THE ASSAILANT by Ariel Djanikian
A small movement of the body can occasionally have a strong effect. For instance, a tilt. Not a shuffle or kick but only a tilt, heel in place, from an angle of eighty degrees to twenty-five, can produce, if that foot happens to rest on a gas pedal, an uproar and catastrophe that belies, and is even insulted by, the subtlety of its origin.
A morning, too, can be a bluff. It can assume the look of serenity. A blank face. A countertop drenched in sun. Though all the while little actions are taking place, across one city or maybe several, which will later combine to form something gruesome. And will serve itself up in the afternoon.
What was I doing? Nothing, at first. It was breakfast time, and I was feeding rice cereal to my child from the purple nub of a long-stemmed spoon. I guess you could say I was already anxious. If you were looking for clues, you might say that. My eyes kept flicking left to the lawn, which had chewed itself up to crisp yellow in the dry August heat. In two weeks, we were planning to put the house up for sale. (This overreach had our savings down to the crumbs, and we were desperate to downsize.) And a dead yard would be a disastrous real estate feature, the kind of thing that might cause a young couple with a pre-approved mortgage to roll by the house without stopping. So yes, I suppose I was in an anxious mood, I was undoubtedly primed for it, when the first provocation arrived at my doorstep. This, a thing with bulk and material, which announced itself with a thump.
It was eight in the morning, quiet. Both my child and I lifted our heads. “Now what could that be?” I asked the air. The noise of cicadas rose and fell. A white moth fluttered clumsily past the Plexiglas door. On the threshold was a battered package from a law firm in Fresno. I lifted it and turned it over in my hand. So it was not a delivery of books after all. Nor the package of baby clothes I’d been waiting for. In fact, it could only be one thing: the last bequest of my grandfather, who had died on the Fourth of July, at age ninety-three, just several weeks ago.
People can reach out from the grave if they want; it’s easy to do, if they have the cash, and give their descendants here and there some hearty slaps in the face. For most of my life, I had felt confident about what was coming to me. I had trusted that promises made twenty-five years ago would narrow their eyes and gird their loins and see themselves through to today. I had believed that, despite certain hints during my grandfather’s last hospitalization, despite his acid per-sonality and his dislike of visible wealth in his children or grandchildren (while he himself lived in high comfort). Amazingly, I had even gazed past the greatest warning sign of them all: his recent marriage, the fourth for him, the fifth for her, to a sharp-eyed materialist who had three insatiable sharks for children. I was stupid. I’m usually not. I’d always had a read on my grandfather. For instance years ago, when he’d said, go ahead, buy the house, wink, wink, you’ll have enough to cover the mortgage later, I’d thought: go fetch a pen, guide your hand over his, have him translate those cheeky words into something you two can take to a notary.
Now it was too late for a notary. I stood staring at my own name within the bequest. There was a number beside it. A puny number. An offensive number. An inheritance, which is to say, not at all within range of what I’d expected.
The phone rang into hollow space. My husband worked in a university building where everyone kept their office doors open. He had to speak quietly; he had even answered his phone quietly; and he could not come close, supposing he’d wanted to, once I’d told him the news, to matching my timbre of outrage.
“We’ll be fine,” he said.
“We were close to being more than fine.”
“The important thing is that we have our health.”
“And when we don’t?” I listed, off the top of my head, various cancers that ran in our families. “How are we going to manage then?”
For this my husband had no answer. He’d grown weary, I’d noticed of late, of deep diving with me into hypotheticals.
I tried a more pressing concern.
“Home prices dropped again,” I said darkly. “CNN is calling it a buyer’s market.”
“I know,” he said, “I saw the same thing.”
His worry dragged me further down; no matter that it was worry I’d just incited myself.
“Is my grandfather really dead?” I asked. “It’s too bad, because I feel I could kill him.”
* * *
At the pediatrician’s office, not much time later, they were having some problem with the computers. The atmosphere in the building, I was sure, was oxygenated to a perfectly normal level. And yet it felt insufficient to me, and I could not catch my breath. My child wiggled off my hip. I hoisted her up again. A new family arrived and pressed in behind us. It was a tall woman straight out of a Norse myth, accompanied by her three white-haired children. The woman wanted to know what was going on. They told her, and she answered with a huff. We were here for the same reason, she and I, today was a walk‑in day for school physicals. Finally the receptionist deemed the computer incorrigible and directed us all to the billing desk around the corner: they would check us in there. The woman happened to be on the side that was closer. Determinedly, keeping her eyes ahead, she marched forward and reached the desk first and began listing her children’s names.
