The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  “Luke, are we sure this isn’t something the kid made up?” She turns around. “Or like…I mean, the Son of Sam took direction from his dog! John Hinckley shot Reagan for Jodie Foster!”

  “I was hoping the same thing,” he says. “But no, unfortunately. Apparently this is all very literal. I’m sorry, Cel.”

  A peppery smell fills Cel’s nostrils; she feels her heart begin to slow, and realizes for the first time it’s been racing.

  “I mean, I know we’ve had our differences,” says Luke. “But I am sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “Sorry for you. Because now you have to go talk to him about this.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Well, we have to deal with this, don’t we?” Luke is using his assistant-professor voice. “We have to address it, do we not?”

  Cel says nothing. At least these questions are rhetorical, not Socratic.

  “And that starts with talking to Mattie.”

  “And you think I’m the man for the job.”

  Luke shrugs; his unwillingness to take this opening for insult frightens Cel more than she understands. “All I know is that he let you in the car.”

  “I was already in it!”

  “But he didn’t kick you out.”

  “I’m not sure he noticed I was there.”

  Cel leans her forehead against the glass, peering down until her sense of physical vertigo nearly matches her inner one. On the sidewalk below her, a dab of bright green bobs against the wash of concrete. She closes her bad eye and the dab becomes a black man in a lime-green shirt, bending over to pick something up.

  “So you want me to what—interrogate him about this? Argue with him? Luke, he was a fucking lawyer!”

  “He was a public defender! I’m not asking you to beat him in a paperwork race. I’m just asking you to go talk to him.”

  “I thought that’s why we hired Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

  “Network is dubious about that guy.”

  “And they’re not dubious about me?”

  “I think the word I would use is ‘unaware.’ They are largely unaware of you, and this, for now, will have to do.”

  Slowly, the man in the polo shirt stands up with whatever he is holding. Could it be a feather, an engagement ring, a crack vial? The care in his movements suggests something not dropped, but discovered. Cel opens her bad eye and the man disappears back into the sidewalk.

  “The only helpful thing I can say, Cel? Mattie will understand why you’re doing it. He knows you have to, and you know why?”

  Cel knows it’s better to quote Luke than to let him quote himself. “Because it is my job.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid that it is.”

  Outside, the light is turning sepulchral and stormy. This is the kind of weather Cel usually likes: choppy Van Gogh skies, the sense of changing wind and altered possibility. Cel can sense Luke lingering in the doorway—beset by uncharacteristic remorse, or merely dissatisfied with having given Cel his final line?

  “What?” Cel says into the window. Her breath fogs the glass.

  “Just—” Luke says quietly. “I mean. Nobody’s expecting a miracle. But you know, a lot of people work here.”

  “I know.”

  Outside, the storm is starting. She’d loved storms as a child: roiling skies gave her a dangerous, promising feeling—a sense of revolution, or a shipwreck from which you just might emerge into a new life. But this storm only feels like what it is: another thing to get through. Cel squints through the rain, looking for the bright green shirt of the man. But he is gone, vanished into Manhattan along with whatever he was holding—Cel will never know what it was, and she feels a stupid grief at this. That something so small can still be permanent. This is not the sort of thing worth saying to Luke, or anyone. She turns around to say it anyway, and finds that he is gone now, too.

  TWENTY-ONE

  semi

  1991

  Eventually there came a time when it seemed the war had reached a stalemate. The best men had gone to their graves, with only cowards left to count them. Like other survivors before us, we were ashamed, and fled.

  I went to Iceland. I wanted not to see the Northern Lights.

  For years, I’d longed to see them. Now, I could hardly bear that they existed. I certainly couldn’t stand their wheeling across the sky—for me and only me, alone in the foreign snow. But the thing about bearing things is that it isn’t ever up to you; there is nothing elective in endurance. And so, of course, there they were: a green, electric seizure, spectacular beyond imagining. A miracle, sure, and what’s one more? I shivered and thought: Why me?—but this was only out of habit.

