Revolver

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  I lay there for too long, in my nasty waste and humiliation, reeking of bourbon and spent coffee, utterly dazed. I could hear Brillo Pad and his ammosexual co-host laughing at me. Their words were lost amongst the whirling ringing in my ears and flashes of silver that lingered in my vision with every blink. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their mocking tone was unmistakable.

  Slowly, I got to my knees, using the bathroom sink to haul myself to my feet, my back screaming all the way. The pain kept me from standing up straight. My whole body was shaking, and a thick caul of mucus covered my chin, darkening the neckline of my stained blouse. I washed in the sink, ignoring the condescension of the Revolver crew and the concerned pleading in my father’s voice.

  If I needed another reason to kill myself, I guess I had it.

  My eyes lit upon the social media stream. More men laughing at me.

  Sick whore, one said.

  That was funny, another said. Now suck off that gun.

  Lost amongst it all was a lone voice of reason. A single person that wrote:

  #Revolver is disgusting and irresonpsible.

  Don’t let these people win! Turn it off!

  It didn’t take long for the message to get buried in the noise, or for other users to attack that one voice of dissent and threaten them with arson and rape and death.

  “Honey, please,” Dad said, openly crying now. Begging me. I saw #Revolver #FAG out of the corner of my eye and my ears burned. Another trait I shared with him. “There’s other ways. We can fix this. I promise you, we can fix this. We can start over. We can change things. Don’t do this.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t do enough for you. I wanted to help.”

  “There’s better ways for you to help than this. C’mon, sweetie. Cara. Please. I’m begging you, sweetie, please. Not like this. You have to listen to me. I—”

  “Turn it off,” I said, turning toward Brillo Pad.

  He nodded and Dad disappeared in a dark wink.

  “Your dad obviously loves you very much,” Sean said. “You can walk away from the money, the money you earned for your father, and leave with nothing. Or you can continue to participate.”

  “We’re up to sixty-five hundred,” Brillo Pad said, a shine in his eyes. He licked his lips, slowly, as if anticipating the blood spill. My life nothing more than a cheap game to him.

  “What’s your choice?” Sean asked.

  I can do this.

  My lips were dry and my back ached scornfully. I brushed aside Dad’s televised lip service and said, “Let’s go for seven thousand.”

  Both hosts smiled, revealing toothy fangs, their leering eyes brimming with hatred. I was in the devil’s sandbox, digging my hole deeper. That was my choice.

  BITCH. SLUT. WHORE. Hussy. I’d heard it all before. Been called all of it and worse. Still, I was surprised at the amount of repetition in the media feed, and the frequency with which these words arose, as if cultivated from some collective, self-loathing hive mind of insecurity. There wasn’t even an attempt to muster something approaching creativity in the insults. The whole display was pathetic vitriol.

  Brillo Pad and his boy-toy eventually got around to my medical history. The Kay brothers owned seventy percent of the nation’s healthcare providers, and obtaining a complete record of my past was an easy feat for them. The social feed filled with hashtag poison.

  Mine: Hashtag Go Fuck Yourself.

  “What do you have to be depressed about?” Brillo Pad asked, apparently in all sincerity. But it was a loaded question. I’d been down this road too many times, too.

  My probation officer: “You’re sixteen. You skip school, no job, you drink all day. What do you have to be depressed about? You want to be depressed, get a job.”

  Dad: “Why did you do this to yourself? Are people at school making fun of you? What’s wrong? Talk to us. Tell us why you’re so moody lately.”

  Ravencroft therapist and post-Ravencroft shrink, Dr. Tilbury: “How do you feel?”

  It was all chemical shit, and I went through rounds of cocktail drugs to find something to even out the dopamine receptors and uptake my way to normalcy. Depressed was just what I was. I didn’t need a particular reason, and anything could set me off, and oftentimes did. Why the fuck did I stop taking the pills?

  Because you’re an idiot, something dark and slithery told me, an all-too-familiar voice perched on my shoulder.

  Nobody understood. Everyone thought they were miserable, that they had shitty lives, that their minor inconveniences were epic disasters. My raise wasn’t big enough. I stood in line for over two hours for a loaf of two-day-old bread. Well boo-fucking-hoo. Cry me a river.

  My brain chemistry is fucked up, and that’s the bottom line. There’s no cure, only prescribed placations for the demons inside me. If I took the drugs, I was weak. If I tried to solve matters on my own, say with a Remington New Model Army 1858 revolver for instance, I was weak. And if I let nature run its course, my disease was illegitimate and unearned. I was another homeless fruitcake, my depression somehow less than real.

  But, people have their own problems. Nowadays especially. That’s a hard hump to get over.

  I shrugged and said, “Life sucks. That’s all.”

  I saw the glare in Brillo Pad’s eyes. The one that said my answer was a cop out. Maybe it was.

  “How many sexual partners have you had?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, struck off-guard. I took a second to recompose. “How is that at all relevant?”

  “Well, I’m reading over your medical chart,” he wiggled a microtablet at the camera, “and it says you’ve had two abortions. That seems like an awful lot. And both before you were twenty.”