I couldn’t believe what was happening. My face grew hot. Now, I thought, now interrupt. Say: “Excuse me, I think I was first.” I’d seen people say that in situations resembling this. It was no great risk. It was no gigantic occurrence. Its aggressiveness on a scale from one to ten touched only the mildest register of self-assertion. But the keys clicked, and a doctor was named, and the chasm between this moment and the moment of her cutting the line yawned so wide I knew I had to give up. If I’d spoken immediately, that would be normal. If I spoke now, that would be odd. She turned around, hunched over to corral her children. I stepped forward and, as I did, and I should say this was strange behavior for me, I bashed my shoulder hard into hers.
Her mouth popped open in surprise, but an instant later we were back-to‑back, and I couldn’t say if the surprise lasted, or if it turned into anything else. At the desk I gave my name and stated my business, then returned also to the waiting room.
My face was really burning now. I took a seat in a row perpendicular to the woman and fixed my eyes on her. Deeply was I sunk in the midst of the next provocation, though of course I could not have known that then. My gaze was steady. I was sure that I looked like a crazy person, but that didn’t worry me. Good, I thought. Let her believe she’s made enemies with a psychopath: perhaps that will keep her awake tonight, rising at midnight to check on her children and run two fingers over the locks. They called the family and the woman absconded at a hurried pace. Later a new receptionist walked over to me and said they’d have to see me tomorrow: they’d had an especially busy morning, and now the schedule had run up against lunch.
I could not get the child into her car seat. She’d eaten her snack. I’d forgotten a pacifier. She was too young yet to trust in bribes, and threats only further annoyed her. When I tried to hold her down, she arched her back and screamed. All I could think about were those medical forms. We couldn’t register for daycare without them, and the deadline for registration was Monday. I was sweating by the time I shut the door. It was ninety-seven degrees today and hotter here in the parking lot, where there was no protection from a noontime sun that seemed to be pulsing an inch from my face. I was irascible – but who would not have been in my place? A monk would have felt it, a dozy housecat, a person meditating in a public park, a Pleistocene-era sloth.
Rage had overtaken me by the time I turned onto the street. My mind was blank. My hands gripped the wheel. The reflected white light of the full-bloom day made slices through the scenery and I couldn’t hear anything clearly – not the radio, which had turned on with the car, not the child who was still protesting her situation from some vague place over my shoulder. I turned onto the four-lane street that cut through the center of town and encountered a clog of midday traffic.
As I rolled to a halt at the big intersection near the shopping center, about the halfway point home, I sensed nothing out of the ordinary. The Kroger we frequented sat at one of the corners. Our gas station gleamed diagonal from it. There was the massive parking lot that abutted the street, and, further back, a Hardee’s, a UPS store, a Peruvian restaurant, and a block of smaller businesses that possessed only a hazy existence, being as they were in perpetual flux. It took another second or two before an aberrant motion – like the jumps of a bee in a bush – pulled my attention deeper in that direction. What I saw there was a green car, busted up, low to the ground, weaving dangerously down a service road between two broad lanes of parked cars. As I watched, the green car bumped onto a curb to get around a horde of pedestrians, then swung widely back to the wrong side of the road. Immediately I could tell that something bad would happen and soon it did: the car rammed into the corner of a white Toyota Camry, which couldn’t get out of the way in time, and knocked it brutally into the path of a delivery truck that was painted with smiling vegetables. There was the boom of impact and, following that, a series of pops that seemed, confusingly, too belated to have been part of the crash.
Now my heart began to pound. Because the green car was accelerating toward the intersection: coming closer to where I sat, first at the light, at the top of the line. The man driving was hunched low, as if trying to shield himself with the wheel. His expression was one of nervousness and intense concentration – which made sense given his complicated maneuverings. The man in the passenger seat, by contrast, emanated bravado. He had a long face the shape of a bean and hair that was braided flat to his skull. The sun washed over the whole of him, but his wide eyes seemed effortlessly immune to the glare. He wore no seatbelt and leaned far out of the open window. His hand was resting against the outside of the car, and was clutching a silver object. My light turned green but I didn’t move yet: because I could intuit, by the speed of the car, that the two men were intending to run the light.
