by Simon Jacobs
I don’t answer, which is answer enough. The front door opens excessively, obscenely wide, and then, barely here, you’re gone again.
*
The gun (I learned) was a Glock, a 9mm semi-automatic, big and all-purpose and standard among cops. I couldn’t hold it without shaking. I emptied the magazine onto my bed in a flurry of uncertain, clumsy movement, as if handling any part of it for too long would burn me or meld it to my hand, transform it into a permanent part of me. Even when I knew it was empty—the bullet impossibly in the chamber released as well—I didn’t touch the trigger.
I plugged the serial number off the barrel into every stolen-gun database I could find online, smearing my metadata everywhere, but they all came up blank. Gun registration didn’t exist in Indiana, so there was no chance of finding the owner without official intervention. I wouldn’t go to the police, there was no way to explain. The night passed, and nothing changed. I resented a world that failed to restructure itself in some fundamental, demonstrative way when a gun was introduced into it out of nowhere. I hated that it was just one among the many, despicably at hand. I could walk into the Walmart where your mother worked and I could pay for a rifle at the checkout counter like I could buy a toothbrush. I could blow her away right there.
I decided that the best thing I could do was separate myself from it as fast as possible, release it back into the world. The next day I slipped the gun and loose bullets into the inner pockets of my winter coat and walked to the Whitewater River near Glen Miller Park, over the bridge. I counted the cars that passed me on the street, the number of witnesses, but I was already pushing myself away from what had happened, from my role in it. At the bank of the river on the bottom of the grassy slope, where I was invisible from the road above, I poetically threw the gun into the river. From where I stood, I could see it sitting on the bottom of the riverbed, maybe two feet down, its barrel reflecting in the sun. I fought the urge to trudge in and bury it in the muck. The further I was away from it, the safer I would be. On my way back, I threw the handful of bullets away, bunching them inside napkins and throwing them into different trashcans one or two at a time. The following day, I returned to the river, and could not find the gun. It moved, presumably, on to the next.
*
In its aftermath, when the gun had left my possession, I tormented myself with what its appearance meant. Had I carried it with me? Had I pulled it blindly off one of August’s shelves, picked it up along my route somewhere? Was there someone who had given it to me, who had accepted money for its exchange? I construed that there were blank patches in my memory, fugues as if in sleep, spaces I couldn’t remember or control in which I’d carried out this act so far beyond my realm of imagined experience and acquired a gun, then somehow secreted it away from myself, hidden from my conscious awareness but appallingly close—at times on my person—so that, at the proper moment, I could use it. The acquisition, the conditioning must have happened long ago, its circumstances repeated until I eventually became accustomed to the weird weight of carrying a gun with me at all times, or at certain times, or with certain outfits, and that, gradually and subconsciously, I’d molded it into my routine, to the point where I would pick it up, handle it, load it, and hide it on my person, all without acknowledging or realizing what I was doing, without experiencing it as a distinct activity rather than something I did mechanically, that didn’t call attention to itself or create a specific memory. It had come as naturally to me as breathing or sweating, as addressing an itch or walking forward, shrugging on a jacket with something extra tucked into the interior pocket, as closing a door behind you when you leave a building. I hadn’t even noticed the weight of it until I brought the gun down in my fist, could therefore draw it, had practiced drawing it from wherever I kept it enough times that this, too, had become a reflex, a motion I didn’t think about making. It seemed almost miraculous that I hadn’t pulled the trigger, that this blank spell ended where it did rather than one second later, the camo bedspread blurted with blood. And, it followed, if this was one period of memory I couldn’t recall—not only the episode of the theft or purchase or discovery of the gun, but its acclimation—then doubtlessly there were others, other sequences I couldn’t remember, other fugues, further deadly machinery being unwittingly incorporated into my system.
In contrast, at the same time I imagined with equal vividness that it wasn’t a longtime process, but an instantaneous one, that at this given moment, the gun had simply appeared in my hand, relocated from elsewhere. It seemed even more improbable, but the implications expanded: I imagined living in a world where the things I needed—not even needed, or even wanted, but maybe distantly imagined in one specific, fantastical instant—suddenly materialized from somewhere else. That ownership, material and physical realities meant nothing; the objects of the world were constantly scattered and reconfigured at random patterns (or patterns that surpassed our understanding), disappearing in one place to reappear somewhere else. I imagined that I’d caught a rare, transitional moment—the instant where the object physically appears—the interlude between two states. When August looked up, what had he seen? Had he watched the gun appear? Had I been holding it when I entered the house? I wondered where it was ripped away from, that gun, if it had been in use or lain dormant, if someone had stared down the barrel visualizing their end and then watched the gun melt away, if it had disappeared from a glove compartment or a holster, a shoebox on the floor of a closet in a distant part of the country.
