She said she didn't feel anything until the traffic started moving again. This was recently, but seemingly eons ago: December, to be exact. At first, I didn't understand. She was behind the desk in the white lobby at the San Bernardino Hilton Garden Inn, near the potted ficus trees, smiling brightly as she had that first day when I'd arrived in Southern California a couple weeks earlier, in the aftermath of the massacre. Her name was Brittany. She was 20-something, with blonde hair and an otherwise accommodating smile. She said she'd been numb until the traffic started moving. She said it must have been a delayed reaction—of course—but when the police barriers came down and traffic started on South Waterman Avenue again, past the Inland Regional Center, that's when she lost it.
“I guess it would make sense,” I told her. “You had a job to do, too.”
But she seemed a little dismayed. At herself. At the traffic. (How dare it?) She hadn't been ready for it, the cars flowing again, five days after 14 people had been shot dead and 24 others injured—but there was no preparing for it, either. She was behind the desk, alone, the hotel emptying after having been so full and frantic for days. The spell was broken, everything set in motion again. The cars sped by, from strip mall to strip mall, from office to grocery store. She seemed to be blinking back tears.
Then she told me she wished she had a gun, something discreet behind the desk. She wanted to protect everyone in the hotel office located behind the desk, all the guests upstairs. “The way it is,” she said, “we're defenseless.”
That surprised me, actually. After everything, I would have thought she'd have hoped for the opposite, however utopian: no guns at all.
It was a Tuesday afternoon. The lobby was empty, but for a Christmas tree aglow, carols piping. I think she would have talked to me for a long time, but I had a few places to revisit.
I only realized later what she'd been saying underneath, about the cars and all:
What she was saying was that she felt they were coming for her.
What she was saying was: I don't know how to tell you this, but you're next, too.
The idea seemed a little perverse, actually. Ten days in America tracking mass shootings from place to place. Hunting those who had been hunted, to understand that we are being hunted, too.
Even my wife asked: Why? Isn't there a happier story?
It worries me, she said.
It keeps repeating, I wanted to say, because we keep looking away. I was a main offender, like everyone else.
So, this was my making amends: ten days of mass shootings in America, which could be any ten days in America, really, which could be the next ten days before us, full of possibility, too.*
*We’re defining a mass shooting as four or more people shot (killed or injured) in the same incident, including the shooters. According to the similar definition used by the website Mass Shooting Tracker, there were 372 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2015. It’s estimated that there are more guns than people in America today, over 300 million. And the U.S. has the highest gun-homicide rate in the developed world: More than 12,000 people died last year in this country after having been shot.
Unblinking: It starts in the early-morning hours of a Sunday, November 22, 2015, almost simultaneously in Seattle and Newburgh, New York. The incidents seem almost quotidian compared with what will follow: altercations, guns drawn, shots fired, frantic 911 calls, bodies on the ground, bleeding. That same Sunday, there are mass shootings in three other locales across the country: Chicago; Brownsville, Texas; and New Orleans, where 17 are shot and injured in a park, the Bunny Friend playground in the Ninth Ward, when caught in a cross-volley between two gangs. The following day, Monday, in Columbus, Ohio, a man in a gray sweatshirt named Barry Kirk walks out the front door of his house, crosses the street, and enters his neighbor's house, opening fire on a family of four—three dead, one injured (says the transcript of the 911 call: Can hear screaming…shots fired)—then is shot himself by police. Hours later, at a Black Lives Matter rally in Minneapolis, five protesters are injured when an alleged white supremacist sprays bullets into the crowd, later claiming self-defense.
That's Day One and Day Two.
On Tuesday, in a rural town in South Carolina, a man enters another home and shoots four people. Wednesday is mercifully quiet, relatively speaking. On Thursday, early Thanksgiving morning in Boston, someone opens fire on a crowd near Fenway Park, randomly killing an off-duty subway conductor as dozens of people run in terror. A day later, Friday, a thickly bearded, wild-eyed 250-pound man named Robert Dear leaves his trailer home on a cold, empty basin in central Colorado, drives two hours to the parking lot of a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, then starts shooting, hunting people outside in a snowstorm, hunting them inside the abortion clinic, killing three and injuring nine.
Five days after comes the massacre in San Bernardino—a husband and wife, pledging allegiance to ISIS, though with no known affiliation to the group, open fire on a workplace holiday party, the 14th mass shooting in ten days, in this case leaving 14 dead and 24 injured. (The final tally over these ten days will be: 27 people dead, 91 injured.)
