Читать книгу The Shooting - James Boice - Страница 11

(Sheeple I)

Jenny. I wake up, check my phone, and there is her face. This one’s in Manhattan. Black boy, white man. Jenny is on the scene and raising hell; she has to act fast or she will lose the story to the civil rights activists. This is not a black-and-white story but a gun story, the story quotes her saying. And gun stories are all-of-us stories.

She likes to appear unbreakable. Like Joan of Arc. That’s how she seemed the first time I saw her. It was in my hospital room where I lay sedated and suicidal in the aftermath of my own shooting. Her skin was dark, her bones big and heavy, and her high heels on the hospital floor sounded so powerful. She told me she had come a long way to see me. Said she knew exactly what I was going through. She told me about her Michelle, who died at her desk in a first grade classroom. She took out her purse, showed me a picture. A nineteen-year-old young man with his daddy’s gun decided Michelle and all her classmates and her teacher were going to die and so that’s what happened. Jenny shrugged, put the picture away. After these things happen, everybody always says, What do we do? How do we stop this? Why doesn’t somebody do something? Well, here I am. Now where are you?

Our hero, I thought. I joined her. She moved into a nearby Embassy Suites but I don’t think she ever once slept there; she was too obsessed, she was always strategizing, e-mailing, cultivating local ground operatives or playing politicians off one another. She went with me to Kaylee’s memorial service, appeared by my side on the Today show couch. Our family home became a makeshift local branch of her organization, Repeal the Second Amendment. Under the guidance of Jenny Sanders we moved out all the furniture and replaced it with computer workstations and phone banks. She installed a small video production studio where the kitchen had been, equipped it with satellite linkup capabilities to enable her appearances on cable news shows. With her came a cabal of young women of color, inexhaustible little Jennys each with a specific role performed with unflagging optimism. Jenny Sanders was a charismatic prophet and innate executive genius. In another time and place she would have founded a major religion of the world. Every day Jenny and I met with major political donors and super PACs, and again and again, over pasta salad and little green bottles of water, I relived my shooting.

The movie was the premiere of the new installment of the action franchise I had grown up with and adored. My girlfriend, Kaylee, had no interest in seeing the movie but I convinced her. She and I camped outside the theater all night to get a seat. The previews ended and the lights went down. A door to the side of the screen opened and in from the parking lot stepped a figure. Kaylee whispered, Who’s that? And then she was gone. I can only imagine people were screaming—if they were, I could not hear it over the noise of what sounded like a box of M-80s going off all at once by accident. I had already pulled Kaylee to the floor and lay on top of her. I could feel her heart beating against me. She’s still alive, I said out loud. People were running for the exits at the rear of the theater. At the exits they pulled and pushed at the doors, not understanding they had been chained shut from outside. The shooter stood at the base of the screen emptying magazine after magazine, reloading several times with fresh ones he carried in the pockets of his black military contractor cargo pants. I remember his face as he sighted each shot through the scope of the assault rifle. It was blank. It might have been the face of someone driving alone a long distance. This was his life’s great project. This was the only meaningful thing he had ever done. He had been carrying it inside himself for a long time, letting it come to life inside him the way others might carry a baby or music. The air smelled like sulfur. It was smoky, fire alarms were going off, sprinklers raining down on us. I remember seeing blood crawling down the sloped aisle from the exits where the bodies were piled. The massacre lasted forty-eight seconds. Two hundred forty-three were killed. They were dead in the heaps by either exit, dead in the seats they had carefully chosen, asking the ones they were with Are these good? Can you see? unaware this was the final decision they would ever make. They were dead with popcorn still half chewed in their mouths and dopey grins on their faces from the last preview, a raunchy sex comedy starring Jason Sudeikis.

Once the shooter decided he was finished and shot himself through the mouth with a Glock 19, I tried to lift Kaylee but her head lolled like it was made of dough and that’s how I knew what I had been feeling was only my own heart. I hated my own heartbeat. It was a liar, a traitor—it meant that I was the only survivor. Can you name me? Can you name any of the other dead? No one ever can. But can you name the shooter? Of course you can—you can state all three names, they roll off your tongue: first, middle, and last. You can point at his picture and say, That’s him. You can say what he did in his life. Can you say anything—one thing—those he killed ever did? Can you say one thing I ever did in mine?

Then Jenny would hit them with the economic data showing the benefits of a tax on all ammunition, the polling statistics indicating growing voter support in favor of repealing the Second Amendment in favor of a new amendment, our amendment, an amendment we the people—not dead, slave-owning white guys from 250 years ago: us— would write. —This is happening, Jenny would tell them. —It is happening. The tide turns quickly. Be on the right side of it.

I could almost see Kaylee there, in each meeting, watching me showing rich assholes her picture, watching CEOs and hedge fund managers take her picture in their small-fingered hands, pretending to care. I was using her smile and her youth and her utter perfect sweetness to try to garner votes for quixotic state legislation or small bits of money for Jenny’s organization. I was using her lolling neck. Her silent chest. I was giving her to them.

