Kitty is wiping her eyes as we watch the woman being escorted away from the pool area. “She must have just found out,” she says, looking at me with red eyes.
“Yes,” I mutter.
Suddenly I want to drink. I am not a big drinker but there are times when I don't want any more reality and this is one of those moments.
“You want a drink?” I ask, standing up.
“Yes!”
I head for the tiki hut with its folding sign advertising tropical drinks. It doesn't matter: gin, vodka, whiskey, anything to dull what we have just witnessed. I go in and see in the half-light the two men with beards who had been in the procession the day before. Their eyes are red and the bartender is speaking to them.
“Anything you want. You can have anything on the house.”
His eyes are red, too. The men are about the same age as the woman who was so distraught One of the men, who has short blond hair, looks simply stunned, almost too much to speak. He wipes his eyes when the bartender speaks again.
“They were both there?”
The man nods. “Yes…we just got the news that my mother-in-law expired.”
There are several other people there and no one speaks, no one moves. He smiles strangely, his eyes welling. I feel compelled to ask. I have not talked to anyone who had been in the lower baggage area of Terminal 2. Here is the tragedy we have all been running from for two days.
“You were there?” I ask.
He looks at me and then wipes his eyes again.
“Yes. They were together and then they weren't. My father-in-law was shot through the eye and it went out the back of his head.” He pauses. “My mother-in-law just expired.”
And then he says something I will think about for a long time afterward. “It was all in the blink of a kiss.”
He looks at me as if looking for an answer. All I can do is shake my head. No one moves.
“It's just fucking surreal,” he mutters.
And here in this silly bar in a Quality Inn by the pool lives are being altered for all time. All time. There will be pictures on mantles that will take on different meaning. There will be albums that would be dated before the tragedy. There will be photos of the days before. There will be videos of lives that will be shown at funeral homes. Pictures will be rounded up for display to explain a life lived fully as people pay their respects. Then the pictures will quietly be put away forever. And then it will all just stop. Time will stop on this day for those families. The history of families detours and veers away from the darkness and there will be whispers by grandkids about what happened. This family will remember this day for the rest of their lives. Funerals will be held. Wills read. Houses and belongings sold. Anniversaries altered. Cars sold or given to family members. No part of these families’ lives will stay the same. January 6, 2017, will be quietly remembered with loss, grief, and horror. Eventually, the day will be ignored and pushed back as lives are rebuilt. Some people will simply move away and not be heard from again. Nothing will resemble what came before the shooting.
I say something about being in the other terminal and offer my condolences, then order a couple of gin and tonics. Words have lost all meaning. For a writer this is a strange moment but the magnitude of what has happened has stripped away meaning. This man's mother-in-law has been murdered by Esteban Santiago and his father-in-law is fighting for his life. I'm sorry for your loss. I'm sorry this happened to you. I'm sorry your mother-in-law was shot down and your father-in-law critically wounded. Still I say it. You have to, and he thanks me, but it feels so much like a Band-Aid for a terminal wound. There is nothing to say and for the first time I understand the tragedy of a mass shooting. There we were in our bathing suits and sandals and T-shirts, ready to enjoy whatever life could offer, and now we are all in some dark night of the abyss. I take the drinks and go back to the pool.
“The son-in-law was in there…pretty ripped up,” I say, handing the drink to Kitty.
We both turn to the tiki bar. A small group of people are at one end of the bar now. All in the blink of a kiss: that phrase haunts me. Did he mean they were kissing at the moment Esteban let loose with his Walther 9mm, or was it just that life was altered in that moment forever? That their love affair ended in that moment and all love ended? I don't know. Life is evanescent and more so in unspeakable tragedy.
“It's all so sad,” Kitty says, shaking her head and wiping her eyes.
I nod and drink the gin. Then I drink some more, not wanting to think any more about anything. It is a sunny day, but the darkness has moved in. We are back there at the airport again and those four shots are exploding and we are running for our lives. Like a horror movie you want to turn away from, the dark night has returned.
To this day no one can say for sure why Stephen Paddock murdered fifty-eight people during an outdoor concert on the Las Vegas Strip on October 1, 2017. As of the spring of 2018, this is the deadliest mass shooting in United States history. Paddock, a sixty-four-year-old retired accountant and real-estate investor who saw himself as a high-stakes gambler, had lost a lot of money.1 His doctor had diagnosed him as bipolar and given him anxiety medication, but he refused to take it. He said he was in pain most of the time. He had no children, was twice divorced, drank heavily, played primarily video poker, and had a girlfriend whom he had quit being “intimate” with. He left no suicide note and seemed to take pains to cover his tracks by destroying hard drives. His father was Benjamin Paddock, a bank robber who was on the FBI's most wanted list in the sixties and seventies. But Stephen Paddock had no known interaction with law enforcement until the shooting.2
On September 25, 2017, Stephen Paddock began to amass an arsenal in his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. He took Room 32135 and then booked Room 32134 four days later. Both rooms peered down on Las Vegas Village, a fifteen-acre site and the venue for the Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival. The festival would host 22,000 people on its final day, October 1, 2017, when country music star Jason Aldean was scheduled to give a performance. It would be a day no one would forget.
