The Moment

“This is your moment,” Professor Urquardt stated.

A few heads popped up. A few “attentive” faces tilted as something resembling life infused their features. A few doubled down on their pads in full-on voice-to-text mode.

“Your moment.” The Pulitzer and Oscar nominations the University had added unsolicited to the spring catalogue meant little to her bloodless crew of largely Gen Ed Gen-4.0s — most, anyway. But something in Professor Urquardt’s flat, inflection-free, smiling restatement cut through the 9 a.m. fog in a way none of the photographer/videographer’s calculatedly visceral slide shows could. All eyes went to the podium and the image now on the 10x15 screen.

Three armed and armored sentries stood tensed and perhaps anticipatory against a growing but momentarily static enemy force. Nearly a dozen floodlights illuminated the poised protestors and the blue-and-yellow banners scattered across the green.

Melissa Urquardt wondered if any of her young automatons could savor the irony of UCLA sharing a color palette with the doomed and determined Ukraine. Well, a shitty kind of half-ass Alanis Morrisette kind of irony.

 “This is the conflict that has thrust America’s colleges back into position as the crucible in which the nation works out its moral questions. Student journalists have been the ones to document the resulting conflagration—especially on campuses that barred the professional press from bearing witness. TIME reached out to student photojournalists from across the country to tell this story.”

“Link’s in your texts,” Melissa instructed. “This is your moment. You’re in the eye of the shitstorm, as the shit starts to fly. Everybody with a phone is a documentarian these days, but you got one edge. Me.”

No one seemed unduly perturbed by the narcissism. First of all, it was the contemporary coin of the realm, from rapist ex-presidents to the Kardashian litter to emerging TikTok stars.

“And I’m not talking about light and depth and composition and flow and all that fine shit. I’m talking about the moment.”

Melissa stared into the gallery, waiting? Expectant? Challenging?

“What moment?” The voice resigned.

Only Melissa’s left thumb twitched, and the UCLA common behind her cross-faded into successive tableaus of escalating fury, agony, horror. A smile played at Professor Urquardt’s lips as a baker’s dozen faces creased and recoiled and averted. The fourteenth analyzed each snapshot of inhuman fear, each portrait of pain and endurance and human will.

“What moment?” It was more a croak this time, willful youth cracking at the seam.

“The shot,” No. 14 snapped. Melissa raised the remote and erased the image, Nick Ut’s iconic image, the one likely few of these bubble-wrapped 21st Century wunderkinds had ever encountered nor would now ever forget.

“The shot,” Andrea Kober repeated.

**

“I worry for you,” Chairperson Deshpande said. She settled in before Professor Urquardt’s spotless desk, glancing briefly at the supine figure, husband or brother or father, railing amid the rubble of Mariupol’s shattered maternity hospital.

“What delicate soul ratted me out this time?” Melissa grinned with more relish than anger.

“No less than Russell Grandin,” Deshpande murmured. The esteemed Dean of Humanities periodically toured his fiefdom, but Melissa suspected that amid the latest buzz, Grandin was avoiding the administrative suites anchoring the University’s center. When “liberal” thought or expression threatened to disrupt the tranquility of the Central Illinois campus, Dean Grandin usually found his way into the official crosshairs. “Russell questioned how cauterizing the minds of sheltered sophomores might stimulate the future Goldblatts and Chins and Meyerowitzes.”

“It was the Ut photo, wasn’t it? Russ’s still smarting from that complaint by the Campus Christian Crusaders, right? Are we some Missouri high school now, pissing our panties over Harper Lee and Judy Blume?”

“You know far better,” the arts department chief smiled. “I believe Russell saw this morning’s lecture as a call to arms.” Deshpande raised a petite hand. “Well, metaphorical arms. You know the Millington police and the city fathers — and mothers as well — are concerned about the Gaza protests erupting into violence, however baselessly.”

“Islamophobic rednecks.”

“Very likely, though I suspect the local authorities would be as unnerved by a platoon of white women’s studies majors in pink knit caps if they exceeded the proscribed decibel level. Dean Grandin is concerned you might view the current tensions on campus as an opportunity. An opportunity that could put students at risk.”

