NEWS OF THE WEIRD
Reporting live for WYUV, Samantha Dean at the Aventura Mall, and as you can see behind me just miles of stores, a momentous place, and a momentous moment as just a few hours ago, a shopper at this mall, at, at this mall, exploded. We have been told she exploded into—literally, her remains are glass. Luckily, it only happened inside the Bag and Baggage. Three survivors were rushed to local hospitals and are in unknown condition. There were no deaths aside from the woman who, and, I should add, I did say luckily because it did not occur near Santa. Santa and the kids are on the other, the other side of the mall, I believe, and even on, on a different level of the mall, Kurt.
Glass, Samantha?
Correct. Black glass.
It this some kind of bomb? Is anyone calling this a terrorist attack?
They’re not calling it anything yet, Kurt.
They told you it was an explosion, but not a bomb.
Correct. Authorities have yet to detect shrapnel, debris, any chemical evidence of an explosive device having gone off. Um, there was no smoke, no fire, no chemical odor.
Samantha, black glass? Elizabeth Casey wasn’t black, was she?
That’s right, Amanda. I’ll show you. There’s glass outside the store. I can pick some up.
Can we get a shot…
Yeah, got it.
There it is. Oh, it’s tiny.
Like crushed ice.
Very shiny.
Oh. Oh, my gosh.
Samantha, hold your hand steady, please, for the shot.
There’s blood on it.
Can we get that?
It’s dried blood on black glass on black skin. I can’t get it.
Fuck this.
Samantha’s hand drops out of the frame and the shot loses focus.
We stepped 1,200 or so frames into the light. Surveillance cameras record a lot more frames now, but we still have the same amount of time to fit them into. One second per second. It is pure, silent white during every shot of every explosion—Aventura, the forty kids at the Golden Apple, and there must have been three hundred cameras on them. Just the yuck was left behind. No headless kids, nor heads. I was the survivor guy who crawled out from under a two-foot mound of black glass beads in the Bag and Baggage security video and staggered stage right, my life absolutely saved by a display of enormous polycarbonate suitcases, commenters across many platforms agreed.
On New Year’s Eve, I resolve for something to come true in the next year absent any effort on my part. I resolve what I want for myself, not what I demand of myself. What you want in your heart, you can find. This nicely distilled pill-popper’s outlook made me suspect Michelle suspected me of something. I finished my thought and turned to watch the snowstorm in the back yard.
Let my father stop taking pain pills and let my post traumatic Aventura stress-whatever disorder end.
The crisis shrinks flown in from the coasts, elite men and women with full reservoirs of empathy and stomachs for terror, told me that I was very highly valued. I was the only one of three who was standing close enough to Elizabeth Casey to have seen her face before it blew into glass smoke. And for me to have been conscious all the way to the hospital, the ambulance weaving through the media traffic, and babbling under the morphine for seventeen minutes? That’s priceless babble, once we can really analyze your speech centers, they told me.
The therapists talked me into a ten-week course of treatment. I told my shrink that I was experiencing frequent panic attacks followed by auras of outlandish thinking, if auras are what they should be called. He didn’t name them for me. He just made notes. Feeling far beyond thirty-four years old, I was still inventing names for things. This time, for critical ailments. Pet names for repressed dreads. I thought this could be an insanely dangerous thing to be doing and immediately, I felt Michelle’s phantom crossed fingertips press against my lips.
“Breathe with your diaphragm. Everyone has one,” the therapist said.
“I take about four breaths per day,” I told him.
My therapist said, “You take an average of 21,600 breaths per day. That’s part of being alive. And the technique of breathing I just told you about will make being alive more pleasant for you.”
You age faster inside a hospital.
Finally, after two weeks, they moved me to a mobile office in a semi-trailer. But we had to share it with the police’s radio dispatch unit. A very thin accordion-style barrier between the rooms let our voices through. The trailer was moored too close to the Aventura’s east entrance. I smelled honey buns when Annie’s turned on the air pump to delight the great outdoors.
The dispatchers always yelled. They shoved their words through the static.
“I said: Good Morning America. ETA. Repeat: Good Morning America. ETA. Over.”
“Is that a code word?” I asked the guy. “Or the program?”
His head swiveled to me until the cord hanging from his headphones garroted his neck.
“Victims always assholes. Little-known secret.”
One morning early on, my therapist delivered a sealed note he said was from one of the other two survivors. We’d been kept out of contact for vague reasons having to do with witness contamination, but he knew the contents of the letter and thought he should break the rules in this case. Inside the envelope was a Post-It that read, Don’t talk to news at all? Ok? All of us? I signed it, handed it back to my therapist.
When he left me alone, the morphine made television patter difficult to follow as the high-numbered foreign language channels. The most mindless shows in English captured me. I found a thread running through Jackie’s Posse: the ownership of the word cunt. Whose would it be: the haters, or the powerful women you’re about to meet? There is nothing above breathing. I looked at the ceiling light. There would be an Oxycodone later.
At the beginning of December, lying in bed with Michelle, I would from some small point inside me feel anxiety balloon. A balloon so hyper-oxygenated with worry, she must have inhaled it during her sleep, and from there it intruded on her dreams and confused her. Whose worries are these? Their source was nothing Michelle or my father could have understood. I knew the sun wasn’t rising to its natural high. Of the shop clerks I visited to gather spending data, not one communicated anything concerning a future action. Saying to them, “See you next week,” drew puzzled frowns. I had to chase them with late invoices. Every weather report was really pretty wrong. But none of the abnormalities of the year before Aventura, when, on some days the purple-blue sky allowed stars through at noon, nothing appeared anywhere, TV or online.
Can you hear me?
Even radio. Unless you listened to it correctly. Every day, portents blew in like pollen off the Great Plains and eddied in the parking lots of Dayton. I sat in my car outside the Golden Apple and the Aventura, flooding my fear and collected the receipts.
To be continued
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