Still, there’s no way to deny that Reggie is right—you’re not in this all the way. We would take this as an encouraging sign that you might change your mind, except that when it comes to these types of self-destructive acts, no one ever has absolute conviction. Socrates barely topped 98% when he nipped the hemlock cocktail. Joan of Arc was about 97%. St. Peter registered a rather cowardly 89%, although this low number is due to the fact that his faith had eroded with time and persecution; if he’d been crucified with Jesus he would have registered a shade above 97%. Norman Morrison, who set himself ablaze in sight of the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, and Afif Ahmed Hamid, one of the Black September terrorists killed by German police in Munich, clocked an identical, Socratic 98.4%. Impressive as these numbers are, they serve only to illustrate that there is always doubt and fear, even among philosophers, fanatics, and triple-amputees with multiple addictions and relentless, agonizing memories of being whole.
You’ve finished rigging up the wheelchair bomb, and the chair’s electric motor whirs dangerously as it strains to move the bulk, but move it does. By now it’s dark and the heat hasn’t abated in the least and you want to go out and get away from all this. Reggie wants to come along but you tell him no, and just in case he decides to go out on his own you avoid O’Toole’s and instead hit The Hole You’re Inn, a boarding-house /pub you keep in reserve for occasions when you find yourself booted from O’Toole’s before closing.
Tonight there’s a strange, good vibe in The Hole. The leather-vested biker types and thrice-divorced women who look fifty and dress twenty are a peaceful lot. None of the usual screaming catfights over a disputed man. None of the bloody, tooth-cracking scrums that often follow a bumped shoulder or perceived slight. Tonight it’s all smiles and good-natured backslapping. Laughter hangs in the air like cigarette smoke. Someone has programmed the jukebox to play nothing but “Old Time Rock & Roll,” and couples sit on one another’s laps, smile nose-to-nose, sway happily to the beat. It’s a moment rare as a perfect game in baseball, charmed, almost magical, but though you are in the midst of the harmony, you are not a part of it in any emotionally significant sense. Put another, simpler way: you don’t feel anything. You’re the burned-out bulb in a string of colorful Christmas lights. You drink and drink and drink and by the time you leave, just before closing, you literally cannot talk anymore.
Which does not stop you, of course, from dialing Amy’s number on returning to your brother’s. The line rings at least thirty times with no answer before you finally pass out sitting up on the bed.
When you wake in the morning, still propped against the headboard, the phone is ringing, and though in the confusion of a crippling hangover you don’t have any clear idea what to do with it, you instinctually pick up the receiver. On the other end is Reggie.
“You’re late,” he tells you.
“What time is it?” you ask, because you can’t think of anything else to say and it seems appropriate, given what Reggie just told you.
“Time for you to get your ass over here.”
“Give me a minute.” You manage, after some effort, to open your eyes. “I’m just getting out of bed.”
Before Reggie has a chance to chastise you further you hang up and move to the bathroom, stripping your clothes off and dropping them on the floor as you go. In the shower you listen to the hum and blare of life on the streets outside and think about how it’s strange, given what you and Reggie are about to do, that you’re still observing the conventions of normal behavior: answering the phone with a polite “Hello,” showering and brushing your teeth.
Soon enough the centipede starts in, twisting and skittering. You try deep breathing but it’s no good, so you turn off the water and towel dry with stiff, frenzied strokes, as though you’re trying to wipe a battalion of angry fire ants off your body. You pick last night’s clothes up off the floor and put it all back on, save the underwear, then step out.
By the time you reach Reggie’s building you’re genuinely frantic despite having swallowed three of the cool blue tablets some O’Toole’s regular stole from her cat’s vet. Normally these have an even greater calming effect on the centipede than the Vicodin, but this time they don’t touch it. The thin integument of calm holding you together threatens to fail catastrophically and splatter the van’s interior with the contents of your psyche, which would not be pretty in the least.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Reggie asks when you open the door to his apartment. His chair rolls with great whirring effort into the kitchen. He doesn’t look or sound himself. You can’t place your finger on what’s different about him, other than to say it is not good. The net pockets swing slowly from every inch of his chair.
