by Jon Methven
I follow, dragging a limp leg up the stairs, Josey hollering as Phil tugs her into the shadows. The passengers grimace when they see me. My pants are torn off one leg. I bleed from inconsistent ports. The bent stick looks like a weapon. The journalist Pietre Graeme applauds, assuming this is part of the show.
“We need a medic,” shouts one of Misch’s guys even as he allows me access to the bus.
Petty watches me, knows. “Maybe take a seat, Mister,” he says, mustering his best Steven.
“We need to stop it.”
He abandons the tour guide gig. “Not the plan, Pistol. We see it through.” Allie’s neck turns to the prized employee. The Sedlocks get it. “This fucker blows in three minutes whether you’re on or off.”
Bill Chuck is on the pavement, keeping his people clear. I hear Josey but cannot see her through the windows. I reach out to Petty, unable to take another step. “I can talk them off.”
He takes my hand, smiles. I struggle for breath. Maddie sneezes.
“Former investor,” Harry says, keeping it light. “Threw himself in front of the bus. That’s what this is all about.”
I struggle for words. “Harry. Bomb.” I find the coolers in the seats, a quiet hiss, the shrapnel cooking. “A few minutes. Before they explode.”
“He’s lying,” Harry says, grasping for their faith. “This man killed our lacrosse coach. He’s insane.”
It is too late. Three of the journalists leave, not what they signed on for: Meniza Perl, Hansa Schulty, and David Gillard, along with his wife. That leaves nine sets of eyes. “If you don’t leave,” I wheeze, “you’ll be body parts.”
Conner Mack follows, eight left. Through the window, I see Whitman on the sidewalk. He has stopped filming, giving me time to get them off before he captures the explosion that will sell more advertising than anything Lustfizzle has ever posted. Tungsten weeps. Harry puts a hand on her head. “It’ll be okay, honey. He’s lying.”
I stand over Allie, drooling. Jason and Olivia watch. “Two minutes, Allie. Get Tungsten off.”
Pietre Graeme clapping, “Bravissimo.”
Allie nods. “Harry, I’m taking Tungsten.”
“I’m not moving. Not for this piece of shit.”
“It’s over.” She stands with Tungsten, who carries Muggly. Jason follows. Pietre Graeme claps his hands and exits as well, the show just beginning. Harry sits.
“You can’t do anything about it if you’re dead. Think about your kids.” Out the front windshield, Allie and Tungsten reach the far sidewalk. “Go to your wife, Harry. While you can.”
He curses, bends his neck, departs with a sulk. Two left. Olivia stares at the seat in front of her, Maddie clawing at the fabric with a wet hand.
“Minute and a half,” Petty says.
“For Maddie,” I say.
She smiles. “I know you, Pisser. You’re a coward. You won’t do it if she’s here.”
Petty moves around me, grabbing the child. Olivia tries to hold on, but he tucks her under an arm like a doll. “Minute fifteen. Leave her, Pistol.”
Petty descends the steps. On one leg, a minute does not give me much time. I extend my arm. “Come on, Olivia. Think of Todd and Maddie. Think of your unborn child.”
She shrugs, scared. “Are there really bombs?”
“There are really bombs.”
“What about the investment?”
“It’s gone, Olivia.”
“I’m not pregnant.” She is delirious, heaving in the seat. “I just wanted another nanny in the divorce.”
“Take my hand.”
I check the windows, the police pulling back the bystanders so that the bus hums alone in the street. Once we hit the concrete, we drag each other to a sidewalk where we collapse. Over the police line I glimpse Josey and Petty and Phil and Linda, watching to see that it is done, the last silhouette of my terrorist days before they disappear. I know it is coming, that the sound will be overwhelming, causing us all to remember this day and hug our children and fear the strange, Olivia weeping into my bloody shirt, Whitman slapping my head, good job, Pistol, as he restarts the camera in three two one…
Cum Laude
When the interrogations began, I like to believe Harry kept my name out of it because I saved his family. But I know it was fear—of what a man who would step in front of a moving bus is capable of doing. There was whispering in the Gopa community that he had something to do with Russ Haverly’s disappearance, in retaliation for the shower video that surfaced of Tungsten, which did not sit well with some parents. With law enforcement aware of his business, Harry Sedlock had little time for me.
Capra suffered most of the fallout, authorities arresting him blocks from the crime scene and charging him with the works—terrorism, use of weapons of mass destruction, and thirteen counts of attempted murder. In a surprising plea agreement that allowed Capra to avoid life in a federal penitentiary, he even copped to operating a drug ring in the private school community, along with Russ Haverly. Lustfizzle had all the details, a reporter fortunately in the right place recording video of the explosion. It sent shockwaves through private schools along the East Coast, jubilation that the worthy had fallen.
I never spoke with the Sedlocks after we sold the house in Slancy and moved to Connecticut. Moveable Museums struggled on for a few years before the setbacks—computers were hacked, clients’ credit card information stolen, Harry and Allie got a divorce. There were television commercials at odd hours. Discerning eyes would recognize the former sex tape actress engaged in travel scenarios, advertising the biking and kayaking tours, but eventually the commercials disappeared as well.
Jason and Jackson are still married, the only remaining members of our Slancy tribe enjoying island life. I ran into Jackson in midtown last year and asked him to a drink—recount the stolen equipment bus for old times—but he made an excuse of tardiness and promised another time. Conflict either rescues or murders friendship. In our case, it was the latter. Olivia married Devin Brenner. They live on the Upper East Side and have twin girls enrolled in the Mayscarf School. I do not know what became of the other Gopa parents and students, or Toby Dalton, but I imagine he is due to graduate from a prestigious college to disgorge his magnificence onto the workforce in a company of his father’s choosing. No matter how angry we are with our children, we cannot evade the evolutionary mechanism of parental investment.
Penelope Garcia went on to have a stellar career in meteorology, earning a Peabody Award. I never heard from Phil or Little Petty or Linda, if they were disappointed with me that the bus exploded without bloodshed. Every Christmas I get a white postcard with stick drawings of animals, and I try to discern what message these petroglyph mammals are attempting to disseminate. The postcard sits on the mantle with the other Christmas greetings until we ritualistically burn them in the fireplace each New Year’s Eve. I read about it in a Ray McClutchen book, an annual purging of past greetings as a gateway to good fortune in the fresh season.
I meet Ray regularly for coffee. I am paying him back the money I owe a little at a time. We exchange tales of post-Gopa existence that is quieter and modest and undistinguished and noble. He still writes and lectures his brand of fatherly catechism, having discovered why other writers go into self-help: readers have a prophet-ish adoration for people who claim to know what is happening. He is a popular face of self-help lifestyle, and Whitman and I have him on our show a few times a year.
Existential Weather is a twice-weekly podcast that we record in his Bushwick apartment. I take the train in two mornings a week and spend a few hours arguing politics and culture with Whitman, two generations who cannot agree on models and forecasts and who is in charge. It does not pay well enough to afford private school or lagoons in Slancy, but we have a steady following that grows more diverse each month. Whitman has plans to create a radio show, a national audience, a verbal assault
on mainstream media. Me, I just need to stay busy.
Iliza attends Trinity College in Hartford, due to graduate with a double major: Education and Sociology. She will travel abroad with a boyfriend name Sigel, who has a goatee and a fascination with communism, the two planning to teach English in Thailand. I miss Doug Whorley. Gus is a junior in the local public school, where he stars as a goalie on the soccer team. He plans to study literature next year, though he is undecided on a college. In the end, it was months of Josey Mateo’s involvement, and less of my years harping on applications and seminars, that had the most influence over their lives.
It took us several years to get back on our feet financially, but we managed. Standcake has forty locations in three states, one of the fastest-growing health food chains in the country. Now that Laura can afford a fleet of vans, I am little help to the business, my contributions reduced to homemaker of our Victorian house. This spring, I will paint the wraparound porch and install outdoor speakers so Jason Isbell and The Commodores can join us in the evenings. There is a room on the second floor I have been reluctant to renovate, owing to Laura’s insistence that the ghost of the previous owner resides there. We leave it vacant, which is fine since Clint Eastwood has claimed it as her space, agreeing to domesticity so long as I leave the window ajar. I do not keep tabs on her brood. They appear from time to time, rugged and well fed and often bearing dead rodents, which become Abraham’s playthings if I am not diligent.
With my eldest children involved in their respective dogmas, only occasionally asking advice from their father, my main occupation is playing nanny to my four-year-old. Abe will attend the local elementary school next year. I am looking forward to drop-offs and committees and sports teams and gossip. Likely the eldest member of the parenting crew, my experience will provide depth to the younger guardians and foster a sense of statesmanship in the parent-teacher continuum. Most mornings find us at the park as bumper-stickered mini-vans parade past to preparatory classes and appointments, rehearsal and strategy, and I cannot say I am looking forward to the warfare.
My main skill these days is playfulness that Abe inspires, forcing me on monkey bars and slides, up ladders that crack my aged knees and discharge vaporous missiles through my gluteal. Every so often, I will tweak some fiber in a shoulder or ribs, and know it is still there, the scar tissue that the world is a better place because I was run over by a bus. “Come on, Daddy,” Abe says, urging me through our sunrise obstacle course. “Hide and seek,” he’ll say, endless energy crouching behind a tree. Winded and perspiring, I require a park bench to spell my lungs. But there is a hunger in his smile that triggers the tribe sown deep within me, alerting me to the duty, that despite my cultivated patience and age, I still must go to extremes to maintain that joy. I struggle forward. Ready or not. Here come the worthy.
Acknowledgments
To the incredible team at Rare Bird Lit, I’m honored and fortunate to work with such a dedicated crew: Julia Callahan, Tyson Cornell, Alice Elmer, Gregory Henry, Guy Intoci, Hailie Johnson, and Jake Levens. Thank you to the Gaithersburg Book Festival, my most ardent supporters throughout the years. Thank you to longtime readers for advice and encouragement: Mike Altshuler, Luke David, William Giraldi, and Rena Rossner. A special thanks to friends and family who continue to support me. And to my NYC tribe, Alia, Jack, and Hank, who avoid the writing studio at 4:00 a.m. and keep it free of noise and syrup, somewhat.