I was left instead with how fallible the perceptions are, how easily bewildered the mind, how approximate its assessments.
I still wonder what that man and his driver were so angry about. What makes a person want to kill another person — and endanger so many innocent people in the process? What makes a person not even care about being seen while engaged in such actions? How had the gunman been worked up into — or habituated into — the practice of such unabashed violence?
But that night, after the fact, as my adrenaline level began to drop, my fear shifted from the heightened physical state to a jangled, disturbing emotion.
I picked up my cell phone and called friends who had been at the party I’d left, who I knew would be awake. They were watching television, they said, still in a food coma from dinner. Their voices, cheerful and then concerned, calmed me down and, most important, called me back into the world I usually inhabit — that civilized, beautiful and fragile state governed by law and, miraculously, general goodwill.
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