Of course, it's San Bernardino that will score the deepest mark on our psyche, that will force us to pause: for its numbers and brutality; for the mystery of the couple, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who left a baby at home while conducting their massacre, leaving behind plates of freshly made food, too; for the juddering juxtaposition of the holiday party with cold-blooded gunfire from two AR-15s. Because it seems so evil on the one hand, so familiar now on the other.
An hour after hearing about the news in San Bernardino, I was on a plane west. Up in the air, it was a normal flight—guy reading Clive Cussler, woman doing Sudoku, flight attendants shuttling up and down the aisle with fizzy soda—except I was listening via in-flight Internet to the disembodied, live-streamed voice of the female dispatcher on the police scanner in San Bernardino, the call-and-response of various units, from three various crime scenes, crisscrossing over her:
San Bernardino mountain unit, do not go westbound… Shut it down… Hold that intersection, guys!
We need medical aid.
[SOUND OF SIRENS ON SIRENS]
I'm sorry, I can't copy you.
Male, dark-skinned is all I have.
[GUNSHOTS]
We have one guy down and one guy in back of car…
[IN BACKGROUND] Hold your fire!
The flight attendant was motioning. Coffee? Smiling, I mouthed the words “I'm good.” But I was thinking the opposite. I wanted to raise an alarm, years past it mattering. That was the stark desolation of the moment we now found ourselves trapped in.
We couldn't take back our past. Couldn't rewrite it. We couldn't teleport to that McDonald's in San Ysidro, 1984, to warn the 21 dead to flee as a 41-year-old father of two walks in, armed with an Uzi, pistol, and shotgun, and says, “I killed thousands in Vietnam, and I want to kill more.” We couldn't go back to the University of Texas, in 1966, to warn the 14 dead about the unhinged engineering student, carrying an M1 carbine, who is perched in the clock tower about to fire. And we couldn't go back to that midnight show of The Dark Knight Rises in the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, in July 2012, interrupted by a neuroscience Ph.D. candidate, who opened fire on the crowd, killing 12 and injuring 70.
Bears, do you copy?
Go ahead.
So you know: There's a dude in the backseat, um, looks like he's still breathing. He's got an AR strapped to his chest. Backseat, laying flat.
Eventually, another voice on the scanner cut through with a correction. The dude in the backseat, the voice said in five somber beats, was now an “Arabic female.” Even I let out a sigh. By going to the CNN feed, and watching live, I could see the snuff in real time: Syed Farook, the 28-year-old Muslim father of a 6-month-old baby, sprawled on the street across from the vehicle, bleeding out, his long rifle flung nearby. I could watch when the police in the BearCat, thinking the whole SUV booby-trapped and ready to blow, dumped Tashfeen Malik, the 29-year-old mother, from the backseat of the vehicle onto the ground. She toppled like a bag of potatoes, parts of her moving in different syncopations.
Located one pipe bomb at 1700 block of San Bernardino Ave.
By the time I arrived at the Hilton Garden Inn, by the time I found Brittany behind the desk, checking in dozens of reporters at what had become the de facto media command center, we were in press-conference phase. These things play out in phases, and we'd already passed through the fleeing phase (escapees racing like animals from the abattoir, filmed above by helicopter), the ambulance phase (gurneyed bodies in all aspects of desecration, the dead left in place for up to 36 hours for the crime-scene photos), the chase-and-kill phase (was this our most treasured national sport, televised executions, tapping into the same bloodlust and satisfaction?). I was there in time for the press-conference phase of assuage, of tell-it-like-it-is, of aftermath and air-of-calm competency, of everyone-relax-situation-under-control.
It was night now, the strobes of law enforcement disco-flashing. Lieutenant Mike Madden, a 22-year veteran of the force, stepped to a makeshift dais. It was set up just down from the white-lobbied hotel, on the closed-off street that led to the crime scene at the Inland Regional Center. No traffic was moving; everything was concentrated and frozen in that moment. Madden had been one of the first in the Center where the holiday party had been in progress. “When we entered, there was the smell of fresh gunpowder in the air,” he told us. The carnage was “unspeakable.” Farook and Malik had already fled, but the officers didn't know that, kept diving into the building, believing there was an active shooter present. It was hard to imagine, what impulse would drive you to dive in, maybe to your own death, considering all the blown-out bodies at your feet.