“Don’t,” you say. You slap a hand to your forehead to keep it from exploding. “Don’t. Okay.”
“Tell me ‘don’t,’” he says. “We got shit to do, here.”
“Reggie,” you say, eyes squeezed shut. “Just a minute ago? When I said ‘Don’t’? I have never before been so serious about anything. Never in my life. Now we are going to do what we planned today. But right now—for just a little bit—I need you to lay. The fuck. Off.”
Miracle of miracles, Reggie actually listens. He rolls back into the living room—every time the chair moves under its burden you’re certain the motor will throw some critical part and die hissing and smoking—and is silent for several minutes. You lean against the wall and press the heels of your hands into your eyes until you see brilliant, silent fireworks. You moan, long and low, for nearly half a minute. When your moaning trails off the apartment is quiet. After a while Reggie asks you in a voice you don’t recognize to come into the living room and pack the bong. So you do that, not bothering to ask how he suddenly has the time for a bong hit, if he’s in such a hurry. What’s the point of asking questions, expecting answers? You’ve gone mad, and Reggie’s disappeared completely and been replaced by a demon with a voice like André the Giant.
In what seems like no time at all you’re out on the street again, guiding Reggie into the van. A few people eyeball the wheelchair, and one guy going by in a car slows way down and rubbernecks, but to your relief no one comments or asks questions.
You slalom through surface streets for a few minutes, then turn onto the I-90 ramp and merge slowly with the midday traffic. All the while Reggie’s muttering darkly in the back. His breathing grows loud and ragged and a glance in the rearview mirror reveals in his eyes an admixture of equal parts fury, grief, and pharmaceuticals. Sweat stands out on his cheeks and forehead. Whenever he stops talking to himself his mouth hangs open as though paralyzed, the lips slack and buffeted by gusts of breath. His face is transformed utterly. It is barely human, unlike anything you have seen before. He has clearly taken something other than a few bong hits. To a normal person he would be a disconcerting sight, but you’ve been lulled by sluggish freeway traffic back into an odd reflective state, and there is now quite a show going on inside your head, a strange retrospective of your life like a vacation slideshow put on in a neighbor’s half-finished basement.
Scenes rise and fade in rough chronological order, from the earliest memory you didn’t know you had—that of leaning against your father’s chest with his concrete slab of a forearm propping up your dia pered butt—to coming home the night Amy told you it was over. Each scene is backlit with a color that corresponds to the emotion the scene recalls: reds for anger and shame, rare yellows for joy, whites for varying degrees of apathy, and blues for sorrow. As you watch it becomes apparent that blue is the predominant shade of your life, nearly ubiquitous, appearing so frequently that it turns yellows to greens, reds to purples, etc. Your life is so blue it looks like a James Cameron movie. As the slideshow approaches the present, even the greens turn fully blue, and the purples, and then the different shades of blue themselves swirl and homogenize, until your whole life and times, birth to now, is the same color as the ocean off the coast of Easter Island, the bluest water in the world. For you,
there is no anger, no joy, no indifference. There’s never been anything but the sorrow of loss, paid over and over and always in advance, and your determination to go forth in the face of that sorrow. There is nothing heroic about this doggedness; there may well be, in fact, something cowardly concealed within it. Either way, you suddenly recognize—and appreciate—that more than anything else, this relentless slogging forward into life’s headwind makes you truly your father’s son.
It all goes out of you then, the blue. Disappears entirely and irrevocably. It seems important to figure out what will replace it, so you pull into the breakdown lane and put the van in park. You sit watching traffic stutter past on the left, calm as you’ve been since the womb, ruminating with bovine placidity over what it is you’re supposed to do with the fifteen years left to you and everyone else on the planet.
We implore you to stay with this moment.
Reggie, meanwhile, has begun to inquire in the André the Giant voice concerning why the fuck you’re stopped, but despite his tone you don’t feel any particular urgency to provide an answer.
