Prunes at Gunpoint

In a month, Diana Lerzer turns 29. She’s always regarded 29 as that age: the age at which systems break down and maintenance becomes crucial. Years ago at Emory, her boyfriend said she had the metabolism of a flying squirrel, or the Human Torch. This was true: For nearly 29 years, her metabolism has let her eat éclairs and sundaes without sacrificing her consistently serviceable figure. And so the greatest of her selfish concerns (unselfish ones include the depletion of the world’s seafood by 2040, the abuse of immigrant deliverypeople by the Asian restaurants of Manhattan, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and planetary overpopulation) is the inevitable grinding down of this miraculous biological mechanism.

I BOUGHT THE GYM MEMBERSHIP, she thinks. AND I WILL USE IT.

Today she’s ducked out in the middle of work to spend an hour swimming laps, the only tolerable form of exercise. The gym is near the corner of Wall and Broad, mostly patronized by young financial types who work in the area.

She’s entering the gym when her cell phone vibrates: “Admjtwjad Calling.”

When unappealing men ask for her number, she gives them the real one (in case they call right then, while she’s standing there) and when they do call or text, she saves their number in her Contacts as a random letter jumble so she’ll know never to answer in the future. Admjtwjad has been calling for days.

Diana enters the indoor pool area. UGH, SMELLS LIKE PRISON. A few people are swimming laps. Diana dives in. Halfway through her first lap she hears the crack of a starting gun. People are racing? She hears two more cracks and, puzzled, surfaces to look around. Other lap-swimmers have stopped, too. Some sort of slippery scuffle near the men’s locker room—are people fighting? A lot of these finance guys are third-generation date-rapists and fraternity haze-beasts, so she knows she shouldn’t be too shocked. But still. Then somebody tumbles in the pool and the water blushes red around him.

People scream.

More sharp cracks—in the enclosed area the sounds bounce off the walls like birds trying to get out. It’s honest-to-God gunfire. Her disbelieving brain tells her: THAT’S REAL. By the men’s locker room an astonishing amount of blood materializes, as if people have been whacking each other with tomatoes.

Diana’s brain tries to jam visual data together: At least two people—no, three including the body in the pool, have been shot… Figures differentiate themselves from the initial scuffle, spread out around the pool… The ones wearing street clothes—jackets, even—they must be the dangerous ones because why would you… There are four of them—no, five, but one is wounded or something, sagging against the wall…

Also they’re shouting in another language—something jabbery and very foreign. Arabic? DON’T ASSUME, THAT’S RACIST. Do they look Arab or does she just think that because… you know. Maybe they’re Pakistani, or something else brown.

She’s clinging to a floating blue lane line, sort of hiding under it, everything below her chin underwater. Other people try to get out and get shot or pushed back in. A brown guy—the one wearing a backpack—shouts in a thick, clipped voice, “In water, everybody in water!” GOOD, she thinks, PEOPLE CAN PISS THEMSELVES FROM FEAR WITHOUT ANYONE KNOWING. Also: WHAT KIND OF TERRORISTS HIJACK A SWIMMING POOL?

All hostages are now in the water. It’s been ten minutes. Diana’s shivering. Everyone’s shivering. They’ve clustered in the middle of the pool. (Except the dead guy who’s floating where he fell in.) Twenty or twenty-five people, mostly men. One guy holds a bullet-shredded hand above his head to keep it out of the water; blood trickles down his face and neck. Another, who’s been hit in the gut, keeps moaning, “I’m going to bleed to death in here… bleed to death… “

To which a gunman responds: “Stay in water!”

The four gunmen stand poolside (steps from their bloodied comrade, who’s either dead or unconscious against a wall) and have a conference—a fierce, agitated one. The reverberative qualities of the space make it easy to hear their voices, but they’re speaking Arabic. Okay, yes, they’re Arabs. Among the swimmers, there are too many people to form a single huddle, so small whispering clusters form.