The driver beside me gave a small lurch, then saw what I saw. A chorus of honking started up from those behind us, who were too far back to perceive what was happening. Then something calamitous happened. It was a thing that need not have happened, but did: I caught eyes with the brazen man with the long, bean face at the very moment the vehicle began to cross, just as I thought it would, into the box. He saw me, he held my gaze, and he lifted – now I realized for sure what it was – a silver gun. And next, as if to scold me for staring, as if it was a punitive gesture, he angled that gun pointedly into my face.
My rage, the rage of the day, came to a head. It welled and infused my body from brain to toe. What did people think of me? Did they think I was nothing? That was it. That was the final thought. My foot stomped onto the gas and the car flew and – in no time at all, really, that’s how it felt – the long nose of our mini-SUV family car was slamming into the soft green side of the assailants.
When you ricochet from a state of banality to one of phenomenal motion, it might require of your mind several long strides before it’s caught up to where you are now. Our car had come to rest in the box, spun around and facing the gas pumps. My hands gripped the wheel with a sticky intensity, as if I feared I might yet be going somewhere. But the intersection was frozen, and that frozenness was radiating out from us, the center point, and toward the outer reaches of traffic. The landscape held itself at an apex of stillness – like a holding of breath – until, gradually, that calm was fractured by the small, creaturely motions of people stepping out of their cars. What do I remember? The gleaming humps of vehicle roofs; the strangers approaching; the light gray smoke. I smelled a burning, factory smell and also the exhaust and the high heat of the day that previously we’d been protected from, in our sweet, moving bubble of air-conditioning. I stretched around and grabbed my child’s leg. She was surprised. Not crying. Nothing had come close to touching her where she was, in the middle seat, couched on all sides by hard layers of foam. The silence astounded. You don’t realize the noise of an engine until it shuts off. A door hung on its hinges, and I thought: what, the attachment was only that? A window that had previously held the weight of my head during a rainstorm was blown out onto the pavement. What? What? That’s all it could take? Our hood was zigzagged unabashedly high, as if showing off its easy and compliant nature. Worse, the windshield, which had for years seemed like a definite thing – a wall, a movie screen – had disappeared down to its crystalline edges. You were inside when you drove; you experienced the busy exterior world without becoming a member of it. You could drive past anything, you could drive through the length of a state, and as long as you didn’t get out of the car, it was as if you were never there. Except here I was, now. I was a member. I was part of an ugly scene.
I unclipped my seatbelt and climbed over the bench between the two front seats so that I could be with my child. She took my finger and stared into my eyes and, for once in her life, she did not make a sound.
Soon it became apparent to me that the green car had not fared well. The crash had sent it spinning into the oncoming traffic. There was a massive dent in one side, right where I had hit it. But worse, the whole front had ripped off, as if removed by a blade. The inside was empty. The seats were uprooted. You could make out the top of a bare metal spring. The people – the driver and the man with the gun – were not milling around with the crowd but supposedly were at foot-level with the good Samaritans who had gathered in two distinct and shuffling clumps. I, too, was being attended to. Someone had entered into the car. Now there was the close wail of sirens and the odor of singed wire and a man’s damp and naked face appearing close to my own. He was attempting to rescue my child but he couldn’t figure out how to unlatch the multiple buckles. He lifted his chin and we looked at each other, both surprised. He said, in an accent which placed him to the land of Georgia pines: “It smells like fire in here. I think you should get your baby out of the car.”
At the hospital, a team of pediatricians determined my daughter to be in perfect health. As for me, there was a sharp revolt in my shoulder blade when a doctor asked me to lift my left arm. But no whiplash, no bulging disc; likely the muscle had bruised under the force of my seatbelt, and would heal itself in a week.
Lovely and accommodating, those emergency room nurses. When they noticed how hungry we were, they ordered turkey sandwiches and fruit salads up to the room. I’d left my cell phone at the site of the crash but they wrangled up a landline so that I could call my husband. When he failed to answer, the receiver floated away from my face. The nurse at the station asked, “Don’t you want to leave a message?” I hesitated. But then I said, no, I would call him later. There was too much to explain in a message.
