Читать книгу The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes - Anthony Sadler, Anthony Sadler - Страница 10

THALYS TRAIN #9364

Somewhere in northern France.

Five hundred fifty-four passengers on board.

Spencer is holding two fingers against a pulsing wound in Mark’s neck. As the train races through the countryside at over 150 miles per hour, he’s trying to plug the carotid artery because if he doesn’t, Mark dies.

Anthony watches from above.

If there are screams, Anthony doesn’t hear them; if the sound of wind rushing by the windows is loud, he doesn’t register it. He is totally focused. The terrorist is bound, hog-tied on the floor. Mark groans. Anthony feels as if the people lying there below him are the only other people in the world.

The carpet is covered in blood. There is so much blood. It is astoundingly quiet.

The bell that signals the train doors opening and closing is the only other noise, an eerie, antiseptic chirp. Anthony might as well be in the hushed corridors of a hospital. None of it feels real. Did we just do that?

The train moves along quickly, smoothly—normally—as if they’ve imagined everything that just happened. The motion is almost soothing. No one seems afraid. No one seems here. There are no extraneous people around Anthony except the ones who took part in the drama that just played out. No one except the ones he’s immediately concerned with. He seems to have blocked the rest from his mind.

He’s blocked a lot of things from his mind. Including some important things, like the notion that the terrorist might not have been acting alone—that there might be two more, or five, hiding somewhere on board, about to attack. There’s no good reason to think there’s only one. Still, as far as Anthony’s concerned, there’s only one. He’s become wholly absorbed with only this man, solving the problem that is immediately in front of him, and at the moment it is impossible for him to think about anything he cannot immediately see. His brain has walled itself off like a vault, only occasionally letting light in through the cracks and seams in the metal.

Alek is back—where did Alek go? He disappeared with the machine gun, but he’s back now, collecting ammunition and putting weapons in a bag.

Did that all really just happen?

Alek tried to kill a man. While Spencer was trying to choke him. Alek held the machine gun right up to the terrorist’s temple so that the bullet would have opened his head up and passed right into Spencer. Anthony had been trying to help subdue the terrorist when one of his friends almost killed the other. But the gun didn’t go off. Anthony doesn’t know why.

NO ONE WILL BELIEVE IT. Anthony’s not sure he believes it. It doesn’t feel real; it feels like he slipped into a video game character, his own thoughts not wholly relevant here, as if he were mostly a spectator of even his own actions. It is so quiet, and so calm, it is not yet possible to comprehend the fact that his life has just changed forever.

He takes out his phone and begins filming. He needs proof. For his friends; for himself.

He is not thinking about evidence. What he’s doing doesn’t feel like thinking at all really, it’s more like reacting.

He’d been reacting a moment ago when they were all tying the terrorist up and he heard a noise behind him. A groan? He turned, registered three distinct things all at once—a man in a soaked shirt, blood geysering across the aisle, and the man’s eyes moving toward the ceiling as if something important had gotten stuck up there.

Then the neck slackened, the chin collapsed into the chest, and the man rotated forward out of the seat.

Anthony watched it in high resolution and perfect detail, as if he were able to slow down motion just by observing it. He had a superpower.

Then this: a pool of blood crept from under the man toward the chairs.

Look at the blood. It was bright and pulsing, and a lesson from his human anatomy class bubbled up and presented itself to Anthony—bright because it’s oxygenated, so that’s arterial blood—blood meant for the man’s brain was seeping into the carpet instead, which meant he was even worse off than he looked.

Anthony took off running. He crashed through the train door into the first car and yelled. Too loud? His body was charged through with a new force he couldn’t wholly control. “Do any of you speak English?”

“Me,” “I do,” “Yes,” ten people responded, a dozen, all different accents.

“Do any of you have a towel?”

Silence, confusion. Fuck you guys, at the same moment he decided a towel wasn’t enough anyway. Back to the train car, back to Spencer on the ground, Spencer still tightening knots, and telling him there was a man bleeding out right behind him. Spencer wiped the blood from his face, crawled over to Mark, took off his shirt to use as a bandage. “I’m just gonna—I’ll just try to plug the hole.” Spencer reached forward to Mark’s neck, and just like that, the bleeding stopped.

Spencer hasn’t moved since. Anthony stands above him, standing guard, looking down as Spencer remains unmoving, on his hands and knees, shirtless, bloodied, fingers in a man’s neck, the image so absurd it’s almost humorous.

When did that all happen? A minute ago? An hour?

Anthony isn’t forming memories properly. His sense of time is distorted; the hardware in his brain that makes memory has been co-opted to dump so much adrenaline that his digestive tract has shut down; he won’t sleep for four days, and his sense of time has become plastic.

And where’s Alek?

To Anthony, his friend Alek seems only partially present; here, gone, back, no longer a whole person, just wisps and flashes across Anthony’s vision. He’s there cutting open Mark’s shirt, then gone. Walking away with the machine gun, then back. Alek is like a person in an old tintype photograph who fled midway through exposure, leaving behind just a blurred, ghostly residue on Anthony’s memory.

That’s another reason none of this feels real: none of it makes sense. It doesn’t make sense that it’s so calm on board.

It doesn’t make sense that Alek keeps disappearing.

Mostly, it doesn’t make sense that Spencer got out of his seat so fast it was like he charged the terrorist before the terrorist even showed up.

Anthony has to ask Spencer about that. He feels it as an urgent, corporeal need. Spencer, how did you know? But Spencer is busy talking to Mark, the man with the bullet wound, who’s started groaning again.

“I’m sorry, bud,” Spencer says. “If I move, you die.”

Mark doesn’t seem concerned with the hole in his neck. The woman next to him—his wife, Anthony assumes—is getting more agitated; she thinks Mark might have another problem, maybe he was shot twice, or there’s an exit wound. Alek finally decides to accommodate her.

