37.

AFTER THE CEREMONY it was time for Anthony to go home. He walked across the tarmac at Charles de Gaulle Airport toward a jet waiting just for him. Ho-ly shit.

An idea came to him. He dismissed it for a moment, then thought, Why stop now? He took out his selfie stick, extended the telescopic handle, and recorded the last of his European trip.

The interior was plush. Dark cherrywood paneling everywhere. Was it real wood? It didn’t matter. Cream-colored seats that swallowed you up, trays and drawers that appeared out of nowhere with food, candy, booze, whatever you wanted, secret compartments that would magically appear to offer him snacks or juice like the whole machine was designed to anticipate his needs.

He sat back in one of the seats, the backrest collapsed and the legs extended, so that his whole six-foot-four frame was stretched out, and the seat swallowed him up. The plane was whisper quiet, the roar of the engines reduced to a soothing purr that drowned out the intensity of all that had just happened; his life arcing off in a new direction after the train, then four days during which he never came down, camera flashes and phone calls from the president, an ambassador’s assistant adopting him and Spencer and Alek like they were her own children, the presidential suite, a medal he’d never heard of given by a president whose named he still wasn’t sure how to pronounce, all of it pushed back into a distant corner of his thoughts by the thrum of the engine, and one final thought popped up, We never made it to Spain, before that too floated away and for the first time in four days, Anthony slept.

Fourteen hours later, he woke from the dead. He was in Oregon.

He rubbed his eyes, stood up, and was shown to a connecting flight to Sacramento, where he was first exposed to the maddening, funny, and more or less constant pressure of fame.

Fame. Was he famous? It was a strange thought. On the one hand, he hadn’t done much to get famous. On the other, what was a bigger deal, starring in a movie, singing a pop song, putting a ball through a hoop? Or stopping a terrorist? He had sensed, during those eerily calm moments on the train, that France would go crazy. They weren’t three marines like the news kept saying, but Alek and Spencer were military, so it still was a story of American servicemen stopping a terrorist. He wasn’t surprised that France held them up and made a big deal of it. He’d seen the narrative immediately: American military saves the world!

But he didn’t know just how big a deal it was going to be, and it hadn’t occurred to him that anyone outside of France would care, or really understand, what had happened. Because he still didn’t. It was still a small, muddled moment in his life, a brief and incomplete blip on his memory. The images that played across the screen in his mind when he closed his eyes were all things that took place on a small narrow stage, a rectangle of twenty-five square feet hemmed into the aisle of a train car. They were mostly images that involved five people. Spencer and Alek. Chris, the British man. The gunman. Mark bleeding out.

Maybe it was because it just wasn’t possible to accept that hundreds of people were still alive because of him. How does one comprehend a thing like that? What does “hundreds of people” look like? How much space do they fill up? Maybe it was a matter of physiology, just a fact of science that the brain isn’t equipped to visualize that much suffering. The brain needs something comprehensible. It wants familiarity.

On the short flight from Oregon back to Sacramento, Anthony saw, out of the corner of his eye, a person he thought he recognized.

Holy shit is that—? They made eye contact.

“Anthony? Anthony!”

Anthony was disoriented for a minute. Where was he—wait, was John Dickson on the same flight? They’d been trying to connect in Germany; now here they were in—where were they? Anthony had fallen asleep in France and woken up in Oregon and it took a beat to place himself back in America rather than somewhere in Munich or Berlin, or wherever they’d been only a week ago, a time period that now seemed impossibly long.

“John? What the hell are you doing here?” What were the odds? After trying so many times to get together in Europe, they ended up on the same tiny commuter flight from Oregon to Sacramento.

“What the hell did you guys do over there?”

Anthony began to ask him what it had been like playing semipro basketball in Germany, but was interrupted by a tap on his shoulder. A middle-aged woman in a power suit knelt down next to him.

“Hi, Mr. Sadler? I’m sorry to bother you, but I just noticed I happened to be on the same flight with you. I’m a reporter from a TV station in Portland.” Anthony’s new normal had begun. “I just saw you and scribbled down a note to you. Here’s my card, just give me a call, okay? If you think you might like to go on TV.”

