Fourteen hours later, he woke from the dead. He was in Oregon.
He rubbed his eyes, stood up, and was shown to a connecting flight to Sacramento, where he was first exposed to the maddening, funny, and more or less constant pressure of fame.
Fame. Was he famous? It was a strange thought. On the one hand, he hadn’t done much to get famous. On the other, what was a bigger deal, starring in a movie, singing a pop song, putting a ball through a hoop? Or stopping a terrorist? He had sensed, during those eerily calm moments on the train, that France would go crazy. They weren’t three marines like the news kept saying, but Alek and Spencer were military, so it still was a story of American servicemen stopping a terrorist. He wasn’t surprised that France held them up and made a big deal of it. He’d seen the narrative immediately: American military saves the world!
But he didn’t know just how big a deal it was going to be, and it hadn’t occurred to him that anyone outside of France would care, or really understand, what had happened. Because he still didn’t. It was still a small, muddled moment in his life, a brief and incomplete blip on his memory. The images that played across the screen in his mind when he closed his eyes were all things that took place on a small narrow stage, a rectangle of twenty-five square feet hemmed into the aisle of a train car. They were mostly images that involved five people. Spencer and Alek. Chris, the British man. The gunman. Mark bleeding out.
Maybe it was because it just wasn’t possible to accept that hundreds of people were still alive because of him. How does one comprehend a thing like that? What does “hundreds of people” look like? How much space do they fill up? Maybe it was a matter of physiology, just a fact of science that the brain isn’t equipped to visualize that much suffering. The brain needs something comprehensible. It wants familiarity.
On the short flight from Oregon back to Sacramento, Anthony saw, out of the corner of his eye, a person he thought he recognized.
Holy shit is that—? They made eye contact.
“Anthony? Anthony!”
Anthony was disoriented for a minute. Where was he—wait, was John Dickson on the same flight? They’d been trying to connect in Germany; now here they were in—where were they? Anthony had fallen asleep in France and woken up in Oregon and it took a beat to place himself back in America rather than somewhere in Munich or Berlin, or wherever they’d been only a week ago, a time period that now seemed impossibly long.
“John? What the hell are you doing here?” What were the odds? After trying so many times to get together in Europe, they ended up on the same tiny commuter flight from Oregon to Sacramento.
“What the hell did you guys do over there?”
Anthony began to ask him what it had been like playing semipro basketball in Germany, but was interrupted by a tap on his shoulder. A middle-aged woman in a power suit knelt down next to him.
“Hi, Mr. Sadler? I’m sorry to bother you, but I just noticed I happened to be on the same flight with you. I’m a reporter from a TV station in Portland.” Anthony’s new normal had begun. “I just saw you and scribbled down a note to you. Here’s my card, just give me a call, okay? If you think you might like to go on TV.”
She went back to her seat and Anthony raised an eyebrow, looked over at John, who was laughing and shaking his head. “She tried that already,” John said. “She tried to give that card to me when we first got on. I doubt she ‘just happened to notice’ she was on the same flight.”
So Anthony was beginning his newfound fame with a juxtaposition: he was famous enough to draw reporters onto flights just for the chance to interview him, but not famous enough to overcome the media’s impressive inability to tell the difference between black people.
The small commuter jet landed and taxied, and when he walked out onto the stairs, the circus began. It was like he’d been in a hermetically sealed chamber protected from exposure to the eyes of millions of Americans, and all of a sudden the pressure had become too great, it had burst open, and now here he was, exposed. News helicopters circled overhead to capture his arrival. Three FBI agents and two policemen at the bottom of the stairs took him by the elbow and rushed him down a back entrance of the airport, before he could even properly say goodbye to John. John, meanwhile, walked into the terminal and was ambushed by dozens of camera flashes and microphones shoved in his face, “Anthony, Anthony,” they yelled at John, “are you happy to be home?” While the real Anthony was being ushered into the back of a motorcade and whisked away.
