Termination Shock

Whenever you watched a movie, and new characters began to appear on the screen, you had to pick sides. To decide who to root for. From the word go, Rufus was on the side of the guy in the turban. How many times in his life had he been that guy? And the conspiring, finger-pointing white people he couldn’t have hated more.

Here the video had to be paused because a discussion had broken out among various Black Hat operatives. “Dude is Arab!” someone objected.

“So?”

“It’s kind of racist to call him Squeegee Ninja.”

“Why?”

“Ninja is a Chinese thing.”

“Japanese,” someone corrected him.

“Okay, whatever, but the point is, not Arab.”

“He’s not Arab,” said another voice. “Dude is Indian.”

“I never heard of any Native American tribe wearing turbans.”

“I mean, from India.”

“Oh.”

“He’s not Indian. He’s Sikh,” said yet another voice.

“Sikhs are Indian!”

“No, they are from Pakistan.”

“Arabs then.”

“No, Pakistanis are not Arabs!”

The pace of the discourse had slowed down as mad typing on multiple keyboards was taking over the audio feed. “According to Wiki—”

“I’m gonna restart the video now,” T.R. announced. “Y’all can take this offline.”

The guy in the turban was clearly oblivious to the little drama playing out at the cash register. Even if he’d been paying attention there’d have been nothing to see, because as soon as he came in, all those people clammed up and made a big show of not staring at him. He looked around to get his bearings, then lurched in the direction of the bathrooms. “Lurched” being the operative word here because something about his gait was off. Like invisible hands were trying to pull him back out toward the parking lot and he was tearing loose from them. Once he’d got well into the building he seemed to recover his equilibrium, and then made a beeline for those world-famous surgically clean T.R. Mick’s toilets.

It transpired that he needed to go number 2, and so there was now an interlude during which the cash register caucus resumed its deliberations and acquired new members. A couple of these were open carrying, and as the conversation went on and began to include words like “Arab,” “terrorist,” and “bomb,” these reached around to pat their weapons. One drew his pistol from its holster and pulled the slide back to inspect the chamber.

A different nonwhite, non-Black man entered the frame from the other direction carrying a foil-wrapped burrito and exited to the parking lot. He seemed oblivious to all this drama and was scarcely noted by its participants. Rufus might not have noticed him at all had T.R. not paused the video and remarked, “We think that is the driver.”

Eventually Turban Man finished his business in the toilet and headed straight for the exit. His utter lack of interest in any of the food, beverage, or leisure time modalities on display in the T.R. Mick’s was construed in the darkest possible way by those observing him. A contingent hastened to the bathroom to look for (guessing) bricks of plastic explosive stuck beneath toilets. In this they were disappointed; but by that time the man in the turban had already checked in for his appointment with destiny and the truck stop was on fire.

For three members of the self-appointed posse had followed him outside. Camera angles flickered around for a spell. The principals were all on the move through a relatively camera-impoverished part of the property and the editor had had to make do and fill in with some less than ideal cuts. But as luck would have it there were a couple of strong angles on the place where the posse caught up with its prey: a vacant gas pump, 37G, about a hundred feet away from the building.

One interesting detail that caught Rufus’s eye here was that the guy was no longer unsteady on his feet. More the opposite. While Rufus was just a mediocre athlete himself, he’d played football with a couple of guys who had gone on to the NFL. He’d always known there was something different about them, just based on the way they carried themselves, the way they moved. The guy in the turban was one of those. By the time he reached Pump 37G, the posse had been hassling him for a little while, questions hardening into threats and commands. He was ignoring them, pretending not to hear. But he was keeping his hands in view and well away from his sides, which was smart of him.