by Ron Currie
“You’ve had it checked out?”
“I hadn’t noticed it. But it’s probably just a cyst. Women of a certain age, you know. Everything starts falling apart.” She shoved a loose swatch of hair behind her ear. “Jesus, are we actually having this conversation right now? Because up until about thirty seconds ago, I thought we were going to have sex.”
“Not feeling it anymore?” I asked.
“It was pretty tenuous to begin with, K.” She grabbed the covers and disappeared, bunching the top of the comforter in a ball under her chin.
“I guess it was,” I said.
• • •
After the nine days Sarah procrastinated on the gynecologist appointment, after the two days we waited for the needle biopsy and the four days we waited for the results, after the three days we waited for a CT scan and the two days we waited for those results, after nights of staring into the dark as the reality of what was happening first closed around us like a vise and then, slowly, cleaved us into the two discrete states of existence known as well and sick, after we sat in the examination room while the same doctor who, two weeks earlier, had palpated Sarah’s breast and tried to obscure a growing dismay at what he felt finally told us why he’d been so dismayed, after Sarah had gone from golemlike silence to uncontrolled tears and the doctor lamely offered a box of tissues and I lamely took a few and pressed them into Sarah’s hand, after she excused herself and went to the hallway bathroom to be by herself for however long it took to regain her composure, I found myself alone with the doctor.
We didn’t say anything for a minute. He cleared his throat once, then again, more forcefully this time. I let my head hang and rubbed the back of my neck slowly with one hand.
Between his fingers the doctor held a designer fountain pen, gold, with his initials engraved on the barrel in florid cursive. He tapped the pen in a steady rhythm against Sarah’s file folder, which rested on his lap.
Finally, the doctor said, “Are there any questions I can answer for you? While we’re waiting?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I felt alternately as if I might vomit or burst into tears myself, and did not desire a witness to either. “In fact, if you have other patients, feel free to go tend to them. I’ll just wait for Sarah.”
“I don’t mind at all,” the doctor said. “And really, listen, with this type of diagnosis, in many ways I’m your doctor, too. Sarah may be the one who’s ill, but there’s a lot of weight about to come down on your shoulders. So please, ask anything you want.”
I had a question to ask, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.
“Really,” the doctor said again.
“Okay,” I said. “We mentioned that I noticed the lump in her breast, I think.”
“Yes. Oftentimes intimate partners are the first to discover malignancies. It’s quite common.”
I swallowed. “Would it have made any difference in her prognosis,” I asked, “if I had noticed it sooner?”
The doctor looked down at the file on his lap. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I said ask anything you want, but I don’t like to engage in that sort of speculation. I don’t deal in what-ifs or should-haves. This is where we are now.”
“Right,” I said.
“Besides,” he said, “usually a partner will notice a mass pretty much the moment it becomes palpable. So if you didn’t feel it before now, it must have been because it couldn’t be felt.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Must have been.”
The doctor looked at me. “What?”
“What if I told you,” I said, “that we hadn’t had sex in six months? Sarah and me?”
The doctor stared for several beats, then snapped back to himself. “I’d say, again, that speculation is pointless.”
“Except I saw something cross your face, just now,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“Something that said, quite clearly, that if I’d touched my wife six months ago she might not be dying today.”
“Which doesn’t change the fact that speculation is pointless.”
Now the tears came.
The doctor leaned forward in his chair. “Listen to me,” he said. “As a physician I can’t say for certain that it would or would not have made a difference. But my advice, as a human being who has watched many people go through what you’re about to go through, is to spend as little time as possible thinking about it.”
The doctor and I sat there for another three or four minutes, trying to avoid one another’s gaze, and by the time Sarah came back with her eyes nearly swollen shut from crying I was more than ready to go, and said so, and I left that place as though fleeing the scene of a crime.
25
JOIN, AND DIE
With the arrival of the ragtag militia, television headlines came fast and shrill. REBELLION IN EAST TEXAS read one. LONE STAR SHOWDOWN read another. Still others, either more coy or democratic-minded, framed the story with rhetorical queries and let the viewer decide for herself if she thought the SECOND CIVIL WAR? had begun.