August stopped showing up on campus. There was talk that he’d skipped town—I heard his house was suddenly empty over the space of a weekend—but I never heard anyone mention why, no one had any explanation that neared me, or anything that sounded like me. His departure built into his legend. I didn’t see Candace again, either; she dropped out, or changed schools, or was otherwise taken away. I realized that I had never heard her speak, not once. I braced myself for consequences that never arrived, for the connections to flicker up and the fuse to blow, but they didn’t. No one asked me anything, not even peripherally—it was as if my entire history as it connected with these two people had been selectively deleted, as if August and Candace had taken all of me, my distinguishing features, my life of contact along with them into the afterworld, or it hadn’t existed to begin with. I had never been a part of their story. A week after the gun appeared, Cole was evicted from Villa Scum when someone crashed through the porch during another showcase, and then he was arrested. Without his energy and organizational efforts, the local shows dwindled, and people stopped going, they went to further towns; everything from then on felt like a last-ditch effort to save something that wasn’t worth saving. One night a carful of kids whose names I knew took a joyride in the high school parking lot firing a pistol into the air, which could be heard from some parts of campus. Someone asked me afterward, “Don’t you know some of those dudes?” and I said no, and I let those strings go.
I dwelt on what had happened obsessively, long after I understood that I would never have an answer. I threw away most of my clothes and cleared out my room of everything I deemed non-essential, whose provenance I couldn’t be completely sure of or whose origins lay in someone with whom I was no longer connected. I raided the room for other ammunition, other weapons, but found nothing. For weeks I barely slept, and ate only enough to keep from passing out, to prevent hallucination, afraid to introduce into my body any toxins or substances it didn’t already know, as if this could all have been some chemical misunderstanding. Weight fell away quickly, the padded layers between the world and my person, leaving a dense core behind. I told myself I would never forget anything again. My life became about control. I collected most of my stuff into black plastic garbage bags late one night and brought them to a dumpster on the edge of campus, as far from my dorm as possible. As I let the plastic lid slam down, something crunched behind me, and a voice made a gruff sound. I spun crazily around and slammed my back into the dumpster, pawing pathetically at
the waistband of my shorts, scrambling, for all intents and purposes, for something that wasn’t there.
I fell messily, tearfully to the ground in front of the night security guard, a creature of impulses I didn’t even realize I had, let alone was able to control.
I thought this specific paranoia—the impermanence paranoia—would last forever (the way you expect things at age twenty to last forever), but of course even this didn’t, and eventually, over the next months I patterned most of my behavior away from it, stopped frisking myself each morning, my sweeps of the room upon arrival and before and after sleep, the strictest of my self-surveillance. But it never left me completely; it threaded into my muscles and stayed there.
Barely two weeks after the gun appeared, three students from our college were lingering on the tracks downtown in Richmond’s depot district one night when they were hit by an eastbound train. One girl died at the scene; the other two students were airlifted to a hospital in Dayton where, two and a half weeks later, the second died. The third student survived, and after two more weeks he left the hospital, without clear memory of what happened.
The Norfolk Southern Railway system covers the eastern third of the US like a network of veins. On the news, when they covered the accident, they returned to the same helicopter shot of the railroad from above, filmed just after dawn, the train plowing across the screen from the upper-right corner, diagonally bisecting the view. The train occupied just a narrow strip of the shot, surrounded by flatness, wide roads, as if to visually reiterate that there is always warning, there is always somewhere else to go. I thought, of course, of the gun, conflated with the idea of the train. I assigned it the same design—the train appeared instantaneously, impossibly close, on an empty horizon. Why else wouldn’t you run away?
The tragedy affected the campus and town like nothing before it, shuffled all the relationships around a few focal points and formed new connective tissue between them, and when it emerged in the wake of the accident, the lines had been redrawn like a bandage over what once had been. Anything I had done receded into the past; my actions—and the people attached to them—were lost in this new context, this new curriculum of grief, and at the height of my ascetic period, desperately unarmed, you and I met in our final capacity.
*
That night, I’m installed in the master bedroom and don’t hear you re-enter the house. The first indication of your presence is the shower, a hum through three walls. It’s an undeniably homey sound, the quiet reassurance that another body occupies the same space, forming hygienic habits and mutual routines, traceable and regular: an empty coffee cup in the sink at the same time each morning, a filter in the trash can. The bed remade, a light left on. The water shuts off, and when the bedroom door opens a few minutes later, I don’t recognize the person standing there. For a second I feel paralyzed, inserted into someone else’s narrative. It takes a few steps across the room toward me before I’m fully convinced that it’s you. You’re dressed in a sort of kimono printed with birds in flight, pulled up from an Eastern-fetish closet somewhere, but the most shocking part is the glasses—you wear them infrequently enough that I always forget you have them at all, the revision of your face behind the frames. Your bare feet slip out beneath the hem of the robe in a way that classically signals temptation, unmasking. A second of garbled reality re-clarifies itself before I speak.
“I didn’t know you brought those with you,” I say. I feel like I could be talking to someone else. Where had you kept them?
You sit on the edge of the bed a quarter-mile away, massaging your knee, risen like an island among the blue folds. “They’re not mine. I found them in the study downstairs.”