“You are seriously shitting me. Half the kids here at Cornbelt U. lack the outrage or energy to pick a suitable protest poster board at the CVS, much less show up for a 8 a.m. sit-in on the Quad. Shit, my little crew was ready for the Urgent Care over a genocide PowerPoint.”

“May I ask if you are now shitting me?” Deshpande asked calmly. “These sabbaticals in Ukraine, Gaza, Burundi — are they about your moral outrage, or something else altogether?”

Little escaped Chairperson Deshpande’s notice or intuition. Not that Melissa Urquardt was much of a quandary. No one on the Pulitzer and Best Documentary shortlists burned through five universities in descending Forbes order without some considerable friction generated. The Psych Department folks might have labeled Professor Urquardt a high-functioning sociopath if they could get her in the hot seat and everyone on campus hadn’t already reached pretty much the same diagnosis.

Melissa smiled. “Does it matter?”

Deshpande rose. “I informed Dean Grandin it does not. However, knowing neither passion nor outrage are within your general repertoire, I find your recent posts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook curious, if not confounding. Russell called them ‘borderline instigatory.’”

“That hurts.”

“No, Melissa,” the Chair chided gently, “it does not.”

**

Psychopaths kept whiteboards, string, pushpins, markers, Melissa had once suggested when an ill-advised overnight guest came across her special spreadsheet on the open kitchen Dell. She explained The Project in exhaustive depth, scrolling down the color-coded, annotated columns, then suggested they return to the loft. Amid continued confusion over psychopathy vs. sociopathy, problem solved.

Melissa had again reached Jean Niyangabo, consulting the corresponding folder in an adjacent window. She was young and pretty, even with her angular face contorted in rage and shaking a fist at the heavens, or more accurately Evariste Ndayishimiye, who’d turned out to be as adept and brutal a liar as his predecessor. The president’s security forces, ruling party thugs, and anti-Nkurunziza loyalists had cut a deep swath among the resistance, particularly idealistic amateurs like Jean, but this had been a relatively small knot of rebels, and the offense no-holds-barred. And Jean’s disappearance, like the others, had coincided with the sudden absence of an outlier Melissa had spotted only after the bloody fact.

Actually, one of several outliers. A legion of outliers, a virtual United Nations of outliers, a diversity of strangers strangely detached from the ebb and flow of the melee. Melissa would have written off “Green,” as he was designated via Excel, had he not also surfaced at a Minneapolis BLM protest and flanking his anguished sisters at a Roe v. Wade rally in San Bernardino that had blown up with the arrival of well-armed fundamentalists. “Red” meanwhile had cameo’d during a pro-Palestinian demonstration on the Thames, a gang eruption in Manila, and a border protest in Yuma demonstrating his range in a red cap and “WALL ‘EM OUT” tee. “Blue,” she put at a Ukraine church bombing, an anti-anti-COVID jamboree in Raleigh, and at the 2018 March For Our Lives in Chicago.

Seventeen candidates overall were highlighted in Green, Red, Blue, and Yellow, Violet, and Pink besides. Lost in the chaos, never found in the aftermath. And these were just Melissa’s shoots.

The Ace Hardware doorbell rattled, and Melissa spotted the familiar red-and-blue topper on the wreck at the curb. Professor Urquardt snatched a twenty from the coffee table as she silently swore a thorny vengeance if they fucked up the jalapenos again.

**

“Outside agitators? Pardon my French, but it’s the fucking ACLU, at the invitation of the Islamic Students Union and the President’s express approval,” Russell Grandin rasped, almost in the patrolman’s face.

The cop stood his ground, stone-faced except for blue eyes darting about the coiled crowd growing in layers before the Administration Building. No doubt weighing the optics of stiff-arming the dean of a major department of Millington’s third largest employer. Nearly a dozen photographers already hung hungry at the fringes, and it was only a matter of time before the Peoria and Decatur TV crews rolled up. The nearby sheriff’s folks, who’d shown up practically salivating without MPD’s knowledge or approval, looked not to give a rat’s ass about optics.

