stand on the street, McMellon and Carroll are no more than ten or fifteen feet from Diallo. Now Diallo runs. It’s a chase! Carroll and McMellon were just a little aroused before. What is their heart rate now? 175? 200? Diallo is now inside the vestibule, up against the inner door of his building. He twists his body sideways and digs at something in his pocket. Carroll and McMellon have neither cover nor concealment: there is no car door pillar to shield them, to allow them to slow the moment down. They are in the line of fire, and what Carroll sees is Diallo’s hand and the tip of something black. As it happens, it is a wallet. But Diallo is black, and it’s late, and it’s the South Bronx, and time is being measured now in milliseconds, and under those circumstances we know that wallets invariably look like guns. Diallo’s face might tell him something different, but Carroll isn’t looking at Diallo’s face — and even if he were, it isn’t clear that he would understand what he saw there. He’s not mind-reading now. He’s effectively autistic. He’s locked in on whatever it is coming out of Diallo’s pocket, just as Peter was locked in on the light switch in George and Martha’s kissing scene. Carroll yells out, “He’s got a gun!” And he starts firing. McMellon falls backward and starts firing — and a man falling backward in combination with the report of a gun seems like it can mean only one thing. He’s been shot. So Carroll keeps firing, and McMellon sees Carroll firing, so he keeps firing, and Boss and Murphy see Carroll and McMellon firing, so they jump out of the car and start firing, too. The papers the next day will make much of the fact that forty-one bullets were fired, but the truth is that four people with semiautomatic pistols can fire forty-one bullets in about two and a half seconds. The entire incident, in fact, from start to finish, was probably over in less time than it has taken you to read this paragraph. But packed inside those few seconds were enough steps and decisions to fill a lifetime. Carroll and McMellon call out to Diallo. One thousand and one. He turns back into the house. One thousand and two. They run after him, across the sidewalk and up the steps. One thousand and three. Diallo is in the hallway, tugging at something in his pocket. One thousand and four. Carroll yells out, “He’s got a gun!” The shooting starts. One thousand and five. One thousand and six. Bang! Bang! Bang! One thousand and seven. Silence. Boss runs up to Diallo, looks down at the floor, and yells out, “Where’s the fucking gun?” and then runs up the street toward Westchester Avenue, because he has lost track in the shouting and the shooting of where he is. Carroll sits down on the steps next to Diallo’s bullet-ridden body and starts to cry.
Conclusion Listening with Your Eyes: The Lessons of Blink
At the beginning of her career as a professional musician, Abbie Conant was in Italy, playing trombone for the Royal Opera of Turin. This was in 1980. That summer, she applied for eleven openings for various orchestra jobs throughout Europe. She got one response: The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. “Dear Herr Abbie Conant,” the letter began. In retrospect, that mistake should have tripped every alarm bell in Conant’s mind.
The audition was held in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, since the orchestra’s cultural center was still under construction. There were thirty-three candidates, and each played behind a screen, making them invisible to the selection committee. Screened auditions were rare in Europe at that time. But one of the applicants was the son of someone in one of the Munich orchestras, so, for the sake of fairness, the Philharmonic decided to make the first round of auditions blind. Conant was number sixteen. She played Ferdinand David’s Konzertino for Trombone, which is the warhorse audition piece in Germany, and missed one note (she cracked a G). She said to herself, “That’s it,” and went backstage and started packing up her belongings to go home. But the committee thought otherwise. They were floored. Auditions are classic