Paddock began to stockpile weapons in his hotel rooms. He had two AR-10s and ten AR-15 rifles, with hundred-round magazines and bump stocks, as well as multiple pistols. He had telescopic sights, and the AR-10s were mounted on bipods.3
Colt started selling the AR-15, a gas-operated semiautomatic weapon, as a civilian version of the military M16 in 1964. The Colt version took a twenty or thirty-round staggered column detachable magazine and supported a flash suppressor, sound suppressor, or muzzle brake, which kept the barrel from rising up when fired. In 1977 Colt's patent expired, and other gun manufacturers began to make their own versions under different names, but all were known as “AR-15 rifles.” Adding a bump stock made an AR-15 capable of firing ninety rounds in ten seconds.
The Bump Fire stock…provides an effective means of engaging a gun's trigger extremely quickly. Instead of pulling back the trigger to fire, the user places his or her finger slightly in front of the trigger and pushes the whole gun forward with steady pressure. The trigger hits the finger and the round goes off. Recoil pushes the gun back, but the shooter's forward pressure immediately returns the trigger back to the finger, and so the gun fires off another round faster than the blink of an eye.4
Paddock was readying himself for killing on a massive scale.
Just before 10:00 p.m. a security guard, Jesus Campos, noticed a door accessing the thirty-second floor wouldn't open. An L-shaped bracket had been screwed into the door and the floor of the hallway to block access from the stairs. Campos went back down to the floor below and took the elevator up to see what was going on. When he heard what sounded like drilling he walked down the hallway toward the door of Paddock's room. As he approached, Paddock opened fire through the wood of the door, spraying two hundred bullets into the hallway. Campos collapsed, shot in the right thigh, and dragged himself into an alcove between two rooms, where he radioed for help. A maintenance worker, Stephen Schu
ck, had also arrived on the floor, and Campos screamed at him to take cover. Schuck too radioed for help.5
Paddock knew time was growing short. He smashed two of the room's windows with a hammer, and at 10:05 p.m. he began murdering people five hundred yards away. There was a sea of people below him. He did not have to aim but sprayed bullets over the festival crowd. When he did use the telescopic sites, he fired bullets with deadly accuracy. The bump stock allowed him to fire continuously for ten minutes. Many people at first thought the shots were fireworks, but then panic took over and people ran toward the security fence that surrounded the grounds. Jason Aldean ran off the stage without a word and would later be criticized for not warning people as to what was happening.6 All the concertgoers could do is run for their lives as they were cut down.7
Fifty-eight people were shot dead and over five hundred wounded. Seventy-five minutes after the attack began the police would reach Paddock's room with explosives to find him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound through the mouth.8 Jesus Campos had radioed in the location of the shooter and that along with the muzzle flash allowed police to determine where the shots were coming from.9
Upon investigation, authorities determined that Paddock had considered other venues for his rampage, such as the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago.10 He had no known associations or links to any hate groups. He was found to have ammonium nitrate in his truck, along with Tannerite, a binary explosive that explodes upon impact from a high-velocity bullet. A large tank of aviation fuel near the concert was found to have bullet holes and authorities determined that Paddock had fired into it to try and ignite the fuel.11 It did not explode, however, since aviation fuel does not ignite easily.
Those killed in Paddock's massacre ranged in age from twenty to sixty-seven; thirty-six were women and twenty-two were men Thirty-one of them were pronounced dead at the scene. Nearby McCarren International Airport was closed for four hours for fear of shots being fired at the planes. Three hundred people ran onto the airport grounds to escape. President Trump called Paddock “a demented man with a lot of problems.” Paddock's girlfriend returned from the Philippines and said Paddock had sent her 100,000 dollars days before the attack and told her to buy a house for her family there. In conversations with the FBI she said her fingerprints would be on the bullets because she had helped him load the high-volume magazines.12
No motivations could be subscribed to Stephen Paddock except maybe the rage of his gambling losses, though he was solvent at the time of the shooting. One can only surmise that Stephen Paddock had slowly changed over the years into a psychopath who felt nothing, a human animal bent on self-destruction and wishing for final revenge against a world he perceived had destroyed him.13 Fully armed like a battle-hardened solider, he exacted his revenge using altered weapons and a sniper's lair.
After the Las Vegas shooting President Trump vowed to ban the manufacture and use of bump stocks. As of this writing in 2018, however, no federal law has been passed prohibiting bump stocks, although several states have banned them.14
Monday finally comes and we return to the airport. I would like to say it is eerie being back in Terminal 1. I would like to say that being dropped off in the same terminal and talking to the skycap men is weird. I would like to say that I see death all around, but the truth is that all that is gone. The airport is a busy place of human activity once again. People are there to board planes and fly away from Florida. And so are we. The truth is that humans are very present-minded.