Typical bug-eyed overstatement from the news-industrial complex? Perhaps. But consider the concentric circles: Claire and I in the center, surrounded by Trumbull and his men. Trumbull and his men, surrounded by the FBI. And the FBI, now themselves surrounded by two hundred or so angry people from all over the country, neo-Nazis and disillusioned ex-military and Second Amendment warriors who shared in common precisely two things: a great and consuming hatred of government, and a uniform whiteness.
Consider, further, that two of the newly arrived revolutionaries, a man and woman from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, had peeled off from the main group and, after dressing themselves rather foppishly as villains from the Batman universe, executed a pair of police officers on their lunch break at a pizzeria in Plano. Simultaneous point-blank shots to the side of the cops’ skulls, bone shards and gray matter sprayed all over their thin crust like some macabre Expressionist painting, a Gadsden flag draped carefully atop the whole mess while terrified diners hid under tables and ran screaming into the street. Real violence had now been committed, real blood spilled in the name of armed insurrection, and given that, one might be slightly less inclined to view the media’s revolution narrative as hyperbole.
Certainly, the networks no longer needed to manufacture tension for their audience. If previously a fight had seemed possible, now a sense of inevitability presided, and that sense came through on the television without any embellishment from newscasters. The abject stillness of the air seemed both portent and grim promise. Images of the FBI and revolutionaries with rifles trained on one another, perched in truck beds and kneeling behind open car doors, were such that one could almost smell the blood to come. Tactically, this display of aggression on the part of the revolutionaries was beyond foolish; the Bradley chain guns could have ripped up all the Bondo’d F-150s and dusty Astro vans in less time than it takes to scramble an egg. But psychologically their posture made sense, as a clear willingness to die will always give one’s enemy pause—in particular if that enemy has reason to worry about public relations.
That afternoon the agent on the public address system went quiet for the first time in five days, and I surmised that Trumbull had finally broken his silence and contacted the FBI. This supposition proved correct when Trumbull came to us that evening in the third-story bedroom where we’d spent the entire day, passing the hours with endless hands of gin rummy, the general strategy of which had been altered considerably by the fact that the deck of cards was short two sevens and the queen of clubs.
“Tomorrow morning,” Trumbull said. “Ten o’clock.”
Claire leapt from her seat, spitting and cursing, and threw herself at Trumbull. She swung on him repeatedly, and he backed up half a step as her fists pelted his chest and shoulders like raindrops hitting a rock. He could have broken her in two, but did nothing to restrain or repulse her, instead turning his face to avoid an unlikely but still possible blow to the virile arch of
his nose. Claire kept this up for an impressive amount of time, but did eventually tire, as we all must, whereupon she stood with her fist still cocked at her side, panting, yet more furious in her impotence.
“He knows what he has to do,” Trumbull said, and left.
• • •
In the dream I performed psychic surgery on my wife, folding my hands into her wasted body, pulling out pieces of tumor like raw stew meat and depositing them in a blood-streaked steel bowl at her bedside.
Everyone we’d ever known stood gathered in the room, looking on.
Sarah lay awake and aware on the bed. Each time I pushed my hands into her she arched her back and sighed. I worked carefully, seeking out every last malignant bit in her chest and brain and femur until, satisfied that none remained, I wiped my hands on a white towel and told Sarah she was healed. All those assembled clapped and cheered, and Sarah, still lying flat, turned her head toward me and waited for the applause to die down, then smiled and whispered: “That doesn’t matter.”
