A group of heavily armed men move snake-like in military formation along a commercial strip of the city. A crowd forms on the other side of the street behind cover and watches the action unfold through their phones. Another group of heavily armed men enters view, coming up the street, moving directly into the cross-hairs of their foe. The surreality of civilians engaging in urban combat under the glare of broad daylight doesn’t register with the watching crowd as an anomaly. It’s the world they’ve come to expect, filtered through their digital experience, made semi-real by the immediacy of the action – taking place in front of them, but once removed by the camera lens on their phones.
The rival groups get within mere feet of each other, somewhat timid at first, questioning the terrible choices they’ve made in their lives, their willful disregard for human life, and empathy for a world they don’t fully understand and has led them to this moment when a sudden BANG triggers a fusillade of bullets flying in every direction. Bodies scurry, some fall lifeless on the hard concrete. Everything goes black.
Carol sits up in bed, covered in a cold sweat. She gets her bearings, places herself, surveys the room for possible intruders, then sits idle, listening for movement in adjoining rooms. She feels like a cliche, the kind of characters in movies haunted by a PTSD lay people can’t relate to, and if they’re honest with themselves, think is fake or at least embellished. Carol used to be able to relate to that opinion until she became the cliche. It was something she hid from friends and relatives, embarrassed to be on that side of the social divide – burdened by trauma or stress or anxiety or a personality disorder instead of the lucky few who could skate through life and look down their nose at the afflicted.
The actual event seemed so trivial, common even, in a weird way, which is likely the reason she was so sensitive about having trauma. A mass shooting had occurred a thousand miles away. Initially she dismissed the news. She purposely avoided those stories once they started to become common, whenever that was. Nobody could remember. But she knew herself. Chasing tragic news stories was a rabbit hole of content consumption and days or weeks long obsession, possibly followed by months of therapy. It was a no-win situation so she practiced avoidance to keep her sanity.
Everything changed when a distant friend told her one of the victims was someone she knew. Not someone she knew well on a personal level or anything like that. They were a work client, someone she’d talked to every other week for a few months, exchanged the usual pleasantries with before getting down to grind of work and the prescribed roles of client and service provider, payor and payee.
The news paralyzed her. Gun violence on that scale had never hit so close to home. It triggered the worst possible impulse in Carol; to consume every piece of news related to the event. She started first with the broad details – the bucolic suburban setting, the annual holiday parade, families gathering along a parade route, celebrating a beautiful holiday and weekend. It started as a scene ripped from a Norman Rockwell painting until it became something else. She then studied the victims, their ages, family situations, the people they’ve left behind. The people they were and what they were in the process of becoming until bad luck intervened, banal evil took over.
The story of her client was the most awful. It was the one highlighted the most by news outlets, a sad paradox of our collective desire for entertainment hewing closely to one appetizing end of the narrative spectrum: senseless violence juxtaposed to the suburban idyll of child rearing and white picket fences. The woman and her husband, also killed in the act of senseless terror, had been shielding their young child from the barrage of semi-automatic bullets raining down on the spectators. The child survived and was found wandering alone when things settled. For Carol the story was a bitter dose of reality. It was gun violence made real. A small and growing family was wiped off the face of the Earth because Americas is too enamored with guns and power to see their own flaws. Too enamored with violence and attention and shortcuts to fame to bat an eye at how crazed we’ve become.
Carol did her best to avoid all news about the killer. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of the glory he was obviously seeking. The selfish and heinous act deserved nothing but scorn and derision.
She took off from work the rest of that day, then the next day, and the one after that. Each night she had the same gun-laced dream. Somewhere somebody had gotten their fifteen minutes of gun fame while she was alone, a thousand miles away, wrestling with the burden of understanding in clear terms that life is fragile and tomorrow is never promised. Not in America.