In his altered state Reggie is even less patient than normal. He waits only two seconds for you to respond, then says, “Either move this van, or I’m a blow it up.”
“Reggie,” you say.
“Just go ahead and keep sittin’ here,” he says, “if you think I’m kiddin’.”
He is not kidding, we assure you.
You turn your head and see he’s got the SPD detonator, which looks like a silver pen, in his half-hand. You start the van and pull forward, hoping the remaining drive will give you time to talk him out of this.
“Reggie,” you say, looking over your left shoulder for an opportunity to merge, “listen, something has happened to me, here, and I don’t mind telling you it has altered the way I think about pretty much everything.”
“That’s very interesting,” Reggie says without much interest.
“Also,” you say, “also, I’m starting to believe that this isn’t such a great idea after all. Blowing up the SSA building. I suggest you think for a minute about what you plan to do, and then, having thought about it, call the whole thing off and go home and get high and live to watch the sun set tonight from your kitchen window.”
Though we’re beyond pleased that you’ve changed your mind, it’s important that you understand just how dangerous Reggie is in this altered state. “I have a suggestion for you,” he says, using his elbow as a lever to prop himself up. “Shut the fuck up and drive, is my suggestion.”
You take the exit onto Washington Boulevard, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror as Reggie fingers the detonator and watches the city through the van’s privacy glass.
At this point the Harold Washington building is only a couple of blocks away, and with Reggie still unwavering you’re not sure what to do, so you pull into an alley and turn off the engine. “Okay, Reggie,” you say. “This is the end of the line.” A risky, risky tack. “I’m not taking you any further. You can blow us up right here, or get out and roll the rest of the way to the Social Security building. I won’t stop you.”
Reggie glares at you in the mirror, his eyes red and baleful. “Unstrap this shit,” he says. “Let me out of here.”
“We could go to O’Toole’s instead,” you say. “Friday night at O’Toole’s, Reggie. Bacchanalia. It’s what we live for. All your friends will be there.”
“Friends, shit,” Reggie says. “I’m not their friend. I’m their pet nigger. They like to keep The Fox around, make them feel like they good, tolerant white folks. Buy Reggie a drink like it’s affirmative action night. Not today. Unstrap this thing. If you ain’t goin’ with me, I’ll go alone. Don’t make no difference.”
Wisely, you do as he instructs. Soon he’s down on the pavement beside the van.
“See you later, Reggie,” you say.
“Probably not,” he says. “I’m not mad at you, though. I understand. You just a kid. Kids don’t want to die.” And even though this has nothing to do with it, you see no point in correcting him.
He pushes the joystick and the chair groans toward the end of the alley. You watch until he reaches the sidewalk, then call out to him.
He spins around to face you again. “You see I’m busy here.”
“Reggie,” you say. “Just let the people get out first. Okay? You’ll still make your point.”
He waves a dismissive half-hand at you, then hits the stick and rolls south toward West Madison, disappearing from sight behind the brick wall of a walk-up taqueria.
You drive the van back out to Skokie. When you return to your brother’s place you switch on the TV and a stab of disappointment reaches you through the lingering indifference of revelation. There are news flashes on every channel, cameras all trained on one Harold Washington Social Security Administration building, which is ringed with police cars, ambulances, and a SWAT armored personnel carrier. Emergency strobes flash in the artificial twilight produced by tall buildings. People talk anxiously behind barricades, point, hug themselves. Details are hazy, the newscasters say, but they have multiple reports that a man has entered the building with a bomb.
