A Live Story

　

I was against hiring an intern. I won’t deny that. Live news reporting involves things like fires and car crashes, the aftermath of shootings and explosions – it’s intrinsically hazardous and you have to make decisions on the fly and, sometimes, simple things, like telling people where to stand or when to duck to avoid bullets or shrapnel are hard to communicate. Often, there is a lot of noise, background static, people gawking while they chatter on the phone. Sometimes, a civilian gets mad that the camera crew is exploiting a tragedy and people get pushed or punches are thrown. So I didn’t think it was prudent to assign an intern to the live news crew. The job requires experience. I said: "I’m not going to babysit that girl." "No one expects that," the News Director replied, overruling my objections.

The intern, Malena, was the police chief’s daughter, just graduated from Oberlin and a nice enough girl as well. The news director told me that hiring her for the season would pay off in access. "We’ll get closer to the action," the news director said. "She’s got law enforcement connections. The girl will turn out to be an asset." I disagreed: "The police chief will want to keep her a long wayfrom the bad stuff." "We’ll see," the News Director said.

The first couple months nothing really bad happened. We covered a landslide in the suburbs, but it was really just a property damage gig, no deaths or injuries – I assigned Malena crowd control: she stood a couple dozen feet from the camera and on-air talent, gently steering rubber-neckers away from our shoot. She had a nice smile and a tactful manner and was good in persuading curious locals not to invade our space. There were a couple of fires and an oil spill on the freeway. A man threatened to jump from a construction crane downtown. People were rowdy at that scene, but Malena quieted them down, suggesting, I think, that one or two of the interlopers might get some on-screen time with Jessica Norman, our glamor-girl action news reporter, if they would zip their lips. The man didn’t jump but the interlopers did get a few minutes interview with Jessica, B-roll footage that didn’t make the cut for the evening news. There was a chain collision in the fog where the freeway went over the mountain. Fatalities were reported but I kept Malena away from the casualties – some camera crews think it’s amusing to take pictures of mutilated dead bodies, but, of course, that sort of thing is, more or less, useless: you can’t air the footage both because of standards and practices, as well as privacy concerns, and I had seen enough fragmentary corpses in Iraq and Afghanistan to have lost any interest in taking pictures of them – it’s just bad road kill with clothing over some parts of the carcass. No big deal and, certainly, not the least bit informative.

A gas pipeline ruptured and an explosion shook down some houses and a freeway overpass in the foothills. We rushed to the scene and set up on a cul-de-sac overlooking the calamity. Malena did traffic control while Jessica Norman pointed out various features in the fiery panorama below our vantage. The midday light was harsh and the blades of sharp looking little shadows made everything look mean and angular. I carry a reflector to smooth things out and I had Malena hold it for fill on Jessica’s face. "You make me look good," Jessica said, "and I make you look good." Malena smiled and pointed the reflector and I locked down my camera for another shot and, then, the ground shook underfoot. Tongues of blue flames flickered through the grating in the curbside gutters. Natural gas had seeped into the storm sewers and flash fires roared through the tunnels. One of the explosions lifted a manhole cover about sixty feet from where we were shooting and flung it skyward like a discus. Malena was dropped the reflector and, as a reflex, I threw myself over her as we dived for cover. The manhole clattered against the concrete, spalling it into a shower of shards and pebbles. The wind changed direction and the smoke rolled over our position and, for a few moments, we were lost in the choking fog.

Back at the van, Malena’s face was wet with tears from the smoke in her eyes. We re-shot the footage interrupted by the flying manhole cover and, then, drove back to the studio. Malena said that she would buy me a drink because I had saved her life. I told her that I had done no such thing, but she insisted. We went to a sports bar for a couple of hours. It was a place frequented by Latinos and the TV sets were all tuned to soccer games. It’s surprising how easy it is to ignore a television screen, even a huge one, when you don’t know much about the sport being played and the commentary is in a language you can’t understand. After a few drinks, I told Malena that I sometimes saw dead people. She asked me what I meant. "It’s not a Sixth Sense kind of thing," I told her. "I just have vivid memories about people that I knew who died in war zones." She asked me if it was post-traumatic stress. "Nothing like that," I said. "Just very clear and precise memories." "Does this happen a lot?" she asked. "Not really," I said. "When that manhole cover popped up in the air, I had a flashback – the sound was like an IED. I still have the muscle-memory," I told her.

You resist temptation by avoiding it. I went home before anyone got too drunk. Malena offered to drive me to my place but I declined. "You’re just as drunk as me," I said. "I don’t want the Police Chief’s daughter getting in trouble." She laughed at the idea.

A week later, we were at a scene where a Cessna was shredded against a stony hillside when our scanner picked up the call: Active Shooter at the Transfer Station. We abandoned the Cessna and the forlorn corpses slumped in the underbrush for our van. The navigation system showed us maps and intoned directions. "It’s my Dad’s jurisdiction," Malena said. She took out her cell-phone and called one of the dispatchers. We raced along the boulevards toward the transfer station. Sirens sounded all around us and I could see helicopters converging over a place at the edge of town.

