The reason that Ryan can't make it to this party is that he is exhausted, both physically and emotionally. I visited him in Los Angeles months ago, and when he picked me up at the airport I was stunned by his appearance. He had the pall of a cadaver. He put up a good front to greet me, but after we'd picked up my bag and he drove me to his home, he practically collapsed.

I didn't want to be rude, but his pale, weakened state and dulled, defeated demeanor was so obvious and troubling that I could not help but comment on it. He admitted that something was bothering him, but he insisted that we find some dinner first and get caught up a bit.

We went to a Thai restaurant, and the meal was quiet and uncomfortable. I don't know why he insisted on food first — he didn't eat anything. I ordered the Pad Thai (which was too oily) and he ordered a curry dish that he did not touch. Instead, he ordered gin and tonic after gin and tonic, another one every time any server passed by our table. He must have had a half-dozen over the course of the meal. His plate and silverware lay untouched for the duration. I was unnerved by the drunken, wavering, jerky drive back to his place, although later in the week it would become apparent that he drives that way when he's sober, too.

Or maybe he just wasn't sober at any time during my short stay with him.

Anyway, we got back to his place and he set us both up with drinks. I tried again, grilling him about his increased alcohol consumption and his obvious ill health. Reluctantly he told me his story; he told me that he is a haunted man.

 

He said that for the last several weeks, he had not been able to sleep, he couldn't eat, and he felt tormented day and night. This was not a "Halloween" haunting, not some ‘spook’, or superstitious notion. This was something more persistent and malingering: a ghost — an actual ghost that he couldn't shake.

He told me that a couple of months before, he had been working, auditing a research site at a medical center complex in East Los Angeles. The research site staff had set him up in one of the doctor's offices. The doctor was traveling, so the office was temporarily vacant. It was a large corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows, but the view was limited to the sprawling parking lots of the nearby hospital and associated medical center office buildings. Looking out of those third-floor windows, Ryan could even see his own car, quite clearly, in the lot nearest to the building, just a few hundred feet away.

It was a normal morning, Ryan said. He was engrossed in his work. But mid-afternoon he was distracted by some loud cracking noises coming from outside. He went to the window and looked out to see a woman in jeans and a pink sweatshirt sprinting through the parking lot. He heard a couple more cracking, popping sounds and saw their origin. Another woman was brandishing a pistol, and sort of loping after the first woman.

The first woman started weaving between cars, ducking and dodging. Ryan watched from three stories up as she crouched down and quickly slid between some rows of cars. The other woman hurried after, gun drawn, but had apparently lost sight of her.

By now Ryan was plastered against the window, gripped by the unfolding action before him. He heard sirens in the distance. He lost track of the hunted woman, and thought that was a good sign; the woman might escape her gun-toting attacker. The woman with the gun started darting between cars, getting more frantic in her search.

Then Ryan saw her. The hunted woman was crouched down, leaning against the driver's side of Ryan's own car. The other woman obviously hadn't spotted her, but she was closing in, probably just out of dumb luck. Then Ryan watched as the hunted woman rose up a little and reached into his car's driver-side window. Ryan had left it open a crack to let the heat out, but apparently he'd left it open wide enough for the woman to reach her entire forearm into it. She reached in and unlocked the door.

This immediately tripped the car alarm. The woman with the gun closed in quickly and started shooting. She winged her in the first barrage of shots, and then stalked over to her prone body and shot two more times at point blank range.

By that time, three police cars had screeched into the parking lot. The woman set her gun down on the hood of Ryan's car, raised her hands and walked directly towards the nearest police car. One of the officers actually tackled her, and soon she was driven away.

 

Ryan stayed at the window and watched as more police appeared, and even an ambulance came, even though it had happened in the hospital complex's own parking lot. The press showed up, and the scene was buzzed by both police helicopters and press helicopters. Ryan went out to the parking lot and was questioned by police (along with dozens of other witnesses) and he wasn't allowed to remove his car from the scene until very late that night.

During questioning it dawned on Ryan that while he had observed the scene through the window, he did not think to act on it. While it was going on, he hadn't dialed 911. Obviously someone else had — the police had appeared on the scene within a few short minutes — but he realized that he should have at least thought to call 911 himself. It hadn't even occurred to him.

More troubling was that he did not think to unlock his car, or to disable his car alarm, with the remote on his keychain. Doing so would have been as easy as reaching into his pocket, and he was pretty sure that the remote had enough range to be effective from three floors up. Sure, he didn't know that she would try to get into his car. He had no idea until she was actually reaching in the window, and by that time it was practically too late. He also wasn't sure that seeking shelter in his car was her safest option; his car wasn't bulletproof. And had he unlocked the car, there might have been an audible click, and the parking lights would flash twice, which may have brought attention to the woman, too. It also seemed unlikely that the woman would have been able to open and then shut Ryan's car door and remain completely unnoticed anyway.

But what struck Ryan afterwards was that he had not even considered any of these options at the time. He was merely spectating, and he simply watched as a woman was murdered rather than take any action at all.

 

Ryan finished his story that way. We spent some more time talking about the practicalities: I believed that for him to attempt to intercede with his keychain remote would have been fruitless or might have even worsened the situation, and further suggested that the woman sealed her own fate when she reached into his car. And although I believe that he should have called 911, to comfort him I agreed that this was irrelevant, as the authorities had obviously been notified by someone else in a very timely manner.

Ryan stressed that the main issue was his reaction to this situation, and his reaction was to stand and watch. It wasn't important that his actions might have been irrelevant or even counterproductive. What was important was that while it was happening, he didn't even think to act, he didn't even think of his options or moral responsibilities that way. He now felt that in failing to even consider doing anything, he failed the woman, and he failed himself.

And he said that because he failed the woman, the woman was haunting him.

I thought that he was talking figuratively. Again he recounted his sleepless nights, his lack of appetite, and his constant distraction.

"I'm haunted every day and every night," he told me.

I tried to tell him that he was blameless, and that he should not hold on to his guilt. He clarified that it's not just his conscience distressing him; he was genuinely haunted.

"She comes to me as a sound," he told me. He said he heard it all the time, day and night, and it was draining his life and soul away. He hears it at home, he hears it at work, he hears it no matter where he is.

And some dark, dreary, chilly night, when the moon is full and the wind is howling through the trees, you might hear it, too… It sounds like…

BWOOOOOT, BWOOOOOT, BWOOOOOT, BWOOOOOT, NUUUUU — NEEEEE — NUUUUU — NEEEEE — NUUUUU — NEEEEE — NUUUUU — NEEEEE, EHHHHHT. EHHHHHT. EHHHHHT. EHHHHHT. WEEEEOW WEEEEOW WEEEEOW WEEEEOW, OOOOOOEEEEEEEOOOOOOOEEEEEEEOOOOOEEEEE [repeat]