A young woman and her sister sit side-by-side in a Parisian outdoor scene, framed by swirling greens and icy blues. Lush trees tower over a shimmering lake in the distance, setting the two against a pastel backdrop. The eldest dons a cherry-wine colored bonnet and keeps her equally crimson lips pursed in a Mona Lisa half-smile, eyes transfixed on something outside our view. Her younger sister clings close beside.
Two Sisters (On the Terrace) – Auguste Renoir [1881, oil on canvas]
In his composition, I recognized my older sister and me. Though only four years separate us, we could not be more dissimilar.
She to this day maintains a reserved demeanor and takes a methodical, logical approach to most any challenge; I am sociable and wildly emotional, requiring constant affirmation and affection. She is soft edges and symmetrical patterns, and I, erratic angles and dizzying contours. Growing up, it sometimes felt as if we were speaking different languages to one another.
But Renoir made sense of our bond. His rendering comforted me with its permanence, a reassuring reminder that my sister, quiet and consistent, would always be there, too.
I never allowed myself to imagine a scenario in which I, like the young girl in Renoir’s scene, could no longer cling close to my sister when I needed her. I had apparently convinced myself that life’s fragility did not apply to us, a perception that was irreversibly shattered over one year ago by a lone gunman on the Las Vegas Strip.
Sunday, October 1st, 2017
In the moments before a barrage of bullets began tearing through the crowd of concert-goers, my older sister was eating a cinnamon-sugar soft pretzel. She wanted a treat to finish off her final night at the three-day Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas. As she savored the doughty knot, she and her husband moved closer to the stage, listening to Jason Aldean croon his setlist. She remembers the smell of beer wafting through the venue, as throngs of country music fans sipped from plastic cups and sang along in their own off-key performances.
When she first heard the startling popping noise, she instinctively looked up, expecting the bright bursts of a fireworks show. She remembers thinking that it was odd that nothing appeared to be happening in the dark, empty sky, but she shrugged it off and resumed watching the concert. A few seconds later, the loud sound recommenced more vigorously, followed by an absolute, unnerving silence.
All at once she was being yanked backwards by her husband, who was yelling that they needed to go in a tone that expressed something she had never heard from him before: fear.
What she recalls after that has returned to her slowly and exists only in brief flickers of memory. As they took off in a dead-sprint towards the exit, the deafening cracks of gunfire resounded all around them, ceasing every few minutes only to promptly start again. People were panicking, swarming behind food trucks for protection and lying sprawled on the ground, with no idea where the shooting was coming from. A man they passed had taken his shirt off and was attempting to tie a makeshift tourniquet around his badly bleeding arm. Another man running next to my sister collapsed, and she didn’t have time to discern whether he had tripped, or if he had been shot.
Courtesy David Becker/Getty Images
The sounds became so intense that at one point her husband pushed her to the ground and laid on top of her, entirely covering her small frame. At the time, it didn’t register to her that he was risking his safety to shelter her, or that in the process he had severely torn up his knees, which became caked with dirt and blood. It didn’t register to her that the entire time gunfire rang out, she was unknowingly repeating curse words over and over. For her, nothing much was registering at all. They stayed in this position only seconds before they were up again, bounding towards the exit.
As they reached the gateway, the security guards shouted at the masses of people trying to escape not to leave the premises, insisting that they were safer inside the confines of the showground than they would be on the streets, where they assumed the shooting was coming from. Security suspected that there was a group of shooters or at least an accomplice; they thought the shooters might be headed to nearby hotels next. They didn’t yet understand that the guns were being fired through smashed windows of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino by only one 64-year-old man, who was deliberately spraying rounds of bullets on the unsuspecting crowd. He alone stood in that window on the 32nd floor killing people at random, killing people who had families and loved ones, killing them for no reason, playing God.
My sister’s husband elbowed past the guards and into the street, and the two ducked behind cars that had been forced to a standstill in making way for the stampede of horrified fans rushing from the site in their country Western getup. It was only when my sister and her husband were locked in the bathroom stall of a nearby hotel that she realized that her husband was still gripping her hand, his knuckles white; he had never let it go. My sister took out her cell phone and, with her hands still shaking, texted our mother that she loved her.
Around 2 am they were finally given the all-clear and cautiously emerged from the bathroom. They found themselves surrounded by hundreds of people similarly seeking refuge in the hotel’s entryway, though these total strangers now all shared something in common: at around 10 pm that October night on the Las Vegas Strip, they had survived the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Courtesy Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Since the attack in Las Vegas, which killed 58 people – not including the shooter himself— and wounded nearly 500 more, my sister and her husband have not changed their day-to-day routines much. They still wake up at 6:15 am every morning on the dot, grabbing their matching lunchboxes on the way out the door. They still attend their graduate school classes at UC Riverside together in the afternoons, sending silly selfies to one another throughout the day. They still watch an episode of television with dinner every night before going to sleep.
But in more subtle ways, their lives have transformed drastically. Loud noises and large crowds make my sister overwhelmingly anxious. A few days after the shooting, a box noisily knocked over by a grocery store attendant sent her cowering to the floor. Cannons at a college football game caused her to lurch out of her seat. Months after the event, at a Taylor Swift concert, she mentally sought out potential hiding spots in the stadium and mapped escape routes.
The boundless light that once existed within my sister has been faintly dimmed by the perpetual weight of lived trauma, and of ever-looming survivor’s guilt.
One Year After
Impressionism is about moments. Renoir and other Impressionists sought to capture a fleeting instant, a feeling, an impression. Some focused on more existential themes of alienation in modern society; Renoir, however, primarily focused on the representation of leisure and beauty, asserting his disregard for openly critical subjects. The moments Renoir captured were lovely, breezy, and often altogether largely contrived. The girls in ‘Two Sisters,’ it turns out, were not in fact actually related. The realities Renoir painted were predominantly of unrelenting sunniness and artificial tenderness, his own enduring versions of society at its best.
The Las Vegas Shooting is about a moment, too. A moment in which, one year ago, a deranged man committed a senseless act of violence that ended 58 people’s lives and destroyed countless others. He gave us a glimpse of the very worst of humanity, and one year later, we are still collectively grieving, reeling, searching for reasons and answers and closure that will never be granted.
I found myself envious of Renoir: I wondered what it was like to be able to so fully occupy this space of strictly beautiful moments; I wondered if he could find light in the ugliest of circumstances. Because when the news broke that there had been a shooting in Las Vegas, when I lay huddled in my friend’s lap confronted with the unfathomable idea that I might actually lose my sister, any romanticized notions I had left of the world evaporated. Unlike the girl in the cherry-wine colored bonnet, kept forever alive in Renoir’s tranquil scene, my sister’s existence is impermanent, a consciousness that had struck me with inconceivable force.
Renoir once defended his paintings by remarking, “Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.” To an extent, I agree: Beautiful art can be the best form of escapism. One year after the Las Vegas shooting, Renoir’s ‘Two Sisters’ is still beautiful.
But one year after the Las Vegas shooting, I have realized that to ignore reality or feign ignorance of darkness in the world can be dangerous. Because one year after the Las Vegas shooting, little has been done to make sure no one ever misses out on moments with their loved ones again due to gun violence. And although the two figures in Renoir’s painting were not truly related, that really was my sister getting shot at, and she wasn’t protected in the swirling greens and icy blues of Renoir’s dream-like realm.