As he spoke, remembering, Madden's eyes seemed to brim, and he choked up briefly. Of course, he was asked about it. “To be honest,” he said, “it was a little surreal.… People don't call the police because they're having a great day, they call because there's tragedy going on. This was a tragedy I've never experienced in my career, and I don't think most officers do.” He recalled the room in which the party was just beginning: the Christmas tree, the decorated tables, “the pure panic on faces of people who needed to get out.” For some reason, the sprinkler system had been activated, alarms were blaring. His job was to subdue the shooters, stepping over and beside the dead, and near-dead.
It pained him to think of all those he'd stepped over.
At the press conference, Madden's allotted time was up. Next came the important-person-uttering-platitudes phase, and Governor Jerry Brown delivered. Then, someone else stepped to the bank of microphones, to offer a logistical update. All of it was uploaded instantly and beamed live; all of it scrolling across America's ticker with equal emphasis, the same valence.
But Mike Madden, after stepping back, stood with his hands clasped. He made a show of listening, but wore a pensive frown. He seemed far away, in that unmendable room again. That was an image that stays with me, even now, months later: a man in a crowd, looking through the horde in front of him, to an unshakable memory. The horde, of which I was a part, fiddled with cameras, mics, pens, went straight to the regurgitation of details. Photos of the guns used by the killers were displayed—the two AR-15s, the semiautomatic nine-millimeter—as heads craned and cameras shuttered. At the end, someone yelled, “Can we get a closer look at the weapons?”
A fellow officer put a hand on Madden's shoulder; he turned and walked away.
When I began visiting some of these crime scenes—the truth is, I'd wanted to go to all of them but I couldn't keep up—I was reading a novel by Milan Kundera. I was reading in part for relief, to think about something else entirely, which is a common reaction to shootings like these: to want to turn away, deny, defend against. There's anger, resignation, and then…what's-for-dinner? To let it in fully, to absorb ten days of carnage, let alone one, is something the psyche resists. Or must. And yet even the Kundera novel, set in Communist Czechoslovakia, seemed to warp to the subject at hand. “Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip,” he wrote. “A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty.”
It all seemed new again, each shooting, didn't it?
In Columbus, a man named Barry Kirk had waited for his friend and neighbor, John Anderson, to return from work at 5 P.M. on that cold November Monday before Thanksgiving. When he saw Anderson's car pull in, he walked down the rickety steps of his house, crossed the street as he had so many times before, for Anderson liked to invite his friends for barbecue, including Kirk. But this time Kirk, for reasons that no one really knows, even now (least of all, the lead detective), killed his neighbor with a semiautomatic handgun—and then hunted the murdered man's family through the house, killing the wife as she pleaded on 911 and their 7-year-old son, who had been playing a video game. The Andersons' 12-year-old daughter, Makyleigh, was found wandering from the house afterward, her bloody hands described by police as “cherry red,” having played dead to survive. Meanwhile, a homeless friend the Andersons had put up in their basement survived unharmed. (Read the police log: 12YO Children life threatening… Suspect is critical life threatening… Media on scene… NBC New York calling in…)
We must consider this a historical event. But the novelty came in the details, not in the event itself. And indeed it had the staying power of dew in our national consciousness, which is to say none at all, because four days later it was burned away by the next headline shooting—the wild-eyed man, Robert Dear, hunting humans at the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs. Robert Dear soon gave way to Syed Farook, hunting humans at a holiday party, who later gave way to other shooters, hunting other innocents…and so on.
Working backward, I next visited the Bunny Friend playground in New Orleans, where hundreds had gathered on a Sunday night. A graphic that ran later in The New Orleans Advocate showed 17 body silhouettes of the victims, each with little explosions where the bullets hit, and made it clear how close the bullets came to hearts, major organs, primary vessels. Miraculously, no one died.
The playground is located between Desire and Gallier in the Ninth Ward. During Hurricane Katrina, the lower Ninth took the brunt of the flooding, and the Ninth's comeback story has been sporadic. The blight is real, the drugs woven in. Since Katrina, the police force has lost 250 officers, while gang violence is a fact of everyday life. My friends in the city used a word to describe the roughest neighborhoods: rampy. These tended to be the blocks with the worst violence, the most shootings, the most recently paralyzed young men in wheelchairs, with new ramps attached to their homes so they might get in and out.
Rampy—was this the new dystopia made manifest?
