participating in the discourse, or as I like to call it, talking like a real [fancy] asshole.
by Levi Platt
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like for the elevator I take in the morning to plummet into the ground with me in it.
I left work around 5 pm from Midtown and made my way down to 47th to Grand Central to take the Metro-North home. An hour later, a block from my work, a man, a boy really, walked into an office building and shot four people, got into an elevator and stopped on the 33rd floor, and shot himself in the heart. He shot himself, and somewhere on the floor, a maintenance worker hid in a closet and tried to cover her ears to muffle the sound of the gunshots wrenching their way through her building. She said she told an employee goodbye on her floor before everything started. A young woman, maybe half her age.
The gunman, furious and just beginning to show the first signs of low-grade CTE, shot that young woman in the chest. The worker recalled praying, hoping whatever was happening wouldn’t find her or the person she had just said goodbye to for the last time.
I work on the 34th floor of my building, but that’s just me being self-centered, thinking I could extend the shallow thought of someone else's tragedy to myself. I can’t, of course I can’t, and what a profoundly narcissistic thing to do in the first place.
A few days later, an acquaintance of mine, a lawyer, referred to the shooting as “all that funny business.” He owns a second house in Connecticut and an apartment in Manhattan. He calls getting out of the city “terribly civilized”.
I don’t know what to do with that, but I do know I think differently of him now than I did before he said it. I shouldn’t. I know it’s a coping mechanism. To hand-wave it away so that it becomes something muddy. Something apart from you.
Because?
Because, because.
I didn’t like the way he said “terribly civilized”. Something about him saying it in a suit from Drake’s reeking of an expensive-smelling melange of amber and citron--made me clutch my morally indignant pearls. But I’m not any different, not really. The cologne was warm, elegant even, and eventually I couldn’t shake the thought: the smell for him was a comfort. I wondered if it made him feel safe.
When I was twelve, my favorite smell was the lingering chemical ghost of the glue in the subfloor of the doublewide I grew up in. I would read books in my closet during the drowning heat of Midwest summers until I fell asleep face down, wafting the earth passing through particle board, industrial adhesive, and polyester. I’d wake, my face numb and neck sore, feeling happy and safe. It felt like if I stayed there, I could keep the world back.
But what I’m looking for is a through-line.
I have a news app I like. An aggregate site that neatly, and with varying degrees of success, categorizes coverage for news stories by political bias. I wonder if my wanting something that parses out something as absurd as the holistic gist of a report, indicating left, right, and center, is killing me in some way. Maybe it’s just a carry-over from childhood; I need to know how what I consume is killed and processed.
Back to the news app. On my feed is a familiar face. Not a celebrity or a politician. A prophet. My prophet. The picture of him makes me uneasy. We’re a relatively private group of worshippers. Sure, don’t let the massive ad campaigns in the mid-aughts, the paying social media influencers to say positive things about the church, or the immorally large sum of 100 billion dollars stashed away for “a rainy day” tell you otherwise. Most Mormons are preternaturally private people. Justifiably so-- in my home state, it was legal to murder us until the turn of the 20th century.
I don’t like seeing stories about us. But the death of a leader of a church of several million members is still news for people to gawk at, even if it is just so they can continue to ring out old prejudices. We’re all satan worshipping cultists, and certainly not Christians. Even if it is in our name, that doesn’t matter here. At least I’m not sure it does yet.
But the dead prophet is there, glowing on my feed and making my apartment seem smaller than it was before I read it.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A man drives a white pickup into a church house and decides the lives of people there are his to take. He shoots into the congregation, killing four.
A young man did the same (though even that fact has been warped into reprobate shapes depending on what algorithm you find most suitable to your needs), not a month earlier, to a Catholic congregation of mostly schoolchildren.
Is this about guns or politics?
Neither, and I despise the fact that those questions have bloomed here like cancer.
But now you’re looking for it too, aren’t you?
You’re asking yourself, “What’s the thesis here? Where are we going with this?” Surely the point is a political one, a commentary at least.
I’m saying it feels like there’s a space we’re all collectively hellbent on filling as quickly as the blue light confirms a body count, before family and loved ones have the chance to bury their dead.
When the gunman shot up a congregation of Mormons, I kept reading the same witness account over and over. The AP made it a headline: “Woman who was confronted by Michigan church gunman says she instantly forgave him for killing dad”
They missed the kicker of that story, though. It should have read Woman stares her would-be killer in the face and recounts, 'I saw into his soul and he saw into mine.”
That’s getting there, I think..
Simone Weil once wrote the most divine thing a person can give another is their complete attention. To do so with whole intent, she asserted, was to bear witness to the very center of God’s love in its unknowable entirety. I’m inferring here, and giving myself some license of interpretation, but for reference for those more anally inclined to confirm I’m not a fibber, check her letters.
To bear witness.
When my grandfather was dying, Dad and Mom flew out to Oregon to spend time with him. Mom says they talked alot about how much Dad had accomplished. How his sons had fared as adults. My mom doesn’t have the vocabulary for it--at least not in English because she never taught her boys her mother tongue, so something there is lost for all of us-- but for the few weeks they watched grandad continue to wither from cancer, so Dad apparently took to waiting on his dying father hand and foot while being a braggart about how well life was going for himself. He kept on with his dying father like any boy would.
“Ken kept talking about you boys. About the future. They were making plans. I don’t know why.”
My dad tells this story like it’s a joke: When he was eleven, grandad taught him how to weld, and then would make him spot weld horse trailers every day after school instead of doing homework until he was seventeen and left home for the Navy.
Understandably, Dad did poorly in school. So poorly that on a few of his official grade cards, his teachers suggested he be put in a class with the “other retarded children.” The school eventually did. He was dyslexic, but wouldn’t figure that out until he was a father of two and trying to white-knuckle his way through college on the G.I. bill.
“It was worth it,” he says, “Dad used to get me a Whataburger and a strawberry milkshake every Friday for it. He would take me, and it would just be us.”
No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.
I read it recently, and it's meant as a meditation on man’s general appetite for violence and perpetuating death, but I think it’s just as apt here.
I know exactly why Dad kept making plans.
So the church gunman does his funny business and burns the church down around him. And you know what the priest says to him? He says, “Let's raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to support your widow and child since you were killed in a gun fight with local police after murdering four people and burning down our place of worship. Let’s recall that in the moment of terror, staring down that black maw in silence, a woman holding her dying father, a child clutching the very flesh that held the world at bay while she learned to stand on her own, looked at that gunman and saw someone who “looked lost, who was hurting”--and she bore witness. She saw his soul.”
It’s a knee slapper, isn’t it?
“Ok, but so what? Why should I be thinking about this text over any other text?”
“What makes this one worth my time?”
Nothing.
We cannot learn that which our hearts have no shape to hold.
LW Platt is an essayist and fiction writer from the Midwest. His work has been published most recently with Querencia Press, and Half and One Magazine.