At the first police roadblock, Malena got out of the car and spoke with one of the deputies. He went to his squad car, signaling that we should follow closely behind him. The squad car shot like an arrow along the divided boulevard, running the red lights. We tailed the vehicle at a dozen feet off the cop car’s rear bumper, and, then, came to a second police barricade. The vehicle ahead slowed. A man in a suit, presumably a detective, waved the car forward and we followed, moving in a tight formation down the deserted lane to the police perimeter.

We stopped the van and unloaded our gear on the side of the vehicle opposite the cordon of ambulances and police cars. "Keep out of sight as long as possible," I said as I set up my camera. The sun was bright and the sky clear and the trees along the street reached upward with gestures like ballet dancers. Neat, precise shadows fell across the sidewalk. Other than the sound of police radios muttering back and forth, it was mostly silent and we spoke in whispers. Overhead, helicopters circled like vultures – their rotors made a sultry sound like a ceiling fan. When I peeked around the edge of the van, I saw police tactical squads setting up sniper rifles on tripods and nervously checking tear-gas mortars. The massacre had occurred on the other side of a nondescript warehouse building with vacant loading docks sticking their tongues out at the bright afternoon. Beyond the loading dock, a parking lot glittered with a scatter of cars, probably owned by people who were now dead or dying and, then, there was a low cement wall, a chainlink fence, and the windowless bunker of the transfer station. Some mobile homes dotted the hills above the station and one of them displayed an American flag next to its door.

Jessica Norman stooped to adjust her make-up in the side-mirror on the van. She said that I should not use the tripod and shoot handheld. "It’s more urgent that way," she told me. "This is plenty urgent as it is," I said, twisting the camera onto the tripod.

"Is it a jihadist?" Jessica asked.

"We don’t know," the sound man said.

"Get on the scanner and find out," she demanded.

"I don’t think they know," the sound man said.

"Just call it an ‘active shooter’," I said. Malena was looking intently at a tangle of brush next to the road. A drainage culvert opened out of a retaining wall on the side of a wooded knoll next where we were parked. Beneath the drainage, a little green jungle had sprouted, shrubs and vines and small thorny trees all intertwined.

"There is something moving in there," Malena said.

"A mountain lion?" I asked.

A string of popping sounds came from the Transfer Station. Then, there was a low, gutteral boom. A couple of police from the tactical squad ran forward crouching. For the time being, it seemed as if we were invisible. I supposed that each cop thought that some other police officer had approved our presence.

"I need fill," Jessica Norman said as I locked-down the tripod. "Get the reflector. Otherwise I’ll look like Pinnochio or like I’m sixty years old." She nervously squinted into the sunlight.

Malena was still looking at the ragged-looking little bramble patch under the black socket of the culvert.

"Get the reflector, Malena," Jessica said. "I’m not doing this stand-up without the reflector."

Malena said: "It’s a man."

I looked away from my viewfinder. A man was standing next to Malena. He was wearing dark sunglasses and had a beard that fell like a brown curtain from his chin and his lips. The beard dropped onto the man’s breast and the tips of his whiskers were jagged and silver-colored, making lightning patterns against the blue work-shirt covering his chest. The man’s beard had a sculptural quality, immobile and heavy as if cast in bronze. He reached out his hand toward Malena.

Malena coaxed him forward as if he were some kind of exotic wild animal. She took his extended hand. The man’s hand was grey and waxy and, when she touched him, I felt a kind of instinctual revulsion.

"I was inside, inside..." the man said. His lips moved but not his beard and his eyes were invisible behind the black panes of his sunglasses.

"He says he was inside," Malena told me. "Inside the transfer station."

"I was," the man insisted.

"How did he get out?" Jessica Norman said.

"We were having a retirement party – there was meat and cheese tray," the man said. "There was this guy that none of us knew very well. He was a loner. Stuck to himself and stayed in his own office really most of the time. Something got him mad and he came into the break-room where we were gathered and, then..."

"He started shooting," Malena said.

Another fusillade of shots, as ineffectual, it seemed, as someone popping birthday balloons echoed across the parking lot and loading docks at the nearby warehouse.

"I see him. My god, he’s shooting everyone. He has a gun and he’s very calmly pointing it and firing. And there’s people all around, people falling and screaming and blood, puddles of blood."

A kind of armored car flying a little flag like a pennant crept up the street. A volley of very loud shouts sounded, then, a deep, hollow roar.

The man with the long beard said: "I knew I had to get out. I had to escape. I’ve got a wife and kids and so much reason to stay alive. I said to myself that I was going to escape no matter what, that I would get out of the transfer station, that I would survive regardless of what happened, I kept telling myself that I was going to get out like I was praying..."

"Praying?" Malena asked.

"Praying except maybe just to myself. I don’t know. (He paused). I said that I had to make it out and I did..."

"What is the name of the shooter?" Jessica Norman said.

"He is just some guy. Employed a couple years. Kept to himself."

"A Jihadist, a Muslim or something?"

"I don’t know," the man said. "I never knew his last name."

"But you got out, you survived?" Jessica Norman asked.

I thought I had been filming but, in the excitement, I hadn’t pressed down on the right button to engage the camera.

