by Michael Cart
“Why didn’t they stop it?” I said.
“That’s one of the questions,” Tim said. “Don’t you think? Why didn’t they stop it?”
“Because they’re an audience,” Jacob said. “Maybe they didn’t think he would actually shoot him.”
“Or maybe they knew it was fake,” I said. “Like a movie.”
“It’s not fake,” Tim said. “I’ve looked into it.”
“He’s a little obsessed with it,” Jacob said.
Tim was like that. He couldn’t let things go. And when he was like this, you had to either follow him or let him think he was the one leading.
“It’s not fake,” Tim repeated.
“So what? Now you want to shoot someone?”
“Why not?” Tim said.
“Because it’s stupid.” I could see that Jacob and Nick were already on board. Typical.
“No one’s going to get hurt,” Tim said.
“That’s clearly not true.”
“Well, not hurt bad. I read about it. He got shot in the arm and then had a doctor treat him. We could do this. We do it and then immediately get to the hospital. It’s, like, fifteen minutes away, fifteen tops. We go in and tell them it was an accident. We have to commit to that and stick with it.”
“What if they call the cops?” Nick said.
“It was an accident,” Tim said. “That’s all we have to say.”
“How did it happen?” I said.
“We didn’t know the gun was loaded. We weren’t familiar with the gun, something like that.”
“It already doesn’t make sense,” I said. “It won’t make sense.”
“We just need to figure out the story,” Tim said. “We need to figure it out and stick with it.”
“Forget it,” I said. “No one’s shooting a gun in here.”
“I’m willing to be the one who gets shot,” Tim said.
“No,” I said.
“Why?” Nick said.
“Because I’m not going to get hurt, not bad, anyway. And I’ll have a great story to tell. Think about it. I can tell any girl that I got shot, and can tell her any story about how it happened, and show her the place where I got shot. I can get mileage out of this. For, like, ever.”
“What girls?” Nick said.
“I don’t know,” Tim said. “Any girls, girls I meet in college next year. I can tell them all about it.”
“Couldn’t you just make it up? You could tell them the story without actually having to get shot. What would they know?”
“You’re missing the point,” Tim said.
“What is the point?” I asked.
“The point is to shoot so it means something for once. Anybody can shoot a deer. How many people can shoot another person?”
“Anybody can,” Nick said. “It happens every day.”
“Everybody does it,” I said.
“Not like this,” Tim said. “This is different and you know it.”
“You want to get shot just to impress some girls you don’t even know,” Nick said.
“There are worse reasons to do something,” Tim said. “Wars have been fought to impress women. Besides, it’s only part of it. Don’t you want to know what it’s like?”
“I know what it’s like,” Nick said. “It’s going to hurt like hell.”
“You don’t know,” Tim said.
“I don’t know what it’s like to have my hand chopped off, either, but I’m not asking you to go get the ax,” Nick said.
Tim was getting fed up, but not enough to drop it. “No one’s asking you to get your hand chopped off, and no one’s asking you to get shot. I’m not even asking you to do the shooting. You’d probably miss my arm and shoot me in the chest, where you should have shot that deer.”
Nick dropped his head and stayed quiet.
“I’m the one who’s willing to get shot,” Tim said. “For my own reasons.”
“Just because isn’t good enough,” I said. “Not to be shot or to be the one shooting.”
“It’s my story,” Tim said. “And the one who does the shooting can tell people he shot a guy. How great is that? How many people can say that? ‘Yeah, I shot a guy once. With a rifle.’ Beats most people’s lame-ass stories. Might even beat my story about getting shot.”
“I’ll do it,” Jacob said. “I mean, why not?”
“You’re not doing it,” I said. “This is stupid.”
“It’s no more or less stupid than shooting anything else,” Tim said. “We just wasted the whole day chasing after some stupid deer. What’s the whole sense in any of that? In fact, this makes more sense. We’re both agreeing to it, we’re going to take every precaution we can, and it’s not going to be a big deal.”
“You don’t know,” I said. “Jacob could miss and hit you in the chest or neck or somewhere. You could have more damage to your arm than you think. You don’t know. There’s no point to it.”
“It’s a .22,” Tim said. “You can’t hurt anything with a .22.”
“There’s that couple in Missouri that killed all those people who came to their house, killed them all with a .22 rifle,” Nick said. “The wife made a bed quilt out of scraps of their clothes, remember?”
“What are you talking about?” Tim said. “That’s not happening. None of that has anything to do with this. It’s going to be about the same as getting hit with a baseball.”
“Get me a baseball, then,” I said. “I’ll throw it at you all day long.”
“We’re going to do this,” Nick said. “You don’t have to be part of it. Go up to your uncle’s house, and just go with us to the hospital.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“He can’t,” Nick said. “He has to be part of it.”
“How do you figure?”
“The safe, that’s how,” Nick said. “How else would we get the .22?”
“We could say he gave us the combination,” Jacob said.
“I might as well be part of it, then,” I said, “for all the trouble I’d be in.”
“You might as well,” Nick said. “Who doesn’t like to shoot stuff, anyway? Isn’t that what you’re always saying? You should do the shooting.”
