#firstscene

Here’s a longer chunk of something still in progress which may appear elsewhere later in a different form. Enjoy:

For Craig, copy editor and reporter at the Times, America’s last best hope for journalism, print or no, New York City’s biggest media frenzy since the turn of the millennium starts when he stumbles in late-late from work and watches from his living room couch the images that will be in circulation for weeks, months:

In an architectural white blazer evoking a split tulip, Demi Etienne is addressing a crowd from a stage in front of Rockefeller Center, her husband Jonathan playing supportive spouse a polite distance behind her. The air pulses with flash photography. All public space is occupied. The crowd roars and she lifts her hand to quiet them with a smile, her hair up in a style defying all natural order. There’s a distant clap, and Demi is not two words into her speech before a second clap opens her head on live television, her hand striking the microphone to shrieking feedback.

It’s cacophony as self-preservation kicks in and the plaza becomes a parting sea split along the bullet’s vector. Demi doesn’t go down, though; she’s floating, a figurine with arms stuck out and a not-bleeding hole in her forehead like a bindi. Jonathan runs upstage and she turns unconsciously toward him as though falling were not yet a certainty. Demi’s slow turn reveals, to the crowd, a ballooning exit wound—explosive round, Craig thinks—but no blood. The back of her head looks like a rainboot stomping a puddle, a shiny splash of curved chrome with circuitry beneath it.

Jonathan doesn’t see this, presumably, until his wife slips through his hands to his feet, and he looks down.

Craig rewinds, watching again the glitchy movements and the husband’s unparsable face. He watches again and again until he’s shock-saturated and all that remains is the rhythm—the jazz triplet of last syllables, the ghost note of a breathless crowd, the crescendo of chaos. After a moment, Dizzy comes to mind, the drummer at Craig’s downtown nightspot with whom he’d had drinks just hours earlier. He lets his mind wander back to Dizzy, grinning as he passes time signatures between hands and feet, his sticks skipping over the kit like stones down a slot canyon.