By Josh Wilson
(New York City, 2022)
Brawley gazed at the package. It was in a Nordstrom’s shopping bag — a large box wrapped with plain butcher paper, meticulously taped. No logos, no bar code or curl of ribbon.
“There’s a bag over there,” the young woman had said, a mother with a pouting toddler in tow. “It looks heavy.”
She was frowning, uncertain.
“You’re thinking fast,” he told her. “Thanks for being alert.”
He pulled out his walkie-talkie, motioning her to back away, and for a few moments the air was filled with electronic squawks and crackling voices. Then he looked up and called out, calm but loud:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to apologize but we have to ask that you all clear the room immediately. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to clear the room.”
There was a murmur of protest and confusion. People looked up from the exhibits, absorbed, brows wrinkled.
Brawley opened his mouth again, but before he could speak the alarm went off. An attendant’s voice echoed out from the vaulted ceiling, asking people to evacuate the museum in an orderly manner.
“Guess they aren’t taking any chances,” he said to the woman, turning. But she was already making for the door, her kid bubbling up into a fit of contrarian wailing.
Guess nobody is.
He watched the room empty out, positioning himself by the entrance to keep an eye on the package. As he did there were heavy running footsteps: the bomb squad, arriving in their airtight safety suits and carrying boxes of equipment.
The foremost came up: “Thanks,” he said. “You better clear out now. You made the right call.”
He clapped Brawley on the shoulder and then turned and moved into the room. The team had already set up a perimeter, and was sealing the doors, windows and ducts against gas and germs.
The security guard walked away, towards the stairwell. The alarm was still ringing, and patrons rushed past, panicked, emerging from darkened rooms filled with gems and crystals, and glowing models of the sun, and dioramas of woolly mammoths and other extinct, fabulous monsters.
He wasn’t a well-read man, Brawley. But he understood the majesty and revelatory power of the dusty bones and peculiar artifacts: charms and fetishes that could beat back the darkness, and set a child’s eyes alight with a glimpse of some greater knowing.
He trudged down the stairs, sullen, and suddenly wracked by a fit of trembling. Teeth chattering. Mind gripped by visions of shrapnel and flame, flesh seared and torn to ribbons.
I fucking need a god-damned drink.
But the liquor only gave leave to his insurgent mind. All night long he felt the scorch marks on his face, the fragments of glass and metal and bone dragging through his gut.
“A fucking bomb!” he roared at the mute faces around him. He thought of the young mother and her child, lifted, borne back by the red-orange blossom, and pounded his fist on the bar. “This isn’t fucking normal!”
The bartender finally mustered a smile. “Here’s to makin’ it one more day, big guy. On the house.”
She poured a double. Brawley knocked it back in one heroic gulp, put his head on the scarred, varnished wood, and wept.
* * * * *
“Security officers found a bomb by the big T-Rex in the American Museum of Natural History this afternoon,” said the bright-eyed anchor on the evening news. “The device, which police described as ‘amateurish but powerful,’ was quickly defused and removed from the scene. Police briefly pursued a suspect through the crowd outside the museum, but there have been no arrests. Officials commended a security guard, Kendall Brawley, for identifying the bomb after a museum visitor expressed concern. Authorities have not made a link between this incident and the catastrophic explosion last month in Fossil Flats, Colorado. That blast destroyed the richest bed of dinosaur footprints in the world, and took the lives of 13 researchers. In an anonymous fax Christian fundamentalists claimed responsibility, saying they believed the tracks were ‘the footprints of Satan and Beelzebub,’ and that God had ordered them to act.”
The TV droned on: Drought, floods and fish kills … tac-nukes gone off in Bosnia, intercepted in Syria, believed under construction in the Horn of Africa … plague rats ‘liberated’ from an Oregon lab won’t survive the winter, experts say … police and pickets clash in the streets of Kansas and New Hampshire … In the Southwest there are rumors of militias trading shots: Mexicans and Indians and paleface border patrols … “Tropical Palau, swamped by the latest cycle of megastorms and monster surges, is now considered 85 percent uninhabitable” …
They snagged the bomb in the museum, however. Saved a great cathedral of science from the forces of ignorance and hate. That’s what the anchor said, and segued from that point to another feelgood item:
“Mother Nature makes a comeback in the Adirondacks. A team of biologists believe they have evidence that frog populations upstate are on the rebound. Cornell University scientist Dr. David Mannerling says the species is adapting to acid rain, thinning ozone and warming climates, and that new emissions controls would therefore be an expensive over-reaction. We’ll be right back.”