* * *
DESPITE THE GUARD’S and the radioman’s and the newspapers’ suggestion for individuals to stay in their homes, I ventured out that evening. I had bought a new jacket, a burnt-orange number that would do well in the chill, and I wanted to show it off to the old man.
It was dark by the time I got downtown. Rounding a corner, I saw the people streaming into the square, the mass of them glowing with small fires carried in their hands. I joined the back where they kept the Sunday morning folks—old men and women, the youngest children. After reading so many reports, I felt the excitement that came when a beloved book was made into film, all of a sudden visible and real.
The old man was nowhere in sight. I worked my way up—small candles progressing in size and heat to beer bottles to liquor bottles to torches. I stopped one row behind the frontline, where a hot silence draped itself over the crowd. Peeking up on my toes, I fought for a view between shoulders. The people leaders had stopped before the men leaders, no more than a breath between them. The men in power had covered themselves in plastic: square black helmets with tinted visors over their faces and plates of protective rubber embedded in their uniforms. Each had tucked himself behind a shield with one shoulder, holding a black club or metal blade in the opposite hand.
A teenager with a blue bandana over his face whispered down to me, You shouldn’t be up here.
It started the way anything started: with a seed of quaking static in your gut, a feeling like you’re moving but not moving, and then a wild overflow, a purging, a getting the inside out as fast as possible.
A young man in front, looking at the men, cried out, Annie!
And the crowd behind him cried, Annie! Justice!
Betsy! he cried.
Betsy! Justice! the crowd responded.
Charlie!
Charlie! Justice!
Dante!
Dante! Justice! the crowd yelled.
And Eric, Frankie, and Geoffrey; Harry, Iona, and James on down the line, each response faster, each filled to the brim with heat—all the while, the uniforms hiding men motionless—Kathy, Larry, Michael, all the way to P for Peter. I didn’t know how many Peters there were in the world, how many in our city, but in between the young man’s saying it and the crowd’s dutiful echo, I saw a particular Peter, a perfect whisper of a schoolboy, a pristine castrato who only ever sang the pains of boyhood into beauty, and after the crowd added Justice, I responded with a cry of my own, a sound that could have been the scream of a child or a mother losing that child, and the scene quickly became something confusing.
The back of the crowd surged, pushing the front of the line into the men, who pushed back with their plastic plates. They pushed and pushed until the line broke, the people and the men zipping themselves up, boy, man, boy, man, until there was no longer anything separating us. I saw one of the men’s long blades bared then made to disappear inside a young one. From behind me, rocks and more rocks, bigger rocks, and flaming bottles took flight. I covered my head with my hands, trying to move out by moving back. I ducked and dipped, muscling through while making myself as small as possible. As I was nearly out, a shoulder knocked me to the ground, and down there with me was a body, a small body, which I put into my arms. I stood. I hunched and pushed, stepping on feet and hands. I got out of the crowd to the edge of the square, where the concrete fell away to hard dirt, and the dark trees of the park picked up. I got down on my knees, cradling the small body in the bowl of my lap. The body was a child, a breathing child I did not know or recognize. A boy or girl child, a cap of short black hair with a ring of oily red around its head, red that bled down the rest of its body, as a baby pushed from the womb, covered in the messy violence of its mother’s flesh. I looked to the crowd for a mother or sister missing the child, but I saw only bodies, one against the other, and from inside the clash a man with a long blade breaking free. He moved toward me and the child, a confident march neither slow nor fast, the man as faceless and irrevocable as fear itself. The red was coming from inside the child’s head and it shone all around its face. Its eyes were looking at me with so much blank hunger, like my eyes could feed his, hers, its chest’s breaths winding down, and I said, You’re beautiful. It’s okay. You’re beautiful. You’re so beautiful; you look just like me.
GUN CONTROL
IF THERE’S A GUN IN ACT ONE, fire it in act three. Make it loud. Make it bang. Call it a climax.
If there’s a gun in act one, fire it in act two. Let the rising and falling action make a perfect, even-sided triangle. Make it a cartoon mountain peak. Call it isosceles.
