How to Be Safe Read online

  HOW TO

  BE SAFE

  A NOVEL

  TOM McALLISTER

  For my parents—Mom, Dad, and Fred

  PROLOGUE

  WITH SOME TIME to kill, the shooter parks his car outside One Brother’s Pizza and he thinks: It’s just a slice, a slice won’t slow me down. He thinks: A slice may even be good for me. He thinks: This is a choice, I’m making a choice and nobody in the world has any say over whether or not I make this choice.

  Last night, he forgot to eat. Even after a full month of planning, there were loose ends to tie up, there were final considerations. He hadn’t wanted to leave a note, but while he lay in bed not sleeping there were so many words in his mind desperate to escape and he could feel them crawling like cockroaches out of his mouth and so he decided to record them in his notebook. Later they will find his notebook and call it a manifesto. The media will try to analyze it and explain it, but they are dull and they cannot be trusted to understand.

  Next door to One Brother’s is a small insurance agency with an oversized window, in which a pretty middle-aged woman sits as if on display. Her desk faces away from the street, but her body is turned so that he can see her profile, the cold curve of her cheekbone, the skin beneath her jaw sagging like an ill-fitting mask. He stands only three feet away from her, separated by the glass like a prisoner at visitation. Her blond hair is cut in a bob and swept stylishly across her forehead, and she wears a blouse and skirt like something a mannequin at a high-end department store would wear. Her legs crossed with her cell phone resting in the valley between her thighs, she stares down intently at her crotch, occasionally laughing and swiping fingers across the screen. She looks like a well-adjusted version of his mother. Like his mother if she’d had better parents and gone to a good high school and been able to earn an associate’s degree in something. If she would just look up from her phone she would see him and they could make eye contact and have something like a human connection, they could hold hands and have a picnic and dance in a field to a Billy Joel song and smoke cigarettes together under the moon, but she is playing a game with bright colors and cute cartoon birds, and in those brief moments when she looks away from the screen she seems to be thinking about something unpleasant, a fight with her ex-husband or her son’s college applications, or maybe trying to convince herself that the weird mole on her neck is nothing and she’s going to be fine.

  The phone on her desk rings and she pivots to answer it, turning her back to him.

  She will see him on the news later and not even know how close he’d been to her, how she could have saved everyone if only she’d taken the time.

  Across the street, there is a gas station flanked by a ten-foot-tall brontosaurus statue, the dinosaur smiling grimly as if he’s just become aware of the extinction of his species, of the incurable loneliness that will plague him until he dies. It’s a pretty dark joke by the proprietors, he thinks, a reminder that the fuel pumping into patrons’ cars is the liquefied remains of millennia of once-living things, some long extinct. Every car is full of dead things, churning and grinding and conveying people from one place to another and eventually the people are dead too and replaced by other people. The monetization of large-scale death, the repurposing of extinction.

  He enters One Brother’s, where the pizza is laid out like jewelry in a glass case. He points at a slice with pepperoni and the man behind the counter slides the slice into the oven to heat it up, then turns his attention back to the TV in the corner of the room, which is tuned to a talk show that must be made for children and adults who have suffered traumatic brain injuries. The panel of hosts is debating the proper etiquette for farting in a restaurant; the audience laughs like a roomful of dope fiends who have just gotten their fix.

  It is eleven o’clock. By noon, he will have killed nineteen people, wounded forty-five. He is armed extensively, enough to take out more than that, but his gun will jam and one of his homemade bombs will not detonate.

  The pizza scalds the roof of his mouth and he feels the skin peeling off with the bubbling cheese and he drops the slice back onto the plate, sauce slopping out of his burning mouth and searing his chin and he thinks: Fucking pizza pizza fucking fuck all the fucks. Then he thinks: I could just do it here. Then he thinks: If that guy looks at me again. Then he thinks: Play it cool. You made a plan for a reason.

  Later, the pundits will speculate. They will look for reasons. They will want to know why. They will call him a loner and they will quote former teachers saying he was bright but shy and they never thought he’d be capable of something like this. They will say, Nobody ever suspected it could happen here.

  The pepperoni is unctuous and too round too obviously manufactured too hot too crispy too indifferent. Pepperoni is made from dead animals, he reminds himself. They died for you. Like Christ except at least pepperoni serves a function. There are two jobs in the slaughterhouse, the slaughtered and the slaughterer. Most of them don’t even know until it’s too late.

  There will be a hero teacher who tackles him, and that hero teacher will be the last one to die.

  He bites into the pizza again and now it’s not too hot, it’s so-called just right and as he grinds it with his teeth and feels it sliding down his throat, it goes to that place in him that craves garbage, that is insatiable in its pursuit of grease and sugar and fat, that place in him he would cut out if he could because then someone else could be the fat kid at school, the slob, the punch line. He feels the grease cooling inside him, congealing, and he feels at the same time satisfied and helpless and angry, and then he takes another bite.