  “I was raped,” I said, my tone hollow. I had to shut myself down inside. It was the one way I could go on. “I was … I don’t need to justify myself to you.”

  “But you are promiscuous, aren’t you?”

  “Hey, I know you and your pals think rape is great and rape babies are God’s gift to women, but—”

  “But,” Sean interrupted me, “you’re a murderer! You’re a sinner! You’re a maniac and a serial killer and a whore.” His was a toothy strike, and he craved his pound of flesh with theatrical zeal.

  “Whatever.” Defending myself was useless. I made a point of not glancing at the social feed. I needed a cigarette.

  “So after you’ve killed two innocent babies, you think you can simply take other people’s hard-earned money and kill yourself? Take the easy way out?”

  I laughed. “You think this is easy?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Honestly?” I said. “Listening to your hypocritical bullshit and not pulling the trigger on this here gun is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”

  “Why do this? You know you’re going to Hell, right?” Brillo Pad jumped in, probably worried that Sean was hogging too much of his camera time.

  “I guess we’ll see.” Not that I believed in Hell, or Heaven for that matter.

  That little diatribe brought in another hundred bucks. I yawned.

  “I hope we’re not boring you,” Brillo Pad said, smug as ever.

  “I want to know about the riot outside,” I said.

  “There is no riot outside,” Sean said.

  “What’s with the gunshots, the explosions? I can smell shit burning. Why don’t you report on that? This city is falling apart.”

  “Those are a bunch of hoodlums getting what they deserve. What do you think you deserve, Ms. Stone?”

  “You’re deflecting,” I said, sipping coffee, trying to be cool.

  “You learn that word during your time in Ravencroft?”

  I shrugged. “I heard tanks earlier. There’s real life happening right outside this studio, and you’re willfully oblivious.”

  “There’s nothing happening outside.” Brillo Pad was turning red and inching toward the edge of his seat, ready to
fly off. If I were in the studio with him, he probably would have throttled me.

  “Except people getting what they deserve, right?”

  Another hundred bucks came in. “Maybe people actually want to hear the truth for once,” I said. “Seems there’s some real money in the news.”

  “That isn’t your money,” Sean said. “You didn’t earn that.”

  A huge concussive blast hit too close, shaking the building. The lights dimmed and, this time, took too long to self-correct. The Revolver hosts did a fair job of keeping their cool, still holding on to the pretense that nothing was happening.

  “An explosion just rocked the building, Sean,” I said, putting on my best reporter’s hat and mimicking some old-school journalists I’d seen on TV before the Kay brothers bought up the entire nation, one politician, one lawsuit, one television studio, and one piece of legislation at a time. “We are at the epicenter of something very serious, and very dangerous.”

  The green light winked out. The mic was dead. Brillo Pad cut to commercial, but I still had the camera studio feed on the left-most display while the adverts played out on the center console. I watched the hosts talk animatedly – yell, in fact – at one another, at their producers, at everyone in the room with them. There was no audio, but their wide mouths and violently red faces told me everything I needed to know.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. For once, I actually felt OK. Somehow, an inner reserve of strength had helped prop me up in a way all the bottles of booze in the world never could.

  The door blew open as another explosion erupted outside, even closer. The walls shook, but I didn’t know if it was from the blast or from Stevens’s furious stampede into the room. He took long, quick strides toward me and backhanded me across the face. The inside of my cheek cut open against my teeth and filled my mouth with a coppery tang. The blow toppled me off the stool and sent me to the ground. Hot coffee scalded the underside of my forearm and the back of my hand. Somehow, I still held onto the gun; even more miraculously, it didn’t go off.

  He flung the stool aside, sent it crashing into the wall, and delivered a swift kick to my stomach.

  “You stupid whore,” he screamed, kicking me again. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  I raised my head, tried to sit up, but he grabbed my face in one large hand. His fingers pushed my cheeks into my teeth, making my lips pucker in pain. He smashed my head into the floor, screaming in my face, an incoherent rage.

  “You trying to ruin the whole fucking show?” he yelled.

  Saliva peppered my eyes and forehead. His fingers loosened and I took in a massive, painful breath. My ribs burned with the inhalation. He punched me square in the face and I felt my nose depress inward with a sickening crunch, snot flooding the back of my throat in a bloody glob.

  I tried to blink, but saw nothing except swirling stars.

  “I’m going to teach you a good goddamn lesson,” he said, one fat hand going to his belt and unbuckling the leather. I tried to scoot backward as he unbuttoned his pants and pulled the tail of his shirt away from his waist.

  “You ain’t ever gonna forget this lesson,” he said. “I can promise you that much, you mouthy little shit.”

  “Get away from me!” I dug my heels into the carpet and pushed myself away. My shoulders banged into the wall, and his hands were groping at my pants, fumbling with the button.

  I raised the revolver and pulled the trigger. Time slowed and I watched the immaculate details of horror, as the flash of superheated gases puffed against his hair and bubbled the scalp to bursting. A gout of red exploded from the opposite side of his skull, messy chunks of grey and white mixed in with the blood, making a noisy, wet splash against the carpet.