“If we can get close enough,” says a brass-jawed, mantle-browed frat-beast, leaning in, “we could take them down—there’s enough of us.”

“You are a fucking retarded idiot,” Diana says.

A guy from another cluster interrupts, hissing, “Hey—some guy over here speaks some Arabic.” Whispered information is relayed slowly from person to person: “Heard him say… They’re trying to figure out what to… happened before they planned… a bomb went off before they… “

Someone says, “They must have been trying to bomb the Exchange.” Given the concentration of soldiers all up Wall Street on any given day, Diana thinks, that’s a pretty bold plan. More information relayed: “One of their bombs went off by accident, he says. These five got chased in here. They’ve got something in the backpack that they’re trying to get somewhere… “

“What is it, does he think?” Diana wants to know. “In the backpack?”

A belch of gunfire convulses the crowd. Ragged screams—people submerge themselves, try to crawl on the bottom of the pool. A blood-cloud is billowing; someone else has been hit.

“Shut up!” a gunman shouts at them. This one has no accent. “Stay in the water and be quiet!”

Three hours later. Diana’s skin is spongy, whitish.

Again everyone is huddled together in the center. The gunshot guy died about two hours ago. Diana hopes his blood doesn’t have any diseases. When he passed out, people took turns holding his wound closed, but it was impossible to keep it dry even if they floated him on his side. Now he’s floating a little ways off, near two other bodies.

The injured gunman is dead, too. The other four remain near the locker room entrance, arguing amongst themselves. They have an air of desperation. They’re giving the hostages what seem like crazy, resentful looks.

THIS SEEMS BAD, Diana thinks. I MAY DIE SINGLE.

A guy shivering next to Diana nudges her. “Look at this,” he whispers, showing her something under the water. A bullet. “It went through the water and slowed down so much it just kind of bumped into me. Didn’t even break the skin. Maybe it bounced off the bottom first.”

“Oh,” she says.

“I’m Alex,” he says. Alex is thin but muscular, good-looking, with close-cropped dark hair; he looks at her appraisingly. “If this was a movie—” he starts to say.

“Shut up,” Diana tells him. “Don’t even finish that sentence.”

If this were a movie, she knows, friendships would form among the waterlogged captives—perhaps even romance. There’d be humanizing backstories for some of them, including some revelatory surprises. And somehow there’d be a trickle of information from the outside world.

But as things are, nobody has a clue what’s going on outside—if the police have laid siege to the building or the Exchange is a heap of rubble or what. Nor has Diana learned anything about the other people in the pool or felt any desire to do so. She just feels mounting impatience.

Everything about this experience, including the people she’s sharing it with, seems so tedious and uncomfortable. She’s cold and, somehow, not even frightened anymore (she’s actually astonished at her own lack of fear, considering the proximity of multiple corpses; maybe she shivered it all away). Just bored. Just pruned.

THIS EXPERIENCE IS GOING TO REQUIRE A LOT OF THERAPY AND MOISTURIZER, she thinks.

It’s been almost five hours. One gunman—the one without an accent—walks to the entrance of the men’s locker room and disappears inside. Voices can be heard. About twenty minutes later, he returns. Whispers pass among the captives.

“He’s talking to someone,” one guy says. “A negotiator. They’re going to get us out of here.”

The accent-free gunman goes back in the locker room; a few minutes pass and then angry yelling, in English, comes echoing back: “We are not afraid to die! We will kill them all, it doesn’t matter!…” and so forth.

“Jesus Christ,” somebody whispers.

Okay, Diana does feel a little scared now. “…will understand that we are serious!”

Then a gunshot.

Everybody flinches… and waits, senses peeled.

The gunman saunters out of the locker room.

Eight hours now. People float on their backs… everyone’s skin is like cheesecloth. Someone weeps quietly but Diana just feels supremely exasperated.

Voices now—the gunmen are shouting, gesturing. Pointing at particular captives: “You! Come over here. And you, and you. And you.” A gun is fired resoundingly at the ceiling. Pieces of the ceiling fall in the water. “You! Now!” Diana realizes that they’re pointing at her.

