Impact
The night was strange to begin with. Shortly after Phil and I met up, as we were walking east to Alive One, some guys in a pickup truck drove past us yelling n——-, f——-, that sort of thing, in our direction. I flipped them off; they saw; they stopped their truck, and three or four of them got out, acting the way gangsters act in movies when they want to broadcast scripted toughness. I was utterly out of my element. I said something like “how old are you?” to the guy closest to me, because he seemed like a kid—he could’ve been as young as fourteen. As this was happening Phil and I were on the final approach to a busy, well-lit intersection with a fair number of pedestrians present. The movie gangsters thought better of doing whatever they had intended to do, got back in their truck, and drove off, shouting uninspired insults. One of them threw a beer or soda can at us, and it barely missed my head, spraying my face with a sprinkle of inoffensive fluid. We were moderately shaken, Phil more than I—maybe he let himself think about it more than I let myself think about it, or maybe he just had a more protective mother than I did, and he was less comfortable lying by omission to her than I was lying by omission to mine.
We had a couple drinks at Alive One, then went to a gay bar, where, for a little while, Phil left me alone to use the bathroom; I was nervous, but no one hit on me. Phil himself didn’t seem to be in the mood for an encounter, or maybe he thought it would be shitty of him to get hooked and leave me alone. I wouldn’t have minded, but in order to tell him I wouldn’t have minded I would’ve had to presume in him a thought process the presumption of which I thought he might find mildly offensive—not politically offensive, just personally—so I didn’t tell him I wouldn’t have minded, and we kept on having a premium-mediocre sort of night (technically, by then, a very early morning), bantering about the bar’s choice of musical-theatre soundtracks and the varying accuracy of a number of gay stereotypes. Eventually we got bored of this and went to the Golden Apple for diner food. I got a continental breakfast, coffee, and a vanilla milkshake. Phil got a continental breakfast with the eggs done differently and sausage instead of bacon. We bantered, if you could call it that, some more, this time about the fates of certain politically questionable acquaintances—some mutual, some not—from our college days. I sensed from him a gentle pressure to make condemnations in the place of my gentle disparagements. I gently resisted. It was all very civilized.
After a while he got sleepy and left. I set up shop with my coffee refills and my journal and jotted some notes. Mostly I was thinking about the architecture of a story-seed I’d been rotating in the back of my head—a protagonist not unlike myself comes into possession of a ticket to a show in a parallel universe accessible by back-alley (literal back-alley) wormhole, goes to the lower levels of a city called Marstinerium built on and into a massive piece of rock floating in an endless black expanse (think Sanctaphrax, but changed enough to avoid plagiarism accusations), and watches the show, which turns out to be a striptease during which the woman removes not only her clothing but also her skin, her internal organs, and so on. At the end all that’s left is a brain stem with a spinal-cord flagellum, squirming off the stage and through the audience, and this parasite takes up residence in our protagonist, piloting him back to our universe, where it will use him, we presume, to do Bad Things.
I also put some desultory effort into abstract pseudo-Escherian sketches while thinking about the movie-gangster encounter of what was technically now the previous day. It was funny, the slurs they’d chosen. Only one of us was gay, and neither of us was any sort of person of color. I was wearing a pair of shorts that you could call… pale red? pastel pink? raw salmon?, and I’d been wearing the same shorts about three years earlier on the Manhattan subway when a blotchy-faced drunk had accosted me verbally, calling me a f——-, ranting about how homosexuals ought to be beheaded. He was white; his increasingly irked Native American companion kept telling him to shut up. I just kind of stood there, giving the drunk a perplexed look. When I got off the train, a woman getting off at the same stop asked me, face full of concern, if I was okay. I noncommittally affirmed that I was. What I was really thinking, not at her but at my verbal assailant, was you idiot, you’re making us all look bad. Us being the anti-woke faction. I walked away wondering what would’ve happened if I’d started to flirt with him.
What bothered me about the gangsters, what I couldn’t get out of my head, was the knowledge of how unprepared I’d been. Things had stopped a few seconds short of the point at which I might have been physically punished for my lack of preparation, and then the can had missed my face by a few inches. Nothing truly bad would’ve happened if we’d been mugged or beaten up or both close to that intersection—we’d’ve been patched up at a nearby hospital and given all the material support we’d’ve needed—but I’d been left with the impression that by flipping the gangsters off I’d somehow shouldered the responsibility of ensuring that things did not turn out that way, that we won the encounter. It had been a draw—they had to have seen we were scared, but we’d escaped concrete punishment for the bird. I had at least avoided losing in a concrete way. But not by skill. By luck. Had I pondered the likely ramifications of my challenge I would have concluded I did not have the skill to win, and I would have let the gangsters’ initial insults pass with nothing beyond a nice display of get-me-out-of-the-hood body language. I should’ve pondered, I thought. In a sense I’d chosen not to ponder. In a sense I’d chosen to lose, and only something some people would call the grace of God had saved me. I did not want to have relied on anything so flimsy as the grace of God.
