When I wake to a huge explosion on Christmas, 2020, I want to believe it’s thunder, but outside the window there’s not a cloud, only clean blue dawn. I sit up in bed, more curious than concerned. After a year of mass death and quarantine, after months and months of collective grief and exhaustion and fear and waiting, perhaps I can be forgiven for responding to what might just be a nearby disaster with little more than a yawn. We’ve been waking, daily, to radio dispatches from a world on fire.
I lay back down. Close my eyes, resume a fetal curl. It’s still so early. A little more sleep, if I could beckon its return, might make me a more fun mother on this festive morning. The season is upon us, never mind everything else, cheer will be had. I expect my 12-year-old daughter to come padding into the bedroom, squinting sleepily and asking about that loud noise, but she doesn’t, and anyway now I’m awake, there’s no going back under.
So I turn to my phone to see what people on the neighborhood Facebook page are saying about the sound that woke me, because people on the neighborhood Facebook page are always saying something. Sure enough, a thread on the topic is already more than 200 comments long, though details are few. It shook my house, someone says.
Intentional? No one knows for sure.
By the time the presents are unwrapped we’ll learn that the blast was, in fact, intentional. Photographs reveal an apocalyptic scene, rubble and char and shattered glass. Blackened, gutted buildings slouch as if frozen in mid-collapse. The creepy husks of torched cars.
A bomb has destroyed much of 2nd Avenue, a prominent stretch of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, just three and a half miles from my house. The avenue is made up of a tree-lined stretch of beautiful old buildings dating back to the 1880s and features in Nashville’s early history as the locus of river trade. After the explosion, dozens of those buildings are damaged, several will be demolished. 400 residents have been displaced, and yet, miraculously, no one is dead.
I knew 2nd Avenue best in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before I left town for almost 20 years. Home to rambling antique shops, art galleries, vintage clothing nooks, a few restaurants, and a lot of vacancy, it was the best kind of liminal space, one where history felt tangible, and so did my future, the person I would be once I moved on. Teenage me fell for the dusty, quirky charm of those blocks. In the years to come, the tourism industry would invade 2nd Avenue, gussy it up in neon, and install beefy bouncers at the doors. The place I’d prowled with curiosity disappeared long ago, and with it, my sentimental attachment. I long ago gave it up to the tourists, for whom this city means something wholly different than it means to me. I surrendered, in the fashion of anyone who hails from a place with this kind of dual identity—one for the locals, one for the revenue-generating visitors, and civic leadership squirming in the middle, trying to convince the former that the latter is the pill they need to swallow in ever higher dosages.
Now, on Christmas morning, 2nd Ave. really is gone. A bomb has blown it to bits. That sounds like heavy-handed metaphor for both the pandemic year and Trump era, two excruciatingly slow detonations, but this one comes in a flash, a giant fireball that can be seen above rooftops. It blows out windows for blocks, is felt from 10 miles away. Because the explosion happens in front of an AT&T transmission center, it disrupts communications across several states for more than 24 hours. It grounds airport traffic, wipes out 911 call centers, and leaves thousands in the specific darkness that is life without cell or internet access, further isolated at the end of a year defined by such.
Actually, a bomb doesn’t do all of that.
A man does, using a bomb.
Two days later we learn his name: Anthony Quinn Warner. 63 years old, white. Gray-haired, thin-lipped. A loner, a tech guy. A boomer, OK. Lived his entire life in a suburb not far from where I grew up. Listened to a lot of 103.3 KDF Rock, as did I.
Long before the night of Christmas Eve 2020, Warner quietly, painstakingly went about transforming a recreational vehicle, that for years sat in the fenced yard next to his house, into a mobile explosive device. In the summer of 2019, his then-girlfriend warned the police that he was building a bomb, and that he knew what he was doing, and that he had “some mental and emotional problems.” They all but ignored her pleas to check him out; one excuse they give now is that she seemed mentally unstable. So Warner’s work continues through 2020. One month before Christmas, he quits his job, gives away his car and house. He smiles when he tells a neighbor that Nashville is never going to forget him.
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After 1 a.m. on Christmas Eve, Warner drives his RV down to 2nd Avenue, and he waits. Or he doesn’t; he could have died inside the RV, from self-inflicted gunshot or something else; we’ll never know. But I can’t stop imagining him waiting, so close to the finish line. His RV, meanwhile, broadcasts a message, a woman’s voice: There’s a limited time to evacuate this area. There’s a large bomb inside this vehicle. Evacuate now.
Six police are on duty. They bang on doors, rouse sleeping residents. Occasionally the RV pauses its warning loop and plays a song, Petula Clark’s “Downtown.”