"Let me redo this," I said.

"How did you get out?" Jessica Norman asked.

"I told myself I had to get out, that I had to make it. Then, I went to the door. But, after that, I’m confused. I don’t recall. I just don’t know. But, suddenly, I’m outside, right here."

Some heavy weapon fired from within the armored personnel carrier and the heavy vehicle rocked from the recoil on its axles. Cops wearing body armor ran up to take shelter behind the armored car. One of the men tripped and fell sideways. Then, there was a very bright flash followed by a concussion.

Without thinking, I flung the camera in the direction of the charging police and the armored car. Through my viewfinder, I saw a small car rolling forward, hidden some of the time behind the pickup trucks and SUV’s in the parking lot. Fountains of glass billowed off the parked cars and, then, the moving vehicle pancaked, dropping down heavily as all of its tires flattened so that its hubcaps spurted off their rims Fire gushed from the vehicle and it slid sideways, bits of metal and chrome skinned off the side of the car and skittering across the concrete.

The gunfire continued for a half-minute and, then, it was silent.

"Did you get that? Did you get that?" Jessica Norman said.

"I got it," I said.

"Let me do my stand-up with the smoke behind me," she said.

The sound man signaled that he was ready for the shot. A thick, serpentine coil of oily black smoke rolled along the lane next to the warehouse. Several police were running toward us, arms extended as if they wanted to seize with their own hands the images that we were shooting.

"They’re going to shut us down," I said.

"Stay on me, stay on me," Jessica Norman said. "Stay on me, until they boot us out of here."

I watched through the viewfinder: Jessica made a grim face and described what we had just seen, stammering a little and the smoke spilled across the background like a great scroll opening and, then, the police manhandled her and knocked me down, dragging us away to a place two-hundred yards to the rear, between a waiting ambulance and a firetruck, a dull corner where nothing much could be seen.

"What happened to the survivor?" Jessica Norman asked.

"I don’t know," Malena said. "I think he got scared and ran away."

"I didn’t see him run away," the sound man said.

"Maybe the police have him in custody," I said.

For a while our vehicle was impounded. The News Director sent another van to retrieve us so that we could get the footage back to the studio. I checked the playback – I had a very clear shot of the shoot-out in the parking lot, images of Jessica Norman flinching a little as the smoke curled around her, then, the cops pushing through the haze and dragging her to the side, thick fists and forearms reaching up to knock my picture out of commission.

"Did you get anything of the survivor?" Malena asked.

"Nothing," I said. "I didn’t have the camera running."

"Bummer," Malena said.

"It happens," I replied.

That night, my hands began to shake. They shook so much that I had to hold my glass of scotch between both palms. I recalled all of the corpses I had seen in war zones. I thought of the faces of the reporters and correspondents that I had known who had been killed doing their jobs. My hands shook so bad that I spilled booze all over my chin and chest.

The next morning, my hangover kept me from going to work. Around midday, Malena called me.

"Did you get my text?" she asked.

"No," I said. "I haven’t looked at my phone."

"Look at your phone," she said. "I’m really freaked-out."

I said that I would call her back.

It took me a while to find my cell-phone. When I lifted the phone, I noticed that the tremor in my hands had gone. On the phone, there was a text-message from Malena: "Look at this video off the news stream on my computer. I don’t know what to say."

I tapped on the screen. The video was a news report about the shooting at the transfer station. The gunman had died in the parking lot, riddled with bullets in his car. I recognized the footage as the pictures that I had taken the previous afternoon. A man in a uniform listed the names of the dead – the gunman had killed eight people. One of the victims looked familiar to me. The dead man grinning at the camera wore black sunglasses and had a long beard drooping down to the middle of his chest. The edges of his beard were silver-grey and frizzy.

I called Malena: "So we interviewed one of the victims."

"How is that possible?" she asked. "He’s dead now."

"He must have been wounded. He must have been badly wounded when we talked to him."

"I didn’t see where he came from," Malena said. "It’s like he just appeared in that brush."

"He must have been shot and left for dead and, somehow, got outside and taken cover in those weeds."

"It’s not like that," Malena said. "I talked to my dad."

"And?"

"They found the guy with sunglasses and beard inside the transfer station. He had gone to a door that was locked from the outside. He was clawing at the door when the gunman shot him a half-dozen times. He broke his fingernails trying to rip the door open but he couldn’t. It was locked."

Malena paused.

"He said he wanted to get outside." She said.

"He must have got outside," I said. "He got outside and found us and, then..."

"And, then, ran back through the police line to get into the transfer station and, then, go to the corridor with the locked door so that he could die there?"

"It doesn’t sound plausible," I said.

"And with a half-dozen wounds, any one of which would have killed him?"

"I agree that it doesn’t sound plausible."

"Will you check your footage to see if there is any evidence of that man in the stuff we shot?" Malena asked.

"I’ll do that," I said.

That afternoon, I went to the studio and checked all of the raw footage from the reporting that we had done the previous afternoon. There were no pictures of the man with the long beard. In the excitement, I had forgotten to engage the camera. It’s a rookie mistake, but it happens.