I did not want to have—yes, that was my entire life, a string of did-not-want-to-haves. Milkshake gone, approximately-third cup of coffee half-empty. I refused a top-up, shut my journal, put it in my bag, and started scrolling Twitter.
Maybe ten minutes in, while I was reading a vaguepost about the inability of whisper networks to protect autistic naïfs from sexual predation, I experienced a seemingly sourceless wave of anxiety. I looked around. A bunch of normal people doing normal things. I wasn’t really seeing them, but they weren’t doing anything worth seeing; if they had been, I would’ve seen it. After a long moment I concluded that the source had been my coffee. I went back to the feed.
When someone screamed, high-pitched and rough, close to the diner, my head snapped up. A man was running across the three-way intersection towards the door. Others had noticed the scream, and a flutter of concerned head motions swept the booths in my vicinity. I barely had time to register the icelike trickle in my chest before the man entered the vestibule, then the restaurant proper.
“Help!” he shouted. “People trying to kill me! Call 911!”
He was white, with a scraggly beard and black clothes. He looked poor but not homeless. He ran along the row of booths that included mine—passing me as he did—jerked his head around, identified the route to the kitchen, and took it. A security guard pursued him, yelling “Sir—stop! Asshole!”
From the kitchen came yells and curses and the sound of a heavy metal object hitting the floor. A heavyset black man sitting alone with a mostly-finished beer in a booth across from mine began to get up. Other diners, murmuring and frowning, looked like they might follow. I pocketed my phone. I had to use the bathroom, and—
More people were entering the restaurant, passing through the vestibule to the main area. They too were dressed in black, wearing ski masks—or, in the case of the first one to enter, a gas mask. The leader’s gloved hands were empty; the three who followed carried rifles, and their fingers were on the triggers.
“Everyone stay still!” shouted the one who had entered second. It was a man’s voice, grave and piercing as a trumpet playing Taps. “We’re only here for one person! After we kill him we’ll leave!”
It was, of course, immediately after this that a young patron of the diner tried to escape, ducking behind the last person to enter, rushing through the vestibule, opening the outer door—and collapsing backwards in a spray of gunfire. I saw a sliver of it from where I sat. It was loud, and blood leapt through the air. There had been someone—there was someone standing just outside the restaurant, a member of the entourage who hadn’t come inside. And the bullets—they hadn’t come out with a ra-ta-ta-ta-tat, it had been more like a grrrrrrrrrrrrt. Automatic-sounding.
Screams and whimpers swept over the restaurant, but they failed to cohere into anything so bold as a general attempt to break free. A couple people began to stand up, then sat down as rifle barrels swivelled in their direction, raising their hands open-palmed. Trumpet-voice cocked his head at gas-mask; gas-mask nodded, and trumpet-voice headed for the kitchen, one of the other goons following him. Before they were out of my sight I heard from the back of the restaurant another brief spray of lead. A back exit, I surmised, that the target or one of the restaurant’s staff had not known was guarded by yet another of gas-mask’s subordinates.
Someone, somewhere, hiding behind something, had to be calling 911, I reasoned. I was very cold, and shivering, and I thought that if I swallowed too much saliva at once I might puke. There was no reason for me to do something, I told myself. This was some kind of over-the-top rogues’-gallery-coded gang killing. Their target had embezzled funds or fucked gas-mask’s bitch. I was trembling everywhere. I wanted to jerk my head several times in rapid succession, but I couldn’t—it would have been bad to draw attention.
A single gunshot from the kitchen. “Please!” came the target’s gravelly shriek. “This isn’t right! It wasn’t evil! We both wanted it! It was good for both of us! If you let me ex—”
Another shot, and the man’s voice stopped as if from a pause-button hit. Then—one, two, three, four, five. Ten seconds or so later, trumpet-voice and his companion reentered the restaurant’s main area. He nodded at gas-mask, who nodded back.
“Good job, everyone,” said trumpet-voice. “We’ll be gone in a minute, and then you can do what you want.”
The entourage made for the front door. Trumpet-voice and his companion passed my booth without acknowledging my existence. The person who’d stayed with gas-mask during the kill was already closer to the door than I was. Gas-mask made to pass me—then stopped, turned ninety degrees, and leaned over the table, the blank eye-discs of the mask seeming to search out my frozen eyes. I was trembling harder than before. I couldn’t swallow. The others—they’d stopped their exit, they had their guns. Were they about to execute me? Was I supposed to fight? Half an hour from now, if I were still alive, would I not want to not have fought?
Light stuttered to life behind the gas mask’s black eye-discs. They shone an almost uniform creamy white. Then the gas mask’s wearer spoke.
“If you stay still, you will not die.”
It was a young woman’s voice. She was correct. No—why had I thought—why did I think she was correct?
The end of a thin cylinder was inches from my face. A shiver, like an amplified version of the kind you get from the very best music, ran through my body. I was nakedly, inarticulably afraid that, if I moved, I would suffer something too horrible for me to comprehend or predict.
The end of the cylinder settled in front of my right eye. There was a tiny bit of motion from behind the cylinder, close to my face, and, just for a moment, a burning blasting scouring unwrought my head. Then there was nothing.