  Everyone eats a last meal, even if most don’t realize it at the time. You have a bowl of grain-based flakes and skim milk before heading to work and having a stroke at your desk. His father’s last meal was a hot roast beef sandwich and a bag of chips, washed down with between eight and twelve beers. He didn’t come home from the bar, but that wasn’t unusual; they didn’t even think anything was wrong until the police called and said they’d found his car and someone ought to come in and identify the body.

  Rasputin’s last meal was sturgeon in Champagne sauce and poisoned honeyed cakes. Eichmann had half a bottle of red wine. Timothy McVeigh had two pints of mint chocolate-chip ice cream. John Wayne Gacy ate deep-fried shrimp with fried chicken and strawberries.

  Gerald Lee Mitchell—a bag of Jolly Ranchers. Patrick Rogers—a single glass of Coke. Stacey Lawton—a jar of pickles. James Edward Smith—a clump of dirt. Dozens of condemned men ate pizza before they faced the firing squad or the chair or the injection. Everyone in the pizza shop is condemned, he thinks, they just don’t have the luxury of knowing how or when the end is going to come.

  The door behind him swings open, bells ringing, a cop jangling fat and sloppy to the counter, too dumb to know what’s going to happen. Too dumb to even suspect. He is jovial and everyone here knows him. He carries himself like the world is a good and fine place and like there is meaning in being an overweight small-town policeman who spends his days in a pizza parlor watching terrible TV.

  The officer will be one of dozens pursuing the shooter through the woods near the school, and he will be maimed by one of the traps laid there in advance. He will lose his left hand and sustain severe burns on the left side of his face and he will never work active duty again. After nine months of rehab he will try to reclaim his life but will never again feel like the world is a good or fine place.

  The shooter is finished, except for the crust—eating the crust is unnatural, it’s like eating the bones—and he wants to make a grand gesture when he leaves, give everyone in that room a story, so that years from now they can tell people that the day the shooting happened, they saw him. So they can say: I can’t believe it could ha
ve been me. So they can say: I could tell something wasn’t right with that kid, but I didn’t think he’d do that. So they can say: If I could just go back and do it over again I would have stopped him. But you can’t do things over again. That’s the point. He wants them to understand the randomness of fate, to understand that he himself is fate personified, and he chose not to kill them, not because they’re special or more important or better prepared or more faithful or more likable, but because there is no reason but unreason. He rises and goose-steps toward the exit, his heavy boots pounding a warning into the floor. At the door, he pivots on his heels and salutes the room. He holds this pose for a moment, whistling “Taps,” and then lowers his hand deliberately, like the soldier standing before him and his mother at his father’s funeral. He turns sharply on his heels and leaves the pizza shop.

  He will not survive the shooting. Has no intention of surviving the shooting. There is no escape; anywhere he goes will be the same. He will run only so that they chase him.

  His mother, drunk and alone at home, is watching TV and may not even know he has left the house. Next month, she will have a last meal of Canadian Club and onion rings and a hundred aspirin. Her boyfriend, Don, will be investigated for murder when they find the bruises on her arms, but he will have an airtight alibi. He will try to wring the most out of the low-level celebrity he gains from his association with the whole ugly mess, but in the end he will still be the same sad man he always was. In seventeen years Don will have a final meal of three saltines and some broth spoon-fed to him by the hospice nurse.

  He pulls into the school parking lot. It is fourth period. Soon hundreds of his classmates will be herded into the cafeteria and they will fill themselves with fried food and they will be so loud. They think they have unlimited time and they think the things they care about matter but those things do not matter. The first shots will be fired in the cafeteria during lunchtime, and there will be explosives planted at the doors so anyone trying to escape will be exploded. He will stalk the halls, firing randomly through barricaded doors and catching the stragglers who are stuck without a hiding place. He will pull the fire alarm to make them think he set fire to the building and he will pick them off as they flee. The hero teacher will be shot through the lungs because this is not a world for heroes. This is a world for villains, this is a world for grand statements, not subtlety.

  After the shooting, they will investigate his journals and his music and his web browsing history and they will try to paint a portrait that makes sense; they will shape a narrative around him that suggests the possibility of solutions. During the autopsy, they will find the pizza in his stomach, and they will find the residue of Adderall and Ritalin in his blood, and they will cut his brain open hoping to find some clue about what makes ­people like him exist, but they will find nothing besides what they always find. His brain is just another brain. It’s connected to someone with a bad soul, but you can’t bottle that or study it. The slivers of his brain placed on slides under a microscope will not show the memories, won’t allow them to read the rejection and the emptiness and the abuse and the fear. The slides will not show the ways people can be ruined just by existing in the world. Shell-shocked acquaintances will say without irony that he had so much to live for, ignorant of the fact that the prospect of having to live like this for another fifty years was not the solution to but rather the cause of his hopelessness.

  He leaves his car running and doesn’t bother closing the door. The walk to the school is short, only a few hundred feet, and he feels himself gliding across that distance. He feels suddenly deprived of his senses, blind and deaf and numb. There is no heaven and there is no hell and there is no afterlife there is only now. There will be no white light for him to walk toward. He himself is the light toward which others will walk. He enters the school and then feels his material form disintegrating in the heat as he turns into a red giant star and then goes supernova and collapses on himself and becomes a neutron star, impossibly dense and powerful, and everyone nearby is drawn toward him by the immense gravitational force and then he’s a black hole and then he is nothing at all just cosmic dust that used to be something.