Prior to my visit to the playground that morning, I'd spoken to someone—I'll call him Ray—who'd been at the scene that night, who'd had almost a dozen family members there, too, as they lived in the neighborhood. On the phone, he told me he wasn't afraid to meet me, or to be seen with me, that someone needed to make a stand against these gangbangers. I was inspired by him. He said he'd take me around. We were to convene at Bunny Friend at two that afternoon.
The night of the shooting, one of the city's many social clubs had hosted a Second Line parade through the Ninth Ward, which went off without a hitch. It wasn't until later, around six thirty, when a large, buoyant crowd, responding to a call on social media, gathered at Bunny Friend for the filming of a music video. But as the crowd kept building, shots suddenly rang out. Police responded quickly as hundreds fled through the neighborhood.
Looks like we got…people shot in the park.
Female shot through the leg.
On the court… Come to me!… We got multiple!
More units out here!
[SCREAMING, CRYING]
We got a female shot in the back. [bawling]
Everybody in the park!
We got another victim…shot in the groin area!
And so it went. In the panic, the ground had been littered with cell phones, keys, earrings. One person at the scene called the duration of gunfire “indefinite.” Others jumped in the cars of strangers, searching for cover. Weeks after, the arrests totaled nine in all—said to be gang members with various beefs against one another.
Now, there I sat, for 15, 20, 30, 45 minutes. I called Ray.
“I just wanted to check,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “something's come up.”
“So you're running late?” I said.
“I'm not coming,” he said. “It's not safe.”
Our conversation was over, because now he didn't want to talk at all. Two hours earlier, he'd had enough, wanted to stand up; now he wanted nothing to do with it, to make himself and his family invisible. In a neighborhood ruled by the gun, I realized, you do everything you can not to invite it. If the would-be killers are willing to shoot into a crowd of hundreds, what would keep them from shooting you on an empty street, with no one around?
It had been similar for the police. Of the hundreds in the park on November 22, with all the camera phones there, they kept pleading for someone to step forward with any digital evidence. But people had been reluctant. In an era when everything is a movie, were we really to believe there was no video?
Solutions became dissolutions here, the illogical logical.
So I sat alone at Bunny Friend playground, in a neighborhood one might describe as rampy. I could look on my phone, at media photographs of the incident, and see exactly where the bodies had been felled: the woman on her side over here; the man being rolled away on a gurney over there. Who was looking out the windows at me now? They were invisible—but maybe not so invisible—behind curtains. The playground was just a patch, where it had been a Roman coliseum, and I was reminded of those Civil War battlefields, cluttered with ghosts and silence, energy fields and densities so rooted in the past that they deny the present. We were in the middle of the city—and yet nothing moved here. The current, the substance, was fear—and I felt it, too. Four, five blocks as I drove away—that's when I saw my first person. He was in a wheelchair.
It began, begins, will begin again. With a sound, reported as a dull crack. A firecracker in the distance. A backfire, a chair tipped, hitting the floor.
It's a shift of air, an exhale. It will begin with a thud, a whimper.
On a robin's-egg-blue morning in paradise—in my town, yours; at the intersection; on the subway—there will be a repeating report. Pop-pop-pop-pop. Glass veins, like frazil ice. Someone will jerk, as if stung by a bee. Another. Chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk. The swarm is suddenly everywhere. People flail to a music that can't be heard. Bodies disassemble in strange slow motion. Someone's elbow explodes, a head vanishes, the carnage horrific. Everyone else flees, squeezing wherever they fit. Someone calls 911, someone else. It doesn't seem real. How could it be? Here we are at our prayer group, at our holiday party, in our home. There's the polite man you work with, the classmate, the harmless stranger—now wearing a black tactical vest, swaddled in ammo. Why? It's a prank, an audition. It can't be real.
But it will be.
Now, a siren will sound in the distance, another. You are becoming part of a historical event, too, soon to be forgotten, and then repeated. The sprinkler system engages. It will be raining inside, a cold shower. The paper decorations are matted to the floor. The fire alarm emits a piercing sound, along with the continuing pop of gunfire. Wailing now, the injured. Except for the sleeping body, leg askew. And the others, sleeping, too. On the scanner, the voice of law enforcement will be pitched: active shooter… officer down… request medical aid. The news carries like an electrical storm. A bulletin on TV, the whupping of helicopter rotors overhead, someone at or near the scene begins to narrate. If it's ratings-worthy, we interrupt the following program.
Now is when the traffic stops.
And we pause. There will be injured, and there will be dead. We will begin with the obvious questions: Who is the shooter (age, occupation, etc.)? What is his psychological profile? Where did he get the gun?
The last question will be maddening, because if answered honestly, each and every time we'll realize that we gave it to the killer ourselves. By amnesia, inaction, or the true belief that every American should own a gun, if they want. But why, then, will we be so surprised, outraged even, when they—the neighbor, the zealot, the racist, the paranoid schizophrenic—use it?
Ten days, then, without blinking; it comes in a swirl. In Seattle, the shooting occurs in front of a supermarket, around 1 A.M., perhaps gang-related, as well. A plate-glass window shatters, leaving jewels on the sidewalk, while, of the three women rushed away by ambulance, one hovers in “red condition,” with a life-threatening injury. In Newburgh, New York, in a dive bar jammed between an electrical-supply store and a Mexican bodega, an argument breaks out over nothing remembered, weapons are drawn, five are maimed. In Brownsville, Texas, the incident takes place in front of a nightclub, the alleged shooter with a tattoo above his right eye: CELTA. He flees, then later turns himself in, perhaps realizing he isn't going to get very far with a giant CELTA tattoo above his right eye. And in Chicago, on a day when three people are otherwise shot dead/erased/vanished, an early-afternoon visit to Soap Opera Laundromat results in yet another altercation, four people wounded in the gunfire.
Monday, here is Barry Kirk again, in his gray sweatshirt, crossing the street again in Columbus. In Minneapolis, the alleged shooter at the Black Lives Matter protest makes a video while in transit. In it, he and two of his buddies wear bandannas to hide their faces, aping Tarantino lowlifes, glorifying themselves by the gun they carry. It's uncomfortable to watch, these losers in action, gathering themselves for what they think will be a meaningful gesture, their hero moment. One of the black men they're about to shoot will require stomach surgery, but lives. The shooter says he's there “to make the fire rise.” He's convinced his gun throws the flame.
Then, there's Charleston—two groups of men, each allegedly with a beef against the other, opening fire. The gun is adept at conflict resolution, shuts everyone up equally. In Boston, outside a bar on Yawkey Way called Who's on First, Jephthe Chery, a “God-fearing” Haitian immigrant and well-loved transit employee, gets caught and killed in a crossfire—and so goes his American Dream. By the time Robert Dear, the anti-abortionist, takes his Friday drive to Colorado Springs, in hunting cap and trench coat, with a long rifle and two propane tanks in his truck, he must think himself on the cusp of herohood, too. But he isn't the only one. As Dear barricades himself in the Planned Parenthood office for five hours after already having killed a police officer and two friends of women with appointments at the facility, a local citizen approaches the police, strapped with a handgun and ammunition vest, offering to go in. The police demur. How many citizens with guns can one Friday afternoon endure?
Then: San Bernardino.
Ten days, 14 reasons, from terrorism to protest, suicidal nihilism to revenge, Old Testament plotlines included, replete with angry loners, half-wits, gangbangers, and normal people snapping, practicing their right to free speech with a gun. You get an eye-for-an-eye, and in this case it looks like more than 100 with shot-up bodies of varying severity (this one unable to use her hand; this one partially paralyzed; this one with a bullet in his groin), and 27 funerals. Times those ten days by 36—there's your rough year, America.
Makes you believe that it's the whole, not just the part, that's rampy.
History evaporates, but here we are again. From the hotel desk, she can see the traffic moving. And that's when we begin to forget again…
In San Bernardino, I met a network correspondent on the street, at a makeshift memorial site near the Inland Regional Center. She works in breaking news: excellent at what she does, intense, what under different circumstances one might call “locked in.” In the past months, she'd covered the shooting at a Charleston church (nine dead) and the terrorist attacks in Paris (130 dead), and here yet another (14 dead). She told me that at a vigil we both attended the evening before, she'd been moved by a woman who felt a hopelessness that seemed to speak for many of us, that spilled with emotion. Except the woman kept talking. Nothing would be done about this violence—or ISIS—she said, until we got rid of the Muslim in the White House, until one of his children was shot.
“Everyone is coming from their own place and experience,” the correspondent told me. “It's impossible to generalize these communities.”