“No, I shouldn’t,” I said. “I don’t care if you do it without me, but I’m not doing it. But you’d better figure out your story. None of it makes sense.”
We talked through the story, or numerous versions of it, over and over, trying to get it to seem plausible. I thought that the more they talked it through, the more they would see that it didn’t make any sense, and they’d give up. Instead, the more they talked about it, the more it seemed like an inevitability. Jacob was going to shoot Tim, and Nick was on board or indifferent, and what I thought didn’t matter. Even I was getting to the point where I didn’t really care. Let Tim get shot, if that’s what he wanted. If he thought he could figure it out, who was I to stand in his way?
It seemed like a certainty, but it hadn’t happened yet. “This isn’t going to work,” Tim finally said. “Not like this.” He leaned forward on the couch and gave me his full attention. “It has to be you.”
I should have known that it would somehow come back to me. “It has to be you,” Tim said. “You’re the only one who can get away with it.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Your uncle,” he said. “You have to get the gun. You have to do the shooting. It doesn’t work any other way. Besides, your uncle will forgive you. Not the rest of us. He’d never let us come back here. He’d never forgive us for the shooting, and especially not for opening the safe, even if you’d given us the combination. But he’d forgive you.”
“Maybe not,” I said, but no one else agreed. “And what about your parents? They won’t forgive me.”
“It was an accident,” Tim said. “If we stick with that, they’ll get over it.”
“They won’t care,” I said. “All they’ll think is that I shot you.”
“You’ll have to live with that,” T
im said. I would have to live with it. “But you’d know that I let you. It was my fault.”
“You’re asking me to take on a bunch of trouble just to shoot you. I can shoot you anytime. Why does it have to be tonight? Let’s do it back home; let’s wait so we don’t have to drag my uncle into it.”
“It has to be tonight,” Tim said. “It’s perfect tonight.” This is where it becomes almost impossible to talk with Tim. His ideas become cold, immovable facts and he counts on the rest of us going along.
“And what if I tell people?” I said. “What if they get so mad, my uncle, my parents, your parents, that I tell them that it was all your idea, that you wanted to be shot?”
Tim shrugged. “You won’t tell them. But if you do, it doesn’t really matter what I wanted. You pulled the trigger. It was both of us. That’s why we stick with the story. It was an accident. We were packing our guns for the morning, and we brought all the guns into the cabin. You were teasing me about the .22 and picked it up. You didn’t know it was loaded, and you were kidding around and accidentally pulled the trigger. It was an accident. That’s all. How mad can they be?”
“They’ll be out of their heads mad,” I said.
“It’ll be a scratch,” Tim said. “They’ll be relieved.”
“Let me see the video again,” I said. I didn’t watch Chris Burden; I watched his friend, the one with the rifle. He stands with feet apart, his right foot in front of the left, both of them parallel to the wall behind Burden, the rifle raised to the friend’s right shoulder, his left hand on the trigger. They’re both in the frame, about fifteen feet apart. You can’t see the friend’s face as it’s hidden by a big bush of hair. You don’t even know his name. All Burden says is, “At seven forty-five p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend.” He’s absolutely precise about the time, but nondescript about the friend. Maybe Tim was right; in his story no one would care; they would only care that he was shot.
“We’re going to film it, right?” Jacob said.
“We can’t film it,” Nick said. “We have to stick to the story. We can’t have some video of it. Then we’ll all be in trouble.”
It didn’t matter. We were well into Timland. “It’s only for us,” Tim said. “Use my camera.” He handed his phone to Jacob.
It was almost midnight; we’d been talking about it for hours, talking about it until it had weight and momentum and expectations, like a movie that once started can’t be abandoned, but has to be watched until the end. I was going to do it. I didn’t see any other way. It was Tim’s movie; it was his idea.
There is something immeasurably satisfying about shooting a gun. If you haven’t done it, I can’t explain it, and I’m not sure I understand it, anyway. It’s mechanical and physical at the same time; it takes concentration and control and yet is nothing more than squeezing a trigger. Such a small action causing so much violence. Maybe that’s it. I don’t know, but I know that I have always liked it. Lots of people do.
The trick is to not think about it, not in the whole, anyway. You have to restrict your thinking, concentrate not on the person, but on the arm, not even on the arm, on the small target area. You have to disconnect the arm from the person, the target from the arm; you have to think in abstract terms, like target, objective, dehumanized words, so the thought of shooting a person, especially your friend, doesn’t creep into your mind. But do you have to do that? Isn’t that the test? Should you separate the act from the person, the victim from the violence inflicted upon him? Or maybe you should be aware, painfully aware. It shouldn’t be an easy, callous, soulless thing, should it, to shoot another person? Even if it’s planned, well planned so that no one gets seriously hurt, it still shouldn’t be easy, it shouldn’t be allowed, really.
I thought they would stop me.
I walked to the mudroom and took the .22 out of the safe. It was still dark in the place where my uncle’s house stood. Maybe they were still gone, or maybe they’d come back and had gone to bed. You couldn’t tell. I thought he would have checked in with us, but maybe not. I checked the rifle; it had a bullet in the chamber. I checked the safety and made sure it was on. It seemed as if it was going to happen, whether I wanted it to or not, but I was the one who had to pull the trigger. I reminded myself of that. Nothing could happen without me, no matter what Tim or any of them wanted.
