The Sixth Station(9)

The troops began rushing him inside as the roar of the reporters grew deafening. “Over here! Demiel! Over here!”

Demiel, suspected terrorist leader and mass murderer, whom many called “Savior,” simply shook his head so slightly that eyewitnesses—of which there would be thousands more than were ever there that day—would later say it was more of a thought than an actual motion. While that motion would remain forever in dispute, what I can never dispute is that after that shake, thought, or whatever it was, everything grew quiet—for me, at least.

In fact, for me it had all become so still that the deafening din on the packed streets, which moments before had sounded like the roar of ten oceans, went so quiet I could hear a single birdsong in the park. I think it was a robin.

It even seemed that the federal agents who were supposed to be perp-walking Demiel—parading him in shackles for the benefit of the media—slowed down and walked calmly, neither rushing him nor pushing him.

It felt as though a mass fugue had suddenly affected nearly everyone who had come to see the sight. It wasn’t until later that I learned that I was the only one who was suddenly so calm and distant.

I could hear Dona’s remote Minicam running next to me. I was holding on to my reporter’s notebook, but I was no longer all that interested in writing anything down. It wasn’t that I couldn’t; it was just that I didn’t want to.

All I could really focus on was Demiel slowly moving forward, the sound of his shoes slapping the pavement growing louder as he came nearer to me. And then that sound seemed to die away, too. When the shackled suspected terrorist was right in front of us, he stopped and looked directly at me. I could see the pores in his face, the small irritation where his starched collar had scraped his neck, and even smelled his freshly laundered shirt.

Reflexively, without knowing why, I returned his stare.

He leaned into me, and I could hear the hundreds of reporters, in unison, letting out a muffled “Ohhhh,” as I stood there, unmoving.

Then he kissed me on the lips.





3





It took a quarter of a second for the federal agents to realize what had just transpired on their watch. It took another quarter of a second for ben Yusef’s two “handlers” to spring back to action in unison, shove him hard, and hustle him inside the building.

Immediately the world around the UN came back to life for me—the din, the frenzy—as though it had never stopped. The realization that something very, very strange had happened finally hit the crowd as ben Yusef was being hustled inside.

When I personally could no longer see him, I became conscious that my fingers were on my lips. I’d done it blindly, unaware that anyone was watching, when in fact the whole world was watching.

I could feel the wetness of his kiss on my lips and closed my eyes as though savoring the kiss of a lover who had just walked out the door. It was similar to the feeling I’d had when I’d kissed Donald good-bye that last time—when I knew he was going for good. All of that seemed to happen in the nanosecond before I instinctively wiped his saliva off my mouth and cheek with my scarf. But regardless, I could still feel his wiry moustache and the bristles of his beard on my face against the background of whizzing, clicking, buzzing cameras. I put my fingers to my lips again.

Dona smacked my hand away protectively and whispered, “Stop it … just stop it.”

It was pretty much all they had, the images of me touching my lips, in place of the big photo—the one of the kiss—that every reporter had gotten from some obscure angle, but none had gotten up close and personal the way Dona had. She had both shots from thisclose in 12-megapixel still, and video versions.

I heard her saying somewhere in the background, “Damn, girl! And I’m the one who bought new panty hose!”

Inexplicably near tears, I croaked, “Why me?” The answer I would later learn was more complex, more dangerous, and more horrible than any poison gas or weapon of mass destruction that humans in their infinite wisdom had yet to devise.

Within an hour those pictures of me touching my mouth were posted on the front page of every media and gossip site in the free and unfree world, blasted to millions of e-mails, Tweeted, Facebooked, forwarded, YouTubed, and you name it on millions of monitors and phones, shown on JumboTrons, and on loops on every 24/7 news channel.

Dona knew, though, that she alone was holding the best video of the kiss, and with that she could become a very wealthy woman. Because Fox News had relegated her to “permanent freelancer,” Dona’s film did not belong to them.

“‘God works in mysterious ways,’ my mother always told me,” Dona said as we began to make our way inside.