  I was standing in a field of volcanic stones—tarry and anthropomorphic: you could see why the locals thought them trolls. Above me was a churning chaos, the sky glowing malachite, turning the snow to colors that have no name. I was accidentally quoting Chekhov, I realized, which is about what I deserved for trying to do something original with my grief.

  Hallucinatory light rotated above me—seeming to work some deeper transformation on everything it touched, as heat turns sand to glass. The ice was pyrite, the air vitrified; the stones around me were not stones at all, but trolls, and then not trolls, but fossils—ancient creatures calcified by comets. I blinked, and they were the running mummies of Pompeii; I blinked again, and they were skeletons in the ossuaries of the Plague. They were the seared shadows at Hiroshima, forever fleeing into the walls. They were the righteous anointed by the Rapture, standing in permanent reproach of us all.

  What perversity of fate is it to be forgotten by the apocalypse?

  But then, there is no reason to think we get just one. This was as good a place as any to wait for the next one.

  I lay back in the snow and closed my eyes. I thought about tsunamis, about millennial earthquakes. I thought of Krakatoa, of the asteroid that irradiated Siberia. I summoned imperialist extraterrestrials, I summoned horsemen.

  I whispered to the universe: Take me with you. Take me with you.

  part four

  In the dark, a flame goes out. And then

  The afterimage of the flame goes out.

  —FREDERICK SEIDEL

  A second chance—that’s the delusion.

  There never was to be but one.

  —HENRY JAMES

  TWENTY-TWO

  semi

  1993

  The journalist is figuring me out, I’m afraid. He has taken to calling me in the evenings, after I’ve come back from the theater or the hospital and it is very hard not to answer the phone.

  The fourth time he calls, I tell him I’m not interested in blackmail.

  “This isn’t blackmail,” he says. “It’s not going to be that kind of story.”

  “Not what kind of story?” Though surely this is submitting to his tactics; his very first goal, before anything else, is to engage me.

  “This would be more like a character study,” he says, and I laugh at him.

  “Well, you certainly picked a character,” I say. “I’ll be interested to see what you find out.”

  Then I hang up, and am alone again, and still.

  * * *

  —

  “Can’t we turn that off?” I say to Brookie, the third time the news of Ryan Muller’s fan letter plays on CNN.

  There’s no answer. I know he isn’t really sleeping.

  “Hey.” I tap his foot. Under the sheets, his yellowed toenails have probably grown out again. The nurses are good at remembering most things, but they do forget about that. “Let’s change the channel, okay?”

  He swallows. His throat makes a childlike, glutinous sound. I reach for the little sponge and swab his mouth. When I’m through, he looks at me and says, “I lost the remote.”

  �
��I don’t believe you,” I say, swizzling the sponge in its jar. There’s something about this ritual that reminds me of dyeing Easter eggs, though who would have ever sat with me through such a process?

  Brookie swallows again and says, “Where the hell would I be hiding it?”

  He has a point. He’s wearing a johnny—pocketless, ass-less—underneath three papery blankets, the kind you get on airplanes. Even though it’s the middle of July, he is always freezing—teeth chattering audibly, body juddering with the weird energy of a person mid-coke-comedown. Meanwhile, the rest of us are roasting. The nurses walk around with globes of sweat beneath their arms; when they turn off lights or hoist bedpans, you can see dark hemispheres of Pooh Bears and carousels, dogs with little bones and cats with flamboyant umbrellas—as though all their cloying universes have fallen under eclipse. Even Ashley has them, and we love Ashley: she is tiny and unflappable, and under different circumstances, we think we would have been friends with her. Though it’s true we were never friends with all that many women.

  I scan the room for the remote, but I don’t see it. On the wheeled table next to Brookie’s head is a Styrofoam cup of half-melted ice, the Weekend section of the Times. Tuesday is Science, but we don’t read that one anymore.

