A chorus of cries distracts me, but it’s way too late for me to do anything. Someone has flung themselves out of the crowd just a few feet behind me. You can hear some of the cries distinctly on the video—“April!” “Stop him!” “Watch out!”—but it is mostly incomprehensible shouts of alarm.
He’s clearly visible on the tape; he looks like just some white guy. Jeans, blond hair, medium height, white T-shirt, khaki jacket. He pushes his way out of the crowd and springs right for my back with a six-inch-long knife held up in his fist. I couldn’t see any of that, though.
I didn’t really react in any way until I felt the knife hit me, which is when I screamed. That scream is so loud and awful on the tape that we had to cut it out of the video. Lav mics are really good at picking up only the noise from the person they’re clipped to, so it’s just straight raw scream with very little of the background excitement. I only heard it one time during editing and I can call it back to memory at will. If I think about it, I can still feel a little echo of the knife slamming into me, just between my shoulder blade and my spine. The knife cut through my brand-new suit coat from Top Shop the first millisecond and brushed past my shoulder blade the second. It felt like being punched full force by a heavyweight fighter. The ripping of the skin didn’t even register over the feeling of the blade hitting my ribs. The pain shot up and down my back from my neck to my tailbone and then down my arms for good measure. The next moment, the weight of my attacker crashed into me, knocking me forward and down to my hands and knees.
Andy was recording at 120 frames per second just in case. That lets you play the video in slow motion if you need to. You would have been able to see every bit of what happened if Andy had held the shot. He didn’t, of course, but here’s what the camera saw:
Half a second after he sees the guy running toward me, Andy’s lifting the camera up over his head, thinking not about cinematography but about attack. At first all you can see is sky and buildings and crowd, but as the camera comes down, lens first, you can see the literal moment that changed history. One second, the guy is rushing me and pushing the knife into my back, the next he goes limp. Not just limp—he loses all structure. All the power he has held tight in his body collapses. In the instant before the camera smashes his face, his skin goes two shades darker. His body crashes into mine, knocking me forward, but he’s no longer putting pressure on the knife, which wiggles a little in my back. The camera captures itself slamming into the guy’s bizarrely distorted face and then everything goes black.
From the perspective of the cell phone cameras that surrounded us, it’s a lot clearer. The guy crashes into me, knife in hand. The next instant, he’s a sack of liquid slamming into my back, and the next, Andy crashes the camera down on his face. I didn’t ever upload one of those wide shots to my channel, but there are plenty of videos around of it. His face, already bloated and distorted and dark, splits open under Andy’s camera like a soap bubble popping. The black mass that squirts and oozes out of the split skin is clearly not blood. I collapse onto my hands and knees, the shape of the body slumping off me onto the ground. In only one video did the camera owner keep his wits together enough to film me rising from my hands to stand. The knife is just sticking there (it turned out to be lodged between two of my ribs), blood starts seeping through my shirt, but the white suit coat is nice, thick wool, so at this point, it doesn’t look more than torn.
The crowd seems to be made mostly of screams. Some people stand perfectly still; others run. The running and the screaming at the center of the crowd causes panic in every direction. It’s a miracle no one died in the stampede. I feel the warm gel sliding down my back as Martin Bellacourt, my own little Gavrilo Princip, lies lumpy on the ground, very, very dead. I turn around to look at the body and it’s barely recognizable as a human. It looks like a bunch of dirty, wet, stained clothes on the street.
I look from the body to Andy and then to Carl and back to Andy. I’m in shock—well, not literally . . . yet. The pain is there and it is intense, but it’s like someone else is feeling it. Andy looks at the camera, covered in the dark gel. He shudders, suddenly pale, and drops it to the asphalt.
“Are you OK?”
“Yeah, I think I’m fine.” And then I add, “Though it feels like . . . like there’s a knife in my back.” I turn to show Andy, which sends a new wave of pain up my neck and down my back. This is a new, fresher, sharper variety. I flinch, which makes it worse. I feel the knife wiggling around—moving my left arm in any way is excruciating.
“Oh my god. April, there’s a fucking knife in you,” he says. And the wiggling knife, which was only ever an inch deep, falls out of my back, clattering to the ground.
“It seems as if you are wrong!” I say, my head spinning as a fresh warm stream of blood starts pouring down my back. “Oh, Andy, this does not feel good.” We both look down at the knife on the ground, a little bloody but almost pathetic for all the damage it ended up doing.
It was a little thing. The cheap black plastic handle was designed for the blade to fold into it. There’s a picture of it online if you want to see it—it seems even more pathetic in its little evidence baggie. The blade is just a little wider than my finger. Turns out your ribs are really tightly placed in your back, I suppose to protect against this sort of thing.
Andy was staring at me, horrified. I guess that’s understandable. I wanted the camera, I wanted to finish the video, so I was like, “Can you grab the camera for me?”
“No! What?! April, you’ve been stabbed. You need to sit down.” And then he shouted, “WE NEED SOME HELP OVER HERE!”
This did not seem like a good plan to me. “We came down here for a reason. I’ve got like half a line left,” I said weakly. I was starting to feel dizzy, and suddenly every inch of my skin was covered in sweat.
“No, April, lie down, you’re going to pass out.” He was walking toward me with his arms out, ready to catch me.
“NO ANDY GIVE ME THE FUCKING CAMERA!” And with that final effort I was unconscious.
I came to about twenty seconds later on the asphalt in Andy’s arms. A news crew had made their way to us faster than the cops or the paramedics.
Anyone watching Channel 7 news at that moment, or any other television station anywhere within the next week, was treated to an image of Andy sitting on the ground hugging my unconscious body, calling out for help through his tears and trying to wake me up. The blood had stained a circle in my coat around my back, and Andy was pushing his hands on it. It’s all very dramatic. On replay they tended not to show me coming to, preferring the simplicity of the bits where I’m completely unconscious and passive.
They also didn’t show the part where the NYPD arrived and verbally tore the whole TV crew a brand-new set of holes.
My mouth tastes bitter, and I’m still seeing stars, but I’m conscious by this point.
“Andy, thank you. I’m sorry.” This is a whisper while two cops start asking him questions.
Andy’s answering their questions; one cop has a notepad out. He’s telling them our names and what happened, and then he’s trying to explain the gunk that’s all over us and the stained pile of clothes that used to be Martin Bellacourt, which he’s unsurprisingly failing at.
Then he just freaks out. “Look, Officer, I understand that you’re doing your job, but she’s been stabbed and I don’t know what to do. Could we please get some help?”
Then I pipe up, nearly shouting, “I concur!” which causes a fresh wave of stars in my vision. I have no idea why I can’t ever shut the fuck up. That’s what I should’ve named this book.
I Have No Idea Why I Can’t Ever Shut the Fuck Up: The April May Story.
Anyway, that actually works, and the cops let the paramedics through. There are four, possibly eight, possibly sixteen of them, and they are all very nice.