Witness to the Next Shooting (Only a Matter of Time)

Screenshot of the media coverage. My face shows my discomfort. February 2022, Sacramento, California, USA.

The blast was loud—like a firecracker when you’re sleeping, like glass shattering when you’re home alone. And and and still, it had that expected quality of the sudden blare of a timer you’ve set only to become engrossed in whatever you’re doing.

I was on a stair machine, climbing nowhere, headphones over my ears, eyes peeled to my phone screen. It’s only now, as I write, I realize how much louder it must have really been. Like if a gun fires 12 yards in front of you and your headphones mask the sound, was it still 175-decibels-plus-reverberation earsplitting?

Oblivious to the chaos that had been escalating a row of exercise machines in front of me, I was, for a split second, stunned. Then my brain registered the smoke in the same way a smell triggers memory. The details sharpened before my senses. The shooter, weapon in hand. The man before him, teetering. The sulfur mingling with sweat. The press of communal fear.

Then came the steps embedded in communal muscle memory.

Go, our collective brains said. I turned to my left, eyed the glass doors, tracing the path that would keep treadmills and stationary bikes between me and the gunman.

Crouch. I stepped off the machine.

Run.

I glanced back in the direction of the gun, once, twice as I moved steadily, my head low, toward the door. I don’t know what I heard, though there must have been sounds, only that my ears, my entire being, was waiting for the next gunshot and the next. A whisper, raspy with fear, sounded close to my ears. “Hurry.”

Together, we streamed out the door, spilling onto the sidewalk white with sunshine. We turned left toward the brick barrier of the building next to us.

“Go back,” I told a family strolling toward us, in the direction of those glass shatterable doors, fat-cheeked toddler gurgling in his stroller. I switched to Spanish when Mom’s laughter tinkled in the sunlight, riding the cadence of Dad’s animated story, unfazed by my warning. “Hay una …” Losing the word, I mimicked, pointer finger trained on the lot packed with cars, thumb cocked. “Pistola.” The spell of their bubble popped. The father took in the flood of people streaming past them in the opposite direction. His face crumpled in understanding, and he stepped in front of his family, back tense, steered them away into the sea of parked cars.

I turned back and watched the man who’d fired the gun slip out the door, his gray hoodie pulled up to shield his face. He threw his leg over a bike that had been propped against the building and pedaled down the sidewalk to the right, disappearing among the heavily trafficked street at the far corner of the lot. Patting my workout pants, I realized my keys and purse were in the locker room downstairs, realized my phone was in my hand. I dialed 9-1-1.

“I’m not sure,” I answered the operator, lurching toward the street sign that seemed forever away, squinting but not quite able to make out the lettering.

Someone else had already called in the shooting at the Planet Fitness. She wanted to confirm I was at the same location. But I was passing through a town I’d never been to. Didn’t know the difference between Stockton, Mack Road, or Capitol Ave. I’d just wanted a quick workout and a shower. Then I’d planned to grab dinner, figure out a quiet spot to tuck the van in and sleep for the night, and head south again at the rise of tomorrow’s sun.

Now, the dispatcher wanted to know if I’d seen which direction the shooter went in. He’d gone right, I told her, if you’re facing the street from the door. I tried to flag people streaming by. “That street,” I said, pointing to where the bike had disappeared. “What’s its name?” But no one answered, shaking me off or ignoring me altogether, caught up in escape, in survival, in fear of strangers, in confusion. I saw that the sun was lowering directly in front of me over the lot, and the word west formed in my mind. “He went north,” I said. “Northeast.”

We hung up, and I took in large gulps of air. For the first two years of living in a van, I’d avoided the classic shower-by-gym-membership model. I washed below a foot-pumped nozzle in water warmed by the sun or over my stove. Pre-COVID, I supplemented with the indoor showers at truck stops or rec centers when outdoor showers were less convenenient. Now, with my second vaccination in my arm and things opening up, I wanted people again. I wanted cities. I wanted a life less conducive to hunting a secluded spot for a shower tent and dousing my head with water heated by tea kettle. So, I’d taken out a Planet Fitness membership. Today was my first visit.

At the back of the lot, Ruby the van stood out, taller than most. I could get in with a hidden spare key, turn the heater on as I determined how to collect my things. But a shiver of loneliness was greater than the chill over the lot as the sun’s angle widened, its rays gone sideways. And I found myself not even going for a warm jacket before joining the handful of people gathered outside the entrance.

A bearded man in a black T-shirt and I tumbled like weeds blown by the same wind to each other and then through the assessment phase, comparing details, letting the words soothe the trauma, like kneading an injured muscle. He’d been even closer, on the treadmill in front of me, just feet in front of the stretching area, cordoned off by a short, hip-height barrier. He’d been watching the altercation boil in that space before him. Shouting had tumbled into shoving and barreled into fists thrown. Then the man in the gray hoodie had dropped to his haunches and reached for the jacket, which he’d, at some point, tossed to the ground. The gun was in the pocket. He took it out as he got to his feet, wielding it like an extension of his frustration—unwieldily and imprecise, a juxtaposition of the implement’s reality, cold, hard, rigid.

When the man with the hoodie had fired, my new friend couldn’t be sure if it had been accidental or early. But whatever the case, the timing had likely saved his target’s life. The muzzle was not yet perpendicular with the ground when the bullet left it. We’d see later, when a stretcher came through those glass doors, carrying the wounded man, still brazen though in a subdued way, that he’d been hit in the thigh, instead of the stomach or chest. And how it would have torn through skin and shredded vital organs at a range near enough for fisticuffs, our eyes told each other as the wounded man disappeared behind ambulance doors.