If there’s a gun in act one, fire it in act one. We can see it there, we know what you want to do with it. There’s no need to be coy.
If there’s a gun in act one, push out the barrel and tip the bullets onto a quilt-covered bed in act one. The soft sound of their plunking. Guns are dangerous and more dangerous when the bullets are left inside.
Alternatively, if there’s a gun in act one, keep the bullets inside it. Do not fire it in act one, two, or three. Guns are dangerous and more dangerous when the bullets are left inside.
If there’s a gun in act one, describe the gun as cold. As smooth. Describe the gun as feeling heavier than it looks. Note the weight specifically. Compare it to something more familiar and innocuous. A wrench? A lead pipe? A bag with two or three apples inside it? Depending on the size of the apples.
If there’s a gun in act one, put it in a fenced-in backyard. Let its shots in act one, act two, act three be an annoyance, as a neighbor’s dog. Wonder why the dog won’t stop barking. Wonder whether it is barking at anyone in particular. Think, Surely it will run out of barks soon.
If there’s a gun in act one, have the dog bury it in the backyard in act two. Let the gun be a bone-dead thing we forget about and that decomposes, becomes part of the earth. Or let the gun be a seed that is watered and allowed to sprout and become tree and bear fruit that we may then pick and eat or can in jars to be placed in our cellar, lined up in rows against the wall for cold times, drought times, less plentiful gun times, so that we may never go without.
Or take the harvest to the farmers market to sell by weight in green paper cartons, cheaper the more you buy, a half peck, full peck, bushel of guns.
If there’s a gun in act one, let it instead be a banana. Let the hero slip on the peel, fall onto the third rail of the subway tracks in act two, and while he’s being electrocuted, let the banana shoot him in the head.
If there’s a gun in act one, flirt with it in act two. Treat it like a boy. Look at it, look away, then look back again. See the gun, but more important, let the gun see you. Know that the second time you look, you’d better be ready to put your finger on the gun’s trigger and take the gun into your mouth as far as it will go because otherwise why did you look at the gun a second time?
If there’s a gun in act one, in act two let the story of the gun become a will they/won’t they.
The gun is in love with you or you with it or both of you in love with each other. But know that the thing you most want in this world—to be killed by the gun in act three—is never going to happen. The closest you’ll get is a near miss. A graze of the temple, the crisp deletion of a pinky toe, a finger snipped off like someone clipping her nails. Know that the near miss will be followed by the gun’s girlfriend or wife walking in and saying, What’s going on here? Someone had better explain this. Know that, because you love the gun and don’t want to get it into trouble, despite the gun’s inherent danger, despite how close it came to killing you for nothing, you will have to lie for the gun. You will have to say, Blood? What blood? You will have to say, I was just playing with this … knife. I love knives. You will say, I really did think the safety was on.
Remember that counter to if gun, then fire runs the deeper, truer maxim that only unrequited love can be romantic. The gun must be away from us, unfired, incomplete, unsatisfied, in order to hold any kind of love potential. That’s why we must keep the bu
llets inside.
Know that you may go through acts one, two, and three without ever having a gun, let alone the gun you love, fire a single bullet in your direction. This will create sympathy or its uglier, more honest cousin, pity, for you in your readers, though some, no matter how subtle your rendering of your unrequited love pain, will still think you’re a sad sack who shouldn’t be in love with a gun to begin with and certainly not a gun who already has a girlfriend.
And so if there’s a gun in act one, put the gun to your temple in act one, finger smoothing the trigger, just to see how that feels. Just to see how you might act in subsequent acts. Just to see how one act might lead to another.
If there’s a gun in act one, pry it out of your cold dead hand in act three, but not until late in the act when your hand will have clawed especially cold and especially dead around the gun. Snap your fingers off if need be. Let the story be about your hand not wanting to ever let go.
If there’s a gun in act one, let act three be so far away that the gun rusts, jams, seizes, so that it’s no more useful than a rock, which is similar in size and weight to a fist, the size and weight of a man’s heart, which is a pretty good thing to kill someone with.