His parents’ house was already hemmed in by a phalanx of news trucks with satellite antennas fully extended, so Anthony’s father had booked a hotel room, but Anthony wanted his own bed. “Can you just drop me off at my apartment? I’ll be all right. If there’s nobody out there.”
Pastor Sadler rerouted the sheriffs.
Still, Anthony was having a hard time connecting himself to the experience of what was happening around him. He didn’t feel in his bones that he had saved hundreds of lives. That was an almost impossible thing to accept. That was Superman, flying up to a jumbo jet and nudging it just before it crashed into a mountaintop. If he couldn’t fully internalize how many lives he had saved, how, really, could all these other people? What to make of all the news trucks surrounding his house like they were guarding it? Did those reporters all understand?
Was it him they were interested in, was it the seriousness of what had happened, or was it something else? Were they like the reporter on the plane, faking (he was now certain) a chance encounter when really she wanted his face to boost her own ratings? He didn’t mind it terribly, but he had no idea how long it would last, this value he now had inside him that others could extract. Soon Spencer would tell Anthony he’d gotten calls from stalkers, and from local news anchors imploring him to come on their own shows like he owed it to them, because landing one of the three heroes was a guaranteed promotion.
So Anthony had a new power now: the power to make careers.
The questions swirled in his head, more questions than answers, but the one thing he was certain of was that he was exhausted. If he was going to be any use to anyone, he needed some rest.
By some grace, none of the reporters had found his apartment yet. The complex was gated, but unguarded, and with no one watching it; the gates were always open, not keeping out undesirables so much as gently suggesting that they please, if it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience, stay away. Two men in black suits got out of the SUV with him, walked him all the way up to the door. Nobody was there. “Yeah, I’ll stay here,” Anthony said.
Anthony was home.
Then, quiet. It was strange to be here on his own, without Alek and Spencer, who were still back in Europe being debriefed by the military, Spencer getting more medical care.
It was strange just to be back. Everything in his life was different, but everything in front of him looked the same. It felt like a minor offence that his apartment was exactly as he’d left it, after he’d just gone through . . . whatever it was he’d just gone through. The colors should be brighter, the rooms bigger. Everything had been surreal, larger than life. Now he was home, and home was exactly the same, and he didn’t fit it. He felt he’d been in a dream; now he was waking up to beds that needed making, an apartment decorated by a college kid rather than some Parisian interior designer, a degree that needed completing.
He didn’t want to be alone. He called everyone he could think of, and soon he had twenty people over asking him to recount the story, but even with all his friends and classmates around him, there was one person he felt he really needed to talk to.
Spencer, he thought, his apartment wall to wall with bodies, how you doing over there, brother? Spencer, how did you know the terrorist was behind us?
38.
THERE WERE SMALL DUTIES that came with fame, Anthony was learning. He was sick with something; jet lag or maybe coming down off the high had brought on its own withdrawal, but he was groggy, exhausted, and his stomach ached. He felt pulled apart from Sp
encer and Alek; he wanted to talk to them, he wanted to be with them. Such a momentous thing had happened to bring them together but now he was held maddeningly apart from his partners. It made him feel incomplete, to face this country alone, as if he was the only one who’d done anything; a table with one leg.
“You have to do a press conference,” his father said. “They won’t leave you alone until you do. You don’t want them to still be looking for you wherever you go.”
The last thing Anthony wanted to do was to go out in public like this, without Spencer, without Alek, feeling exhausted and sick, but he knew his dad’s house was surrounded by press, and they were starting to show up at his church. If he didn’t give the press something, it wouldn’t stop.
“All right,” his dad said, “we’ll do this. The mayor and I will do most of it, you just talk for a couple seconds and then get off. Make your appearance, and we’ll say you have to go get some rest. They’ll understand.”
“What do I say?”
“Just think of how you feel, and say that.” What would Anthony have done if his father wasn’t a pastor, with years of experience and advice about public speaking? “It doesn’t have to be fancy or deep. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Just say what you feel, son.”
“I feel like puking.”
“Well, maybe don’t say that.”
Anthony swallowed a handful of Tums, looked in the mirror—a little pale, but otherwise you couldn’t tell he was sick—and went into the city. Surrounded by police officers, he walked onto a stage outside of city hall, and then he did what he was told.
“I’d just like to thank everyone for coming out. After a crazy few days it feels good to be back on American soil, but especially in Sacramento. Um, this is my home, and I’m just glad to be back here to see everybody. It’s kind of overwhelming for me. I didn’t expect all this to happen, but I just appreciate you all for coming and, um, it’s just good to be back home. Thank you.”
And that was all he could muster. He stepped off.
When his father took the podium and agreed to take some questions, a reporter asked one that threw Anthony for a loop. Did Pastor Sadler have any concerns now, the reporter asked, that his son might be a target for terrorists?
It was a ridiculous question, and Anthony hoped his father wouldn’t answer too rudely.
“Yes, I do,” he said.
Anthony couldn’t believe what he just heard.
“But there are no credible threats right now.”
Dad thinks I’m in danger?
Anthony tried to let the thought pass. Even though the people around him were mostly press, and even though he wanted desperately to go home and collapse onto his bed, the crowd there seemed genuinely happy for him.
Later that day, he saw the local NBC affiliate report on his press conference. “Sadler spoke for less than thirty seconds,” the correspondent said, “then left without taking any questions. Police closed down streets around city hall, as a motorcade whisked him away.”
39.
WHEN HE FINALLY CONNECTED with Spencer, Anthony had been back in America for almost a week, which somehow felt both longer and shorter than seven days. On the one hand, it felt like just yesterday that they were all together on their reunion, all together on the train, but on the other hand, so much had happened since then. When Anthony looked back at it, the few days between then and now were dense with events that would define his life. That made it feel like more time, or at least, more significant time. Time itself still felt like a fluid concept, just like it had on the train. Were minutes passing, or hours?
And it felt longer also because he was experiencing it alone. This should be the three of them together, all home, all hailed as heroes together. But since those days together at the embassy in Paris, they’d been pulled in different directions. Spencer was still at Ramstein Air Base in Germany when he finally answered one of Anthony’s calls, and he wasn’t doing great.
“I mean, it’s nice that everyone is so caring,” he said, “but it’s just so much. I mean it’s nonstop. There are always people around, like a million people trying to take care of me. We just want to come home.”
“I know, man, I wish you could be here and see what it’s like back in America. They love us here.”
That didn’t seem to lift Spencer’s spirits much. Maybe he was having his own hangover from all that had happened.
Plus, the air force had given Spencer’s family a liaison to help them deal with all the strange new demands and, no bullshit, she was an alumnus of their private school. What were the odds? A school across the world with a dozen kids in a class, and she happened to be there?
“What you need,” Anthony said, “is to get back here. Sacramento loves us. I’m getting into clubs for free, I’ve been out to eat, people just pay for me. I could get used to it.”
“Well, there has been a little of that . . . if you know what I mean.”
“Ha! For real? What happened?”
“We snuck off the base. We had to put one of the MPs in the trunk to get past the checkpoint.” They’d gone to a bar that served American servicemen from the base, run by an old American expat who for whatever reason had put down roots in Germany but must have missed American kids, because he opened a bar and did things like offer shots on the house when an American hero walked in the door. The moment Spencer put the liquor to his lips, a sound system blasted the opening synch riff to Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” “Then I felt a tap on my shoulder,” Spencer said, “and I swear, this girl asked me if I wanted to do a body shot. So obviously I did, and the whole place just was chanting, ‘USA!! . . . USA!! . . . USA!!!’ while I did it. Even out here, I get noticed wherever I go.”
But there was something else that had hit him even harder, he told Anthony. He’d gone out for dinner off base with his and another family, and their little girl kept arguing with her siblings during the car ride about who would get to sit next to him at the table. She prevailed, but then the whole evening stared up at him like she didn’t quite understand something about Spencer. After dinner she finally mustered the courage to ask him her question: “Are you a superhero?”
Anthony could hear Spencer shifting the phone.
“Then she said she wanted to hug me. But she was afraid to, because I still have the cast, and the stitches. She said she wanted to hug me, but she was afraid she would hurt me. And it just all came out. I just bawled, man. I think that’s when it just all kind of hit me.”
40.
IT WASN’T SERIOUS, AT FIRST. The three of them started getting media requests, then a PR manager from their hometown signed on to help them keep track of everything coming in, and produced three two-sided sheets of media requests. It was too much to do; how could one person do all of them, do even three or four or five of them? So Anthony went down the list eliminating the ones he knew he didn’t want to do. Not many were easy to pass up—when fame finally comes knocking, you don’t shut the door in its face—but one was an obvious “no thanks.” Dancing with the Stars.
And then one morning a week after Anthony got home from Paris, while he (he thought) was the only one of the three back in the States, his dad told him there was an announcement on Good Morning America he should watch, so Anthony pulled it up. After a clip of Gary Busey riding a horse, the host teed up the ageless Dancing with the Stars host, Tom Bergeron.
All the final cast members had been announced but one. “Tom,” one of the hosts said, “will you do us the honors and reveal the suuupersecret star?”
“Yes, indeed,” Tom said, sitting in a director’s chair in the middle of Times Square. “I found out about this late addition to our cast last night. I’m thrilled to introduce him. He was one of three Americans who took down a terrorist on board a packed train in Paris.”
Holy shit, is that Alek! In Times Square!
Or rather, Alek’s shadow behind a sheer pink screen, but unmistakably him; even in monochrome silhouette, Alek had a trademark slouch. Hands in p
ockets, Johnny Bravo hair whipped off center. Out he walked through a beaded curtain onto national television, smiling ear to ear, then turning because the beads were clinging like tentacles to his shirt, and he had to undo himself. He broke free, walked out with a hitch in his step, and asked the sixty-five-year-old celebrity chef Paula Deen for a high five en route to his chair. Alek didn’t seem shy or quiet at all. He seemed to be right in his element, sitting in Times Square in his standard jeans and running shoes, next to a handful of suits and designer T-shirts with aggressive necklines.
Anthony couldn’t believe he was watching the same Alek. Was that really his friend sitting next to the Crocodile Hunter’s daughter? Sitting in front of a mop-headed social media star? They beamed in a Backstreet Boy from a set where he was filming a movie. Anthony was watching his friend becoming a pop idol before his eyes.
He and Spencer would go about their more mature media requests, Anthony deciding it’d be cool to go on the shows he watched faithfully. Jimmy Fallon (which was a mistake; Jimmy Kimmel treated Spencer better); and Lester Holt for evening news, while they waited for Alek to make a fool of himself on national television.
But a crazy thing happened on the way to Alek’s national embarrassment. He didn’t fail.
He kept advancing.
He survived the elimination rounds.
He made it past the first half of the season.
He made it to the two-night finale, so Spencer and Anthony flew down to see him on the first night, since he’d obviously be eliminated before it got to the final three stars.
He wasn’t. He made it to the final night. Alek seemed natural in the makeup, under the lights. And sure, he was the one “star” whose professional dancing partner fielded most of the questions, the producers apparently catching on quickly that Alek wasn’t the most verbose contestant they’d ever had, not the best choice for a passionate anecdote, but he seemed to like the performing; he actually seemed to have this in him. Anthony had never seen that side of him, but it seemed like something that had always been there. Alek wasn’t pretending; Alek never pretended. So Alek actually liked to perform. It was like he’d been hiding an artistic side all along, and it took the train to bring it out.
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