She went back to her seat and Anthony raised an eyebrow, looked over at John, who was laughing and shaking his head. “She tried that already,” John said. “She tried to give that card to me when we first got on. I doubt she ‘just happened to notice’ she was on the same flight.”

So Anthony was beginning his newfound fame with a juxtaposition: he was famous enough to draw reporters onto flights just for the chance to interview him, but not famous enough to overcome the media’s impressive inability to tell the difference between black people.

The small commuter jet landed and taxied, and when he walked out onto the stairs, the circus began. It was like he’d been in a hermetically sealed chamber protected from exposure to the eyes of millions of Americans, and all of a sudden the pressure had become too great, it had burst open, and now here he was, exposed. News helicopters circled overhead to capture his arrival. Three FBI agents and two policemen at the bottom of the stairs took him by the elbow and rushed him down a back entrance of the airport, before he could even properly say goodbye to John. John, meanwhile, walked into the terminal and was ambushed by dozens of camera flashes and microphones shoved in his face, “Anthony, Anthony,” they yelled at John, “are you happy to be home?” While the real Anthony was being ushered into the back of a motorcade and whisked away.

His parents’ house was already hemmed in by a phalanx of news trucks with satellite antennas fully extended, so Anthony’s father had booked a hotel room, but Anthony wanted his own bed. “Can you just drop me off at my apartment? I’ll be all right. If there’s nobody out there.”

Pastor Sadler rerouted the sheriffs.

Still, Anthony was having a hard time connecting himself to the experience of what was happening around him. He didn’t feel in his bones that he had saved hundreds of lives. That was an almost impossible thing to accept. That was Superman, flying up to a jumbo jet and nudging it just before it crashed into a mountaintop. If he couldn’t fully internalize how many lives he had saved, how, really, could all these other people? What to make of all the news trucks surrounding his house like they were guarding it? Did those reporters all understand?

Was it him they were interested in, was it the seriousness of what had happened, or was it something else? Were they like the reporter on the plane, faking (he was now certain) a chance encounter when really she wanted his face to boost her own ratings? He didn’t mind it terribly, but he had no idea how long it would last, this value he now had inside him that others could extract. Soon Spencer would tell Anthony he’d gotten calls from stalkers, and from local news anchors imploring him to come on their own shows like he owed it to them, because landing one of the three heroes was a guaranteed promotion.

So Anthony had a new power now: the power to make careers.

The questions swirled in his head, more questions than answers, but the one thing he was certain of was that he was exhausted. If he was going to be any use to anyone, he needed some rest.

By some grace, none of the reporters had found his apartment yet. The complex was gated, but unguarded, and with no one watching it; the gates were always open, not keeping out undesirables so much as gently suggesting that they please, if it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience, stay away. Two men in black suits got out of the SUV with him, walked him all the way up to the door. Nobody was there. “Yeah, I’ll stay here,” Anthony said.

Anthony was home.

Then, quiet. It was strange to be here on his own, without Alek and Spencer, who were still back in Europe being debriefed by the military, Spencer getting more medical care.

It was strange just to be back. Everything in his life was different, but everything in front of him looked the same. It felt like a minor offence that his apartment was exactly as he’d left it, after he’d just gone through . . . whatever it was he’d just gone through. The colors should be brighter, the rooms bigger. Everything had been surreal, larger than life. Now he was home, and home was exactly the same, and he didn’t fit it. He felt he’d been in a dream; now he was waking up to beds that needed making, an apartment decorated by a college kid rather than some Parisian interior designer, a degree that needed completing.

He didn’t want to be alone. He called everyone he could think of, and soon he had twenty people over asking him to recount the story, but even with all his friends and classmates around him, there was one person he felt he really needed to talk to.

Spencer, he thought, his apartment wall to wall with bodies, how you doing over there, brother? Spencer, how did you know the terrorist was behind us?