If there’s a gun in act one, let its firing in act three become so inevitable as to become predictable. Let the inevitability become a hum over which the real story is laid, let the inevitability be like the dog’s bark echoing throughout the neighborhood, but not close by, not even one door down, not so annoying and disruptive that you need to do something about the dog, not so disruptive that you need to take care of the dog, i.e., take the dog out of its yard in the middle of the night, drive it out of town, tie it to a tree, etc.
Despite knowing that if gun, then fire, despite knowing that it’s not just inevitability but persistence, a kind of insistence, a drive and purpose like gravity, know that if gun, then fire will outlive you, know that if gun, then fire might even kill you. Nonetheless, grind your wheels, if only a little, against if gun, then fire. You might, for example, take the gun somewhere you’ve never been before in act two. You will have to drive or walk or bike (you cannot fly with a gun; they do not allow it in carry-ons and we don’t have time for checking bags). For example, you might drive or walk as far east as you can go. Which means, eventually, depending on where act one begins, hitting a mountain, an ocean, a cliff. Take the gun, and assuming it’s still a gun, throw it as far as you can throw it. Loosen up your arm, rear back, make it a good one. Keep the bullets inside it. At the edge of the water or cliff, the top of the mountain, the bubbling mouth of the volcano, you may see others doing or just having done the same thing. Give a nod, perhaps even do a secret hand signal—a tug of the ear, a swipe of the nose—but say nothing. Do not smile. Do not congratulate yourself or the others for the long journey to the gun’s obliteration. This is something you and the others should have done a long time ago, long before act one even began.
If the gun in act one has become a banana in act two, let the gun, instead, be a banana clip. Something plastic, built to break, something that went out of style in the mid-nineties. Something that people now only wear ironically. And so let the banana clip be a kind of joke that cannot hold up to the weight of scrutiny, the roll of our collective eyes.
If there’s a gun in act one, and in act two or three the gun is no longer a gun, then fire it—that is, discharge it—for not holding up its end of the bargain.
If in act one the gun has become a banana, use the banana to kill as many children in the school as possible. Show up hours or days or weeks in advance and plant the banana and dozens of other bananas in hidden corners of the school, where they will eventually (at some point in the now distant-seeming act three) rot and cause a horrible smell to disseminate throughout the school, thick as smoke, sending the teachers and children and lunch workers pouring out of the building like vital fluid from a wound, pinching their noses or the noses of their friends.
Give the parents, the teachers, perhaps even one child the chance to say, We were supposed to be having our science fair today. It was such a fun, exciting thing we were going to do. But now this. I guess we’ll have to have the science fair tomorrow or the next day. We’ll just come back tomorrow.
If this, then end the story now, leave the children looking ahead to, but not quite getting, the science fair. This will put them in a state of insecurity (What if the same thing happens tomorrow? What if there are more bananas?) but also of hope, which is a good state in which to leave things—that is to say complicated, perhaps only slightly wiser, potentially, probably a little sadder than before.
But if you’d like to raise the stakes, if you’d really like to make the story worth telling, send one kid to the emergency room because they thought he was having an allergic reaction to the bananas. Instead have it turn out that he had begun hyperventilating on account of pinching his nose too tightly. Let it be a mistake. Let it just be that everyone is overreacting to the incident with the bananas.
If the gun in act one has become a banana in act two, keep one banana—a last-resort banana—tucked into the back of your jeans with your shirt pulled over top. When all the other bananas have spoiled, have split their soft guts onto the floor, peel the banana, put your finger on the trigger of the banana, and force the remaining children and teachers closest to you to each take a bite. They might turn their heads or even begin to cry for the awkwardness of something shoved into their mouths, but just do it. Bananas are for eating, and so make them take as many bites as they can, but, and this is important, be sure to save the last bite for yourself. It is, after all, your banana.