My friend and I had opposite reactions to the arrival of the news crews. I, more comfortable on the other side of cameras and reporters’ notebooks, walked away. He followed me, neither of us ready to sever the tie that meant we weren’t processing this alone. But as we leaned against a cement pillar, watching as the cameraman got a wide-angle shot for B-roll and the woman in pencil skirt and blazer tested her mic and scanned for a willing eyewitness, his reluctance to stay put emanated from him. I could almost see the line drawing him to the mic. Our eyes met, and we stood as one and were reeled in together. I stepped back as she interviewed him, though, as I would see later watching the coverage, not quite out of the shot. I would be surprised to see that I still wore my mask outside and a little embarrassed, like it was a statement I hadn’t meant to make.

Our wait outlasted the media teams. The owner arrived, escorted in by the officer at the door, who assured us it wouldn’t be much longer. By then, the sidewalk had turned the color of steel like an autopsy table, the light over the lot sterile and cool.

“Wanna see what we can see from the other side?” my friend suggested.

The gym was part of a strip mall. By going through the main entrance, we could circle around inside to the gym’s entrance from inside, another glass door, this one across from a now empty food court. The stores were all shuttered, and our voices and footsteps echoed in the hollow space. For a moment, we sat at at table. I offered to buy us food with Apple pay if we could find a place nearby, thinking of the warmth of company for dinner.

When movement inside the gym caught our attention, we stalked to the window. A girl, purple shirt, long dark ponytail, held a spray bottle in one hand and a mass of paper towels in the other. Her back was to us. And she stood still, looking down for a long moment. When she bent, she disappeared below the waist-high wall blocking off the stretching area where the gun had fired and the man had fallen. I stepped closer and peered through the glass, cocking my head and bending, trying to find an angle where I could see her. Then her hand appeared just beyond the wall, pushing the wad of paper towels along the floor. I gasped as my mind filled in the wet, sticky redness that must have been below those towels.

“Is this happening?” one of us said.

“I think so,” the other said.

“She’s really young.” That was probably me.

Bile rose in my throat, and I stepped back away from the glass, feeling like a voyeur, feeling numb and sick and impotent, wanting to be away from all of this. As we made our way back outside, unspeaking, the tie that had kept us together was rent. We became two. Strangers.

The front door was open moments later. I collected my water bottle and towel from the stairmaster, stumbled to the basement locker room. Showering down there in the empty windowless room felt weird. But I was cold, and I craved hot water and strong pressure. I dressed and wondered where I would sleep and how I’d shake myself into the task of finding a spot to park that felt safe. As I walked once more toward the glass doors leading to the sidewalk, now lead-colored in the moonless night, I walked past the man with the beard and an older woman we’d met during our wait outside. Spaced a few treadmills apart, earphones in place, they finished their interrupted workouts. I nodded in their direction, not looking back for an acknowledgment and hurried into the night air.

The view out the window flap of my shower tent. November 2020, somewhere on the California coast.

I ended up getting a hotel room for the night. The desk clerk’s boyfriend had been on his way to the gym when the news of the shooting broke out. She gave me a voucher for breakfast and a late checkout. In the room, I showered again. In the morning, I hit the road as if nothing had happened, more or less putting it behind me. It goes without saying that I’m grateful one man being shot in the thigh in a crowded gym in a strip mall was “all” that happened. But it should also go without saying that it being so easily dismissed as a day in the life is a problem.

How can something feel both inconceivable and inevitable? Both a shock and an of course? I don’t know what adding my voice to the chorus asking over and and over again, “Is this happening?” can do. I don’t know how we’ll stop being torn apart, rendered strangers by the fact of horror being normalized or political divide being grounds for hate and unreason—only struggling to take care of “our own,” to carry on. Or not. I don’t know how I could if I a loved one was among the 48,830 people who died by gun in the United States last year (2022) (just over half by suicide and just under half by murder with a handful of accidents and police shootings between).¹

I don’t know how we’ll turn this collective timer alarm we’ve set off.

I do know that people with guns kill people. I do know that if someone brings a gun into a space where I am, my chances of dying by gun skyrocket. I do know that I am human, so nothing human can be alien to me (Maya Angelou). What if the deadliest of weapons weren’t available to become an extension of the frustration and fear and impotence that can boil in our human hearts, inevitably getting the best of us from time to time? What if, in those moments when our human brains are addled with despair, and we ache like an unfillable abyss, we couldn’t easily reach for an implement that can end the chance of seeing abyss become expanse, end us in a fraction of a second? What if, when anger turns our human veins red-hot with betrayal and vengeance, we had to pause before simply gripping a tool of destruction? What if we didn’t have to wonder when it will be our or our loved ones’ turn to be witness (or worse) to a “gun incident”?

I do know that, when I wake up and hear the next deadliest shooting has happened, again, I have to fight a cloaking sense of unreality and hopelessness begging me to simply turn away. It wasn’t “mine” this time. What can I do anyway? How does my despair help? I do know that, when people from the United States ask, aren’t you scared to travel alone, especially in far-flung countries, I am surprised. It is here where a clock is ticking.

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• If you or someone you know is in suicide crisis or emotional distress, in the United States, call 988. Here is a list of suicide assistance lines in 35 countries.

• Here, Maine News Center pays tribute to the 18 who were killed in Lewiston, Maine, this week.

• A report by the American Psychological Association has sections on what works in preventing gun violence on the individual, community, and policy levels.

• Moms Demand Action has a form you can fill out to ask Congress to reinstate the assault rifles ban and a box you can check to become a volunteer.

• I read

  Joy Sullivan
  ’s gorgeous piece on why to press on without guaranteed results, even in the face of the unsolvable, “How to keep going in the dark,” right after writing this piece. And I’m so glad I did.

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Thank you for letting me share this story. I don’t know what specific questions to ask today. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

1. John Gramlich, “What the data says about gun violence in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, April 26, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/.