I snapped awake next to Claire, gasping as sweat ran in rivulets down my rib cage and across my thighs, my mind spinning with thoughts of Einstein at Auschwitz, dressed in rough striped wool, his head shaved clean and a Star of David sewn to his tattered shirt, Einstein on corpse detail, carrying nude bodies to be stacked and burned endlessly like cordwood, Einstein scribbling formulae by moonlight with a nub of pencil stolen from the crematorium, Einstein running each afternoon to the canteen, where he is given just two minutes to eat a watery soup served boiling hot so that his mouth and throat seethe with blisters, Einstein loading and unloading the ovens and sweeping up ashes, Einstein twisting the head of a corpse and yanking on pliers with both hands until a gold bicuspid pops loose, Einstein telling prisoners about to be gassed that they are going to receive a nice, hot shower, Einstein exhorting his partner in crematorium work, who has just found his brother among the dead, to cease weeping lest he anger the guards, Einstein too weak to run to the canteen any longer, arriving with only enough time to eat half his meager scalding ration of soup before a bayonet tip prods him back outside, Einstein rummaging through refuse bins behind the kitchen, wolfing potatoes and cabbage that drip with rot, Einstein, naked from the waist down, his legs white fleshless sticks, squatting over a ditch beside the barracks, brown water issuing from his rear end, Einstein devouring a paper upon which he’d scrawled equations as though it were a medium-rare fillet in red wine jus, Einstein reduced by starvation and beatings and the relentless abrasive force of sun and rain to a spiritless creature beyond fear, beyond caring, a creature to whom that doesn’t matter, and that doesn’t matter, and that doesn’t matter, Einstein muttering nonsense as he wanders the camp with only one boot on, Einstein, now useless to his captors, shot dead with utter lack of ceremony, Einstein in a cart under a pile of other corpses, Einstein stripped naked and relieved of his own gold teeth by a fellow Jude, Einstein, limbs stiff and belly concave, loaded into an oven, Einstein removed after several hours and swept into a bin, Einstein dumped into eddies on the Sola river, Einstein whisked downstream and dissipated by the current.
Beside me, Claire stirred and put a hand on my chest, and when she felt the cacophony inside she propped herself up on one elbow and searched my face, her eyes wide with alarm.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey, what’s going on?”
I gasped for breath. “I’m scared,” I told her, awed by both the fact and the feeling.
26
ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE
Fear abided, carrying me sleepless through the rest of the night and into the most dreadful dawn I’ve ever witnessed, the sun a bloody disk peeking over the horizon while below us men and women checked their weapons, boiled coffee on camp stoves, eyed one another with wary hatred.
“Tell me you won’t shoot that cop,” Claire said as we sat at the bedroom window looking down on the scene. “No matter what happens.”
For the first time in as long as I could remember, I had both the impulse and the ability to lie. “I won’t shoot him,” I told her.
The heat, more than anything, is what I remember. Stepping out as Gus, Trumbull’s lieutenant, held open the reinforced steel door, sunlight like a blast furnace, the air inert, thick, nearly unbreathable. Nothing and no one moved. The prairie grass on Trumbull’s property, tall and proud only a few days before, lay wilted against the chalky earth. Perspiration sprang up on my forehead so quickly that it caused pinpricks of pain, as though my sweat glands were cramping. I could feel hundreds of eyes on me as I strode with Trumbull to meet Frank and an FBI agent, who waited for us with an oversized Radio Flyer stacked high with pizza boxes.
Trumbull greeted them.
“Appreciate you brokering the deal, Frank,” he said, extending a hand. “The men are anxious for some hot chow.”
Frank looked at him like he knew very well Trumbull had no real interest in pizza. He put his own hand out, and it quavered into Trumbull’s enveloping mitt.
I stood there in the sun, sick and trembling myself, chilled despite the astonishing heat, knowing it was mine to decide: both whether to shoot Frank, and when. There would come no signal, and there was no agreed-upon moment. The opening salvo in Trumbull’s war belonged either to me or to the man holding Claire at gunpoint somewhere inside the compound, and as I was unsure how long I would be able to keep my feet I reached for the Desert Eagle that very moment and shot Frank, there in front of the federal agents and sovereign citizens and television cameras circling in distant choppers, I shot Frank for audiences in Madrid and Beijing, Ottawa and Oklahoma City, I shot Frank for the purposes of Trumbull’s agenda, for the entertainment of millions, but I shot Frank, ultimately, for the sake of Claire’s life, for this dear strange young woman whose existence I wanted to preserve badly enough that I was willing, if not eager, to become a murderer.