A thousand meetings, a thousand howling escorts from the building. —I’m sorry what happened to you happened, said one Democratic state representative, —it breaks my heart. But, look, you’re talking about guns. And if that wasn’t bad enough, you’re talking about taxes. In Texas. He looked at Jenny like he was going to cry. —Are you out of your mind? Do you want any Democrats in office in this state? Do you want any kind of future political life here, Jenny? There’s a right way of doing what you want to do and a wrong way. And, darling, this is the wrong way.

—Fuck you, Jenny told him, and left. I followed.

People sent my family and me death threats all day every day, via phone or letter or social media or e-mail, even in person. They protested outside my house carrying guns, screaming at my family and Jenny whenever we left. A caravan of men carrying guns followed us around wherever we went, calling us enemies of the state, traitors to our nation. They called Jenny a cunt. Called me a faggot. Oftentimes walking through a crowd of these guys spitting at us and screaming, it was more terrifying than being in that movie theater. In the movie theater, I knew what was happening. By that point, it had happened so often I knew exactly what it was. And it was not personal. My and Kaylee’s being there was a result of chance. With these guys, everything about it was personal. They hated me, wanted me dead, they wanted me gone, they wanted her gone. Jenny assured me not to worry, to stay strong, but her voice picked up a stammer, and I noticed her hands shaking whenever she lifted one of her half dozen daily macchiatos to her lips. —This is what is necessary, she’d say. —They’re on the wrong side of history.

My family and I had to move after we found a bullet hole in the siding at the front of the house. Jenny found us a new one. To keep its location secret, its deed was signed by the manager of an LLC set up by one of her donors. It was in a town fifty miles away. I did not want to live in a town fifty miles away, I wanted to live in my town.

She and I kept giving interviews, kept writing letters and making phone calls to RSA members across the country appealing for donations to fight the Battle of Texas, in which Jenny assured them victory was close at hand but at the same time so was defeat, now more than ever their help was necessary if they wanted to save the lives of future Americans. I alone seemed to see the fight as increasingly hopeless. The more money she raised to fight the NRA, the more money the NRA was able to raise to fight Jenny. The stronger the candidates the RSA ran in local Democratic primaries, the more gusto with which the party shock-and-awed them with its vastly superior manpower, media influence, and money, tarnishing them as circus characters of the fringe Left with no chance of defeating the Republicans in the general election. Jenny and I were failing to get any lawmakers to even draft a version of the ammo tax just to get her out of their hair. The state assembly would not even hold a vote on whether to consider looking into the boxes and boxes filled with independent, peer-reviewed, rock-solid science showing the benefit of the ammo tax on the economy and public health in America. At the same time, the NRA was convincing its membership that victory for the RSA candidates in both the primary and general elections was a certainty, that Jenny Sanders’s success at passing the ammo tax and ultimately repealing the Second Amendment was imminent and assured, and, as a result, new NRA memberships, donations, and nationwide gun and ammo sales all reached heights not seen since the aftermath of Newtown.

—Can you feel it? Jenny said to me the night one of her candidates lost a primary by thirty-three percentage points, as I sat slumped in the corner of the hotel conference room drinking, despondent. —What we’re doing is working. We’re making big progress. We’ve just got to keep doing what we’re doing.

—Are you insane? I said. I sat up and began to rant, but she cut me off.

—Dude, shush. She pointed up at the ceiling, the music blasting now. —Beyoncé.

She spun and danced away to the center of the room like a drunk aunt at a wedding. I watched her dance alone, realizing what I had done. I had placed the last vapors of my faith in humanity into a callous lunatic.

Our daily schedule consisted of: meetings, phone calls, being shouted at, meetings, lunch, getting spit on, meetings, phone calls, having our tires slashed, e-mails, writing op-eds, TV appearances, campaign rallies, door-to-door canvassing, planning tomorrow which would always be the same as today—and over it all, an incessant looping sound track of the pop queen. After a major prime-time Fox News host called me a sniveling, emasculated weasel on live television, Jenny played Beyoncé to try to cheer me up. When a former Republican governor and presidential candidate called for my and Jenny’s being added to the terrorist watch list, Jenny responded with some lyric from a Beyoncé song. And when another former Republican governor posted my picture on her Facebook page with a bull’s-eye photoshopped over my face and the message Lock and load, the vast digital army of little Jennys blew up the page with pictures of Beyoncé until the offending former governor was forced to delete the whole thing. One time I caught Jenny staring at herself in the mirror in my house and she turned to me and said, —I kind of look a little like Beyoncé, don’t I? I think the worst thing I could have done to her would have been, not joining the NRA, but confessing that I did not get Beyoncé, that Beyoncé meant nothing to me.

—Do you think she would like me? she asked once in the car as bearded men pounded on the windows on either side with their firearms. —I mean, if she met me?

