Garrett Biggs

We will never know precisely what dinosaur skin looked like and we will also never know how it felt when Lauren, a recent theatre graduate from Barnard, stole a prop gun from the set of Cabaret, held it to her Uber driver’s neck, and demanded he drive thirty miles an hour into a white brick wall. The driver’s name was Santiago. He drove a Mercedes. We will never know for certain why Lauren chose to order a luxury Uber during surge hours or why she waited six minutes to pull the plastic gun out from her backpack, but we can go ahead and make guesses. Maybe they upcharged her only like six dollars and she didn’t plan to live past midnight. Or her mother accumulated a ridiculous amount of money when she divorced a hedge fund manager. Or Lauren worried she lacked nerve and wouldn’t go through with it. Or when she slid into the backseat of Santiago’s car, she expected he would take Fulton but he turned onto Vanderbilt and in the six minutes it took for her to wield her weapon, she was suddenly overcome with joy for this street she always loved. Its brownstones stood sturdy, nondescript—lovely feats of architecture, really. Nothing like the ugly, industrial lit condominiums that budded across the adjoining neighborhoods. Sometimes it was hard for Lauren to believe other people truly lived inside these rented cars and single pane windows. Harder still to believe everyone she interacted with wasn’t a weird little drone, putting on a performance for her, alone. If you asked her whether there were other feeling creatures on this earth, she’d put the odds at 50/50. She had doubts about how evolution unfurled. First came God (or so she figured) then came amoeba (tough to picture, but likely true) then an ape or a monkey (or maybe something mysteriously kangaroo-like) and then for a time there were all these cavemen slouching around. We will never know what it was like to be some paleolithic guy hunting an armadillo bigger than her Uber and we will also never know why Lauren believed man did not displace Neanderthal. As far as she was concerned, first came God then amoeba then monkey then caveman, and finally, the actors. Soulless, grimy, stupid actors—and as the car passed a spooky park lined with empty tennis courts, Lauren almost certainly convinced herself that Santiago was an actor or an idea or a city when she shoved the plastic gun mere centimeters from his spine. Pick speed or pick stillness. Pick a paralysis. Pick between an exploding airbag or a bullet in the neck. And when you pick, she probably said, don’t pick a trope or a prop. A faint hollow pop. It’s true we may never know what it feels like to press the trigger on a gun, but we do know what it feels like to watch a flag fly out the end.