  His eyes went soft as he collapsed against me. I spent too long trying to get out from under him. I spent a long time sitting against the wall, my breath ragged, pointing a relic of a revolver at him, waiting for him to move. He never did.

  My heart was racing, and I couldn’t quite believe what I’d just done. I wanted to cry, wanted to run, but I was stuck here in the ‘off’ position, exhausted, reeling and unable to catch up with reality.

  I can do this, I thought. And then I wondered what this was supposed to be.

  What did you say earlier, Daddy? That we could fix this? We could change things? Maybe we can.

  I had five bullets left.

  Another explosion, this one right outside. Close. Very, very close. The noisy, heavy treads of tanks rolling into the city square.

  Blood seeped from Stevens’s skull, a standing pool too thick for the carpet to absorb.

  Five bullets and a promise. We can change things. Maybe.

  For the first time in a long time, I felt good. For the first time in forever, I smiled a real smile. Not like I had anything else to lose, anyway, right?

  THE RIOTS, THE explosions, the gunshots – it kept people on edge, nervous. I heard the shuffling of bodies behind closed doors, but nobody came out as I strode down the hallway and into the broadcast studio. Or maybe, since it was a Saturday night, the building was short staffed, operating on a skeleton crew. What kind of accountant wants to die a hero while pulling some weekend overtime?

  I strode into the studio and marched past empty cubicles. Brillo Pad Brian and Sean were sitting right where they had been for the last few hours. An array of cameras surrounded them, but only one was operated by an actual human being; the rest were automated or controlled remotely from the control booth.

  The cameraman turned, saw my gun, and reached for his own weapon. I shot him in the chest before he could pull on me.

  Then I walked towards the hosts.

  Brian and Sean both panicked. Brillo Pad went for his gun, his hand shaking with nervous energy, and before the barrel cleared the shoulder holster the gun went off, punching a hole in the green screen behind him. The unexpected shot rattled Sean further, but he was at least able to get his gun out.

  I shot him first, blowing away half his face.

  Brillo Pad raised his hands in surrender, forgetting about his weapon.

  “Any more guys with guns around?” I asked.

  “Please, don’t kill me.”

  “I don’t know, man. I’m an irrational, shitty little bitch. Who knows what I might do.”

  “Those were just words. You need to get a thicker skin, that’s all. This is a man’s world. It’s not anything personal.”

  “Seemed pretty fucking personal to me.” I squared the front sight of the revolver with the centre of his forehead, and decided to get a little bit closer. I kept walking until the barrel was pressed to his skin and his eyes went cross looking at the metal shaft.

  “You’re not a man,” I told him. “You’re a weak, insecure child playing at being a man. And not even a real man, at that. You’re trying to live up to some outdated, old-world Hollywood ideal of a man, playing dress-up with all your fancy little guns, like you never grew out of playing cops and robbers. You’re not a man, and you don’t know shit about what it means to be a man. You’re a coward who’s afraid of the whole damn world, and nothing more.

  “You think this,” I pressed the gun hard against his skull, “gives you power. Until somebody with some actual balls steps up, and then your true colors run, and you beg and you grovel. You had all kinds of shit to say about me, about how weak I was, about how awful I was. Where’s your fucking righteous indignation now? Where’s that smug superiority, that grandiose sense of entitlement you broadcast to the nation? Huh? Where is it?”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “That’s what they pay me for. This is a show. It’s entertainment. That’s all it is. You need to understand.”

  “I understand entirely.” I pulled the trigger and watched, dully, as he slumped in his chair, the back half of his head obliterated.

  Two shots left.

  I looked toward the control room, at the still cluster of open-mouthed people stationed behi
nd the long stretch of clear glass. The center camera, now unmanned, went auto, drifting smoothly toward me of its own accord. I watched a woman barking orders, snapping her fingers at people, giving directions to her crew.

  Over ten thousand dollars were on the board. The figure kept climbing by the thousands as the seconds ticked by.

  Another explosion rocked the studio, and heavy footfalls stampeded through the anteroom. Shouting and gunshot were plainly audible, and too, too close.

  “This isn’t a man’s world,” I said, to the camera, feeling the need to speak.

  “This is our world. Forget the Kay brothers. Forget their bought-and-paid-for politicians, and their Bible-thumping propaganda, and this Revolver shit. Forget them, and move past them. They want you to hate, they want you to fear. Because they hate, because they are afraid. They want us divided, and they want all of us to be as insecure and insignificant and as fucking petty as they are.

  “Outside, this riot they’ve been ignoring. It happens every day. And you know what? It isn’t a riot. It’s not. It’s a war. And it’s at your doorstep right now. This is supposed to be our country, our home. This is our world, our lives. We can fix this. We can change all of this. We can make it better.

  “We have to make it better.”

  Boots hit the floor, getting closer and closer. Revolver security, or state police, or sisters-in-arms, I didn’t know. I didn’t much care.

  I’d come here to die, and I still had two bullets left.