A patrol car slid up to the hospital entrance, nearly up to the windows, and I found myself transported to another waiting room, this one at police headquarters. Maybe it was the effect of the food – something physiological – because during that ride there was a precipitous drain of adrenaline out of my blood. The enormous high I’d felt earlier, when I’d stomped down onto the gas and soared across the sun-scorched pavement, was beginning to fade. I was losing that mercury-bursting surge of aliveness, that high-heat August rush, when the world had sharpened along every edge: along the lime-green curve of the gas pumps and the flaking walls of the shopping center. There had been, also, sustaining me, my own amazement at what I had done. A gun once pointed at my face was now a minuscule piece of a wreckage. A balance of power had belly-flopped into reversal. And how, but for the genius way I had altered the terms of the debate, and made it not about men or women or guns, but strictly about the size of our cars?
I was sure it was bad for me: this dim and air-conditioned place. The corners were damp with cleaning solvent, and the polished thoroughfares seemed ready to erase your presence should you try to leave a mark on the sterile gleam. While my child investigated a pile of magazines, I bent over in my chair and tried to breathe normally. Slowly it was dawning on me that what had happened today might have consequences upon my tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on. I began to wonder, and this was an almost unbearable thought, if, perhaps, I had done the wrong thing? I was clinging to the silver flash of that gun. To the bullet inside (still lodged inside) that in a different world could have been lodged inside me. But I also remembered something else, something I knew would be best to suppress: a rage that had more to do with the earlier events of the morning than those final seconds preceding the crash.
A policewoman came to fetch me. She was unappealingly short, which is to say about my height, though unlike me everything about her was doughy and round: her torso, her head, the bulb of her nose. She had kind and affectionate eyes for my child. Her youngest of four, she said, craning to look at me while we walked, had just turned ten. And it had recently hit her, now that the brood was all in double-digits, how much she missed them at this age. We entered into a conference room with walls and carpeting the color of dung. A man sat there, in uniform, already poised over a laptop. Clearly I was not the first person to come through a situation like this with company, as in the corner sat a large bin of worn but age-appropriate toys. My child saw it, brightened, twisted away from me and pattered over to see. She was tentative at first, then bold, seizing a Disney doll, a yellow excavator, a pair of kiddie binoculars, and expelling them gleefully onto the floor. When she discovered a rainbow-colored plastic piano, she let out a gasp. For her we’d reached the day’s culmination, the pot of gold at the end of an arduous search. For her it was as if the day’s events – the gunshots, the wreck, the rocketed bodies – were necessary steps in a journey to put that toddler’s piano into her hands.
They wanted my full name and I said it, then out of necessity, spelled it. Address? Phone number? Occupation? Spouse? My answers had a calm, soporific cadence to them, and the back-and-forth seemed to possess a dual purpose: the officers received their information, while I, in the meantime, was allowed to remind myself of what I was: a respectable, perfectly normal person, who was wrapped up a thousand times in the fine-threaded netting of a social existence.
“And this morning, you were coming from where?”
My voice, in answer, was soft, polite, yet firm. Perhaps for clarity’s sake I should confess there was nothing that scared me about the police. My dealings with them in the last ten years sifted down to a couple of parking tickets. During my childhood, even, which took place in Philadelphia during the 1980s crack epidemic, I’d thought of the cops as a sort of merry, mercurial cleanup crew, who used to sweep down our block once a week in order to collect trembling addicts from their hunched, puddled spots on our stoops.
So now, despite my paroxysms of doubt in the waiting room, I felt no strong compulsion to lie. Nor did I attempt, even through sly ellipses, to make over a single fact. I described in detail the paths of the cars. I described, in such a way as to render an instant deep and prolonged, my decision to use the car as a weapon, in retaliation for the threat of the gun.
They were surprised. They’d assumed that the wreck had resulted from a simpler course of action – I accelerated through a green light while the men ran their red – and in fact it took a strenuous effort on my part to disabuse them of their assumptions.
The policewoman rotated the laptop: two mug shots lit up the screen.
“Can you tell us who was driving, please? And who was holding the gun?”
I pointed to each: the driver with his slouched, sad eyes, the passenger with his bean-shaped face and wide, insistent glare. Then I asked, half-hoping for comfort, despite what I’d seen: “Did they survive?”
“No,” she said.
“Ah.”
A silence hung between us.
“It was too late by the time the ambulance got there.” She indicated the driver. “There was a woman who tried CPR on him. But she said that she didn’t get any response.”
