Somehow people in New York knew before I did. A few days before I had turned the ringer off on my phone. I slept in. I never sleep in, not even when I’ve been up all night. I woke to Katrien telling me, “Get up, the store’s on fire.”
My phone was already filled with both condolences and expressions of shock. As I scrolled down, I finally saw multiple texts from Thu. She eventually gave up on getting in touch with me, and smartly contacted Katrien instead. My landlord was apparently unaware of this more accessible option.
“The bookstore’s gone. It burned up. Brad, I’m so sorry,” was his voicemail message.
By the time I got there, the burn seemed complete. Books had become trash strewn down the street. I mostly wandered around. Pure immediacy is both a state of shock and suspended animation. It’s where action and reaction are indecipherably, strength and helplessness stare one another down.
Everyone seemed to be performing roles, capably and professionally. Even I, as useless as I felt, must have done the same. Everyone was or seemed sincere. I guess that’s also the thing about pure immediacy. I wouldn’t say it necessarily brings out the best in people, but it does tend to show what’s really there.
I believe everyone who apologized for the loss. And yet loss was also the one thing not truly there in that moment. It loomed, yes. It was even staring at me from behind the line no one was permitted, into the blackened hole, blown apart violently, of what used to be a bookstore. I guess what I mean is that silent truths, the reality of all things taken and gone, are such because they don’t have to be announced in order to be true.
By the time I got to my car, I knew I would have to say something beyond whatever was quoted by reporters. Fortunately, nobody who knew us at all expected something especially well-crafted. Given the circumstances, yes, but also because I’d always taken a devil-may-care sort of attitude with social media. The most eloquent thing I could manage was also the most simple: what you’ve maybe already heard about is true. And though it was not as bad as it could have been, it was as bad as it was. And like any loss, it would endure.
I returned to the store a few hours later to meet with a public claims adjuster. He had lost his home to a fire a couple of decades ago. I couldn’t imagine. This paled in comparison, but in these matters nobody is really comparing. You feel what you feel when you feel it. It’s always as bad as it is. Am I up to the task of being better than what I am?
He talked me through the claim process. I mostly understood what he meant about the property loss – if you were to turn your store upside down, anything that falls out is property. Barely at all what he said about the coverage of future losses. It wasn’t until I got home that I had a sense that the future often has more to lose than the present.
“It’s been a helluva day,” was how I started the video I posted online that evening. I’d sat down in my office at home with no notes, or even a real intention to record anything at all. As I scrolled through the comments on my earlier post, and clicked through the posts of others, marveling at the geographical distance the responses reached, I started and deleted at least a dozen responses.
Thinking back, I realize I talked more that day than I might have expected. I internalize a lot of things, to my body’s distress. And yet, between the multiple reporters, the adjuster, Katrien and Liz, my landlord, my former boss at the bookstore, I was in conversation all day. What I think I missed, as I opened up the video program on my computer, was the gathering of thoughts that sometimes only happens alone. Not to assemble them coherently or inspirationally, but like you might debris. To sift through all that is broken for something worth salvaging. I thought that maybe the camera might help.
When I do author introductions at events, I often walk to the microphone without a script. I’ve described it less as improvisation, which is a proper art, and more as talking myself into a corner to see if I can fight out. As I hit record, something similar happened. Clawing my way through the brute reality of the circumstances, I eventually scraped against the tiniest bit of dumb resolve. A resolve that simply knows no better or other.
The immediacy of the day’s loss had by its exhausted close discovered “Well … now what?”