Man of the Hour (50 page)

He started to limp toward David with his chin lowered and the gun raised. His eyes were looking off to the side a little, though, as if his real objective were elsewhere.

David glanced over his shoulder and saw kids trampling each other brutally, trying to get out me emergency exit. The big bearded man had disappeared in the pack, but was obviously trying to hold the door and keep them back. And in the resulting gridlock, kids were falling and getting stomped. A ninth-grader named Cheryl Smith crawled away, spitting blood.

In the meantime, the little man kept coming—limping and grunting in outrage. From the corner of his eye, David saw Elizabeth trying to kneel on the bench and cover her brother’s body with her own. Clearly she’d figured out what was just dawning on David—that the little man was coming for the bomb, to find the switch and finish the job.

David tried to stand in his way, even as the metallic taste of fear filled up his mouth.

The little man raised the gun and pointed at David’s face. Warning him to get out of the way. David didn’t budge. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to play the hero anymore. He only wanted his ordinary life back again, but it was too late.

From twelve feet away, the little man fired.

David felt stinging just under his left eye and then a spider’s web of pain spread back through his skull. He staggered backward and the little man brushed past him on his way to Elizabeth and her brother. The pain was more than enormous. It was a world in and of itself with no outside reference points. It turned into a horn boring into his head. Unbearable. It was impossible to remember not being in this much pain. But somehow David managed to break free of it for just one second and with a last furious burst of strength, like a mother lifting a car off a child, he reached out and grabbed the little man by the collar, spun him around, and punched him in the face.

More from the force of surprise than anything else, the man stumbled and started to lose his balance. Knowing he was about to black out, David threw himself forward, plowing into the little man with his shoulder, knocking him down and pinning him to the greasy floor. For a second, he was aware he was covering the man like a heavy rug and then he wasn’t aware of anything.

When he came to, he heard a thousand feet running his way, a mad horde, the kids reversing field to come help him. Someone pulled him off the little man, and as he rolled over, he saw what looked like a forest come to life—hundreds of flailing limbs and branches closing in on the shooter, crashing down wild angry blows.

“Call my son. Call my son. Somebody please call my wife and my son and tell them I’m all right.”

In the parking lot some twenty-five minutes later, David was beginning to collapse into a kind of delirium. He’d lost a great deal of blood and he kept hearing paramedics talking worriedly about the discharge coming out of his ears. There were ambulances, cop cars, bomb trucks, emergency service vehicles, helicopters circling, reporters swarming, broadcast trucks, satellite dishes and oh, who cared anymore?

“Somebody please call my son.”

Camera shutters went off in his face. Sirens screamed in the distance. He was on a stretcher, being worked on by strong purposeful men in blue jackets and white shirts. One of them, a young black guy with kind eyes, kept holding his hand and smiling at him.

“Don’t worry, man. We’re not gonna let you die.”

David tried to sit up. “Who said anything about me dying?”

“Never mind.” The young guy gently pushed him back down and made sure David’s IV line was still firmly attached.

More bodies materialized around him. More FBI agents, more reporters, more cameras, more noise. He was aware of other bodies on stretchers nearby. The little man and the big bearded man, looking badly beaten. He hoped they wouldn’t go in the same ambulance with him. A black bag was carried by, and he knew Nasser was inside it.

“Who killed you?” somebody called out to him. He vaguely recognized Judy Mandel’s voice.

Who killed me? But I’m not dead yet. Somebody started to put an inflatable sleeve over his leg and he mumbled that it wasn’t broken. In spite of all the drugs they were giving him, pain still kept flashing through the inside of his head. He turned and saw Elizabeth Hamdy being led away by Jim Lefferts from the FBI.

“Somebody please call my boy …”

Donna Vitale suddenly appeared before him. She must have been in another part of the building when everything happened in the cafeteria.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Somebody please call my son. Tell him I’m all right.” He could barely get any other words out, it was so hard to focus in all this agony.

“It’s all right. I’ll call your son for you.”