When I dared to look at the faces again, the expressions burned with something new: a protest, an outrage. They stared at me and seemed to be saying: come back to the intersection, let’s live the crash over again and make it end differently this time.
I pressed on my eyes, then opened them wide.
“That’s awful,” I said. “I can’t believe it.” The smile on my face was a pure apology. “Now I feel like a murderer.”
So far our talk had been clipped and direct. But here the tenor of the interview changed, and the policewoman became more profuse than I would have imagined her capable.
“You shouldn’t,” she said, as she turned the computer away. “You were defending yourself. A man pointed a gun at your head, and you reacted. You were in serious danger. I can say that for sure. Do you think they were driving like that for fun?” I could taste her breath on my tongue. “I’ll tell you why they were speeding like that, because it’s going to come out soon enough. They’d just robbed a convenience store in downtown Durham, where they beat up a sixty-year-old cashier. And I’ll tell you something else. Who do you think was in the emergency room with you today? The driver of the Toyota Camry. He was leaving the Kroger supermarket and I guess he got in the way because they shot him in the head.” She dropped her voice, dropped her chin a little. “The truth is that we know these guys. They’ve been in and out of here a hundred times. Drugs, robberies, beating up girlfriends. I feel sorry they died but it wasn’t like you couldn’t predict it. Probably they were good kids at one point, but they grew up to be a couple of thugs.”
In one look, you could tell that this woman had not come from means. Her teeth were crooked; her diet was likely poor. She spoke with a Rocky Mount lilt, which made me wonder, when she called them thugs, if there wasn’t something personal in it. As in, if these dead men are not below me, then who?
Now I considered the dragging lines of type on the policeman’s screen and experienced a new, terror-inspiring thought. I asked the officers if, given the deaths, the robbery, the sensational crash, this day had the potential to become a news story. They said they’d had calls, but nothing out of the ordinary.
“If you want us to keep your name redacted,” the policewoman said, “we can absolutely do that for you.”
I smiled, agreed vigorously to the plan, and apologized for the inconvenience.
“It’s a weird time for reporting the news,” I said. “You have reality, and you have the story, and then you have the response to the story. And who knows what one has to do with the other?”
We were finished. I assisted my child in returning the toys to the bin, then sat down at the table with her, in order to sanctify the statement with the loopy, drunk-looking marks of my name. As I was pushing the papers forward, the policewoman, in a startling gesture, placed her large hand over mine.
“I want you to remember something,” she said, her whole body brimming with gentle authority. “No matter how this day turned out, you are the victim here.”
The word, I’ll confess, immediately elicited in me a firm resistance. I bristled and repelled it from my flesh. I took my hand away and cradled it under my child’s thigh. The victim. I had never thought about myself that way before; and the truth was that I did not like the idea. The expression “to pigeonhole” came to mind. Any label that made walls around me I could not endorse. Any fencing in, any doubt cast upon my will or my capacity for action was not a thing – in general – which I was willing to accept.
We all stood up. We exchanged goodbyes like a trio of chums. I shifted my child, who was really very sleepy now, and planted her firmly onto my hip. Who knew when I would see my car? There was a new face hovering by the door, a man whose job it would be to drive us home. They had yet to excavate my cell phone, but the man presented me with my child’s car seat as if awarding me a prize. I strapped it into the back of the cruiser and secured her into her nook of black foam. We started moving and she fell asleep almost immediately: the fingers of one hand raised and slightly curled, as if she were still playing that rainbow piano.
The scenes of my hometown – the restaurants, the college buildings, the coffee shops, the fast food spots with their outdoor, umbrellaed tables – slipped by the window like images loaded onto a reel. The victim. I was still thinking about it. The policewoman’s voice had caught in my head. And yet, strangely, a change was coming over my mood. I no longer felt that bristling sense of rejection. Instead the world was reaching its long arms toward me, and wrapping and rewrapping them around my weary frame. I felt touched by a yellow light. My frigid skeleton was thawing and untwisting itself in this new summer’s heat. The victim, I thought, the victim. I rested my head against the backseat bench. What, after all, I asked myself, was so horrific about a pigeonhole? Try curling up. Try putting in a little dry hay. Try breathing in the fresh scent of the wood. I was one of those people who was so bad at relaxing. On vacations, I was irritable. At home, I tossed and turned for three hours before falling asleep. Perhaps a pigeonhole, after all these years of vague unease, was exactly what I needed.