Tim stood against the wall of the cabin, his legs slightly apart, braced for whatever was to come, his left arm held out slightly away from his body, hanging straight down, a slender target. Jacob looked at the image of Chris Burden and made minor adjustments to the way Tim was standing. We figured that was the important thing. I could do whatever I wanted, just as long as I could hit the arm. I wasn’t sure that I could.
I raised the rifle to my shoulder and looked down the barrel with my hand nowhere near the trigger. I’ve done my share of shooting; I haven’t killed that many animals, mostly squirrels and rabbits and some birds, even shot a couple of deer. I’ve never thought about it, never had any hesitation or second thoughts. They have thoughts and feelings and consciousness just like we do, parents and families, and feel pain just like we do, but “You shoot them, don’t you?” Tim had said. “You don’t have any trouble shooting them. So why not shoot me in the arm, just nick the arm, that’s all you have to do. I want to know what it feels like. Aren’t you the least bit curious about it?” I wasn’t curious. The less I thought about it, the better. I looked down the barrel and saw his arm, tried not to see it, but see instead the fabric of his shirt, the dark patch of cloth, nothing but a dark patch of cloth against the white paint of the wall behind him. I lowered the gun.
“I’m calmer about this than you are,” Tim said.
“You want to switch places?”
“It has to be you.”
“Just come look.”
“Don’t think about it, just shoot. Then we’ll get the hell out of here. It will be all over. Just shoot.”
There were only about ten people who watched Chris Burden get shot in the arm, Tim said. I wondered what that meant. Were there only ten people interested in seeing someone get shot in front of them or were there only ten people invited to watch? And were they instructed to not intervene, to not try and stop the shooting of another person, or were they disinterested or thought it was fake or that it wouldn’t really happen? I didn’t know if Tim really wanted to go through with it or if he was sure I wouldn’t pull the trigger. He seemed to really want to know what it was like to be shot in the arm; he wanted to have that experience and that story. Maybe he trusted me to do it right. It was hard to tell with him, and the more we’d talked, the less certain I was. Jacob was standing off to the side, waiting with Tim’s phone in his hand, and Nick was standing behind us somewhere, out of sight. They weren’t going to say anything; they wouldn’t do anything. They would be happy enough no matter what happened, I thought. But who wouldn’t want to see some guy get shot? But who would?
“You don’t want to go your whole life without shooting someone, do you?” Tim had said to Nick.
“Actually, I would. Why would I shoot someone?”
“Because you can,” Tim said. “This is a free pass. Maybe your only chance to do it and get away with it.”
“If I started shooting, I’m not sure I’d ever stop,” Jacob joked, but it was probably true. It wasn’t a big stretch to see Jacob as one of those quiet types who snaps one day, and the next thing you know he’s boiling bones on the stove and making quilts out of his victims’ clothes.
But I was the one holding the gun, aiming it at another person, doing the one thing you’re told to never do, until they train you to do it in the army or police department or something. They train you not to think about it, don’t they? They prove the thing that Tim always argued, that we’re all relativists, that under the right conditions, we’re all capable of anything. Did I want to help prove him right? I looked down the barrel and saw nothing but blue cloth. It wasn’t Tim; it wasn’t even his arm. It was just a
spot, a target like any other, and all I had to do was pull the trigger like I’d done hundreds of times. I wouldn’t miss. The bullet would hit the cloth, maybe just to the right of his actual arm, grazing him and lodging in the wall behind him. It wouldn’t be an accident, but it would seem like one. Maybe we’d get away with it. Maybe no one would hate me too much, and Tim would have his scar and his story and would know what it feels like to be shot, and I’d know what it was like to shoot someone. I would give Tim everything he wanted, and I’d have to take the blame. Only in Tim’s world is the guy getting shot better off than the one doing the shooting. But do you think about these things or put them out of your mind? There had been nothing but talk about it, nothing but thinking. That part was over, wasn’t it? There was nothing left to do but squeeze the trigger. That’s how the story has to end, isn’t it? It was such a small thing to do, but no one would understand. Everything would be a lie after that. I thought Tim would stop it, that he couldn’t just stand there and wait for it like that. I couldn’t look at him, but he couldn’t look back at me, either, could he? Could he stare at the rifle and wait for it? Jacob and Nick said nothing; they would say nothing. It was between Tim and me and I tried not to think about him. Someone should have stopped it. There was nothing to do but put an end to it, to stop it myself, one way or the other.
The door opened and my uncle said something. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it wasn’t even a word; maybe it was nothing more than a shocked sound. I didn’t hear anything but a pop, a split-second crack that seemed slightly out of reach, maybe not even inside the cabin, as if it had happened behind my uncle, right when he spoke, something snapping in the dark outside the door. It wasn’t until I lowered the gun that I realized what had happened.
We had rehearsed our lie, gone over it again and again. It was an accident. It was an accident. That’s all we had to say. Only now it wasn’t a lie. And no one believes me.
THE BODYGUARD: A FABLE