When you’re alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go downtown
When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know, downtown
At 6:29 am, Anthony Warner explodes into oblivion. Tiny bits of tissue will be found days later by the FBI and matched with the DNA on a hat and gloves found in Warner’s car. Two days later, questions remain, and the cleanup has only begun, but the tourists are back. Separated from the bomb site by yellow tape and police barriers, they crowd into honky tonks, just as they’ve done for years, and straight through the many months of pandemic. I know I’m hardly alone in finding this as strange and unsettling, almost, as the bombing itself. We watch them on the news and on social media, bewildered by their revelry in the midst of a profound disruption. How do they do it? How do their minds function this way? Maskless and profane, they keep showing up.
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The Nashville bombing occupies a moment of multilayered liminality: the close of one calendar year and opening of the next; the slow stretch between Christmas and New Year’s; the hinge points between a pre-fascist administration and tentatively rescued democracy, and between a pandemic and the delivery of a vaccine that will eventually bring it to some kind of end. In these in-between days, there is little for us to do but wait—just as everyone, everywhere, has been doing for most of a year.
For Nashvillians, it’s a year that is arguably one of the worst in our history.
On March 3, 2020, a tornado ripped through Nashville, killing two people before slicing east through the state and killing 23 more. Its path was less than a mile from my house, an urban swath that, nine months later, is still identifiable by blue tarping and scraped lots, boarded-up windows and half-destroyed houses; one giant piece of metal roofing sits in a parking lot, twisted like a scarf. From certain vantage points the neighborhood looks disturbingly naked, sheared of all canopy. The tornado was followed, exactly two months later, by a derecho that destroyed even more trees and left thousands without power for days. Summer arrived, and with it, soaring COVID numbers, thanks to decisions made by our city and state leaders—and to the tourists, who, encouraged by those leaders’ decisions, kept coming.
Finally, a man born and bred here has blown up an iconic piece of our history.
Day by day, we learn a little bit more about the Christmas Bomber. The nickname is both accurate and a convenient oversimplification. We learn that he was a conspiracy theorist, one who believed in a race of lizard people and plastered his home with keep-out signs and surveillance cameras. We learn that he had but one offense on his record: for marijuana possession in 1978. We learn that he was, according to a guy who used to hang out with him long ago in bars, that he hated cops, and was popular with the ladies.
In this liminal space, I happen to be reading Intimations by Zadie Smith, a book of essays written in early quarantine, and her words are eerily relevant. She writes of a guy who’s a fixture in her NYC neighborhood, a homeless, legless man named Stevie. “And I know he is fond of conspiracy theories,” she writes, “which I have never considered anything less than an entirely rational mode of processing contemporary American reality.”
She writes, as well, of another man, potentially mentally ill, who emailed her entire university in order to have his voice heard. Reflecting on his message, and trying to make sense of it, she writes, “I was left with the useless thoughts of a novelist: what is it like to have a mind-on-fire at such a moment? Or has the world, in its new extremity, come to you?”
In these days I can’t stop thinking about the visions of Christmas Eve that danced in Warner’s own head as he worked, and waited, to enact his plan. The world in its new extremity had come to him. And now, at the end of 2020, it feels like it has come to me, too. To all of us. The bomb is the breath that blows down the house. Everything is not okay. I can’t stop listening to my mind’s chatter. A Gram Parsons song is also stuck in my head—the final cut from his final record, Grievous Angel. But my brain doesn’t get the lyrics quite right: “In my darkest hour” are the words I keep hearing, but the actual line and title is “In My Hour of Darkness.”
I am lucky, in that I recognize what’s happening in my brain. I recognize it the way you might recognize a person you hung in bars with, in a city where you lived in unhappier days. We haven’t partied in a while, depression and me. Now here he is again, on the barstool beside me. Too close, his voice bristling and constant. He won’t shut up. Another familiar sensation, like the numbness with which I greeted the Christmas morning explosion. This sensation seems, to adapt Smith’s thinking, a rational response to Now.
The openness of this time becomes a vice, the wounds of the year exposed to the air. I manage small tasks. I bake biscuits, I order running shoes. I am trying to manifest my best intentions. But in this moment there is nothing I don’t question, no truth I hold untarnished. Because I activated an out-of-office reply, bounce-back emails pile up, and my inbox is a little too on the nose with all the subject lines reading “Delivery Status Notification (Failure).”
After dark, I lay alone in bed, watching bodycam footage of the Christmas bombing. Tangled up in my obsession are some other mind-gems: I am a jealous heart, a bitter soul, a lousy writer. Pitiable, irritating. A poor gift-giver, a bad cat mom. Outside, down in the backyard, my husband and his buddies stand around the fire pit, laughing and drinking and drinking and laughing. This is how they cope—at least that’s how my brain wants to see it. All is mechanism; all is hedge.
“I’m in a low,” I admit to my daughter the next day when we go for a walk in the woods. We’re in search of a magical hollow tree that miraculously made it through the tornado. We don’t find that tree. But we find several others to admire, and the winter sky is a beautiful patchwork of blue and gray, and we discuss our hopes for the new year. Our talk turns to birds. I tell her I have recently seen several vultures and crows. She is quick to remind me that these can represent cleansing and renewal, just as they can be symbols of death.
