WKZ RADIO REPORT
Good evening and Happy Halloween, I'm Harris Haggerty with the news bulletin for today, Wednesday, October 31st. A TRAGEDY IN PAWNEE. As you know by now, mother and child were killed in a terrible accident in the Margate Tunnel in Pawnee on October 26th. Nicole Pearce, 36, and her six year old daughter, Lena, were both severely injured. They were pronounced dead at the hospital less than an hour later. Two other victims were pulled from the wreckage and suffered minor injuries. One doctor at Pawnee Medical Center, said quote, "In twenty-five years of emergency room medicine, I have never, ever seen such horrific injuries," unquote. At the entrance to the tube closest to the scene of the accident, has already been covered by stuffed animals, candles and flowers. The city council of Pawnee has erected to wooden crosses by the large heaps of now damp plush toys. The funeral arrangements have been published. A public viewing is now scheduled for Monday from noon until seven at Christ the Redeemer Church and the funeral on Tuesday morning at ten AM also at Christ the Redeemer.
In other sad news, residents of New York City, New Jersey, and Long Island are still in the dark after Superstorm Sandy made landfall on Monday. Both Con-Edison and PSE&G, the major electricity providers, are still working to restore the lights. Several electricians have even travelled from Chicago to the areas most severely impacted. And now more on the storm… It was a depression when it made landfall near Atlantic City. At her height, she sustained wind of eighty miles per hour and had gusts of over one-hundred. The governors of New York and New Jersey are both getting help from the President. The monetary damage is thought to be in the tens of billions. The complete number of fatalities in the United States is still unknown at this juncture, but it is thought to be in the dozens.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5th, CHURCH OF CHRIST THE REDEEMER, 13:00
I had a strange joy about this, sitting in the front pew of this church. I looked at the two boxes up there and grinned. The caskets were shut and two easels with good pictures of them were displayed. They didn't have to worry about anything anymore. And I was happy that the caskets were closed too. As asleep as they may have looked, I knew that they were dead. They were at peace.
There had been no peace for the living over the last week. The media was having a fucking field day with this. It was plastered all over the newspapers. "TRAGEDY IN PAWNEE" "MOM AND TOT DIE IN CRASH" "A PEARCE TO OUR HEARTS: A FAMILY FRACTURED" All the papers wanted to make puns and witticisms and still I was in no mood for levity. They published all sorts of editorials, but I didn't car about what they had to say. Even in the last hour, I watched all of those eyes look at the caskets and then at Jackson, and then at me, in that order always. I didn't want fifteen minutes of fame. I knew that Jacks didn't want it either. He wanted to go to school.
I wanted to send him to school, and I was going to send him the next day when I got a call from his teacher, on Sunday the 28th. Mrs. Burnett was a nice lady, stern. When I picked up the receiver, I could hear the emotion in her voice. She was sniffling as she spoke. "Mr. Pearce, I know I'm breaking protocol by calling, but I had to call you in person to give you my condolences."
"Thank you, hearing an actual human being say it is nice."
"Well, I called to say that—. It's my professional opinion that he needs a little time away from school. He's in the fourth grade, and fourth graders don't quite understand how to express—"
"I don't understand," I started, "He wants to go to school. I want him to go to school. I want him to be with his friends and I don't want him to fall behind." I even thought that I sounded demanding.
"Please," she stretched the word trying to calm me, not that I was truly upset with her. "You see, Jackson isn't the problem. He wouldn't be the problem. He's the smartest young man I have ever come across in all the years, I've been teaching. I mean that. He grasps all of the concepts so quickly. He's sensitive to how others feel. I'm afraid that the rest of the students would be the problem, because they're nowhere near as thoughtful. Most kids his age still have two or three of their grandparents, but he's lost his m—. I requested counselors to come in and train the whole student body on sensitivity."
"So what does that mean for him in the meantime?"
"It means that you I'm going to email all of the work. It takes the counselors about a week to acclimate the students."
That was bad fucking news. We had nothing to do all week, or at least he didn't. I had to find the insurance policies, and make all of the arrangements while he usually sat outside in the hallways of the institutions I had to visit.
And now, here we were, sitting in the front pews of this church watching the dozens and dozens of people who came out to show support, or grieve or gawk or balk. Their faces all started to look the same for me. They looked stiff and cold, unlike my memories of Nicky and Lena.
There was something in the back of my head, a voice, telling me to siphon money from these people. And I didn't, though it would have been easy.
The ctOS made it easy. Anywhere there was a surveillance camera, there was a ctOS connection. Somehow, Blume had wormed its way into every aspect of the lives of every citizen in this town. Bank accounts, medical records, everything on everybody was in that system.