Alek is here again.

Alek takes the scissors from the first-aid kit Anthony didn’t realize he was holding.

Alek cuts the man’s shirt and does a blood sweep, running his hand up and down the man’s back, looking for a wound. It’s strangely intimate. The three of them all try to keep a man alive with their bare hands on his body.

There is no blood on the man’s back.

Alek is gone again.

Even Mark is calm. “Guys, my arm hurts,” he says. He says it evenly. He has an arterial bleed, and is only alive because Spencer is plugging it with his fingers, but Mark doesn’t seem to know or care all that much about the fact that he’s dying.

“I can’t move you,” Spencer says. “I’ll lose the hole.”

“Just let me shift a little, my arm’s really sore.”

“Yeah. We’re not worried about your arm right now.”

No one seems to have any sense of how serious any of this is. Mark is unbothered that his head is inches from the terrorist who shot him. They’re lying right next to each other, right there on the carpet. Neither of them cares. The terrorist is unconscious, and Mark is close behind.

They wait.

They ride the train for thirty more minutes.

Anthony knows police in France will want to talk to them. He knows newspaper reporters in France will probably want to as well. Through the fog lifting in his mind he understands that they’ve just encountered a terrorist. We just frigging stopped a terrorist. Spencer and Alek are off-duty US service members. Anthony knows that will matter. Anthony knows that will make this a big story in France.

The train curls into the station, and when he presses his face up to the window he can see the French National Police standing on guard next to SWAT-type vehicles. Still, he does not know what will follow. That they will become celebrities, not just in France but in America too. That they will be on the cover of People magazine, that the CEO of Columbia Sportswear will give them his private jet for a week and that Anthony will ride it home, that his arrival will be captured by cameramen in helicopters overhead, that plainclothes officers will stake out his college classes, that he will sit next to a gorgeous starlet and have a conversation on TV with Jimmy Fallon, that the president of the United States will invite them over so they can see the secret catacombs of the White House, that Alek—Alek!—will be on Dancing with the Stars and make it to the final night, that they will ride a float through their hometown during a parade in their honor, that a glittering Megyn Kelly will win a nationwide contest for their first group interview.

That a trip Anthony only began planning a few months before, when his application for a high-limit credit card he definitely could not afford was miraculously approved, would make him an international celebrity.

All he could think about at that moment was, I gotta talk to Dad.

WHAT ANTHONY WILL UNDERSTAND later is that, at the moment he recognized the threat he was facing, his body was overtaken by a series of physiological changes that prepared him to take it on but prevented him from accurately perceiving his surroundings; that literally changed how he experienced sights, sounds, and feelings. Others called it “fight or flight” but that didn’t do it justice, didn’t express the power of the processes taking over their bodies. This he knew something about; he was a kinesiology major. That the moment he recognized what was happening on the train, chemicals released, arteries constricted, noncritical systems shut down. Sugar was pumped where it was needed, which is why he felt a superhuman level of energy, but also his perception changed. His body jettisoned senses that weren’t mission critical. People didn’t get that—their bodies actually changed. Everything changed, down to tiny muscles that flattened the lenses of their eyes so they could focus on objects in the middle distance. Better to see charging predators or paths of escape, but that same change stole their peripheral vision. They were looking through tunnels.¹

But the most beguiling thing of all was that he wasn’t processing information accurately, because he was blocking out things that weren’t important. He did not remember any other people on that train car except the ones he interacted with. Spencer. The hog-tied terrorist. Mark moving closer to death. Were there even other people in the car? He could not honestly say he remembered them, though of course he knew that there were.

But most relevant to what he was experiencing at that moment, this disruptive, disturbing inconsistency, was that the moment he recognized the danger and this process began inside him, his perception of time changed. Events presented themselves to him as slower than they were actually happening, and his memory imprinted things out of order. Sometimes his memory was simply blank. There was a reason for this too: as his body was overtaken by physical changes, the hardware in his brain that formed memory was co-opted to dump chemicals. The memory-forming machinery was no longer left to simply form memories—part of what was happening to Anthony on that train was a medical condition with a commonly known name: amnesia. He couldn’t form memories correctly, in effect because the video recorder in his brain was being used for something else.

Perhaps that’s why Anthony never saw that pistol. Or rather, Anthony could not remember seeing that pistol. It’s a funny thing about memory: it doesn’t always feel hazy when it’s wrong. Maybe it’s why witnesses to violent crime swear they saw things they never did, and swear they didn’t see things that happened right in front of them. It’s why burglarized store clerks sometimes don’t recognize what’s going on in the jumpy CCTV footage of the robbery or the shoot-out: what they actually experienced felt entirely different from what they see on the screen.

Sometimes memory can feel precise, a laser-cut model of what happened, so you can see a fully detailed picture right there in front of you when you close your eyes. It can feel certain when it’s wrong. How are memories formed, but through a system of sensors arranged around your body to take in sights, sounds, smells? What if those senses are off? What if they’re calibrated wrong? What if the shape of your eye has changed so that, like through a fisheye lens on a camera, the image you capture is altered? What if even the way you’re experiencing time has changed? Anthony experienced the attack differently from Alek, who experienced it differently from Spencer. The acceleration and near-freezing of time began and ended at different points for each of them. Each have large black spots over their memories of parts of the attack, extraordinary clarity over other parts.

Later Spencer would say he wished he had a video of what happened, but his older brother, Everett, a highway patrolman, disagreed. Everett knew what it was like to go through a traumatic confrontation that felt so maddeningly different from what an unfeeling security camera captured that it was actually disorienting. “It’s better that you just have your memories,” he said.

But that was just it. Their memories were different.