A piece of creative nonfiction about a disturbing experience, involving a robbery, a shooting, and the effort to make sense of it all.
Slowly the French penetrated my understanding, or perhaps it was the loud voice of the gendarme, whose face was about six inches from my ear. “Go back, or go to jail.”
My eyes were fixed on the thin stream of blood, trickling between my legs, from the forehead of the dead robber. What struck me most was the perfect circle of the bullet hole, centered, also perfectly, between his eyes.
I had been swept across the street with the crowd as I exited the Metro at Marx Dormoy. When we arrived in front of Le Grand Magasin the gunfire had stopped and a getaway car was speeding away, pursued by the police. Everyone saw the dead man. The others, fluent in French, soon moved back across the street. I was transfixed.
Once I became aware of the angry gendarme at my side, I too moved away, and continued along the street to the apartment where I lived with friends. I bought a bottle of wine on my way home.
As we ate dinner that night, I told the story, as I tell it here. A remarkable experience.
Experience is defined as the impression left by contact with an event or occurrence, which serves as a basis of knowledge. It is said that experiences play a crucial role in shaping our lives and influencing our perspectives, that they contribute to personal growth, empathy, and understanding of the world around us. Experience includes episodic memory – reliving a past event that can be explicitly stated, which I have done with this piece of writing and on countless occasions in conversation. Psychologists and cognitive scientists believe that emotion tends to increase the likelihood that an event will be remembered later. Some experiences are transformative, being so powerful that they leave one a different person from who they were before.
All this assumes that an experience has meaning, which begs the question: What was or is the meaning of my experience on that evening in Paris? I don’t know. Which is a strange answer since I began this rather prolix discussion of experience by defining it in connection with knowledge.
Note: The 18th arrondissement, known as Butte-Montmartre, is mostly known for hosting the large hill of Montmartre known for its artistic history, the Moulin Rouge cabaret, and the prominent Sacré Cœur basilica which sits atop the hill. The 18th arrondissement also contains the Goutte d'Or district, designated a Sensitive Urban Zone, an area defined by the authorities to be a high-priority target
Quite an interesting experience! I can see why it was forever emblazoned in your long-term memory like so many incidents of mine. Unfortunately some of those incidents tend to get a little frayed on the edges of facts as I look back at research I did about what happened after.
My experience like that was as I turned the corner to take the highway south in Mexicali, I had my window open and I heard a coach's whistle blowing. I stopped and the young Mexican officer ran up and explained in English… "Go to police station… pay fine."
I envisioned being thrown in jail for having little cash and my car impounded. I convinced him that I'd mistaken the stoplight didn't have a left arrow when I made the left turn in green. He started to let me go when an older officer came and they argued in the street as I drove away.
