“No pressure,” said Kate. “And it’s still fucking freezing in here.”
We were all in our coats. I’d actually worn the Balmain that day. By one o’clock we were talked out, exhausted, and hungry. Carmen ordered Thai, so we could keep going. By the time we were eating no one wanted to say one more word about politics and the man about to be sworn in on his own Bible that day.
So Garrett brought up Zeden announcing she would “auction her body for the climate.” The plan, as breathless pop culture outlets reported, was for the pop star to sell herself to the highest bidder for no less than tens of billions of dollars.
“And then she says she’ll finance major pieces of decarbonization herself!” he gushed.
“While she’s a slave?” said Jenice. “Yeah, I don’t see what dreadful precedent this could set.”
“She wouldn’t technically be a slave,” said Carmen from the receptionist desk where she was back on hold with the building manager. People had stopped working to gather around in the conference room.
“Our possession of our own corpus is a social construct like anything else,” said Liza.
“And what if some billionaire decides he wants to make a torture xpere out of her?” Jenice demanded. A few of us had started to crack up at this absurd conversation.
“The money she’ll raise isn’t a social construct,” said Tavia.
“Uhhh,” said Liza, “money is the most constructed thing of all.”
“I think,” said Kate, dropping a huge helping of noodles from chopsticks into her mouth and talking while she chewed, “if this VR pop-star bitch somehow creates a green hydrogen glut that wrecks the market for dirty energy by wearing Little Bo-Peep outfits for Larry Page, Zeden might be a genius, and I missed my calling.”
At this point we were all laughing so hard my stomach hurt.
“Her next tour in a neck manacle will make a billion socially constructed dollars,” said Liza.
That’s when the fire alarm went off. We all jumped. It was an older building and the blaring incantation reminded me of middle school drills, the sound abrasive, alien, and unendurable. Coupled with a strobing white light from the smoke detectors on the walls, the noise had all of us craning our heads around the room searching for some smoky source.
“Is it a drill? Do we have drills?” Kate shouted over the din.
“No idea!” Liza yelled back.
“I guess, let’s go?” Kate stood and started in the direction of the stairs. “Fucking food’ll be cold. It’s always something, right!”
“I’m gonna grab my purse!” I shouted, but no one heard me. I ducked into the office I shared with Liza and Garrett. Another alarm I’d never noticed was positioned directly over my desk. The purse was on my chair, but my phone wasn’t inside. The noise was a drill bit in my head, and for a moment I couldn’t remember what I’d done with the phone. I looked back through the window to the main room, thinking maybe I’d left it on the table, but people were filing out, and that’s when I watched a man come up out of the stairwell. At first I thought he was maintenance, there to fix the heat or stop the alarm. That was how he was dressed: dark shirt, dark pants, boots, and he was carrying a tool. He had a sharp nose and dimpled chin, long hair parted in the middle and tucked back behind each ear. His forehead was red and shiny, and he reminded me very much of a friend of my father’s, a guy who’d sold him farm equipment and who he’d played poker with every month. Because of that distant memory, it was a friendly face, a trustworthy one. But Kate and the others stopped short, like they’d each smacked an invisible wall. That’s when the man raised his weapon and started firing.
Three brittle metallic explosions thundered over the fire alarm, and the first bullets tore through Liza’s shoulder and ripped through the back of her throat in a pulpy red splash. Liza fell, and Carmen screamed and scrambled under a table, and the man stepped forward into our offices, a look of calm concentration on his face, finger jerking, shoulder bucking with each kick of the gun, and Tavia crumpled like she’d been punched in the gut, and then through the gut, and Jenice cried out, tried to move toward her wife and two bullets tore her arm almost entirely off her body so that sharp bone came shredding out of the meat of her bicep, and I just stood there, feeling the skin of my breasts go taut, the way it does when you swim in frigid water. The fear spread, ancestral, primitive, evolutionary, something beyond nation-states and law and art and free enterprise systems and even the capacity of humans to articulate or comprehend, just a full-body contraction, bottomless and paralyzing. Plaster sprayed in huge chunks from the walls, and I could see the individual beads of sweat on this man’s forehead, as he traced the line of fire across the offices, and everyone was screaming and running, diving under desks, trying to find cover, but the only exits were the elevator and stairs, both behind him. Then his sights found Kate, because instead of running she’d crouched beside Liza, who’d fallen at her feet, and even sitting here trying to write this now, I can’t bear the thought of what I saw, what a weapon of war can do to a human being, to the bone and blood and flesh of their infinitely precious and concrete form, even though I have to watch it in my dreams over and over and over and over again.
Kate had an expression not of fear but disbelief. Disbelief that this could be happening. Her lips pushed outward like she was about to say the word wait. Then the bullet ripped her face away, taking a whole section of skull and cheek and hurling the fragments against the wall, and the next round punched a hole beneath her rib cage the size of a fist, and she was blown backward, collapsing awkwardly into a pile of her own limp limbs. Suddenly, there was water spraying from the walls, one of the rounds bursting a pipe, and for some reason the hiss of water snapped me out of it. Someone was screaming, the rounds were still booming, the fire alarm shrieking, and my eyes met Carmen’s. She was under the conference table, and her face begged me to do something, and that’s when I zipped myself down to the floor behind my desk and clamped my hand to my mouth to keep from screaming and bit my tongue as hard as I dared because I was sure he would hear me sobbing. I went somewhere then, a blackout or a fugue, falling away into some undiscovered void, a fear so depthless, it blotted out reason and logic. I’m sure I flinched in terror at each explosion of the rifle, but I don’t remember.
I didn’t scream until the NYPD officer put his hand on my shoulder. The fire alarm was still blaring, and when the officer tried to lift me up from behind my desk, I just started slapping at him, even though I could see it was not the man. Finally, my hands caught up to what was happening, to the kindness in his face and the incredible pale blue of his eyes. I pictured him with daughters, and how he might put them on his shoulders or peel Band-Aids onto their scraped knees. The room had filled with smoke. He half carried me out, and I let myself be led. He told me not to look, his voice anguished, but I had to, and I saw the shooter on the ground, gore dripping from his chin where he’d placed the barrel, and there was the conference table overturned, and there was Carmen, her entire left side cut open, eviscerated, and all her organs outside her body. The air reeked of gunpowder and the metallic tang of blood. The officer whispered reassurances that it was over, that I had survived. The alarm stopped, so then there was only the hiss of water and phones ringing in the pockets of the dead. As he practically dragged me across the wet floor, the pipe still gushing from the wall, soaking the carpet, I simply couldn’t help but look. You don’t know what blood is until you’ve seen it that way: indiscriminate, slapped across walls and tables and chairs and hanging in stringy clusters and wet chunks of tissue and shards of bone. And I could see what was left of Kate, her face gone, her torso almost cut in half. It was impossible to believe that somewhere in this unknowing matter lie all our demons, the real ones and the ones we dream into being ourselves, and all I could think was, This is real. This is what has happened.