The scene goes on for hours, and while the only visible difference in the situation is that day has turned to night, there are updates almost every minute, speculation regarding what’s going on inside. The bomber is a white man in a wheelchair, you’re told. Two minutes later, correction, a black man, no wheelchair. There are unconfirmed reports that in addition to the bomb the assailant is wielding a weapon of some kind, a modified AK-47, perhaps, or maybe even they’re being told it’s possible a rocket-propelled grenade, but no, after hearing a description of the weapon CNN’s resident tactical expert cuts in and says that based on the description it’s his expert opinion that this is not an AK at all, and certainly not an RPG, but rather a FAMAS French assault rifle. Meantime, police negotiators have managed to contact the assailant through use of a throw phone, which the SWAT team tossed through the glass front door and into the lobby, but so far they’ve been unsuccessful at convincing the man to either give himself up or allow some or all of the six or seven hundred unconfirmed people in the building to evacuate.
Sometime during all this you notice that the strange calm you experienced earlier has faded, and you are trembling, badly. And sweating. And crying a bit, if you’re not mistaken. This is not the centipede, though there are similarities; rather it is a normal, if belated, physiological reaction to having almost died.
Just as it’s occurring to you, around ten o’clock, that you not only haven’t had a drink yet, but haven’t even thought about one until now, there is a sudden commotion on-screen as a mass of several hundred people rushes from the front entrance of the Washington building, running with their hands held up. They move like cattle driven by wolves, pouring through bottlenecks created by parked patrol cars and paying no heed to the officers trying to direct their escape. The television announcer says there’s been no official word but it seems evident that heroic police negotiators have succeeded, and the assailant has released hundreds of hostages after a nearly eight-hour ordeal of terror.
But the ordeal isn’t yet over, the announcer says, because there is still a man barricaded inside the building with a bomb and a deadly exotic French assault rifle, and no one knows his motivations or demands, and of course it is not necessary to point out the frightening parallels between this potential bombing-in-progress of a federal building and another that happened just a few months ago in Oklahoma City which united a nation in shock and mourning, and this could go on for hours or possibly even days, so we’ll be right back after this break with more coverage of the Chicago Social Security Standoff.
You sit back and breathe deep as an advertisement comes on for a topical pain reliever with an odor so famously awful it ought to be copyrighted. Your chest hitches and shudders. You watch a commercial featuring a stubby cartoon character in a toga and laurel leaves shouting about pizza, and realize you have no idea what you
wish to happen. Your legs want to move, so you go to the kitchen for a beer and return just in time for continuing coverage of the Chicago Social Security Standoff.
It has become a standoff in the traditional sense, with the police holding their ground behind walls and car doors, and absolute silence from Reggie. It’s near midnight. To fill time the announcer brings in the network’s crisis negotiation expert, who explains that at this stage, assuming that the subject has released everyone in the building (which is never a safe assumption when actually negotiating a crisis, the expert says, but for the purposes of discussing the current situation on television is a fine assumption to work from), the approach to negotiating now changes; it’s to be treated more as a suicide intervention rather than a hostage negotiation. Of course the alleged bomb involved makes it considerably more dangerous than your usual suicide intervention, but the basic strategy, the expert says, should be the same. In his expert opinion.
It’s been forty-five minutes since you opened the beer, and you’re only half done with it when the phone rings. Once. Twice. In the middle of the third ring you pick up. You are hoping it’s Amy. You say hello, get no response. There’s a faint click as whoever is on the other end hangs up. Less than a second later the Harold Washington Social Security Administration Building disappears. The image on the television wavers, goes black, and there’s a quick cut to the studio anchor, who stares at the camera for a few silent seconds, then coughs and mumbles something about trying to reestablish picture on what has evidently become a worst-case scenario, and obviously everyone hopes that there really was no one else in the building other than the subject, and—yes, as he said they will try to reestablish picture and while they work on that they will discuss in-studio what’s just happened. You watch for a while without really seeing anything, not certain at all how you should feel. Your hand has gone numb around the beer can. Soon the anchor tells you that they believe they’ve got another video feed established from the site of the Tragedy in Chicago, that the images you’re about to see are graphic and upsetting, and soon CNN expert and crisis counselor to the stars Hank Greenlaw will be joining us to offer some tips on coping with our shared grief, but in any event this is not for the faint of heart, and you may want to have any children leave the room.
Everything Matters! Page 14