Terrorists Preying (cont.)

It’s Short Story Monday again. This is the first multi part story I have begun to post, and I’m having my doubts about the efficacy of trying to share such long stories in this manner. If it's a page turner that you can't put down, then such a piecemeal approach feels stifling, though Dickens did it with his weekly serials. On the other hand, a newspaper serial has a lot more room to work with than a blog, with it's unspoken prescribed 500 word limit.

Last Monday I offered up the beginning of Terrorists Preying. It is a first person account about a former art student from the east coast who now lives in Minneapolis. He visits the Walker Fine Arts Museum whereupon he unexpectedly witnesses a scene of great violence.

That scene of a group of three men assaulting an innocent man in an art gallery actually took place, but not in a gallery. It occurred in a dream I had one night twenty years ago. I mulled over where to go with it and wrote last week’s section, believing it a story. When I shared what I had written with a literary professor, he suggested that it was only a beginning. How did it change this man’s life? His soul? What happens next?

This, I agreed, was my homework assignment. What happens next?

Part two begins…

It’s evening and I’ve been changed.

I'm sitting in a chair, listening to music, recording my thoughts, trying to get in touch with my pain, trying to find a way to get inside myself. I don't even know where to begin. I've witnessed a terrible thing and I can't dismiss it. Why didn't I do anything? I want to excuse myself and I can't. Why did I just watch? Why didn't I scream? Or run for help? Or try to stop them? But what bothers me most is that I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything.

The hero regrets his passivity in the face of such violence. He tries to deal with it, gets drunk, remembers Les Garnet from college, his quest for fame at any cost. He recalls a dialogue in which he sees clearly that he and Garnet have different values.

He decides that he will return to the gallery and see if he can meet up with Les again.

I remember these things and wonder if I'm not watching someone else's life.

These were my thoughts as I left my car and began walking the two block hike to the Walker. It was late morning, the day after the assault. A steamy breeze whooshing through the shrubbery and trees blended with the traffic on Hennepin Avenue to create a white noise backdrop against which my memories performed. The headache remained lodged behind my eyeballs.

Once inside I was struck by how utterly different my experience of this museum was from the previous day. Was it only yesterday I was here?

First, the people were different. I looked at them differently, wondering to myself, "What if it had been her?" and "What if he had been the unlucky one?" What were these people thinking? What did they know about the thing that happened? Were they even aware of it? I found myself studying their faces for clues.

A middle aged man with a fat black mustache looked at me suspiciously and I became conscious of how different I was from the rest of these people. The thing I experienced has stained me.

The art today is different, too. The famous paintings are as wallpaper that has no attraction whatsoever now as I walk past on my way to Gallery 7. The Chuck Close piece gives me a start when I round that corner there, but as for the rest, it may as well be beige on beige.

I make the assumption that this is a temporary feeling. Then again, one never knows.

So I experienced the Walker differently this second time through, having been immunized against those very images that one day previous induced catalytic tremors in my soul.

I understand now why criminals return to the scene of the crime. It is not simply to see if there have been clues left behind. No, it's more than that. They return to reconcile themselves to the reality of horror. There has been violence, created and experienced, and they return to pay homage--in disbelief and in awe. Not a conscious homage, but in that same emotional vein. Will the blood stains still be there?

As I climbed the stairs leading to the Garnet/Benders show, the muffled sound of happy conversation reached me through the closed door of the gallery. The moment I touched the handle, the door flew open, revealing a man in his mid-thirties with rolling waves of thick dark hair, dark eyes and wide, fat lips. He wore the eager look of a Little Leaguer on his way to the Dairy Queen after a big win. He turned to say something to someone standing inside the gallery out of my view.

I enjoyed the process of writing Terrorists Preying, trying to let the characters determine where it was going. In many cases, I know where I want the story to go. But in this instance, it’s almost the closest I came to actually letting the hero decide where it should go.

To finish this story continue here ... One of my favorite parts is still up ahead.