He snapped his fingers at Laura and demanded a legal pad and pencil, even though they were right there on the desk in front of him. He drew a map of the office and stared at it. He said things like, So what we need to do first is, and Okay, okay, this is good, this is great because, and, I wonder if maybe instead we should. He obviously had no fucking clue what to do next but was trying to make it sound like he was unknotting some thorny but brilliant plan. We let him at it with the sad understanding that this delusional activity was all the glue holding poor William together.
In the meantime, Jackson, who played shortstop in our softball league, and whose batting average was consistently in the high.300s, and who, it was once rumored, could have gone pro, and whom some of us called Action Jackson, though never right to his face because we didn’t want to come on too strong, huddled a group of us together and said, stage-whispering, So, what do you think? How about we tell them that one of us is sick and when one of the guards comes in to investigate we smash him over the head with that blue paperweight Laura’s got on her desk? Take his gun, go from there?
We looked at each other and then at Laura’s paperweight and then back at Action Jackson and then nodded and said, Sure, why not?
The thing was this: We all knew the plan was doomed to fail. Most of us didn’t think it would work even so far as to get someone to come into Laura’s office to investigate. It was such an obvious ploy. The men in black outside Laura’s office, if they were even within earshot, would know exactly what we were up to. If they had seen any kind of hostage-situation movie clip made in the past thirty years, they would ignore us once Jackson started yelling through the door.
But still. We tried it anyway. Michael was on the floor doing a decent job, we thought, of having a heart attack, and some of us wondered — what with all the double-bacon cheeseburgers he ate for lunch — if he’d had some experience in this role.
Jackson, too, good old Action Jackson, was a surprisingly good actor. There was a timbre of real fear and anxiety and concern in his voice. His eyes showed the fear, too, which spoke to a true devotion to this role since no one but us saw his eyes as he was standing on this side of the door with Laura’s blue paperweight hefted over his head.
In any case, none of us, not even Jackson, thought there was more than a slim chance that one of the goons would come through Laura’s office door, so it was a bit of a shock when the door opened, that it opened as fast as it did, as if the guys were just waiting for us to pull some kind of stunt like this. And it was more of a shock — to all of us but to Jackson especially — when the guard caught Jackson’s arm midswing, how cleanly and quickly the guard broke Jackson’s wrist, and then pulled him — him, the strongest and most athletic of all of us — into a tight hug as if he were some kind of rag doll and then snapped him, snapped Jackson like he was that cookie part of a Twix in a Twix commercial. Jackson’s eyes widened when this happened but that was all. It happened so fast that there wasn’t any pain to speak of, not in his eyes, anyway. Not in his face. No grimace, no groan. Maybe he was dead or maybe he was simply paralyzed, but when the guard let go of him, he landed on the ground like a cardboard box would, or not like a cardboard box but like a side of beef would, or not that either. He wasn’t a side of beef. He was Jackson. He was Action Jackson. He landed the way Action Jackson would have if Action Jackson were possibly dead.
Michael scrambled to his knees and stumbled against the desk and pulled himself shakily to his feet and the guard, finished with Jackson, pulled his gun and aimed it at Michael’s head. We held our breath. We didn’t even look at Jackson, crumpled on the floor. We wanted to rush to him, to throw ourselves prostrate over him, to sob uncontrollably, but the gun pointed at Michael shut us all up, made us keep perfectly still.
Then the guard smiled and then the guard left and we didn’t understand what had just happened and we didn’t know what was going to happen next and we had no fucking clue as to what we should do.
A long time passed and we didn’t move. We didn’t rush to Jackson’s side, didn’t sob over his prone form, didn’t do much but stare at the door, at the space where the guard had stood and aimed his gun at one of us after having ruined another of us. Michael was breathing hard and Laura — poor Laura — whimpered to herself. Jenny sat heavily into Laura’s office chair. But otherwise, we were quiet and still. Even William, who normally might have taken this opportunity to make some sort of speech — a disappointed-in-our-poor-efforts speech or a stern but encouraging father-figure speech or a rallying-the-troops speech — even William was quiet.
He was the first to move. He dropped to his knees and then lowered his ear to Jackson’s face. Jackson’s eyes were open and wide still, as if his face, his expression, had become stuck. We couldn’t see any up-and-down movement in his chest. His body didn’t look comfortable lying as it was. William was there for some time, his ear pressed to Jackson’s chest and then to his face and then back to his chest.
Then he looked up and shook his head, which was the wrong thing to do considering what he said, which was, I don’t know how, but he’s still breathing.
We were so relieved by this we didn’t even bother to tell William that the sad and wistful headshake wasn’t proper head-movement protocol for when someone you thought was dead turned out to be alive. Instead, we rushed to Jackson’s side, where we quibbled immediately: lift him, leave him, set his head at an incline, cover him with a jacket, don’t let him fall asleep, no, if he wants to sleep, let him sleep? What we agreed on though was the need for a doctor.
And also, to be honest, there were those of us who wished, secretly, that he was dead outright.
We weren’t cruel. We understood he was in some way better off not being dead, but how much better off?
We thought about his wife and his son, who was eight and who would bat-boy for us at games. We thought about the change waiting for them when we got out of this. Their once strong and handsome husband and father now irrevocably broken. Doctor’s bills. Physical therapy, wheelchairs, feeding tubes, an elaborate blinking system with which to communicate. She would cheat on him, or would leave him entirely. We’d met her enough times to suspect she was that kind of woman. The son would grow up weak and servile, or a bully. Jackson would become a burden they would come to despise and one day he’d wish that he’d just died and would regret that his condition, which prevented him from living life, also made suicide a near impossibility. We considered his life laid out for him and shook our heads at the travesty of it and wondered at the thin line between being dead now and the life waiting for him in the future.
But mostly, those of us who wished he’d died did so because we dreaded the idea of spending the next few hours in here with Action Jackson — God, what a stupid name — incapacitated and possibly dying, but certainly not being helped by lack of proper medical administration. We imagined good odds on his dying before all this ended. And if he didn’t die, if he regained consciousness, we imagined his making demands we couldn’t fulfill. Or even if he were to lie there stoic and strong, how depressing would that be, the constant reminder of him? How bad for team morale? And while we didn’t have a good plan for what to do next, whatever plan we came up with would surely involve leaving him behind, and wouldn’t that be easier, we thought to ourselves, with him already dead?
We kept this to ourselves, though. We touched him gently on the shoulder or the cheek, careful not to move him or make him worse.
Then we moved away from him and by unspoken consent, we stayed as far away from that part of the room as we could for the rest of the time we were trapped there.