“Look,” the officer finally managed, earning a side-eye from one of the other fellow sentries lining the granite steps. “We got some reports some of the, uh, the students or others, might be planning a little more…physical demonstration here, and you’ve lived in this town long enough to know we’ll get a couple vanfuls of ‘concerned citizens’ here any minute looking to pour gasoline on things.” His eyes darted fleetingly toward the quartet of deputies at the curb, scanning the protestors like a Sunday spread at the Golden Corral. “Believe you me, I, we respect your folks’ rights and all. We just want to be here if any shit comes down from any party. Things stay peaceful, we stand down, OK?”

Grandin stared into the patrolman’s face, then glanced up at the pillared façade and across the brown and black and white and young and old faces below before reaching a decision and descending the steps. A smattering of applause greeted the dean, and a deputy cackled.

**

The officer might have taken little solace knowing the Nikons and Canons and Fujifilms and GoPros working the scene were university issue, on a purely academic mission. By Melissa’s estimates, there were easily 200 IOS or Android “cameras” on the scene, and their reach was potentially global, nearly instantaneous, instantly annihilating. You saw an old-school snapper coming, but the damage done was historical, permanent. Not that anything this savvy crew shot today was going to make Nat-Geo or Time-Life Dissent and Dissonance in the Post-9/11 Era Volume 10. America’d seen it done many times before the last six months, and done bigger and better.

Today was about coverage, about a few dozen extra eyes on the ground. Social media and the kudzu campus grapevine had blown up overnight. This wasn’t Washington or London or some Third World plaza about to go nuclear, but maybe that worked in their favor, Melissa considered as she surveyed the landscape of anguished but out-of-element students, their earnestly outraged allies and faculty struggling to tightrope the right side of history, crackers in and out of uniform and more to come, and clearly outgunned and ambivalent local cops. The news crew heads would be here within minutes if the affiliate tip lines paid off, and everybody’d start auditioning for their 15 minutes. 

Cocked and loaded, Melissa waited. And watched.

**

It often started with one idiot, and there was no short supply here. Melissa couldn’t see today’s winner through the swell of protestors, but the single parrot cry of “PALESIMIANS!!” had a country-fried stank, and the fire caught with a spitting crackle of threats against “Arabs” and “Zionists” and “terrorists” and oaths against Hamas and Netanyahu and, from the peanut gallery, a volley of quaint old Boomer favorites. Ultimately, hands were laid, shoves were exchanged, and when the first student went down – Palestinian, Israeli, Melissa could not discern – the bonfire erupted.

Professor Urquardt scanned her chaotic surroundings openly rather than through the viewfinder. A few of her 9 a.m. warriors seemingly had fled the scene, but a couple were still working the scene. The deputies had joined in the festivities now, and she winced momentarily as one beefy corn-fed lawman snapped a Nikon from its strap and its gawky owner, bringing an elbow up into the boy’s face with a broad grin. The county cop then turned his attention to a fist-pumping young woman in a “Palestine Lives Matter” tee and a hijab, and, enflamed like a bull by the familiar two words, backhanded her to the grass before stalking off. Melissa wove past the bloodied pair and cursed as a burly redhead in an EMT uniform shouldered her almost into the shrubs.

And froze, pivoting even as she was buffeted by the mob.

Blue.

Even without the MAGA cap or the COVID mask or the Dads Against Guns t-shirt, Melissa had no doubt. He kneeled protectively beside the fallen protestor as Cody or Colin or Carl nursed his broken septum. Melissa bought the camera up and machine-gunned a dozen shots as the “paramedic” gently helped the woman to her feet and waved back the lookie-loos and the obliviously enraged and shitlessly terrified as he led her limpingly between the administration and Student Union buildings. Melissa followed cautiously through the chaos to see the man she knew only as Blue pull the demonstrator toward an ambulance parked askew in a largely empty decal lot. At the open rear hatch, the young woman suddenly came alive and began thrashing and kicking at the bogus EMT, who clamped a meaty palm over her face and threw her into the van.