My husband stood on our crisp, yellow lawn. He had his cellphone pressed to one ear and the house phone pressed to the other. As his gaze fell upon me, though, and upon our napping child, he stopped talking and lowered both phones to his sides. Indoors, while I poured out the events of the day, he rubbed his temples and shook his head. He insisted that we could have died. He said – not oppressively but out of love, the same as I would have said to him, had the roles been reversed – that he wished we would never leave the house again. In terms of the crash, he couldn’t believe that two people were dead. Literally he claimed that the first hours after any disaster were hotbeds for misinformation, and that we should not respond, emotionally, he meant, until more solid facts came in.
At the kitchen island we shared a dinner of last resorts: a frozen pizza and microwave peas. On the counter were the papers of my grandfather’s will. My husband had been shuffling through them, I could see, though he failed to notice when, while clearing the plates, I packed them into the laundry room. Appropriately, I suppose, the bequest no longer made the cut for his attention. Nor did my husband ask any follow‑up questions, when I explained how profoundly it had affected me, to be cut in line at the pediatrician’s.
Around nine o’clock the house telephone rang and the child woke up and cried for her father. It pained me a little, to hear her do that, though after the day we’d had together, who was I to begrudge her the preference? It was the policewoman calling, advising me to turn on the TV. Since my leaving the station, she explained gently – in the voice you might reserve for a teenage suicide risk – that the family of the Toyota Camry driver had charged full force into the media. As it turned out, they had an interesting story. The driver was not exactly a passive bystander – no more than I had been – but had seen the green car coming from a long way off, blazing its way down the service road, and had deliberately made himself into a barricade. What perhaps he had not counted on was for the green car to ram into him; nor was it planned, his next move, which was to lift a gun from his holster and shoot. He had not counted on return fire. Certainly he had not imagined being shot in the head. He was twenty-eight years old and only eleven months home from Iraq. Imagine the sick tragedy – for himself, his parents, his wife, his three-year-old son – if he arrived home from war unscathed, only to die a year later in North Carolina.
“Will he make it?” I asked.
“They think so,” the policewoman said. “He just came out of surgery. Though he may have to go in again. Swelling, I think, around his brain. His wife set up a GoFundMe page to help cover the bills.”
“Hmm.” I’ll admit I was thinking, okay, drop the shoe, I can tell there is something: what does this have to do with me?
“Now, we know you want to remain anonymous” – yes, yes, I was saying, my blood turning chill – “but people started calling us and asking about the crash in the intersection. I guess because – well, we hate to even think about it – but who knows what would have happened if it hadn’t stopped there? So we’ve set up a fund for you too: if you get your computer, I’ll give you the address.”
Instead I scribbled it onto the back of a Target receipt.
“But they think this guy is going to live?” I asked.
‘‘It’s hopeful. That’s what we heard.”
“What about the cashier?”
“Totally fine.” She turned cheerful. “One big purple bruise on his chest. We just found out. That’s the worst of it.”
* * *
Later, much later into the night, with the nocturnal sounds of summer filling the dark between houses, and the mass panic chirps of cicadas, some of them stuck to the windows, adding to it their louder swells, I finally consented to look at the pages that my husband had opened on his computer.
The first was a video: an anchor for News 14 reporting live from the crash site. The place had a different feel to it now. The summer heat was sapped away, into the earth, into the big night sky. The wreckage was towed and the streets were swept clean of those long tails of scattered, glittering glass. New drivers rolled blithely through the box, signaling with orange blinkers and clocking off turns, oblivious to the bloody disaster that had transpired just hours ago under their wheels. The report contained scant mention of me – the enigmatic “third car” – as the veteran and the two dead men provided the heft to fill up the segment. At the curb near the gas station, a small makeshift memorial had gathered itself into being. At first I’d thought it was for the veteran, but of course it was for the two deceased. There were bouquets of carnations, still wrapped in clear plastic. There were votive candles like firefly spots in the petrified air.
