cog (voice over footage of doctor
removing his vest and hanging it across the back of a chair): The doctor told
me he wears his bulletproof vest to reassure his family and staff, and as a
normal safety measure.
Doctor: Well I have the same concern
lest that something might go wrong so I try to keep an eye open and look around
but um, I um, um, I’m I’m not any really, really any more afraid than I would
be in any other uh um situation where one has to use precautions.
Lacking
precedent the sound might have been anything: a backfiring car, a salvo of
rogue firecrackers, or the repetitive irregular blast of construction
apparatus, but in its immediate context there had been no mistaking the source
responsible for each retort.
Behind
police tape stretched to the point of distortion where the “DO NOT CROSS” lettering of its repeat print became illegibly
abstract, the clinic’s lawn is a deeper more saturate green than those of any
visible neighbour, watered by a single rotating sprinkler which also serves to
maintain at least some distance between the building and those as would protest
the service it provides.
As
the arc of its water is shunted incrementally around, the spray periodically
drops as damp slap and clatter across the single placard abandoned upon the wet
grass, its photograph of a distressed foetus surrounded by words scrawled in
red crayon: “abortion is murder and
murderers deserve execution”.
Parked
in the adjacent driveway, the side panels of the maroon pickup are punctuated
with bullet-holes, the windscreen glass collapsed in absolutely upon its own
broken weight, and keeled across onto the driver’s seat and slumped thus behind
the steering wheel the doctor’s body, his bulletproof vest having afforded him
little protection counter to the point-blank shotgun blast it has sustained;
the driver himself prone upon the gravel alongside, his body now soaking
through the sheet with which it has been covered.
Having
dispersed at the sound of gunfire, the other protestors now stand regrouped
across the street, silent beyond the silent revolving lights of the squad cars
and single ambulance, wary of both police and attentive medics and yet
unshaken, unshakable too in their collective faith that one of their own has
fulfilled his duty within the narrow parameters of what might to them
constitute mercy.
Within
the cordon work to preserve the integrity of the scene continues, every
suspected evidential fragment of each sequential inch bagged and logged, an
overall record accumulated by agencies unaware the missing assailant had been a
mere delegate, a nameless and fundamentally disembodied trigger finger whose
motive they might suppose, but whose capture and even identity would prove
ultimately elusive.
Amongst
this activity, the forensic photographer rises to manually rewind and unload a
film canister from his camera, replacing it with another before resuming his
document of the site, capturing in the background as he operates witnesses
offering to police their cautious testimony so quietly as to be extinguished by
the pivoting sprinkler, the rising whine of his flashgun, and the subsequent
pop as it illuminates for a second’s fraction the scene inside the car where
paramedics struggle to free the doctor’s body, his mouth now spilling its inert
blood while tucked in underneath the tongue and undetected, a silver quarter
dollar embossed with the antlered profile of a moose head,
cog (voice over footage of the clinic
exterior, and an unwanted poster detailing the doctor’s name, age, address,
telephone number, and car driven): Protestors who congregate outside the
clinics where he practices have followed him, run checks on his licence plate,
and produced what they describe as unwanted posters about him. But he is not
intimidated.
Doctor: It’s just that here’s a job that
if I don’t do it it probably won’t get done and uh, so I do it.
sprawled
across the proscenium partway between life and its representation, and too late
aware his godhood had been squandered in the very making of his angels.