  On the television, they are still talking about the shooting. They are always talking about the shooting. It’s a slow news summer—a slow news decade, as it goes, depending on your perspective. My following of the story has been tenuous and almost wholly against my will. The shooting is, undeniably, a tragedy. Nevertheless, it’s always a little galling to hear talk of other tragedies—to observe the rush to make meaning, discuss policy. The willingness to consider notions of preventability, presumptions of innocence. The reflexive understanding that issues of suffering and death are indeed of general interest. Even the gun fanatics can’t get away with explicitly not giving a shit—in fact, they must be seen to seem to give very much of a shit. They have to go on television to twist themselves in self-sealing circles of logic so tight they can only be understood as articles of faith—and who would bother to argue with, would be so audacious as to doubt the sincerity of, one of those? The bottom line is that, whatever one may think of guns, of course everyone cares about the dead. The dead were people, after all, and the living are not monsters.

  It was all a little much, even before the letter debacle, which launched Matthew’s image onto every channel. Now, he is everywhere: they’re doing retrospectives of his show, his life, his career in politics. They’re doing highlights from his interviews. It all has the feel of an obituary—which I suppose, on a professional level, it is.

  Now they’re showing clips of him and Alice, standing in the rain.

  “Haven’t I suffered enough?” I say aloud.

  “Probably not,” says Brookie. This time I had actually thought he was asleep.

  I suppose the wall-to-wall coverage of these letters was inevitable. In a way, Mattie M was already the country’s major cultural phenomenon—its scapegoat and guilty pleasure, its self-flagellation and original sin. Mattie M is already Jonathan Swift and P. T. Barnum and Andy Kaufman; the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. He is the person who started the rumor about that scene where the Munchkin commits suicide, and all the people who’ve ever rewound the tape to try to watch.

  “I’m obsessed with this story,” whispers Ashley, and I jump about a foot.

  “So is Semi,” says Brookie. He’s speaking in his extra-awake voice now, the one telling us not to write him off just yet.

  “I don’t know why I care,” says Ashley.

  “I bet Semi does,” says Brookie, and winks one swollen eyelid. But I am not afraid of him anymore: anything he says about Matthew, I will chalk up to delirium.

  “I don’t care,” I say. “I’m profoundly bored of this, actually.”

  “You are?” says Ashley mildly, and picks up the remote. Somehow it was right there on the table all along.

  TWENTY-THREE

  cel

  1993

  Ryan Muller’s suicide note is six words long: I didn’t know it was real.

  Six words: almost nothing, yet more than anyone could have asked for. It’s the perfect length for scrolling text boxes, for screenshots, for pull quotes.

  I didn’t know it was real: a declarative assertion with an unstated antecedent. On TV, they go around and around about the referent: did he not know the gun was real, or did he not know the moral consequences were real? Maybe he didn’t know The Mattie M Show was real, offers Suzanne Bryanson on CNN. She isn’t the first person to conclude this; several more advertisers have dropped out overnight.

  “But The Mattie M Show is not real,” says the anchor. “Is it?”

  Suzanne Bryanson says she doesn’t think that’s the point.

  I didn’t know it was real: a gnomic, sub-grammatical utterance, uniquely suited to wild speculation, divergent suppressed premises. (“Just like the Second Amendment!” says Luke.)

  I didn’t know it was real: but real in what sense? Perhaps the real here is metaphorical. It could be a reflection of delusion: perhaps Ryan Muller hadn’t known he was real. Maybe after years of bullying, years of invisibility, he somehow didn’t actually believe in his own causal relationship to the world. This interpretation is ventured by a psychologist who works with violent youths. Or perhaps the issue is metaphysical: Ryan Muller didn’t register the permanence of death. Or maybe it’s epistemological, an issue of theory of mind: he hadn’t grasped the reality of the other students’ lives, their consciousnesses. These aren’t the words commentators are using, but these are the basic issues under discussion: Cel has never seen anything like it on cable TV.