Meanwhile every day a steady ticker tape of the day’s dead: stray bullets killing mother on her front steps, toddler shot by older brother playing with dad’s gun, road rage escalating to execution, failed news anchor shooting former colleagues on air, failed whatever killing ex-wife and her family and their kids, cop shooting unarmed black man in the back during a traffic stop, seventh grader shooting best friend in pre-algebra class, father mistaken for rival gang member shot on sidewalk, white supremacist sitting through entire service at a black church before taking out a Glock 19 equipped with a sixteen-round magazine and killing as many people as he could, then reloading and killing more…

That time for me was like being somehow shrunken down to the cellular level and injected into a human body—it could have been anyone’s—right where the cancer is, and seeing the sickness breathing and eating and seething around me, tasting it, putting my hands on it, doing everything I could to try to stop it and nothing working.

I appeared in a video Jenny’s marketing team produced, reading from cue cards she held up behind the camera, things she had written about what it was like for me being in that movie theater, what Kaylee meant to me and how in love we were, and what it was like having her die in my arms because of the NRA. Jenny did not know what Kaylee meant to me. No one did. Kaylee meant everything. Everything. But I could not remember her anymore. Now whenever I tried to remember her, all I could see was the picture I showed to men with all the money and power right before they told me there was nothing they could do. I did not even know whom I was talking about anymore when I said Kaylee’s name. The reality—the real her, the real me, the real us—was gutted. I had gutted it. I should never have shown anyone her picture, I should never have told anyone about her neck, the heartbeat I thought was hers. I had turned Kaylee into something inhuman, I had desecrated her. I had desecrated myself. Because now I could not even remember Kaylee. I could not remember the girl I loved. I could only remember the politics, the men with guns. And Jenny.

Lawmakers stopped taking our meetings. Maybe now and again an aide with nothing better to do might come downstairs and meet us in the lobby, let me desecrate Kaylee for him, hear Jenny out about the science and the data and the tide, ensure us the administration was taking the issue very seriously before excusing himself.

—It’s working! Jenny kept saying. —We’re making progress! All we have to do is keep doing what we’re doing and not let up!

Late one evening we sat around a table at headquarters, holding an all-night strategy session in advance of a big meeting (sleeping bags had been brought in for the staff), when Jenny began crying and did not stop. The little Jennys around us pretended not to notice. They said, —Thanks, Jenny! Thanks, everybody! and gathered their notepads and devices and scattered to their workstations, leaving me and her alone. I had never seen someone so lonely. Even her style of crying was lonely: hunched forward, curled small and tight into herself with her elbows on the table and hands over her face, shaking silently. I did not know what would happen. I watched her, the narrow hands with the veins sticking out and liver spots beginning to appear, her skinny frail wrists that looked anything but unbreakable, the strands of gray hair she had missed when she had dyed it herself in the bathroom of her hotel room.

—Jenny? I said. —Are you okay? She did not answer. I reached over, touched her shoulder. —Jenny?

—Get away from me! she yelled into her hands. —Don’t touch me!

I jumped up and away, startled. I looked at the little Jennys. They pretended not to see. None of them looked away from her work. They just left her there at the table until they all went to sleep on the floor in sleeping bags. They turned the lights off on her. I covered her with a spare blanket. She was still shaking. Not crying, I realized. Shivering. Was I alone in seeing what it all was doing to her? That she lived on some kind of precipice and one day she would go over into the abyss, taking with her whoever happened to be holding on to her at the time? Would any of the others have believed me if I had told them Jenny Sanders, like any of us, was not the person she believed she was?

In the morning I woke to the sounds of Beyoncé. I found Jenny bouncing around with her disciples before a whiteboard, on which was written a day’s full agenda. —We’re making progress, Jenny shouted at me over the music.

I felt exhausted and useless. I told her I was done. She told me I needed to change my mind, but before long a former graduate student at a university in Washington State drove through campus in his Kia Sorento with a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol and a box of fully loaded sixteen-round magazines in the passenger seat (the gun and the bullets he had bought as part of the surge in guns and ammo sales resulting from Jenny’s Battle of Texas), shooting at every woman and girl he saw, killing nine and paralyzing three and injuring twelve more before police could stop him. Jenny said goodbye via text from the airport as she boarded her flight to Washington. I tried calling her a few times over the next few months, but one of her little Jennys always assured me she was in a meeting or on a call or traveling and would absolutely call me back first chance. She never did. I never spoke to Jenny Sanders again. I saw her only on TV and in news stories like this I read now, today’s shooting. Tomorrow will bring tomorrow’s shooting, and like today’s it will make me remember it all. All of it, that is, but Kaylee.

We’re making progress! Keep doing what you’re doing and don’t let up! I did not understand Jenny’s optimism in the face of completely contradictory facts until later, when hackers got into the RSA’s servers and dumped its until-then-confidential financial and membership data and I learned for the first time how much money had been coming in to RSA during that time, how many new memberships, how the visibility of Jenny’s movement grew like a second sun in the sky over the nation.

Victory at the Battle of Texas.

People ask me: What is she like?

I always answer: There is nothing Jenny Sanders would not do to save us. Nothing at all.