  APRIL

  AFTER, THE SUN turned gray and descended into the lake like a spider dropping from the ceiling. I saw it hit the water, I saw the steam rising up, and I felt the tremors when it crashed against the lake floor. I saw the displaced water splashing over the banks and rushing toward our houses.

  The experts say the sun is too big to fit into the lake, that it can’t just fall, but they can’t explain the darkness, or the fog that hovered over us for weeks. They say it’s basic science—a falling sun would extinguish the world—but I know what I saw. I trust the things I see. I spent much of my life trying to believe in things I’d read. I went through school. I’m educated. I know all the things I’m supposed to believe. But in what world do any of them seem right? Every fact they try to sell you can be disproven if you look in the right places. Everyone says truth is an objective thing, but what if I find a different truth that makes more sense?

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I heard the gunshots, but they didn’t register as gunshots. I’d only heard a gun in real life twice before that day. The first time was when I was very young, when my father made me go on a hunting trip with him and his brother. It was an attempt to bond with an estranged sibling, to reconnect with some primitive vision of masculinity. He’d fired the gun in front of me, hoping to impress me, but all I remember is the look of monstrous glee on his face. The day of the shooting at the school, I thought at first that I’d just heard distant construction or a car accident. I was home when it happened. I hadn’t been at work for two weeks, because I’d been told I was not wanted at work. They had suspended me for a so-called outburst.

  Suspension of the right to work. That’s what the official letter from the school district had said. Rights get suspended and pants get suspended and bridges get suspended. How does it all work? I don’t know; I’m not an engineer. Everyone is suspended in some way, until they’re not. The sun had been suspended in our sky for eons and then it had seen enough.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I watched the news. I ignored my phone though it buzzed incessantly. My email inbox overflowed with people asking questions I could not answer. I deleted everything without reading it. My brother was trying to contact me but I was afraid to answer. What could I say to him under these circumstances? I was very bad at lying to my brother, and I didn’t want to frighten him. On TV they called it a rampage, then they called it a massacre, then they called it a state of emergency, then they settled back on massacre.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I saw the faces. I saw Sara R with the blood on her blouse being led into the back of an ambulance. I saw Kelsey P in the grass where sometimes I would teach my English classes on nice days. I saw a circle of students holding hands in prayer. I saw the windows shattered and the fire smoldering in the gym. These were people I knew, lying dead in places I knew. Changing the channel did not make it disappear. Sometimes life is so graphic it’s impossible to process.

  On TV they speculated. Could it be terrorism? Maybe it was a student. Maybe it was a drill gone horribly wrong. A disgruntled former employee. A random act of violence. An escaped convict. An angel of death. A different kind of terrorist. To be on the news, you just need to own a suit and be willing to guess about anything. You become someone who opines for a living. Opinions need to happen fast, or they don’t count.

  They were grasping for suspects, and they showed pictures of recently fired employees. They showed my face. They said my name. This is Anna Crawford, they said. She was recently fired from her job as an English teacher for insubordination. She posted a message online saying she hates the place. She said, and I quote, I should’ve burned the place down when I had the chance. She added hashtag bitter hashtag spite hashtag fuck that place. On the screen, the text said: FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE.

  Until that report aired, I was unawa
re that I had been fired. I thought I was suspended.

  The knocking started minutes later.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  It was the media first. They filmed me through the windows. And I remember thinking, beyond anything else: I am not wearing a bra. They are going to see that I’m not wearing a bra, and it is going to be on TV.

  The news was running on a five-second delay, so as I watched the media assembling outside my house, I was also watching my recent past self on the screen. She looked so much younger than me. I felt a pang of nostalgia for the life I’d been living just minutes ago.

  I felt the international media rustling through my pockets and ransacking my life, dumping out drawers, hoping to find evidence that I had committed a mass murder a mile away from my home. I felt their hands all over me, violating me. I opened my door and shouted: “You do not have permission. I don’t grant it to you.”

  I shouldn’t have opened the door. When the barbarians are at the gates, you do not lower the drawbridge, even if you have something really important to say. One of them entered my house, and there was a scuffle. The next thing I knew I was in the back of a police car, still being filmed. Later I would watch the video and see that I was laughing as they drove me away. I can’t explain that. I don’t remember it at all.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  While I was gone, the FBI destroyed my home. They broke holes in my drywall looking for caches of weapons. They tore up the carpets and poured my trash cans onto the floor. They found nothing incriminating. Later, they would leave a note saying, “The FBI was compelled by your behaviors to search your home. The FBI is not responsible for any damage incurred by your home during this search. By reading this document, you agree to the terms above.” They say the FBI doesn’t have a sense of humor, but they’re wrong. The FBI loves to laugh.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Nobody told me what was happening. On TV, they reported that I was a person of interest, not under arrest. They were just interested in me, which allowed them to deny my rights.