The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes. Anthony Sadler

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СКАЧАТЬ gorgeous starlet and have a conversation on TV with Jimmy Fallon, that the president of the United States will invite them over so they can see the secret catacombs of the White House, that Alek—Alek!—will be on Dancing with the Stars and make it to the final night, that they will ride a float through their hometown during a parade in their honor, that a glittering Megyn Kelly will win a nationwide contest for their first group interview.

      That a trip Anthony only began planning a few months before, when his application for a high-limit credit card he definitely could not afford was miraculously approved, would make him an international celebrity.

      All he could think about at that moment was, I gotta talk to Dad.

      WHAT ANTHONY WILL UNDERSTAND later is that, at the moment he recognized the threat he was facing, his body was overtaken by a series of physiological changes that prepared him to take it on but prevented him from accurately perceiving his surroundings; that literally changed how he experienced sights, sounds, and feelings. Others called it “fight or flight” but that didn’t do it justice, didn’t express the power of the processes taking over their bodies. This he knew something about; he was a kinesiology major. That the moment he recognized what was happening on the train, chemicals released, arteries constricted, noncritical systems shut down. Sugar was pumped where it was needed, which is why he felt a superhuman level of energy, but also his perception changed. His body jettisoned senses that weren’t mission critical. People didn’t get that—their bodies actually changed. Everything changed, down to tiny muscles that flattened the lenses of their eyes so they could focus on objects in the middle distance. Better to see charging predators or paths of escape, but that same change stole their peripheral vision. They were looking through tunnels.¹

      But the most beguiling thing of all was that he wasn’t processing information accurately, because he was blocking out things that weren’t important. He did not remember any other people on that train car except the ones he interacted with. Spencer. The hog-tied terrorist. Mark moving closer to death. Were there even other people in the car? He could not honestly say he remembered them, though of course he knew that there were.

      But most relevant to what he was experiencing at that moment, this disruptive, disturbing inconsistency, was that the moment he recognized the danger and this process began inside him, his perception of time changed. Events presented themselves to him as slower than they were actually happening, and his memory imprinted things out of order. Sometimes his memory was simply blank. There was a reason for this too: as his body was overtaken by physical changes, the hardware in his brain that formed memory was co-opted to dump chemicals. The memory-forming machinery was no longer left to simply form memories—part of what was happening to Anthony on that train was a medical condition with a commonly known name: amnesia. He couldn’t form memories correctly, in effect because the video recorder in his brain was being used for something else.

      Perhaps that’s why Anthony never saw that pistol. Or rather, Anthony could not remember seeing that pistol. It’s a funny thing about memory: it doesn’t always feel hazy when it’s wrong. Maybe it’s why witnesses to violent crime swear they saw things they never did, and swear they didn’t see things that happened right in front of them. It’s why burglarized store clerks sometimes don’t recognize what’s going on in the jumpy CCTV footage of the robbery or the shoot-out: what they actually experienced felt entirely different from what they see on the screen.

      Sometimes memory can feel precise, a laser-cut model of what happened, so you can see a fully detailed picture right there in front of you when you close your eyes. It can feel certain when it’s wrong. How are memories formed, but through a system of sensors arranged around your body to take in sights, sounds, smells? What if those senses are off? What if they’re calibrated wrong? What if the shape of your eye has changed so that, like through a fisheye lens on a camera, the image you capture is altered? What if even the way you’re experiencing time has changed? Anthony experienced the attack differently from Alek, who experienced it differently from Spencer. The acceleration and near-freezing of time began and ended at different points for each of them. Each have large black spots over their memories of parts of the attack, extraordinary clarity over other parts.

      Later Spencer would say he wished he had a video of what happened, but his older brother, Everett, a highway patrolman, disagreed. Everett knew what it was like to go through a traumatic confrontation that felt so maddeningly different from what an unfeeling security camera captured that it was actually disorienting. “It’s better that you just have your memories,” he said.

      But that was just it. Their memories were different.

AYOUB

       In 1985, European officials met in Schengen, Luxembourg, to hammer out an agreement. The purpose was free trade. European countries had similar values, and if you could ease passage between them, you could make trade easier. Easier trade was good for everyone; all economies would benefit. All countries would get richer as goods and services passed seamlessly between them, with fewer regulations, fewer taxes, fewer holdups at border crossings.

       The idea was to turn the whole territory into effectively one country—once you were in, you were in. Internal borders would become almost meaningless.

       For someone traveling from outside, the challenge would be getting into Europe. Once you arrived, you could move within the continent at will. If you had a Schengen visa, you usually wouldn’t get ID checks. The agreement also made it easier for foreigners, like American tourists, to vacation in Europe. They didn’t need visas at all, and after they arrived in one of the participating countries, they never had to show their passports again, even when they moved between countries.

       Not all of Europe signed on to the Schengen Agreement immediately, but among the first seven members were three critical ones: Belgium, France, and Spain. It made Europe, or at least those countries, more appealing to American tourists. And to immigrants.

       Ayoub El-Khazzani was born in Morocco, and lived in a place called Tétouan. Its name came from the Berber word for “eyes,” a reference to the watersprings that littered the city; Ayoub was raised in something of a Moorish paradise. His family was not wealthy, not even middle class, but the world that surrounded him was luxuriant, suffused with souks overflowing with handicrafts, pomegranate and almond trees lining the hills. It was a North African crossroad; the clothes and crafts in shops testified to all those who had marched through and deposited part of their culture there, most prominently the Berbers, but also the Moors and Cordobas. It was mostly Muslim and, in a way, a reflection of a bygone period thirteen hundred years earlier, when the Muslim world was at its richest, a cultural and intellectual powerhouse, a place with security and civil liberties where even Christians and Jews were protected because they too were sons of Ibrahim. And although they paid extra taxes for their beliefs because they were of course still infidels, they also didn’t have to fight in the army. Things were fair. Things were balanced, stable, orderly. The great Caliph Usman came along and eliminated poverty. Great scientific discoveries emerged from that place. Al-battani, the astronomer and mathematician who fine-tuned the concept of years lived then, as did the father of optics, Ibn al-Haytham, the man who proved that eyes don’t emit light, but take it in. Al-Farabi, the greatest philosopher after Aristotle, studied there. It was the time of the House of Wisdom, where philosophies were translated from Greek to Arabic so they could end up in the West.

       The world owed the caliphate its knowledge; the West owed Muslims.

       Ayoub was well east of ancient Mesopotamia, the site of the explosion of culture that emerged where the Tigris collided with the Euphrates, and that became known as the cradle СКАЧАТЬ