An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing #1)(71)
Everyone disperses, the heir to the throne gets swept to safety, and none of the other would-be assassins get to try their hand at assassination.
That’s a weird day already, right? Well, it gets much weirder.
The parade, of course, is called off and the prince is safe. But then he decides, in his wisdom and bravery, that he wants to go visit the people injured in the bombing at the hospital. The driver takes what is likely to be the worst wrong turn in history and then, realizing it, puts the car in reverse. It’s 1914 and cars are very new and glitchy, so the car stalls in front of a deli where one of the foiled assassins, Gavrilo Princip, just happens to be standing.
Princip steps forward, pulls out his gun, and fires two shots. One hits the prince, who by now I hope you’ve figured out is Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the neck. The other hits his wife, Sophie, in the belly, killing her quickly.
An aide, trying to hold closed the hole in the neck of his prince, asks him if he’s in pain. The archduke says, “It is nothing.” He repeats this—“It is nothing . . . It is nothing . . .”—over and over until he falls unconscious and then dies.
It was not nothing. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand touched off a cascade of terrible decisions and reckless diplomacy that ended in the deaths of more than sixteen million people.
Keep that in mind if it seems like the following events are improbable. Sometimes, weird things happen that change the course of history . . . and apparently they happen to me.
* * *
—
Andy looked like he’d slept a good thirteen minutes. He was untidy and quiet, and I could definitely smell him as he adjusted my lapel mic.
“You OK, dude?”
He looked at me like he was just realizing I was there before moving his eyes back to his work. “Yeah, fine. I’m fine.”
“I don’t think you’re fine.”
He snapped out of it a bit then. “Fuck, April, of course I’m not fine. What the hell are we doing?” He didn’t sound agitated. He sounded tired.
“We’re going to go out there and try to make this a little better for everyone. I need to believe something myself.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re going to say?”
“I have a couple ideas.” I’m not sure I did, but I felt pretty sure that something good would come to me. “Is there anything you think I should say?”
“Aside from that the world is awful and how the hell did we come to this?” He sank down into the sofa. I hadn’t told Andy about the shot, I hadn’t told him about Carl Jr., and I hadn’t seen any sign that it was still in my apartment. If it hadn’t left, it was in one of the rooms I wasn’t going into.
I looked down at Andy, understanding for the first time that his eyes weren’t just puffy with lack of sleep. I realized I hadn’t cried yet. That was messed up. I thought about just crying right then—it would have been easy, just relaxing a mental muscle and I would have been gushing. But then I thought (for real), Nah, April, save it for the camera.
Gross.
Out loud, I said, “All those people out there, they’re defying the police and the terrorists to stand with Carl. To stand with us. To simply say, ‘The world is not awful,’ that’s what we need to go down there and do.”
“April, on the news, they’re saying there might be more attacks. Look at all those people down there! No one’s checking backpacks! I almost had a panic attack just getting into your building!”
“I spend all my time on the news, it’s their job to scare you. I watch it firsthand all day long.” I will say this for myself: I wasn’t giving Andy a pep talk because I needed him. I could’ve gotten someone else to hold the camera. Hell, I could’ve gone down there with a selfie stick and it would have been great footage. I wanted him to do it because we were in this together and I wanted him to feel that way. I felt as if I was telling him the truth. I was just giving him a dose of reality because I thought it would make him feel better to do something great on a terrible day. I was kinda right, I guess.
I guess.
“Remember when I called you in the middle of the night to go look at a weird sculpture? I did that because I thought you wanted something and I could help give it to you. But, Andy, you are so much more than I thought you were then, and I’m so much less. I don’t need you to help make me famous, I need you to help keep me sane. There’s nothing more dangerous outside that door than a Halsey concert.” He had his eyes closed, but I could see the concentration in his face. I don’t know if he was concentrating on keeping his mind in the present, on facing his fear, on not crying, or on not saying things that he wanted to say to me but knew he shouldn’t. In any case, it was clear that he was working hard. “Let’s go down there and make the world a little better, OK?”
* * *
—
Andy was shooting on a DSLR, about the size of a teakettle, with a big, heavy wide-angle lens on it to help him get good shots even in close quarters. With the mic receiver and preamp assembly, it was about a three-pound rig. Ten years ago, a setup to get similar-quality video and audio would have weighed at least thirty pounds.
Another nice thing about wide-angle lenses: They don’t show shaking as much. That’s good when you’re getting jostled around by a crowd . . . or just shaking in terror.