Moving toward them as ordered, Diana notices that the only two other women in the water have also been picked. Her stomach flips over: OH SHIT, WE’RE NOT GOING TO GET RAPED NOW, ARE WE? She exchanges glances with them and knows they’re wondering the same thing. Wait, though—a fourth person was picked: the guy who got shot in the hand. Diana relaxes: They just chose who they thought would be the weakest. Chose for what, though?

At the pool’s edge, she gets dragged out by her shoulders. It feels strange to stand up out of water—like what astronauts must feel, returning to Earth. Diana looks down and sees, faintly, her rapid heartbeat through her swimsuit. “Do as you are told and you will live,” one of the terrorists says, putting a hand under her chin and lifting her face. She nods. Up close they smell bad, like armpits—SUCH A CLICHÉ, she thinks, THAT THEY WOULD REEK.

“You must do exactly as we say,” the guy says, “and not try to escape. When we get where we need to be, we will let you go.” Now she understands. They’re going to be hostages, paraded out past the police with guns to their heads. She feels tired.

The terrorists seem very agitated, checking their weapons over and over, psyching themselves up for the march outside. She watches the one with the backpack kneel by his fallen partner’s body. He slings the backpack off his shoulder and sets it on the—

A sheet of hot light, a staggering concussion, then stinging in all senses… smell, hearing, sight, touch, even taste. For a moment, she can’t see or move. Then she notices she’s back in the water. She surfaces. Air full of smoke; things fluttering down. The backpack—it blew up. Another shitty bomb. Can’t these guys get bombs that don’t explode when they’re not supposed to? Takes her a moment to figure out where she is—how far she got thrown by the blast—and what’s going on now. Her ears are full of ringing. Okay, beside her there’s some commotion—oh, people are swarming the terrorists who got knocked in the water. Good, they’re drowning them. A lot of splashing. And now they’re drowned, good.

Dizzily she drags herself back out of the pool, gets to her feet. Gravity: so insistent. Something else is wrong. A couple mangled bodies lie on the concrete, maybe dead, maybe alive. She staggers past them. Already, through the rubble and dust that used to be the entrance to the men’s locker room, voices can be heard. Uniformed figures, their rifles up, carefully emerge. She tries to say something. She looks down at her hands and only sees six fingers total; more than half the left hand is missing.

Nothing good on TV. All the news is of course about the botched terrorist bombing of the New York Stock Exchange, as a result of which twenty-three people died, if you count the ones in the Downtown Fitness Club’s indoor pool just across the street.

A frumpy, froggy nurse brings a meal. It’s after midnight but Diana asked and is sort of a celebrity patient given the circumstances, so they brought dinner just for her. On the bedside table, her cell vibrates: “Admjtwjad Calling.”

She looks at the bandage on her hand—its absurd shape, the tubes coming out of it. Every finger but the thumb is gone. She wonders if this will appear prohibitively grotesque—unsexy—to men. Only to assholes, she decides. IN A YEAR I’LL BE 30. 30 IS WORSE THAN A MISSING HAND.

Diana has a guy friend who once dated a girl missing a hand. It was only a little awkward, he said (for a long time he and the girlfriend never talked about the absent hand; they never even acknowledged its absence), and not really a problem, except the time near the beginning when he was trying to take off her bra but having trouble with the strap and he said, “Damn, in high school I could do this one-handed,” and then the one-handed girl turned red and so did he, and they stopped and the one-handed girl put her shirt back on.

She looks at dinner and feels bored. Why does everything always trend toward disappointment and anticlimax? There’s some soft-looking chicken with rice and steamed vegetables, a fruit cup, a roll, a packet of crackers, and a small brick of pound cake. Only the pound cake looks good, so she eats that. It’s damp but acceptable.

~ Nick Antosca: Los Angeles, California | The Brooklyner