In order to erase ourselves in act one or two or three, to make disappear the men behind the gun, if there’s a gun in act one, give everyone a gun in act one. Let it be assumed that all men and women are gunned, holding, packing. So in act three when guns are drawn, yours pointing at his, his pointing at hers, hers pointing at hers at yours, it will be no surprise. It will be a given that those guns were there all along, and so if gun, then fire will serve as a least common denominator for our stories, the point from which we start all stories, as language, as body, as breath, as the clearing of a throat just before speech.
Because it will sometimes be satisfying for people to say, Yes, he was always strange. Always standoffish. Antisocial. He always was. For them to say, His family always did love bananas.
It will also be satisfying to say the opposite. To insert, despite If gun act one, then fire act three, the baffled character of ourselves, the tortured mother, the ravaged sister survivor standing in the parking lot, saying, I never in a million years. I had no idea. You just cannot predict something like this.
WINE IS MOSTLY WATER
THEY PUSH HOOKS THROUGH the man’s calves, back, and arms and hang him from the gallery ceiling. Skin pulled to points, skin stretched like bats’ wings. It’s called the Superman pose: facedown, body spread out thirty feet in the air. Adam doesn’t understand the physics of it, why his skin doesn’t tear, though he knows it has to do with the number of hooks. In this pose, he needs eight. Guy, the man who suspends him, says that some people in different poses can get away with only two; it all depends on their skin.
Adam wears nothing but a pair of nylon shorts. They match his pale coloring, so that at first glance he appears naked, and then, on longer inspection, naked still, a eunuch. The shorts itch when he puts them on, but like the hooks, if he doesn’t move, he feels them less and less until he stops feeling them at all. He instead feels the air around him, how far he is from the gallery floor and the people standing below. At his younger sister’s studio apartment, the coffee table is inches from the couch he sleeps on. The arm of the couch is inches from her bed pillow. Some nights, he puts his head at the couch’s arm, some nights his feet. Other nights she asks that he not come home so she can have the apartment to herself.
The exhibit is, in some ways, about flight, about putting impossible objects in the air. In the first room, a glass of water ho
vers just inches off the floor. It’s hard to tell immediately that it’s not flush to the ground. A placard on the wall asks that viewers not touch any part of the installation, but they cannot help bending down and waving their hands around the glass. It looks so much like magic.
As the exhibit progresses, the objects get higher and higher. Two books, splayed open, float hip-high. A dark-wood bedside table comes to viewers’ necks. The contents of its open drawer are visible to most only when they balance on their toes: a handful of gray-wrappered condoms, pencils, and a steno tablet filled with scrawl. A tall brass lamp hovers some feet away and higher, lit and cocked at an angle. Viewers step around its shadow, the place where it would fall were it to fall. Then, walking through a narrow hallway, instinctively looking up one increment higher, they enter the other room. There a bed hovers upside down, pillows secured to its head, but blankets and sheets left to hang, as if to say that this is not solely about defying gravity. Then a scattering of clothes—a black bra, a balled white sock, a pair of cotton underwear. The loose parabola at once leads up to and trails away from Adam, as rock and fire and dust pulled behind a dying comet. It’s hot near the ceiling. Alex, the exhibit’s creator, told him to expect this, but each night it surprises him how surely the heat comes into his body. One moment the temperature is an antiseptic cool, the next his skin flushes, the feeling bleeding out from his chest like a stain. The problem is not the heat or being so far off the ground or the numbing pain that leaves him feeling both within and outside his body. It’s coming down, it’s being released. It’s the phantom cords tugging him backward as he walks to his sister’s home.
* * *
LAST WEEK HE FLEW HOME to visit his father in Fort Wayne. The temperature had reached ninety before noon, and the house Adam grew up in, a gray foursquare on the south side of town, is still without air-conditioning. He had gotten comfortable on the porch swing with a book on the seventeen-year cicada and a glass of iced tea when his father came out and handed him a letter. He sat down across from Adam in an Adirondack chair, and as Adam was finishing reading, his father eased down beside him gingerly, as though trying not to wake a sleeping baby.
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