I wasn't going to do anything like that today. That's what got me into trouble in the first place. And I wondered about Damien. He had gone quiet. They probably got him.
At least that criminal bullshit was over.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6th, CHURCH OF CHRIST THE REDEEMER, 09:46
"… and when I saw this tragedy on the news, I not only asked myself why this happened, but what causes these things to happen. Why do such terrible things happen to good people" the priest was well into his eulogy when my attention came back to the church, the funeral.
"People ask, 'why would God permit this? Does He really care as much as we think He should?' Well, to that I say, I don't know. But I think of God in a different way. I think of Him as a vigilant sort of God. He watches us and knows us. His end goal for all of us is justice and truth and right and good. That is why He sent His Son, Jesus, to save us from ourselves. The only problem that we all will have to grapple with is that He does it in ways that we are simply unable to understand all of the time. He works in mysterious ways. He's God and we cannot comprehend His goodness.
"The Lord giveth and He taketh away. And maybe, just maybe, it was just to remove our dear departed from this world of sin and sorrow, this world of polluted and degrades morality. They have been removed from this culture of death to eternal life. Let us remember what Paul tells in his second epistle to the Corinthians, 'To be absent from the body, is to be present with the Lord.' Let us take comfort in the fact that these two beautiful human beings are definitely at home with their God, a loving, vigilant God who will never leave or abandon them or us, the bereft. Let us remember in this seemingly unending night of weeping and sorrow that 'joy will come in the morning.'
The priest continued, "And I believe that the dawn will be bright and warm. I believe that you who are left behind will make this a wonderful dawn. You will make it warm with the people you meet, with the relationships you form, and the way you carry yourselves in the future. The daybreak will be great and God will bring warmth and love to you now and forever."
He stepped down and I felt empty. They all kept saying that the pain would fade, but it kept intensifying. I looked down at Jacks and he wasn't crying. I don't think he was going to. I read someplace that not crying was a sign of resilience. If that was the case, he was stronger than I was. My vision was blurred tears and my palms were soaked from the ones that had already fallen.
Someone would tell me later that all of the people in that church behind us were sobbing. Someone else said that the church was also filled with the cacophony of cameramen doing their job. I had blocked out all of that noise and only heard the clergyman's soft voice.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6th, ST. JOSEPH CEMETERY, 11:18
I didn't feel light at all. They were in the ground and I was above it, and it felt wrong. Culture of death, huh? Why couldn't I have been the one to die? I deserved it for my deeds and thoughts. I hurt people, killed people, stole, intimidated. They didn't. And my words about peace before were wrong. There would be no peace for anyone now. Now would be a very busy time for my sister and my niece.
As I think, the scavengers are trying their hardest to subsist for a bit longer, before the frost solidified the soil. They were inching their way closer to the bodies in those boxes. And they would have a feast to rival Thanksgiving in a few weeks. The worms and mites would eat into their ears and eyes and mouths. And all the time they would putrefy on their own and deteriorate with the heat and wet and freezing and thawing. And in the end they would be skeletons like any other bones in the ground, nameless, faceless, forgotten and rotten. Unremembered and uncared for. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All of these bright flowers would die and, in the spring grass would grow over the fresh earth here leaching the nutrients they need from those beneath. Chicago would move on. The lights would stay on and burn bright. And we would be stuck trying to find a new normal. Whatever the fuck normal was.
Jackson snapped me out of my numbness, or rather, my nihilism, "What did Father Peter mean when he said 'culture of death'? I mean I don't want to die.
Where the fuck did he grasp those questions from. "I think that he meant that people are—. We're forgetting about each other as people. We're becoming more divided and relationships are dying between people. You'll see as you grow. You'll see that sometimes people forget themselves. They let their personalities die trying to—" I tried to find words.
"Trying to what?"
"Trying to do things that mean nothing to God. People try to get better things in life or get revenge, or just plain hurt other people. They stop living the way God would want them to live and only focus on the ends. The ends don't always justify the means." I didn't know how much I believed what I was saying.
"What?"
I pivoted, "Wanna play chess? I saw a table over there and I feel like beating you today."
"You wish." And I did wish. He won about three-fourths of the time. Every time I won, I felt like he was allowing me to, and he was.
We set the board up, and within ten moves I was about to lose. Something broke his concentration. "Are you getting the feeling like someone is watching us?
I looked around and saw no one. I thought someone was watching, but people had been staring at us for the past few days. I knew that the attention would move away from us. It had to.