She started to reach for his hand, but then Detective Noonan grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her off into the crowd.

Flashbulbs went off, leaving a blinding white light when he closed his eyes. But why would anybody be using flashbulbs? It was still daytime.

He wanted to cry out after her. She didn’t have the number for Arthur. And she didn’t know what he’d meant by “I’m all right.” He wasn’t sure if he was going to be all right, physically. In fact, with flashbulbs going off inside his head, it was gradually dawning on him that he might not be. But he wanted his son to know that his father was
all right
in the larger sense, meaning that he was no one to be ashamed of.

He tried to push up on an elbow and call out to her, so she’d come back and he could explain it to her. But it was too late. The drugs were finally beginning to wrap him up in a thick, warm, drowsy blanket. Somehow, she’d figure it all out anyway.

“Think we should move him now?” one of the medical technicians was asking.

“Better late than never.”

Then he was being hoisted up and carried aloft. As in a dream. More bulbs were going off in his head. He was shuttling between there and not mere. He was going, going, and people were still taking his picture. In the last flashes of consciousness, he saw a microphone suspended before his face and heard Sara Kidreaux’s familiar voice.

“David, do you have any comment about what happened here today?”

“Noooooooo …”

He was shoved into the back of the ambulance and the door slammed. Then all at once, they were moving and the texture was changing again. Past the lights, the sounds, the gyrating chaos of the city around him. Through the sound waves, microwaves, fiberoptics, high-definition pixels, and bouncing satellite signals. Toward a vast black empty space.

He closed his eyes and saw himself again as a skinny awkward boy, tracking the arc of a scuffed ball against a setting late afternoon sun, running, running, running hard for the love of his family and friends; diving in among the champagne-colored weeds, catching it just at the very tip of his mitt, and holding it aloft, triumphant in the gathering dusk for everyone to see.

64

DEAR MR. FITZGERALD,

Thank you for your kind note, which Agent Lefferts had passed on to me at my new location, which of course I am not allowed to disclose to you.

I am glad to hear you are feeling better. I prayed for you every day that you were in a coma, along with performing my traditional Muslim prayers.

I am not sure what to say about all the terrible things that happened with you and my brother at school. My father tells me there is no God but God and everything that occurs on earth is subject to His will, so we must accept it. Even if it means the destruction of a part of our family. On the other hand, you always taught me to think as an individual, and take responsibility into my own hands. So now I am not sure what I believe. Perhaps it was God’s will that Nasser was killed and you got shot and my family has to live in hiding. Or perhaps everything is my fault because I am a bad person. I keep thinking there must be something I could have done or said that would have made things come out differently. Either way, I feel a sense of sadness about the way everything ended, like that hand is still over my heart, and it will probably take me the rest of my life to figure it all out.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about college. The circumstances of my life make it complicated now. But I also know it’s something you very much wanted me to do. So
Insh’allah,
who can say how things will work out?

I may be back in Brooklyn in time for the holidays, though the contact agents have asked me not to say when or where exactly because of the trial coming up with my brother’s friends. If it is God’s will, perhaps I will see you again. If it is not, know that you have a special place in my heart and may God smile upon you in His beneficence.

Yours very truly,
Elizabeth Hamdy

On a warm April day, David Fitzgerald sat on the sofa outside his physical therapist’s office, still struggling for the tenth time to make sense of the perfectly drawn blue words on the white page.

God’s will. My brother. A hand over my heart.
The bullet in his head had afflicted him in unpredictable ways since he came out of the coma just before Thanksgiving. Words could float around in his head for a few minutes before he’d find the right order for them.

But the part about her sense of sadness kept coming back to him. His own life hadn’t been easy these last few months. He’d lost part of the use of his right arm and needed a cane to walk. And even worse, the blinding headaches made him a liability as a teacher. The two visits he’d made to the school since starting therapy in December were grotesque humiliations. He wanted people to remember him as strong, incisive, an educator. Not an oversized cripple slurring his words. Everyone acted glad to see him—Larry Simonetti shook his good hand and Michelle the secretary gave him a discreet peck on the cheek—but David could tell they were also a little afraid of him. It wasn’t just the limp or the bullet hole in his face, a small light-colored scar under his left eye. It was what he made them think of: disruption, violence, and death. They wanted him to go away, but they didn’t want to admit it. And they resented him for making them so confused.

