Just For One Day

We're all the heroes of our own stories. We'd have to be; otherwise we'd collapse into a heap, never to rise again. Each of us a protagonist, variably sure of ourselves and our own virtue. It's a rare one who thinks of themselves as the villain of their own life.

I've always thought of myself as a cool headed sort, someone who reacts well under pressure. For the most part, that's played out in the movie of my life. I'm normally quite unflappable.

Sometimes though, you end up in a situation so far outside your realm of experience that you don't know what to do. You're not sure how to react, so you end up taking cues from those around you. You become one of the mob.

It was a day like any other, a casual Friday that had ended with drinks after work. One of our colleagues was moving on, so we all went to celebrate. I was making a conscious effort to try and be more sociable, though I didn't really feel much like it.

Three beer and quite a bit of chat later, I'd had my fill. I'd never been much one for palling around with work mates; I liked to keep a degree of compartmentalization to my life. So I said my goodbyes, and headed home.

It was roughly eight thirty when I plopped down on the subway car. It had been a long day and a longer week; our quotas kept increasing the harder we worked. Every time we thought we'd come close to finishing, the goal posts were moved. I was exhausted, physically and mentally.

We rolled into St. George station, and a bunch of rowdy kids got on, trash talking back and forth between the two groups. Three young men and two young women appeared to be trying to inflate their own egos, each at the expense of the other. I tuned out their foolishness and tuned back into Bowie.

I too, wished I could swim. Like the dolphins. Like dolphins can swim.

One of the young men sat directly across from me, and the thought briefly crossed my mind to try and get a picture of him with my camera phone. I don't know where the thought came from, or why I suppressed it. And then it came.

One young man called one of the young women a particularly incendiary word. Suffice to say, it had the desired effect, and set her off. She charged toward him.
Her earring flew off and landed on the seat next to me. It was a large gold hoop, somewhat stylized, and suddenly intensely fascinating. I couldn't take my eyes off it.

This is where my tendency to compartmentalize confounds me. Part of my subconscious must have known that things were not right, and were not going to end well. The rest of the passengers sensed it as well, though somehow being seated in the midst of the confrontation, I remained bemused and detached.

Another part of my brain was fascinated with the earring. I've seen a million earrings before, what was so special about this one?

The fracas seemed to break up, with each side pulling their respective antagonist away. I breathed a small sigh of relief as the young woman walked past me to where she'd set her purse. Bowie sang of remembering standing by the wall. The earring no longer mattered.

I saw the second young woman say something to her friend, and the first one reached into her purse. A third part of my brain realized that this wasn't going to end well, setting screeching alarms of self-preservation off in my head. The rest of my brain was unperturbed.

I never saw what she took out of her purse, or really much of what happened next. As Bowie sang that we could be heroes, just for one day, she ran at the young man with the clever mouth. There were two pops.

The train pulled into the station jerking to a stop to the sound of the pops. The doors opened and pandemonium ensued. The third part of my brain was screaming to get off the train, to get out of the way, to get to safety.

The bemused part of my brain insisted that nothing was wrong. The young lady staggered past, and cried out "I've been shot." Bemused brain insisted that wasn't possible. It hadn't been loud enough. And what a ridiculous thing to say in any case.

I looked around to see that everyone else was scrambling to get out of the train and out of the young men's way as they raced out of the subway station. I watched the young woman collapse, as a spread of dark red stained the back of her white pants.
I stepped out of the train, nearly running into one of the fleeing assailants. I watched stupidly as he ran past. I did nothing.

I watched as the young woman lay crying on the floor. Her friend cried as she pressed a jacket to the wound. I did nothing.

My brain tried to process what had happened, still not believing that two shots had been fired from point blank range in a half full subway car, and that only one had hit, and that shot to the leg.

I gave my statement to the police, and decided to walk home. I thought that I should feel something more, fear or something appropriate. All I really felt was detached.
Though I didn't consciously feel anything, it took me a long time to get to sleep that night, and for the next few days. My brain tried to consolidate the incident into my life experience, to make sense of it.

I fantasized that I could have done something different. If I'd done something, maybe the girl wouldn't have been shot; not that she'd been entirely undeserving of what happened. I could have stepped in and defused the situation.

I could have tackled the young man who ran by me, and held him for the police.
I could have reacted differently. I could have done something that would have made the situation make sense. I could have done something.

In the end, I realized there was no lesson to be learned from what amounted to a random event. Stepping in could have resulted in getting either stabbed or shot.

Tackling the young man wasn't likely to have gone well either.

I did the only thing I could to take control of the situation. Eleven months later, I testified to my recollection of the events. I lost the arrogance that made me believe I would be heroic in a tense situation.

I'm just a normal guy, doing what a normal guy does to make it home.

Abandoned

Great Uncle Todd had lived and died here. The house reeked. The stench of old man, dust, and musty desperation assaulted my nostrils as I stepped through the door.

The house creaked ominously under at least thirty years of accumulated junk. There were narrow paths carved to and from the front door, bay window, a corner with a twelve gallon bucket and hot plate, plus a small spot for sitting on the overstuffed and ancient sofa.

I’d only met him once, just after I’d started grade school. My mom was aghast as Great Uncle Todd presented me with a cheque for seven dollars to start saving for college. I could tell that Unca Todd was not someone like the other adults I knew. He just didn’t fit in.

Home from school with no immediate job prospects, I’d been assigned to clean up his hovel, now that he was pushing up daisies. He’d died in the front room, rotted and mummified among the piles of papers, magazines and trash. It was nearly seven months before anyone checked up on him.

His entire five bed room, three story house was filled to rafters with junk, until he could only live in the front room, sleeping on a dingy cot, cooking canned food on a beat up hot plate, relieving himself in a bucket in the corner.

I’d arrived yesterday, opened the front door, and nearly passed out. I held my breath long enough to crack most of the windows I could get too, then locked the front door and found a motel. I hoped that a night of airing out would make the clean up process less unpleasant.

The left wall was dominated by soot stained brick fireplace, its mantle filled with porcelain and kewpie dolls, and a lone, one armed cabbage patch with its eyes punched out.

The back wall at first looked like it had several small heart and star shaped mirrors on it, but was actually one large mirror, painted over with the shapes scratched out of the paint.

The potty bucket was next to it, and on the right hand wall next to it was a narrow window, which looked to have been used to empty the bucket. There had been no running water here for over a decade, the coroner/funeral director had told me. Electricity had been cut off for longer than that.

Any doors out of this room were closed and blocked by junk, though one looked to have been nailed shut, boards criss-crossing it haphazardly.

The only other window looked out to the dooryard, and was covered with heavy, dark drapes. Empty cans once containing beans and spaghetti-o’s lay on the floor by the window, half kicked under a chair that Todd must have sat in while watching the world pass him by.

Judging by the smell, the cans contents had been replaced with mouse droppings. I picked one up tentatively, hoping the rubber gloves and the latex gloves beneath would keep me from getting lockjaw, or worse. The chef in the big white hat looked sea-sick.

I decided to start from the door, and slowly work my way in. The first stack of junk was newspapers, five feet high. The top date was New Year’s Day, 1999. I adjusted the dust mask I’d picked up; it was going to be a long day.