Many times in my life – and this was one – I’d considered how people cannot help but be what they are. I tried an experiment. I tried to imagine the two dead men at age five, age twelve, age sixteen. There is a heavy dose of inevitability, I thought, in every wrong. There is a long story leading up to it, stepwise, which eludes our control. When you find yourself needing to act, you act; and later you see unwinding the detailed explanation for the thing, in the moment, you could have sworn was spontaneous. In their shoes, I asked myself, would I have acted the same? Would I have beat up the cashier and smashed down the service road and pointed a gun into a stunned woman’s face? If “shoes” was a true synecdoche, if by “shoes” I meant same brain, same life, then the answer must always and certainly be “yes.” But then, I thought, what did it matter what car you were driving in, wasn’t the answer “yes” for all? By absolving the dead men of their guilt, didn’t I also absolve my own?
We moved to the veteran’s GoFundMe page, and I let out a curse upon seeing the number. Below, in the comment section, text spewed down the page in blocks: an argument was being waged between those who lionized the man for his intervention and those who called him a dangerous Second Amendment nut, who had put everyone on that service road in danger.
“All right,” said my husband, “now for you.”
We shifted to my page. The number did not come close to matching the veteran’s, but still it caused within me a powerful twitch of joy. A brief plea, made on my behalf, referenced injuries sustained in the crash. For a second, I didn’t know what it meant. But, yes, there it was. I could still feel something when I levered my arm. My husband explained that the story had swept past the confines of our town, our state, and had become one of those news items on which every person could give an opinion.
“I hope they don’t leak my name,” I said. “Even after the money. It’s not worth the death threats.” But my husband thought we were in the clear. If it was going to happen, they would have done it already. Anyway, as far as he could understand, it was mostly the presence of registered and unregistered guns that was causing the uproar, and the veteran’s vigilante decision to shoot willy-nilly into the green car. “You’re more the punctuation to the event,” he said. “The bystander who happened to be in the way. Though they know you’re a mom,” he confessed. “That came out. A mom with a baby who was just coming home from the pediatrician’s.” He turned in his chair: sizing me up. “To be honest, there’s something automatically sympathetic about that.”
As we watched, the number climbed, and we both felt the strangeness of it, and could not speak. This morning my husband had whispered from his office, in regards to my grandfather’s will: what did you want? And I had said, in a clear demand, citing the excellent schools and the forfeits of moving, like a person unafraid to stand up and blackmail the fates: “How about some cold, hard cash for starters?”
We stayed up late. The child did not go to sleep until midnight and we ourselves were too infused with new information to follow suit, as we usually did. All through those early hours we kept refreshing the fundraising page, and also the webpages of various news and social media sites. Each time I felt a tightening of my chest, fearing that with this reload my name would pop up. But it didn’t, no matter how many times we clicked, not on that night or ever.
The cicadas were at it once again, anticipating the dawn. My husband’s eyes were narrowed and red with exhaustion, and yet, there was a delightedness in them as they ran along the walls of our home. He felt me observing him and seemed embarrassed, though he shouldn’t have felt that way, never with me. This was a solid, charming house. Even the yellow lawn would rejuvenate itself. How could we not have felt grateful to keep it?
We both decided it was time to go up, though I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. What I need to do, I told my husband, is to lie down in the bath and soak there with the lights off and the blinds closed. I don’t know for how long, I said, but I think I will need at least a year.
Motions were made toward fulfilling the threat. I walked upstairs but turned the opposite way down the hall. For several minutes I stood at the mirror until, at the distant sound of snoring, I thought: now it is only me awake in the house. I ran the water and eased myself into the heat and sank down low. Narcissism, which can come after victimhood, if you are willing to take that step, is often the most luxurious, most transformative thing you can do for yourself. Without the lights the glow of dawn was weak gray on the tile. My body was submerged, now, exactly to the pink pin-tips of my nipples, which were erect in the touch of the air conditioning, and pointed directly up to the ceiling. I sighed. I ran my hands across the surface of the water and it felt like silk. Did I think about the dead men? How could I, really, in any meaningful way? They were in my life for forty-five seconds. We had nothing to do with each other, we were particles caught up in different storms, except for that singular point of collision. I lifted my gaze. A blue line of sky had appeared between two off-kilter slats in the blinds. It took the shape of a half-smile, on the face of the six o’clock universe. I enveloped myself in its warm attentions, and found them in every way beneficent.
Ariel Djanikian is the author of the novel The Office of Mercy (Viking, 2013). She has recent short stories in Glimmer Train and Tin House.