And Melissa was knocked nearly off her feet as a dark shape sprinted past, what looked like Thor’s hammer grasped in her fist. Before Blue could process the attack, the blonde brought the Nikon body against his temple. The man reeled and roared and obscenity in some guttural European tongue before snatching the impromptu weapon and dashing it against the asphalt. Andrea Kober launched full into him, but Blue barely responded. He grabbed the student by the throat and slammed her repeatedly against the side of the ambulance.

“Fuck,” Melissa spat, and she dashed toward the vehicle as he dragged Kober toward the back. She set off on a dead run wide to the man’s flank, plotting a surprise attack. Twenty feet away, Melissa could see the stunned protestor and her prize – and formerly prized – student cowering in blind despair as Blue yanked an automatic pistol from his belt. He took aim, and Melissa stopped short before making a crucial decision.

The snap of the shutter echoed through the early spring air, and Andrea looked up. Transfixed by the shift in her student’s expression, Melissa missed Blue spinning around and bringing the weapon up. Professor Urquardt dove to the tarmac, her Canon whipping centrifugally and bashing her head against the asphalt. Before things faded to black, she heard the shouting and registered what appeared to be a small army converging on the ambulance…             

**

 “…and federal authorities continue to investigate what appears now to be an international human trafficking operation uncovered by a renowned photojournalist/documentarian during pro-Palestinian protests on an Illinois college campus. The FBI today hinted at a possible link between Eastern European organized crime interests allegedly orchestrating perhaps hundreds of abductions of young women, and the late Jeffrey Epstein, and police in Paris are intensifying security at the upcoming G20 Summit.”

A small woman appeared in Melissa’s periphery, and for a second, she thought maybe it was shitty hospital suppertime. But as Chairperson Deshpande crossed to the Hill-Rom bed, Professor Urquardt rendered David Muir mute.

“You look well,” Deshpande said.

“I should,” Melissa grinned sourly. “They ruled out a concussion, but they want to keep me one more night. They don’t realize this is just little old me. Bet you hoped the fall would’ve fixed something.”

“Your nature is your own,” the Chair said gently. “And whatever one might say, you’ve struggled admirably with it. Or to accommodate it.” She gestured at the TV bolted to the opposite wall. “If not for your obsessive objectivity, these monsters might never have been brought to justice.”

“You mean soulless objectivity, don’t you?”

The folks at CNN, the Post, and Simon and Schuster already had called. Melissa examined her “friend’s” serenely probing expression. “And just how did you know? Seriously, you think I believe the cops and the feds just showed up at Hayride U. expecting trouble. It was you called them, wasn’t it?”

“Your uncharacteristic passion about ongoing global affairs had me perplexed, and so I studied your past work for some insight. Your last few collections and exhibitions revealed the pattern you already had detected. Professor Aboud’s former law enforcement connections helped identify those men as suspected terrorists and freelance mercenaries — a motley crew that seemed to have no cultural or political affiliations.

“When we linked their appearances to reported disappearances in each venue, I realized the victims as well had no common bond, were liberal, conservative, rebels, nationalists, anywhere from 17 to 35. Only one common element — they were women — and that told the story. Well, most of it.

“As I reviewed your phenomenal body of work, I came to realize our phantom predators had seemingly vanished over the past three years. Initially, I thought, and hoped, they or their employers had tired of the hunt. Then it occurred to me — you yourself had fallen to the connections three years ago, and withheld new photographs of these predators from subsequent publications or exhibits. Why?”

 “Ah,” Deshpande murmured, turning to the screen opposite Melissa’s bed. A flawlessly composed, impeccably lit, skillfully focused still filled the electronic frame. “There it is. The moment, I believe you call it. The moment you waited, what, three years for? It should make a wonderful cover shot, and my guess is it will become a rallying image in the war on human trafficking. It was a fateful moment for young Ms. Kober, as well, though I suppose she did not pause to savor it properly.

”By the way, Nick Ut took Kim Phuc to a hospital, where she received treatment for severe napalm burns, saving her life. Was that actually his moment?”

Melissa stared as Deshpande disappeared silently into the corridor. At what had flashed in her student’s eyes as Melissa captured the moment.