quislibet | Some sad news and morbid musings

I would be stressed today anyway, with trying to produce an intelligible draft of a prospectus to give my advisor tomorrow before he visits his parents in Germany for two weeks and with having to face my first session of "driving around in a car with an instructor" two hours from now. I would probably have the headache anyway (I really should get a better pillow) that makes the above less bearable.

Last night my mom called me, fairly late. That, combined with her opening -- asking me if I remembered someone I used to know many years ago -- boded ill.

It seems that Monday morning, just after midnight, a 22-year-old man named Quincy Allen walked into a Citgo in North Carolina and shot the attendant, Richard Hawks, "without confrontation," apparently with the motive of robbery. While Allen was still in the Citgo an unsuspecting would-be customer, Shane Roush, a teacher from Lancaster, Ohio, nearing the end of a long drive to visit his college roommate, entered the Citgo and was dead before he knew what hit him.

Allen is apparently still at large, believed responsible for at least one other murder in the last week, and has warned authorities via stolen cell phone that he would kill more people if they tried to catch him. As it seems likely he will do so anyway, the police are trying to find him; earlier this week, they were looking in the Atlanta area, according to several of the stories that come up on google.

Shane Roush, a few years younger than I, was a childhood playmate of mine, although I was closer friends with his cousin Trent; when Trent moved away from the neighborhood Shane and I didn't hang out so much, and Shane's family moved before high school, I think. I last saw Shane at college, ten years ago -- he ended up attending my alma mater, at least for a year or so (it seems he graduated from elsewhere). We didn't really hang out then, either, although we spoke a few times: it's not easy to create a friendship around age 20 based on having played army guys or D&D around age 10, without much interaction in between.

He was probably someone I would never have seen again in my life, except for perhaps a chance meeting and five-minute "hey, how are you" small-talk conversation at the mall at Christmastime. I thought of him recently, trivially, remembering fondly the day we found all the girly magazaines his father had put out with the trash.

But now he's dead, for no other reason than that he stopped for gas or a soda or something at the wrong Citgo on the wrong night.

My hometown newspaper's article about his death stresses what, for me, is the most horrible aspect of this, which plays right into my persistent fears of unforeseen loss (recently aggravated by having to watch all of those car-crash films last month): the suddenness, the unexpectedness, the fact that you can, for instance, win a doubles tennis tournament with your older brother one afternoon and the next morning hear he has been shot dead in another state for reasons that have nothing at all to do with him. (Not that being murdered for more personal reasons would be better.)

I don't want to imagine his parents' three-hour wait between first being contacted by the North Carolina police at 7:30 in the morning, who asked for details about their son's car without saying anything more, and finally getting the awful news...

I want to say I had forebodings all last evening that something terrible was in the offing; my own t-shirt had made me uncomfortably aware of mortality (as a Gravestone Artwear garment, its point); I didn't really want to look through my alumni magazine, as I had an inexplicable fear that I would see an obituary notice of someone I knew; a bike ride to the supermarket -- our exercise last night, as we were too lame to go to he Y -- had me on edge, since the combination of driving class scare films and the recent fatal bike accident in Cambridge has me paranoid (someone is going to door J. any minute now and I will be helpless to prevent it); and dammit, even the fact that our purchase of cat litter and milk and pita bread and a lemon came to six dollars and sixty-six fucking cents seemed much more ominous than it really merited. Then we watched a taped episode of "Forever Knight," the height of our ambition in the heat, which episode was all dark and brooding and phobia-focused and involved lots of fire (and even as we watch this I can hear our fire alarm giving off its warning beep that the humidity is fucking with the connections and I just know we're going to have a fire tonight and the alarm will fail and...).

And then the phone call came.

But you see, I doubt there's really a connection, even if one accepts the notion of prophetic forebodings. For one thing, the terrible thing already had happened days before; I was just getting belated news. For another, I have forebodings all the time. I check sleeping loved ones to make sure they're breathing. I imagine the worst when people are rather late. I find that I am often almost surprised when people I care about return safely from a trip.

It's a problem.

I seem to have made this about me.

Shane, farewell; it seems so flat and uninspiring to say that I liked you, that you were Good. I will miss knowing that you are out there.