This is an excerpt from a paper that I'm writing for my English class, but I thought that it might be appropriate to post some of it here...
It’s around midnight, Tuesday, December 22 of last year, the time of year when you should be in the holiday spirit, full of cheer and good will towards men and all that crap.
Unfortunately, at midnight on Tuesday, December 22 of last year, the only thing I was full of was anti-nausea drugs, none of which seemed to be working. And the will I was feeling towards men was not exactly good—specifically one particular person.
To be completely fair, this particular person was not a man. In fact, even though he was probably barely sixteen years of age, I won’t even call him a boy. And “feral animal” would have been an insult to other feral animals, but it at least comes close to an accurate description.
The hackneyed phrase “If I could go back in time” suddenly didn’t seem so lame anymore. In fact, as I lay there on the gurney in the ER, blood belching from every possible orifice above my neck—and several that aren’t supposed to do that—going back in time sounded pretty damn good to me. No sales pitch needed there.
The time I would have gone back to would probably have been a quarter to eight on the previous evening. That would have been the time I would have been loading my laptop into my backpack in order to get out to the bus stop, so that I could catch my bus. Unfortunately, my most brilliant ideas usually come to me after the disaster they could have prevented has already happened. Case In point.
I decided that I wasn’t quite ready to go yet, so I decided to stay at the coffee house for the remaining fifteen minutes, and then pack up. Besides, it was also kinda cold, and I was in no mood to stand out in it for any great length of time. Which is ironic, because ultimately that’s precisely what I ended up doing.
I exited the coffee shop, and headed towards the Morse “L” stop. As always, I decided to walk up Lunt. I’d been doing it almost every day for the ten years I had been going to the coffee house, and I saw no reason to change my routine. As I made it across the intersection, I noticed someone kneeling down, apparently tying his shoe or something like that. I did as I always did; I simply walked around him, with no more thought than I would have given to tying my own shoes. I turned my iPod up louder. It was a song I liked. Or at least, used to like...
A few seconds later, I found myself starring in my own personal episode of Wild Kingdom in the role of the gazelle that gets pounced on by the cheetah. There’s a hand on the back of my neck, and hovering somewhere to the right of me, just out of my field of vision, is something that looks familiar. Too familiar. Entirely too familiar. A gun.
There’s a line from the movie Magnolia, where Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character is talking to an agent for Tom Cruise’s character, trying to convince him that he is not some crackpot, but rather his father’s personal nurse and he has to inform him that his father is dying. He tells the agent that this is that scene in the movies where the dying father is trying to reach out to his estranged son, but there isn’t much time left. He goes on to observe that he believes that those scenes exist in movies for a reason: they really happen. I’d like to add my own scene to that list—the one where you’re getting mugged and everything slows down, and all the voices sound like they’re being spoken by James Earl Jones talking through a jar of molasses. “Gimme the laptop, gimme the laptop,” he’s shouting.
Scientists have often observed that during times of stress, the human mind will fixate on strange things, things that have no bearing whatsoever on the situation at hand—curiosities, as you will. In this case, it was the movement of his gun hand. There was something wrong with it—something other than the fact that there was a gun in it. It was moving entirely too fast for something that was supposed to have about a couple pounds of metal. And it was right then that the portion of my brain that normally engages in rational thought simply turned the light out and hung the sign on the door that said “Closed.”
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