What I want to say to her, but can’t is I hope this doesn’t happen to you—this thing happening in my mind. I hate what the world has been serving her—a pandemic and a tornado, now a bombing. She’s a strong spirit; she’s handled it all remarkably well. She is also a child of privilege, we’re both aware of that. Still, I hate every bit of this for her, and I hate that I’m so helpless to protect her from it. At the very least, I want to be better for her.
And I want to be honest, but I don’t want to scare her. I tell her that it won’t last, and I know that this much is true. He won’t stick around. Familiarity is the great salve: I know you, I say to my visitor, and soon enough you will be gone. There was a time when I was a more welcoming host. I lay down with the blues, let it fuck me. I didn’t know how to fight it with my teeth and nails—to resist, is the word. I believed what it whispered in my ear.
I don’t listen like that anymore. But that doesn’t keep me from crackling with bad energy, my synapses singed. I imagine Warner, working on his plan, lo these many months when I myself was churning toward the end of a project, a novel that might go nowhere at last. Bomb-making, book-writing; they seem but two ways to preoccupy yourself when the world is falling apart around you. Which is to say that things have gone wrong, and for me, at this point, what that looks like is the ability to trace a kinship with a paranoid man who felt ignored and misunderstood, who chose to blow up his life and his city. All is mechanism; all is hedge against something else.
AQW, did you feel that, too?
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In bed again. On the screen in my hand, the countdown happens. Police sweep the streets. Petula Clark sings.
Don’t hang around and let your problems surround you
There are movie shows downtown
Maybe you know some little places to go to
Where they never close downtown
That’s so weird. That’s like shit out of a movie, says the cop with the bodycam. I know no one will die, but my heart tightens, I stop breathing, the clock is ticking and I know that 2nd Avenue is about to go up in flames.
I try digging deep for lost memories of those old blocks. Climbing the stairs to a live music venue called Windows on the Cumberland, hearing jazz played live while the river flowed below, feeling I’d found real culture for the first time in my young life. Incense burning. A hot dog stand tucked deep within one of those old buildings, the kind with the glass that makes everything waver. As if I’m looking through such a window now, I can’t put myself back on 2nd as clearly as I want. My memory fails. 2nd Avenue has been lost to me for a long time. What did it mean to the Christmas Bomber to obliterate this place? Why did he hope to be remembered for blowing it to bits?
There’s so much we will never know of the suicide bomber’s sorrows. He was not on anyone’s radar. He wanted attention, and in his derangement, this seemed like a way to get it. His version of sanity was his belief system, egregiously flawed, but committed enough to put a plan into action. He was dedicated to that vision, laser-focused on carrying it out. He gave it his life. He did not falter. He did the thing. But he did not get to witness its doing, and that fact leaves us to imagining him. Filling in the blanks for ourselves. He leaves the story to us, just as he leaves the city to rebuild, to open back up a shared artery.
Nashville will never forget me, he told his neighbor. But soon nobody will be talking about the bomb anymore, not in the national conversation or on Twitter and only barely in the local press. The world moves on. January 6th comes.
You were wrong, Christmas Bomber. Most of us have already forgotten you.
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These days I’ve been dreaming that I’m stuck downtown, trying to find a way out, thwarted by construction. My dreamscape city is full of enormous machines powered by men. Earthmovers threaten to crush me as they go about their work. Tacky bars teem with unmasked tourists, all of them baring their teeth. In sleep I ride around in circles, looking for the turn that will take me out.
Several years ago, when cranes splintered the skyline even more than they do now, I wrote about my hometown, and my outro held a note of hope. This was shortly after we elected a woman mayor for the first time. My daughter was 6 then, old enough to understand that a first female mayor was a big deal, and a good thing. We were raising our future—that glittering, new-new South. But what I didn’t know was that this mayor would make a grievous error. She would be forced to resign. Also, she would suffer the unthinkable, the loss of her young son to heroin. Nothing happened the way I’d hoped.
In my waking hours I listen to Gram Parsons. In my hour of darkness / in my time of need / Oh Lord, grant me vision / Oh Lord, grant me speed. Parsons knew Nashville, too. But when he went on the Opry the audience jeered him. A long hair, a freak. Thankfully, there were plenty of listeners who knew better, and his work lives on today. He died at 26, the year after I was born, overdosing on morphine and alcohol, in a darkest hour.
I’ve never written about depression before. I listened to a lot of voices say that it makes for boring reading. Now I choose to listen to the vultures and the crows; I follow their calls when I go for walks around my neighborhood, which never stops changing. Now there are crews demolishing the ruined structures on 2nd Avenue, rebuilding the ones that can be saved. Now the cleanup is over and it’s a construction zone—I heard that this morning, on the news.