She said when she's lost in the details of her job—knocking on doors, booking interviews, writing and filming and posting on deadline—she's all adrenaline and not professionally able to get too emotional. (That comes later.) She said that she can almost immediately predict the trajectory and audience interest, “as terrible as it sounds.” (For instance, CNN saw its ratings increase 280 percent over the first 12 hours in San Bernardino.) Later, I sent her an e-mail, asking her to explain further, and she wrote back, breaking it down.
“If the assailants are still at large, an active manhunt, the coverage will be constant and revolve mostly on tracking them down,” she wrote. “If they are killed, the high level of interest in the story will be over sooner, especially if motive is determined quickly. There will be a few days of memorials and police press conferences grappling for a motive, looks into the lives of these killers, but it will peter out.… If they are caught alive, the life cycle is a bit longer.… There is a formula, though, and sadly after the killer is gone or imprisoned, the flowers die at the memorials and the press packs up, these communities are widely ignored by the national media.”
That is, history and grief run on very different clocks.
One is over in a matter of days; the other lasts forever.
Seventeen years ago—long ago, yesterday—I didn't just look away, I ran.
There was a call from an editor, asking how quickly I could get to Columbine, in the aftermath of a high school shooting there. On a warm spring day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, wielding TEC-9s and tactical vests, festooned with ammo, had murdered 12 of their classmates and a teacher—then, in the library, killed themselves. Shock was widespread, because we still had the capacity to be shocked. The details were horrifying: the cold-blooded execution of their plan (“When first bombs go off, attack,” wrote Klebold in his journal. “Have fun!”), the stark nihilism of the deed pitted against blighted youth in all of its hope and potential.
I went, reluctantly, believing it important. Once I had what I needed as a reporter, though, my impulse, my animal feeling, was to flee. What I remember, besides the haunted school and its emerald windows surrounded by crime tape, that sarcophagus still full of bodies, is dawn the morning after. At first light, young students, friends, and parents gathered in the parking lot at the school, making memorials for each kid killed, huddling, staggering, hugging in Stonehenge circles, beginning to tell stories even in their shock. It was one of the saddest things I'd witnessed. And it would go on and on, for days, weeks, months.
It seemed as if the traffic stopped for a long time, that first time.
Part of the intense focus on remembering and memorializing the dead seemed necessary to counteract the grainy black-and-white security footage of the killers doing their perverse work. The opposing emotion was big and real and public. Inside the high school, it was crime-scene-photo phase. Outside, it was morning-show-interview phase. I remember one guy, a father, going from set to set, repeating the words “This is death by mayhem.”
What I vividly remember, too, was a feeling, shared communally, that something in the universe had been disturbed, that it was possible it couldn't be healed, or fixed. That our failure was vast, our cowboy mythology faulty, and that the black-and-white footage of the killers was proof of it.
Meanwhile, there were the victims, who had been erased/disappeared/vanished. There were the families now clustered around these sudden erasures and absences, and families gathered around those families gathered around the void. The concentric circles emanated outward, reaching beyond demarcations of town and state, a widening gyre until everyone seemed touched by the nothingness.
That's what seemed most scary. Our interconnectedness was badly disrupted. The broken chain, the unhinged feelings of paranoia and sadness, all could be read in the faces of those left behind: the parents, the siblings, the friends. I now wonder if part of the reason I wanted to get out was to avoid the onslaught of their pain, perhaps a typical response/reflex. To avoid full responsibility. To remain untouched. To live my Manichaean illusion: There's good and evil, and the latter can be avoided. On the cusp of having my own first child, I couldn't ponder our national failure too deeply, and more, I couldn't let myself imagine what had just happened to the parents at Columbine, even the parents of the killers. Their sons' disaffection had turned to slaughter. How could the parents not have known about the guns, or have seen it coming?
When I spoke about this recently with Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan, she said she would live with the guilt and grief of that question forever. “It comes in cycles,” she said. “I've cried more in the last two months than the last ten years.” In the time since the day of the shooting, she'd traveled a very dark path, trying to reckon with the fact that she'd “given birth to a mass murderer.” And still she held him close. She'd written a book, a brave, eloquent book about her journey, including the breakup of her 43-year marriage. She'd dedicated all her profits to suicide-prevention awareness. “Unlike my husband,” she told me, “I've needed to know everything.” When she found Saint-John's-wort in Dylan's effects, she realized he'd tried to treat himself for depression. His journals were full of the word “love.” Eventually, just last year, she forced herself to look at his death photo. “I just wanted to see his last moments on earth,” she said. “We all do what we have to, to say good-bye to our children.”
With the shocking compilation of these shootings, with these shootings happening every day, in real time, she disagreed with the word “epidemic” to describe these events. “It gives it a normalcy I think is dangerous.” And she wanted to warn parents about the signs of suicidal ideation in their children. “I wish I'd asked better questions,” she said.
But none of this alleviated her everlasting internal conflict. No matter how hard she tried not to, she still loved the boy who'd done something so evil, the boy, in the end, who spoke his own grief with bullets and thereby gave it to us.
In talking to her, I kept thinking about something—something I'd had to suppress at Columbine all those years ago, when the world seemed fucked, but simpler. I kept thinking about my own boy, being erased, being the shooter.
Erased, shooting.
Again, again.
We've forgotten how we got here. How did we get here?
She sits behind the desk, waiting, knowing. If only she had a gun, too.
From the Columbus police report:
Heard more screaming.
Shots fired.
Just open dead air. Disconnected the call.
As I went from place to place, from Bunny Friend playground in New Orleans (silent, green) to the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs (boarded up, surrounded by crime tape and temporary fencing, still inoperable and patrolled by a full-time security guard when I was there), from the multiple crime scenes in San Bernardino to the Hilltop neighborhood where the Kirk home looks across the street to the Anderson home in Columbus, as I listened to 911 calls and gathered autopsy reports, as I imagined Barry Kirk in his gray sweatshirt crossing his front lawn, entering his neighbor's house, and hunting the Anderson family, or Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik opening fire on a holiday party—as I both tried to let it all in at last and fought the need to disassociate—I kept reading my book. “History is a succession of ephemeral changes,” Kundera wrote.
And I was thinking about that on a recent, sunny March day when I went to Newtown, Connecticut.
If I once clung to the notion that the worst of these mass shootings were aberrations, or wanted to think of them as functions of a specific place and dynamic, as regional, or even as the climax of some dark fable about capitalism, Sandy Hook Elementary shattered all that, for here was another holiday season—this time December 2012—when Adam Lanza, a disturbed young man armed with three guns, took the lives of twenty 6- and 7-year-olds, as well as six staff members. My youngest was in second grade at the time. That is, we were the Newtown parents, and they had been us, too, formerly. Perhaps they'd been swept away by the speed of forgetting, as well, until the call came: Sandy Hook Elementary was a Code Red.
“I was always that guy who didn't worry a whole lot,” Mark Barden told me at a table in the cramped conference room where we sat. “Even when I got the robo-call that the school was in lockdown. In the end, they brought out all the kids, and they were reunited with their parents, and Daniel never came out.”
We were in the offices of Sandy Hook Promise, an organization begun after the shooting to educate kids to be on the lookout for those who might be isolated and lonely, who might choose one day to express themselves, and be heard, with bullets. Barden, a musician and stay-at-home dad, had his computer out, showing me pictures of Daniel, who'd been 7 at the time, the same age as mine. The boy on the screen seemed ever smiling, gentle, a snuggle-bear. He and his father spent all their days together—but for when Daniel left on the eight-thirty bus and returned on the one at three thirty—and now Barden said he lived in “cycles of grief” that kept changing him, enraging him, driving him to whiskey, to Washington, to advocate, brought him close to Joe Biden, our vice president, who knows something about sudden loss. Barden was quick and articulate and wasn't about to stop talking about the shooting, or Daniel, even if it brought him to all of that darkness again. He was unafraid of that emotion, too. His son—this empathetic, amazing kid—had been shot in the head, and Barden had recently received a box in the mail, from the state: It contained the clothes Daniel had been wearing that day. “That's a gut punch through the soul, I'll tell you,” he said. “That's when profound grief goes to searing rage.”
He still couldn't say the shooter's name. Didn't want to. It was like the part of the movie after Armageddon, everything razed.
“Yeah, this is hard,” he said. “This story just fucking sucks no matter how you look at it. Right? There's no way to sanitize this story. And I have no interest in doing that.… If I can get up in the morning and live with this every minute of the day, you can certainly get there with me. You can look at this and let it in and realize: This is serious, and we need to do something. The greatest enemy is not the NRA, it's our complacency. We created the monster by doing nothing.”
When I asked him how he survived this grief and rage, how he found some peace, he said, “I don't really want to be healed. I don't want to feel better. No one was there to take the fear or horror or the pain away from Daniel, so I don't feel I deserve that luxury. So I want the pain. I want to live with it.”
