“Are these things true or are you making them up?”
“True.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I used a thing called the Internet. You’d be amazed at how much information is available there.”
“Okay,” Wendy says.
“Can I continue, or do you have anything else you’d like to ask?”
She says, “Continue.”
“So our guy’s in a bad mood, and what does he do? Well, for one, he takes a second job. Verizon sales rep during the day, but at night he watches the door at a prewar Tribeca building where bankers like Ricardo Cortes live in palatial apartments. So now we’ve got this guy, Donnell Sanders is his name—a handsome, intelligent guy, no less, who everyone says is a lovely motherfucker—and every day Sanders sits there, trying to figure a way out of his debt, and meanwhile your friend Cortes passes by on his way upstairs, reeking of privilege, flaunting his queer, druggie lifestyle. We’re talking dealers in and out, rent boys, fashionistas, coked-up businessmen. Money falling out of pockets. Empty plastic baggies scattered up and down the emergency stairs. Used condoms on the hallway floor. People buzzing in at 4 a.m., arriving in limos, departing in Porsches. See what I’m getting at?”
“I do,” says Wendy. She imagines Michael as part of this scene, a wedding band being slipped into a pocket.
“Resentment is starting to build. Meanwhile, Cortes, being the asshole that he is, keeps making drunken innuendo at Sanders, jokingly offering money for blow jobs, or what have you. Sanders does not find this funny. His debts are continuing to accumulate, while at the same time C&S isn’t prosecuted for the bevy of crimes that put Sanders in this very situation. Instead they’re forced to pay some bullshit ten-billion-dollar fine that might sound like a lot, but that Sanders knows is nothing to these guys, and will pay for itself and then some after the company’s shares go up in the wake of its non-prosecution. Skip to last month, and it turns out the market’s crashed again, meaning Sanders’s loan debt will somehow increase. So what does he do? What can he do? He goes to an #Occupy rally, exercising his right to, at the very least, bitch about all that’s happened, when he suddenly finds himself in a hotel room face-to-face with the very asshole he’s been hating all these years. So he drags the fucker into the empty room downstairs and unleashes his anger. Do you understand why this is problematic?”
“He’s sympathetic.”
“Exactly. And not only is he sympathetic, but he’s an angry black man, which means that white people will want to placate him out of fear that if they don’t, it could happen to them.”
“What could happen to them?”
“Murder.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
“There are holes in this story. Where’d he get the gun?”
“Of course there are holes in the story. But the holes don’t matter. The holes can be filled. Let’s say he had been carrying a gun as part of his doorman duty, or because he’d recently been mugged, or he has a micro-penis and can’t afford a Ferrari, or he watched westerns as a kid, or any of a million other reasons someone might carry a gun. The point is not to make him lovable, but relatable. There’s a difference. But the holes don’t matter anyway. What matters is the larger effect of this kind of narrative, which draws attention away from some kind of #Occupy-based conspiracy and toward a lone gunman with a personal issue.”
Wendy can already feel herself disconnecting Ricky’s death from the game they’re playing. It’s easier to intellectualize than to face the gutshot of a human vanished. It was easier, after her mother died, to write an op-ed for her high school paper criticizing what she called the Cancer Industrial Complex, which prioritized research for high-visibility cancers like breast and prostate, while killers like pancreatic stood in the underfunded shadows. It was easier, when Nina died, to organize a neonatal mortality support group, using Communitiv.ly’s conference room as an after-hours event space, stocking the meeting with Nespresso pods and nut milks, zero-calorie sodas and artisanal cupcakes, purchasing leather-bound notebooks in which the attendees could write down feelings, though Wendy left hers blank. It is easier, now, to focus on work.
“Look,” says Wendy. “It’s not as bad as you think. Let’s say the doorman did do it. It may seem improbable, but let’s pretend it’s the truth. Donnell the doorman committed the murder in the manner you’ve just described, dragging Ricky into a conveniently empty room and shooting him with a handgun. Here’s the question we need to ask: Would this murder have occurred if it weren’t for the Funeral for Capitalism and the planned march to the Zone Hotel where protesters were provided with an opportunity to exercise their anger? As far as I understand it, the answer to that question is no. Donnell Sanders is not a murderer by nature. I’d guess that he’s never previously been convicted of a crime. He did not premeditate, and never would have killed Ricky if he hadn’t been given this opportunity. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Go on,” says Lucas.
“Now what does this mean for us?” Wendy continues, feeling herself, as she speaks, take on Lucas’s speech patterns, his syntactical style, which is half TV DA, half radio DJ, words relayed so rapidly that it’s impossible to stop and consider any single piece of information without missing whatever comes next. “What it means is that, regardless of who literally pulled the trigger, the blood is on #Occupy’s hands. It’s on Nøøse’s hands and it’s on Jay Devor’s hands.”
“Keep talking,” says Lucas. She’s never seen him show deference before. The power in the room seems to shift in her direction as she stands above Lucas at full height, feet shoulder-width apart, arms at her sides.