The cab drops us off as before and this time we check our bags through at the curb and head for security. I stare at the bench where Callie's glasses had been left along with all our luggage. There is nothing at all to mark those moments of terror just three days ago. I do not look toward Terminal 2 when we walk into the building. I look at the area where I had spoken with the SWAT officer and then I look down the terminal where the stampede of humans had come running. I listen for those four shots again and then push them from my mind. The mission is to get through security as fast as possible.
Kitty and I exchange glances several times in the security line. You can't help but think someone might come in any minute and start shooting. We take off our shoes, belts, and watches and place our cellphones, laptops, and keys into bins. We are scanned, x-rayed, and photographed, while Careen triggers an extra alarm. She has used talcum powder and the chemical composition ignites one of the sensors looking for the residue of bomb-making material. They wipe her hand and she goes through and then, for the first time, we are on the secure side of the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood Airport.
We put our shoes back on, pick up our belongings, and grab some coffee and donuts while we wait for the plane. Even on this side I look around at people as possible shooters. I see happy families with children and marvel at the how the door to horror is so thin. I see the family at the poolside again and the woman crumpling in grief and the son-in-law with the red eyes. I want that plane to pull up to the terminal as quickly as possible. And when it does pull up and we are aboard I feel like this might be one of those movies where people are yanked off a plane at the last minute. I look out the window at the tarmac where three days before people ran for their lives while planes taxied around with nowhere to go. We have heard that the airlines are slowly catching up and in a day all the flights will be back to normal.
And then we lift off. Kitty and I are across from each other and we exchange glances as Florida recedes and becomes a flat checkerboard of sand, golf courses, hotels, and street grids. I see the ocean in the early morning light and I realize then that I have stopped thinking of Florida as a seaside state that offers the ocean and sunshine, an idea I'd had that went all the way back to when I was in college on spring break. There have been no other association up until now, but in these last few days Florida has suddenly become the place to get the hell away from as fast as possible.
The captain signals that we are at cruising altitude and I lean back and shut my eyes. Going home has seemed like a fantasy for days. There were moments when I hadn't thought we would ever get home. It just seemed that the dark place we had stumbled into had taken over the world. But we do go home, and Chicago is snowy and freezing when we land. The Uber driver hoists our bags and we drive home talking about weather, the Bears, the Cubs, the economy, and Donald Trump. The driver had another job that he has either left, retired from, or been fired from. We are not really sure, but he keeps up a steady stream of conversation.
“So you were on vacation?”
“Yes.”
“Florida?”
“Yes.”
“They had that shooting in Lauderdale.”
I feel something shift in me. “Yes.”
The driver shakes his head. “Crazy.”
And then we are home, at our house in the suburbs with the dog, the cat, and the snow in the drive and covering the sidewalk. The fireplace smells like creosote and the house has the musty, slightly woody scent I always associate with when we first moved in. The dog and the cat are happy to see us and the girls run upstairs to their rooms, already connecting with friends. Clay goes to his room and falls asleep but not before he turns to me.
“Dad, you were so right to move out here.” He pauses. “The world is fucking crazy.”
I nod. I know what he is saying. We were 9/11 refugees when we moved away from Chicago, escaping the possible danger of a dirty radioactive bomb. We had taped up our doors and stockpiled water. In Oak Park we were only about three miles west of downtown Chicago and we felt that a second wave of al-Qaeda bombers was sure to come. So we had moved thirty miles west to one of the far suburbs. Clay and I have never talked once about our reasons for the move, but he knows now. He sees a great danger out in the world, an uncontrollable element that living in a house in a suburban setting might save him from.
“Thank God we are home,” Kitty says, after I bring in the last piece of luggage.
I stand up and look at our house, with the paintings, my books, the
pictures of the kids, of all of us on previous vacations. This life has been quietly waiting here for us under the snow and ice. This Midwestern life of cornfields under low skies and five-degree temperatures and months when the sun barely shines. We have returned and it goes without saying that five other people will never return to their homes.
But it is January again. The warmth of Florida no longer exists. We will build a fire tonight and watch television or read and probably order pizza. We will get the kids ready for school and I will have to finish my proposal for a book and send it to my agent. Kitty will go back to marketing, and life will continue. The dog and the cat will have to be fed and the garbage cans will go down by the curb and we will revel in the luxurious drudgery of our middle-class life. We have passed through another door and we are simply back in the land of the living.
President Trump called out as a coward the school resource officer who stayed outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, while Nikolas Cruz went on a six-minute rampage inside, firing rounds from his semiautomatic AR-15.1 The policeman was put on leave immediately and then he retired.2 He was the man who was charged with protecting the students, yet he took cover outside the school behind a car while seventeen people were murdered. It gets worse. When other Broward County police arrived they, too, stayed outside and did not enter.3 When the Coral Springs police arrived, they were astounded that the other officers had not entered. By the time the Coral Springs Police entered the school it was too late: seventeen people were dead of massive gunshot wounds.4
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