  “At least this one’s not addressed to Mattie M,” says Tod Browning on Tod Browning in the Morning.

  Over the day, a consensus emerges that Ryan Muller is referring to the skit. Blair McKinney is hauled back on the air, poor kid, to confirm that none of the students had thought that it was real, at first—not only because it was unbelievable, but also because the shooters had been planning to perform a skit on media violence anyway. They’d even workshopped some early ideas in class, he said, and everyone pretty much expected Troy and Ryan to take it way too seriously and do something weird and unsettling for the final version.

  “What is going on at our public schools?” says Rush Limbaugh. “Is this what our taxpayer dollars are funding? That’s the real story here, folks, as much as the libtard media wants to make it all about the big bad NRA and your vewy scawy constitutional gun rights. What the hell are they teaching our kids? is my question. And why isn’t anyone looking at that?”

  He then launches into a tirade against teachers’ unions.

  It was true, said Blair McKinney, that Ryan Muller seemed almost surprised at first, that he’d quickly turned away and run. And the ballistics testing has determined that Muller’s gun was fired only once, hitting Jacqueline Easton in the arm. But there’s of course no way of knowing why Ryan Muller had stopped shooting, or why he’d ever started in the first place.

  But if Ryan Muller didn’t know the skit was real, says Lee to a nodding Lisa, then he didn’t know the gun was real: they are back, over and over, to the gun. Is it remotely possible he did not? Luckily for producers, this interpretation is empirically testable, and uniquely suited to an on-screen stunt. They bring in people to try to guess, though this is probably unnecessary: Cel has never met anyone in the industry who’s ever fired a gun—any producer, probably, would do.

  “I can’t believe they’re trying so hard to come up with excuses for this guy,” says Nikki. She is sucking a strand of hair in her mouth like a child. Elspeth is seated next to her, green-haired and glazed-eyed. They are splitting a bowl of popcorn, united at last.

  “They’d never do that if he wasn’t a photogenic white kid,” says Elspeth.

  “Oh, I don’t t
hink we can be so sure about that,” says Nikki.

  “We can, actually,” says Elspeth. “They’ve done studies and everything. If a black kid did this, nobody would be searching for ways to forgive him.”

  She’s right about the coverage, Cel thinks, squinting at the television—although she isn’t at all sure forgiveness is why they’re still watching.

  And aren’t they all still watching?

  * * *

  —

  Cel’s answering machine is full on Saturday morning. She tries not to let this make her feel important. She still doesn’t like this job, but she’s starting to see how somebody could—could become addicted to the buzzy adrenaline of crisis, the sense of being chronically in demand. The corresponding right to act harassed all the time, about everything. It occurs to her that Luke probably loves this job. The messages are mostly about the note; many are about the letters; a few are about Mattie’s gun remarks—coverage of which continues to run in a secondary loop beneath the Ryan Muller thing, like the B plot of a comic opera. One of the messages is from Scott from Sligo’s, saying he knows this weekend must be crazy but if she has any time at all he’d love to buy her a drink. Two messages concern rumors about Eddie Marcus—who (according to message one) had been fired from the water commissioner’s offices back in the seventies under circumstances described as “dubious,” bringing disgrace to one of the nation’s most prominent packaging families, whatever that could mean. Cel knew that guy was rich. The other messages contain insane and/or pointless demands—one of the journalists wants to interview Alice (good luck!), another wants to interview the former intern formerly tasked with sorting Mattie’s mail, several want to interview the devil-boy—though it turns out they’ve been scooped on that one: Cel catches one Damian the Devil-Boy on Channel 5 at lunch, submitting to questioning about Mattie’s demeanor the day of the shooting. Cel tries to remember if the devil-boy ever actually met Mattie. Today he is without his makeup, wearing a brand-new Yankees hat over his horns; according to the text box, his name is Ezra Rosenzweig.