I shot Frank in the thigh. It was the best I could do, even at close range.
Trumbull pulled two pistols from his waistband and began firing while I scrambled back toward the main building. As I ran, I turned my head and saw Trumbull draw himself up to his full, impressive height. Here was his moment, august in its visuals yet pathetic in its futility—which, I suppose, could be said of most acts of principle. Were his eyes clear? Did he do what he believed needed to be done, without flinching? It appeared so then, and remains so in my memory. In that regard, he stayed true to his vision and purpose. He fired on his enemies. He bared his teeth under that amazing sun, bellowing like Attila. He had his two, perhaps three seconds of glory. And then the first couple of bullets slammed into his chest, sending twin red parabolas arcing through the air. His blood hit the dirt like tobacco spit. His shoulders snapped forward and his back bowed. His sneer became a grimace. He pitched sideways, and another round ripped through his left arm as he went down. And that was that.
It’s not possible, I have decided, to understand the distinction between a noble death and a pointless one.
For what it’s worth, mine was not the bullet that killed Frank. That slug arrived in the moments after I fired, as Frank sat in the dirt and the world around us became a study in terminal ballistics. The autopsy in Frank’s case would prove imprecise, and all that was known, after the killing had finished and nothing remained but to catalog it, was that the bullet found in his skull had come from a rifle. Whether that rifle belonged to an FBI agent or a Son of Liberty, whether the round it fired was paid for by taxpayers or Tea Partiers, we will never in this life know. Here’s what I do know, and what I told investigators: Frank seemed oblivious to the swarm of projectiles cutting the air and kicking up dust around him. His entire attention was taken with the wound he’d already sustained, not the thousand others he might. He struggled to a seated position, clutching at his thigh as blood burbled up through the hole in his trousers like a drinking fountain. Seeing this, I stopped and turned back, seized for a moment by the instinct to help Frank in some way. His mouth hung open and his eyes flashed with horror. His hat had flown of
f when he fell, and his bald pate gleamed with sweat. For perhaps the first time in his life, and certainly for the last, he was completely unselfconscious. If he hadn’t been so focused on the fact that I’d shot him, he might have had the presence of mind to not sit up in the middle of a shooting gallery, and in that case he might have lived. Because if he’d remained prone, the bullet that hit him in the side of the neck and ricocheted up through his brain stem as I watched would have otherwise sailed harmlessly through the air above him.
There is, in all our lives, the innumerable ways things might have happened, and the one way in which they did.
The Radio Flyer, having taken multiple hits of its own (though somewhat more stoically than Frank), capsized and strewed its stack of pizzas on the ground. I looked up and saw the FBI agent who had accompanied Frank, crouched beside the monstrous tracks of a Bradley, draw down on me with his sidearm while pizza boxes exploded nearby as though filled with strings of firecrackers. The agent took aim with calm deliberateness, as if he were alone on a practice range rather than in the middle of the largest gunfight in U.S. law enforcement history. He might have been the only person actually aiming at a target, instead of just spraying rounds in the general direction of those with whom they had quarrel. Later he would tell me that all he cared about, all that was on his mind in that moment, was making certain that he shot me, preferably center mass. What he’d perceived as my deception could not be allowed to go unanswered, no matter what else happened. So he took his time, costing himself the opportunity to kill me in the process.
Because while the FBI agent aimed, I noticed at the periphery of my vision a shape, roughly the same mass and velocity as a meteor, hurtling in my direction. I caught a glimpse of flashing khaki before the object was upon me, plowing into my chest and driving me backward. We tumbled through the doorway, and Gus slammed the steel door shut after us.
We lay on the floor, gasping and writhing, while bullets continued to chip at the cinder-block walls and ping off the door, leaving pimples of varying caliber in the steel.