On the upside, he had a more-than-decent settlement from the city and he was seeing Donna. But Renee had continued her disintegration. She was in and out of hospitals and had been on and off a half dozen medications since the year started. So Arthur’s child care had to be patched together on a day-to-day basis. David lived for the time he spent with the boy—the days at the museum, the nights at the apartment—but something still haunted him when he went to sleep at night, listening for the sound of his son snoring in his sleeping bag next to his bed.

That same sense of sadness Elizabeth wrote to him about. He’d had a hand over his own heart these last few months. He decided he needed to see her again, if only to thank her and let her know that what happened wasn’t her fault. He needed one last connection.

He began plotting to find her again as he went through therapy sessions bouncing rubber balls and walking on balance beams. It wasn’t going to be easy. He hadn’t seen her since that last day in the cafeteria. She and her family had been put in the FBI’s witness protection program immediately. He’d tried writing to her through the Bureau, to let her know he was okay and to ask what she was going to do with her life. But her reply had left him confused and unsatisfied.

God’s will. How would he make contact again? She said she might be in Brooklyn for the holidays, but he didn’t understand why she’d be coming back for Easter. A week after reading her letter at the therapist’s office, though, he heard a news story on the radio that said there would be a festival celebrating the Muslim holiday Id al-Adha, “the feast of the sacrifice,” on the Coney Island boardwalk next week and thousands of Muslim-Americans from all over the city were expected to attend.

God’s will.
Maybe it was a signal that she would be there. But it was up to him, having the guts to go look for her. He hesitated, and not just out of the obvious fear of running into one or two militant friends of the men who’d been arrested among the thousands of devout, law-abiding Muslims. He was afraid of what the trip down to Brooklyn would reveal about himself, about his own limitations.

Just getting on the subway alone would require a kind of courage. What if he got lost and disoriented? What if he fell down in the middle of a car and found he couldn’t stand up? On the other hand, if he could make it all the way out to Coney Island on his own to find Elizabeth, it might mean he had the guts he needed to get on with his life.

So, early on a crisp Tuesday afternoon, he put on an old tweed jacket, found his cane, and started the long complex transfer of trains required to get him from the Upper West Side to the last stop in Brooklyn.

At the Stillwell Avenue station, he came down from the elevated platform slowly, already hearing the booming voice of the muezzin coming from loudspeakers near Steeplechase Pier.

“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

He approached what looked like a scene from someone else’s dream. Thousands of shoeless Muslim men knelt on prayer mats with the rotting old Parachute Drop at their backs and the Atlantic Ocean rolling and pitching, sunlight in front of them.

Some small cowardly part of David shrank back, remembering it was a Muslim who’d shot him in the face and crippled him for life. But then again, it was a Muslim who’d saved him. Was he going to spend his life hiding behind prejudices and hopping off trains every time he saw someone with a head scarf?

The prayers ended and he followed the throng going into the Astroland amusement park nearby. There were enough people going in to fill a small stadium: old women in veils who looked like they’d just come off the road to Damascus, young men in ties ready for Wall Street, family men with heavy, tired faces, peppery little girls in head scarves. Apparently the group had rented out the park for the day and there were no angry militants in sight. Traditional Arab music wailed from the public address system, replacing the usual cavalcade of ’70s and ’80s disco hits. Workers had covered up the pictures of naked women adorning the Dante’s Inferno haunted house. The Muslims dispersed onto the rides. Women in veils smashed into each other with bumper cars. Children shrieked with delight on the Cyclone roller coaster. Swarthy bearded men in
keffiyehs
rode carousel horses and spun around on the Break Dancer ride. Just ordinary people taking a day off and having fun.