Nine
I pull off the thruway at the first rest stop I reach. Once I’ve parked, I take out my phone and look up every article I can about Ashley Shawger’s suicide. Don’t jump to conclusions, I try to tell myself. Coincidences happen. And the first one I find is somewhat calming. According to one of his neighbors, Shawger was an “eccentric” and a hoarder—a dumpster diver with a garage full of found objects, many of which could have been pulled together to make a bomb. “I was shocked to hear Ashley blew himself up,” said the neighbor. “But when I thought about it, there were warning signs.”
Another article, this one in the Colonie Herald, quotes a coworker as saying that Shawger “hadn’t been the same” since the death of his mother, whom he’d been caring for, alone, for years: “Ashley looked like a tough guy. But beneath the tattoos and the spiked bracelets, he was very sensitive.”
There’s a link beneath the piece that reads ASHLEY SHAWGER’S ACT OF HEROISM, and when I click on it, I’m directed to a Spotlight article from March 5, 2008. It’s topped by a picture of Shawger—jeans and a ZZ Top T-shirt, thinner, less gray in the beard. And the headline is LOCAL MAN SAVES DROWNING GIRL. I read some of it, which details how Shawger jumped into the freezing Hudson River to save five-year-old Portia Conrad, who had fallen from a lookout point at a nearby park. “You don’t meet that many purely good people in this world,” Portia’s mom, Carol, said of her daughter’s rescuer, who at press time was in the hospital, recuperating from injuries incurred in the incident. “As far as I’m concerned, Ashley Shawger is one of them.”
Maybe it really was suicide, I keep telling myself as I google Portia Conrad’s name and find her listed on the 2019 fall quarter honor roll at Colonie Central High. Maybe he wanted to be with his mother. Maybe he was lonely and depressed and too sensitive for this shitty world. . . .
I go to Google Images next, where I find photos of Shawger with his wheelchair-bound mother, with his dog, with a group of friends on a hunting trip, posed around the carcass of a deer. I even find a photo of him eating ice cream cones with Carol and Portia Conrad, a reunion that took place two years after the rescue. The picture that draws my attention, though, was posted within the last hour by an unnamed witness with a phone—snapped through a charred window of the remains of Ashley’s home, one of his tattooed arms visible in the lower left corner of the frame with a yellow circle around it, a red circle around something else, closer to the center. What’s left of the bomb, the call-out reads.
I tap the screen for a closer look—a scorched mass of wires and fuses, a metal ring that looks like a giant handcuff, and something else, a small object that jumps out at me, a startling pale blue. No, no, no . . . I know what it is. I know it before I tap the picture to make it bigger, before I stretch it out with my fingers until the image fills the screen. Even with half its face blown off, I can identify it: an old-fashioned Lux kitchen timer, exactly like the blue one I bought at the flea market in Tannersville, three days after my awkward, too-memorable encounter with Ashley Shawger.
Ten
A?LAYAN KAYA
PRIVATE MESSAGES
January 19, 4:00 a.m.
Participants: 0417, 0001
* * *
0417: You never said that the collective targets innocent people.
0001: The collective targets no one who doesn’t deserve to be targeted.
0417: Ashley Shawger didn’t deserve it. He saved a child’s life.
0001: How do you know he was targeted by anyone other than himself?
0417: The timer. I saw it in a picture. One of the articles said two Lux timers were used to make the bomb. And I saw one of the two I bought.
0001: Read this.
https://msn.com/en-news.ny//bombsuicidevictimwasahoarder/ar-byybk