I was in one world before everybody started running, and in another world one second later…
In the first world, over the course of some moments, I was contemplating a Facebook status update. I was eating with my wife, Rhoda, and our two sons, Benny and Henry, at The Great Mall food court. We often go there for Thai food, and last night, I gotta say, it was particularly good. I’m still replaying the crunch of the eggrolls between my teeth.
I’m replaying other things, too.
During dinner (this was around 5pm), I went back up to the Thai counter to get our water cups refilled. There was this gigantic family standing there (I’m talking about how many of them there were; it was as though the entire bloodline had come out). Those who know me know I have an extreme pet peeve when it comes to people who move slowly during checkout, and this group was smashing their fingers into all my buttons. The matter wasn’t helped when the child of the gang, who was maybe 10 years old, looked over at me and said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said, trying to conceal how irate I was.
“What are you doing here?” he asked me, clearly going with the theme of his family dominating the entire space.
“Well, I’m trying to get water. I presume you’re leaving eventually.”
I think they decided to leave a little quicker than they’d planned.
So there I was, back at the table, wondering if the above was worthy of a status update, one wherein I contemplated, as I was actually doing, if my reply had been Jersey Boy-obnoxious or utterly well-founded, when reality flung me from pettiness to dead seriousness.
About 100 yards away, in the main corridor just off the food court, I saw what I can only describe as a swarm of people running. There must have been 200 of them. Rhoda and Henry had their backs to it (this would become important in a moment). Me and Benny saw it happen.
And they weren’t walking. The wave went fast.
I stood. “Let’s go.”
When Rhoda and Henry turned, the main swarm was more diffuse, as people had turned from that main corridor toward the one leading to a main exit door. At the same time, the movement had started rippling through the food court itself.
I moved away from the main swarm. I didn’t know where to go. I sensed my 10-year-old Henry right near my leg. I saw a nice bright red EXIT sign. It was just off the restrooms. Those restrooms, I’ve used a thousand times. Never once had I noticed the EXIT door right beside them.
“Exit, exit, exit, exit!” I said to my brood, pretty loudly, pointing at the door.
I’d later joke to Henry that me doing so had saved 25 people’s lives. In any case, a human funnel was forming, flowing toward the EXIT door. Henry stayed next to me. I looked back: Rhoda was closer to our table, looking out at the crowd to try and see what was happening.
“RHODA!” I yelled.
She turned and came toward us, flanked by our 13-year-old Benny.
Henry told me he was scared. I said to him (hadn’t said it in at least four years), “Hold my hand.” He’s still too old for that, but he grabbed my wrist (pretty hard).
I felt another hand dig into my back. It was Rhoda. And right behind her: Benny.
Whole team accounted for. Move move move move–
We made it out into the sunlight.
People asked each other what had happened. Nobody knew. My heart was getting a workout. Followers of my story know I had a major surgery four months ago. One of its more pleasing effects is that it seems as though the nerve damage from the procedure (largely healed by now) has regulated my entire parasympathetic nervous system. I’m relaxed when I expect to be scared. Three weeks back, we had an emergency (whole ‘nother story) aboard a cross-country flight. I didn’t get anxious at all. Of late, tense interpersonal exchanges put less demands on my system. Perhaps I’m fulfilling my lifelong goal of becoming less like Sonny Corleone and more like Vito.
But I have to say, this one managed to bypass my defenses.
In the car, we did an accounting of who had finished their meals. Me: check. Rhoda: check. Henry: check. Benny: three tofus left (he likes to savor his meals). OK, not bad.
I called Chief Jared Hernandez, MPD. Note, this was about three minutes after we had first seen all the running. So the chief was still getting up to speed. He said he knew that there had been an act of petty theft, but that was all he had.
All night, me and Rhoda made fun of each other’s reactions. The kids were giddy from the adrenaline and from having survived. I told Rhoda she was “Benny” – not our firstborn son, but the outlier character from Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” (incidentally, my favorite movie of all time) who walks toward the mass shooting when everybody else is running away. She reminded me that we didn’t know there was a shooting. I countered that nothing else in the world could have made so many people run like that. She also reminded me of a time back in LA when a mild earthquake happened during a spiritual gathering and I was the only one who ran out of the room.
But never mind.
Come morning, some news had trickled in. Seemed like there had been a shooting. Eyewitness chatter on Twitter (or whatever it’s called) seemed to confirm this.
But when I got Captain Tyler Jamison on the phone today, he cleared up the confusion. There had been, per the Chief, an act of petty theft. The thief, however – a 23-year-old woman – did not have a gun. What happened was, she tried to run, but the police (who had been called at 5:08) pursued her briefly on foot before restraining her.
To restrain her, they used a remote restraint device, which spits out a cord that can wrap itself around a suspect, preventing them from moving. When the cord goes out, the device pops so loud it could cause a stampede of elephants.
Which, aside from the elephant part, was more or less what we’d been a part of.
“The pop,” Captain Jamison explained, “can be mistaken for a gunshot.”
So Rhoda and I both turned out to be right. She was right that there had been no gun. But I was right that there had been a gunshot. Naturally, there hadn’t been a gunshot, so I wasn’t right at all, but that’s not important right now.
What’s important is, everybody made it home alive. I went up to take a nap. With my head under the covers, in my own private tent, I played the incident over and over again in my head. It’s hard to compute that many people running. Like any other sight that’s shocking, it scrambles one’s sense of time. Past, present, and future all shed their skins. What’s happening in front of you seems so inevitable that it’s as though your entire life has been building up to it.
Which it has.
Something else occurred to me, too, while it was happening. It was a vivid sentiment, but it had no words to accompany it. But I am pretty sure it crossed my mind right there in the present tense, the moment when I first saw the human swarm.
“This is the world,” I thought.
The words came later, there in bed. But the thought had been there back at the mall, half-formed, in real time, waiting to be graced by language.
Before I napped, I started panicking. The adrenaline dosed my bloodstream. The first time you ever panic, it’s so terrifying; it feels like it’ll never end. The millionth time, it’s nothing; it almost feels fun and exciting; you just know you have to get through this to be OK again.
Sleep was rising up to take me. I wondered what had happened. I thought about politics, and fascism, and so many people going crazy, and everybody saying to everybody else these days how insane everything has become.
No more panic. Just sleep now. Dreamless. With the sun still outside.
This is the world.
