Page 158 of Think Twice

“Myron?”

It was Win.

“I’m here,” Win said, and Myron could hear the unfamiliar panic in his friend’s voice. “Hold on, Myron. Stay with me.”

But Myron couldn’t.

“Myron? Myron, stay with me.”

He wanted to listen. He really did. But he was plunging into that humming void now, and there was only blackness.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

WIN

Myron?” I say again, hearing the alien pleading in my tone. “Myron, stay with me.”

But he isn’t. I can see that now. His skin is gray, his lips already blue. Blood bubbles up and pours freely from his neck. I clamp my hand over the spot, apply pressure. I turn to a man who is standing next to me, filming this.

“Call 911,” I say in my most commanding voice. This is what you do. You don’t just yell out randomly for someone to make the call. Too many people will stand around and assume someone else will do it. You assign someone the task and make sure they act on it. “Call now.”

The man nods and starts to dial. I don’t know whether it matters because I imagine someone has already notified the authorities. Chaos reigns. I keep my hand over the gushing wound. Myron’s blood is trickling through my fingers.

He is losing too much blood.

“Hang on,” I tell Myron, the tone sounding faraway and unfamiliar in my own ears. He isn’t conscious anyway. He can’t hear me.

I can see several things going on at the same time in my periphery. Grace Konners is on the ground. She is dead. Her eyes are open and unblinking. Her blood slowly leaks toward the Imagine mosaic. Greg Downing, the one who shot her, sprints toward Jeremy. Jeremy’s complexion, like his biological father’s, is ashen. Jeremy is wisely holding up his bloody stump of a hand above his head, like it’s a torch, staring at it as though surprised it’s there. Greg rips off his coat and wraps it around the wound.

I don’t know how long we all stay there.

At one point a woman kneels next to me. She is maybe fifty years old with reddish hair tied back in a ponytail. “I’m a doctor,” she tells me. “Keep applying pressure.” I will later learn that her name is Dodi Meyer, and that she works in the Emergency Room at New York-Presbyterian. She rolls Myron onto his back. I don’t dare move my hand from his neck until the paramedics arrive and relieve me.

I pull my hand away then and climb into the ambulance with him. I stare down at my hands as the ambulance speeds away. My hands are drenched in Myron’s blood. Later, I will wonder when I cleaned off the blood, because as many times as I have replayed that night in my head, I have no recollection of doing so.

And yes, that’s an odd thing to be wondering about.

Myron dies twice. Once in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Once again while on the surgeon’s table. We oft hear how tough humans are, how we are built for survival, but it never fails to startle me how fragile and subject to the whims of fate we end up being. Here is Myron Bolitar, one of humanity’s best specimens on so many levels, an empathetic soul from hardy stock who has also been imbued with remarkable physical strength and intelligence. And yet. And yet despite doing everything right here, doing the moral thing, the courageous thing, the wise and careful thing, all it takes is a madwoman with a readily available weapon to snuff out such a force. We like to think the universe is just or orderly, but we all know that it is not. It is cruel and random. We think that we have evolved as a species, that it is the survival of the fittest, but in fact, the best of us, the strongest of us, the most intelligent and brave, were sent to battle centuries ago and died no matter how, like Myron, brave and skilled they were, while the feeble and cowardly stayed home and reproduced. That’s who we are. The byproduct of the feeble and weak. The fecal wreckage, if you will, of history. We want to believe that there is an ethical center to our being, that our world is peaceful and kind, and yet anyone who has seen even five minutes of a wildlife documentary is reminded that we must kill to survive. All of us. That’s the world whatever higher being you believe in created—a world of kill or die. No one gets a pass on that, including you smug vegans, who plow fields and in doing so sacrifice living creatures so that you too may survive.

This isn’t a pleasant realization, but do you want pleasantries or truth?

And now, as I watch the life force drain from the man I care about most in this world, I beg to a higher being that I don’t believe in and I know isn’t listening, as many of you sit there and tell me this is part of some master plan.

Imagine being that naïve.

You want to sleep at night, so you tell yourselves fairy tales. Like a child.

But I digress.

Myron is in the hospital. He still has trouble communicating.

That is why, with your permission, I am finishing this story for him.

His road back will be a long, arduous one. There are few guarantees. A full recovery, whatever that might look like, seems unlikely. A full month after the shooting, when he’s no longer comatose and in the ICU, Myron is moved into a private corner room in the Milstein Building at New York-Presbyterian. I arrange this via a sizable donation. A cot is placed in the corner near the window. Terese sleeps there. She has taken a leave. She rarely leaves his side.

I won’t go into the details of his injuries because I don’t see the point. Myron spends most of his time in a fog of pain and medications and procedures. It is hard to know what he comprehends and what he doesn’t. I try to explain to him what I can. It is hard for him to focus for long stretches. I repeat myself because I fear that he either forgets or the material doesn’t quite stick.

So let me answer the questions that I can. I have told this to Myron too, though I am condensing dozens of conversations with him into this summary for you: