On Unbreaking the Glass

In my book, I used a metaphor of shattered glass to discuss the challenges of reconstructing the story as it actually unfolded. Human memory is fragile and imperfect, and after an experience like mine it can be hard to put things back together, especially years later. Here’s how I described it:

 Imagine that there is a story told in a series of stained-glass windows. Beautiful, ornate, and vibrant. Then a hurricane comes through, and destroys it all. Months later, after the emergency-cleanup is over, and the rebuilding of homes is finished, and the hospitals are back open, and the roads are resurfaced, and the church roof is repaired, and most of the town is up and running, it is finally time to turn toward the stained-glass windows. Your task is to gather up all the shards of broken glass, and reassemble them the best you can, from memory, into the coherent story that they once were. Or, perhaps, more accurately, into a coherent story. It’s an impossible task, really. You remember, generally, that the windows depicted a beautiful tale, and you may even remember the broad outline of its contents—perhaps they were the Stations of the Cross. But the shards are hopelessly jumbled, and many of them are shattered further than the original panels. Nevertheless, the piles of glass are all you have to work from, so you start to plug them back into place, building, piece-by-piece, a narrative picture.

You know a red shard went here, and a blue there. But there are twelve red triangles, and a lot of tinted glass dust, and it’s quite difficult to know whether the one you’re holding was really the one that went in that particular spot. The longer you work at it, the more the puzzle begins to come together. You try a certain arrangement out, and then you find a piece that doesn’t fit. No, that green piece can’t have gone here, because it doesn’t quite match with the color of the rest of the trees that you’re sure fit into that particular window—ah, yes, it must go in the fourth window, instead. Obvious in hindsight, but only once you’ve found the clues.

As you work, over many weeks, the story begins to emerge, but you are drawn to an inescapable conclusion: you will never piece it all back together—at least not in its original form. Too many of the shards are lost forever, and too many of them look the same. Nevertheless, the story you construct has many elements of the truth of the original, and it might be beautiful in its own way. Your congregation must learn to see these windows in their own beauty now, and to find joy as you sing and walk in the colored light that these new windows cast around your sanctuary. They are the windows you have, even if they are not the exact same windows that once adorned your church. You must move on; you must move forward.

This is what it has been like to try to rebuild my memories of the period of my life that began that day, in January of 2024. That sense is particularly true to the conversation on that very strange train—into which we are about to dive in Part II of this book. I can tell certain places that aren’t quite right. Things don’t fit the way they ought, and the timeline jumps around. The conversational fragments come back to me in associative ways, but not in linear sequence, and there are inevitable gaps. There are pieces that I can tell are missing, and there are others that I can’t figure out how to place—even though I know for certain that they were said. I will never be able to rebuild the interview in its whole.

The same was (is) true of the conversation(s) that morning at CBS. I remember saying a great many things at CBS that day, but I don’t truly know the exact order in which I said things. In the account I have been telling, which I reconstructed in my book, I am making a somewhat-artistic approximation of the things I remember saying that morning, rebuilt long after the fact. Importantly, as I have acknowledged, transitions and prompting questions are often guessed at, logically-reasoned, or just invented for the sake of being able to narratively connect different shattered shards of conversation that I really do remember saying. Perhaps most challenging: I do not necessarily clearly remember which things I said to which of the various people who interviewed me that morning. Even when I correctly remember a certain sentence…did I say it to security? To the sleepy-looking staffer? To the police? To the Blurry Man? To Mr. Smoke-Break? Or even later that day to “Josh” and “Tamara” on the train? It’s not always easy to say for certain. I have had to guess, and to do my best to reconstruct a path that includes the important things I remember saying that morning, and which might reasonably explain how we got to where we did. I’m reassembling shattered windows from memory.

However…

I have just received something unexpected and transformative, which will require a serious revision and re-evaluation of the account I’ve been trying to reconstruct of that morning.

You see…someone went digging through a box in the attic, and they found an old photo, from a wedding years ago, with a clear capture in the background, vital to my project: an image of the third stained-glass window.

By which I mean: I just got the NYPD bodycam footage.

I am going to post it publicly soon, and I will have a lot to write about the footage, and to adjust in my written accounts of what happened (or what must-have-happened, or may-have-happened) that morning. It shows me how I got things wrong in my first attempt. It helps me see what I got right, or approximately anyway. It helps me see how all the remaining pieces probably fit together, in a way that makes a lot more sense.

Unsurprisingly, I got some things out-of-order in my initial accounts. Certain things I included in the police conversation must have been said to Security, or to the sleepy staffer. And I clearly misremembered or swung-and-missed at a few things from my interaction with the cops.

But you know what else?

I really was acting reasonably and coherently that morning (albeit oddly).

And I really was articulate and sometimes even funny in my conversation with the cops.

And they really did find me so nonthreatening that they sent me on my way with well-wishes and directions toward NBC.

Oh…

And CBS really did instruct me to wait where I was, rather than telling me to leave…specifically so that they could call the cops on me.

Which, I maintain, was some bullshit.