This is what it looked like, then, when you didn't avert your gaze: a devastated man, oscillating between moods and emotions, crying at pictures on a screen, at the memory and void of a son whose bloody clothes he kept in a box. Being with Barden was like gazing upon those transparent human skeletons with organs used to teach doctors: You could see everything inside. One minute he was hopeful, convinced that the radical idea behind his organization—to listen, to de-polarize, to educate about mental health—had already prevented a mass shooting in Cincinnati. History, for him, was this ephemeral change, too, now. Determinedly incremental. He didn't want to take anyone's guns away, he just wanted to make us look at what they'd done to us. Then, he was talking about how he and his wife were different in how they'd dealt with the agony of Daniel's death.
“I have a constant need to know, because I knew every little last thing about his life, and I don't know that last little horrible moment. So I've gone to the school. I went to the class. My wife didn't do that. I went and sat with the medical examiner. My wife didn't do that. I have to connect with that moment. And there's still stuff from that moment I need to connect with.”
You mustn't turn away, he'd said. And they had two beautiful kids left. But it was complicated, and when the pain came, they were different animals. “My wife and I have looked at each other, you know, and said, ‘I want to die.’ There are moments when we both collapse at the same time, and I literally mean collapse. My wife and I have been in each other's arms on the floor in the kitchen, in each other's arms…and our kids will come and comfort us.”
That's partly what it looked like, then, when you didn't avert your gaze, a man and woman on the floor, out of their minds.
“How twisted is that?”
Ten days, then, 14 shootings, a history already forgotten, repeated: The bullets, fired by police, kill Barry Kirk near the steps of his house in Columbus, after he's killed three of four in the Anderson family. In the weeks after, someone lights Kirk's house on fire; later, when I sit in a car on the street between the two homes, the Andersons' green and well kept but now empty and the other a disheveled, char-flamed hulk, the detective tells me with awe in his voice that the little Anderson girl—she's a tough kid, a survivor—she's going to be fine.
In New Orleans, the nine alleged shooters at Bunny Friend are in custody, readying for trial. They're all young, seemingly without prospects. They've pleaded not guilty. The bullets that entered 17 bodies on that Sunday night at one of those faith-giving community gatherings before Thanksgiving in the Ninth Ward, who knows where they came from? But you could make a case that with all the bullets in the air these days, they could have come from anywhere.
In Boston, Jephthe Chery, the “God-fearing” Haitian immigrant and well-loved transit employee caught in the crossfire at Fenway, is dead and gone, buried now where bullets can't find him.
In the high mountain town where the wild-eyed behemoth Robert Dear once lived in a trailer, before he went on his hunting mission at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, the people are trying to forget the crazy man. He would knock on their doors, talk nuttily about the government and religion. Doors slammed in his face; no one listened. Until he shot everyone. On his first day in court, he yelled, “I'm a warrior for the babies,” and the newswires carried it to the world.
Shoot and people listen. The bullets speak, that's their First Amendment right, too.
When I returned to San Bernardino for the second time, I drove past the Inland Regional Center, all blocked and swaddled now in fencing—and past the makeshift memorial on the corner with all the wilted flowers and rain-streaked signs. I went to the house of Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik: There was still plywood nailed on the door, but someone had draped an American flag over it, too. And I went to the block of East San Bernardino Avenue, where the couple had been stopped/killed/finished. They had belonged to someone's family, too. There were bullet holes visible in a fence, and on the road, where Farook had bled out and died, someone had painted a black rectangle.
I was thinking about them—about that black spot in the road—when I went back to the hotel. Brittany was gone now, someone else in her place. After Farook and Malik had murdered 14 at the holiday party, they drove around for almost four hours before meeting their end. After Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed, they roamed the high school for tens of minutes, with quarry everywhere but not shooting anymore, drinking open bottles of water off cafeteria tables, in a sort of daze, what people later called The Quiet Time. What were they doing? What had they talked about?
Yes, the traffic was moving outside again, oblivious. Who knew who was out there, coming this way now? We could tell ourselves no one, no one is coming. History is the dream we have at night and wake forgetting. The problem is it's happened, keeps happening—one every other day in 2016. It's happening now.
The gun is drawn, the bullet pierces skin and organ. We tell ourselves we won't flinch, and then we look away. When we do, the body vanishes—and then another.