died, and then there’s some worrying stuff, some typical markers. He must have been bright, though. Be bright, I guess, I should say? The spray paint, anyway, was frankly ingenious. No real way to communicate, no way to know where to enter or even what kind of weapons he had. We could see in a tiny bit at the very front, but it wasn’t enough to enter with any kind of protocol. I don’t know what would have happened, if much more time passed.”
Seon-Hwa said, “Good thing she was there, then. No disrespect meant.”
“None taken. I wish there was someone like her every time. I wish I was out of a job.” He accepted a glass of wine from a waiter. “But sadly, I’m not. I train negotiators too—have over twenty in my course right now. You should think about it. Natural empathy, genuine connection. It’s the thing that can’t be taught, but it’s what matters the most.”
Seon-Hwa said, “You don’t know the half of it, Mr. Kohli.” To me, she said, “That’s something to think about, my dear. Seriously. You have a gift.”
I shook my head. The idea of the job made me ill. Somehow the training sounded even worse. “I have a job. I’m an audiologist,” I said and then added, “I mean, when I was at home. In Vancouver, before. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t be like you.” I gestured to Ajay. “It’s amazing, though, what you do.” I meant it—I wasn’t disgusted by him but by the idea of being close to that kind of situation ever again, let alone routinely. I cleared my throat. “Excuse me.”
I turned and came face to face with the cell phone man, standing almost right behind me, as if he had been listening to the conversation. “Hello,” I said. “Hi there.”
The man crossed his arms over his chest, the wine in his glass nearly spilling over the tilted rim. “I guess you think I owe you big-time,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think that.” I watched him. It felt like he was going to boil over in some way, but instead of being afraid, I was irritated.
The teenage couple had drifted over and joined us. “Hey,” said the boy to the man, whose arms were still tightly crossed. “Did you ever get your cell phone back?”
The man just stared at me. Then he said, “I was gonna do something.” He looked down into his wineglass. “You didn’t have to do all that. I was going to take him down as soon as I had an opening. I was watching the whole time, watching like a hawk. I was going to. I would have.”