“Do they work?”
You shrug and settle into the pillow, borrowed and hotel-soft. You remove the glasses and place them on the bedside table. “Well enough.” The setup—the glasses, the lamp, a photo in a frame of a toddler in a swing—it’s all assembled to seem strangely domestic, though we’re occupying someone else’s former life and home, though everything is a prop. And there had been a child after all. “Do you want to try?”
“No thanks.”
You rub your eyes. “It’s the same as any ritual,” you say, “it could be generic clear plastic and it would be the same. The strength of belief is all you need. The possessions—they work as well as you need them.”
I choose not to parse this.
Outside, on the ground floor, there’s a heated pool on the patio, lighted automatically at night. Steam rises from the churning surface and sends shimmering patterns of smoky light through the bedroom window. I wonder what comes to swim in the pool after dark, if this is where the other liberated creatures have gotten to. The house proceeds in its nocturnal patterns; I imagine a subsequent night where you fall asleep with the glasses pushed up on your forehead, a book open on your chest, an eighteenth-century novel pulled from the library downstairs, everything working as well as it needs to, and the image is repellent to me.
The next morning the glasses have shifted owners. The pool cuts out. The aquarium stands bereft, steadily warming and emptier than before, and we are on the move again.
*
We exit the property the same way we entered, in clothes taken from the bedroom closets. I salute the empty guardhouse. We step back as the gate swings open. We walk for hours—or what feels like hours, miles—along the shoulder of the road north, wooded on both sides. The asphalt turns steadily grayer, crumbling at its edges, as though gradually ceding to the wild, a battle no longer fought. You chose sneakers, but for some reason I kept the same pair of loafers, which have molded to my feet, relented to my ownership. When a path appears, branching off the main road, we follow it for a few miles (or about an hour, or the imagined space of an hour, etc), down a snaking dirt and gravel offshoot, a strip of grass at its center. We speak less than ever. Every step in this new, unfamiliar direction seems like a rejection of the previous mansion and everything it offered, to spurn every room that we learned; it dissolves behind us, and eventually a brick wall and iron gate twice as tall as we are rise before us in its place. There’s a keypad and a speaker box on our side, but the gate operates via simple latch.
Inside, an enormous property has been carved out of the landscape, and the forest crisply gives way to an ocean of cascading lawn, the space wide in a colonizing way, oppressively rectangular. Set back into its green vastness is the mansion, as bound by its proportions as the lawn surrounding it, a white rectangular box, two broad floors crowned by a domed cap in front, everything so clear in its angles and constraints as to appear blocked in from elsewhere, lowered into place with all of its bearings. A long brick driveway leads directly into its mouth, marred midway down by a single stationary vehicle. We treat the car like a building; as we near it we divide, me on the driver’s side and you on the passenger’s. It’s a dirt-spattered Jeep, the model at least ten years old, unlocked too, and we root through it more out of curiosity than anything else: no keys, a crumpled fast food bag in the front seat, an empty carseat in the back. Despite these signs, the mansion and its grounds don’t read “people” to us any differently than the others, the Jeep doesn’t register as “evidence,” as a sign of anything really except for what once was but isn’t anymore, the kind of certainty lent by undisturbed dust. The windows of the house are set eerily high and spaced widely apart, forecasting indeterminacy, offering no indication of what’s inside, the nature of its interior architecture. The windows seem to rise as we approach and step up to the terrace, like the dots across your vision after staring at a light for too long. I push open the door this time.
The mansion opens itself to us; our eyes acclimate to the dark and filtered light in deepening shifts, like a series of curtains being pulled back. The front half is cavernous, and the door opens directly into a huge, hemispheric foyer two stories high and endlessly tiled, its sanctum-like ceiling pushed up into a dome, the rest of the house built to surround it. We stand just inside for a minute, a
bsorbing it all, the way a visited house at first seems to inhabit a slightly different plane of reality, a moment in which everything still looks untouched, where normalcy can’t immediately be established because there’s no sense of the upkeep, the house’s deeper interiors shapeless and unexplored. A magnificent crystal chandelier dips barely into our sightline. Across the foyer from the front door, a carpeted staircase of the stateliness and grandeur we’ve now grown to expect crooks up to the second floor, which is partially exposed, a hallway set off by a railing overlooking the foyer, marked by a line of doors awkwardly visible from where I’m standing—exiting from any one of them you could survey the foyer from above. There are depths behind the staircase, entryways and closed doors visible opposite us that presumably lead to the functional parts of the house, but the foyer itself remains bare, a naked expanse of tiled floor, as if the budget had run out before they made it this far forward. It lends the area a vaguely mythic aspect, like an empty template, a testament to the idea of scale.
You put your index finger in the air before either of us says anything, like “hold it,” and then stalk carefully a few steps into the clearing, semi-crouched, like you’re detecting infrared beams or picking up on air quality using receptors I wasn’t born with. The routine is new, and its unfamiliarity renders me susceptible for a moment; I’m reminded of the time you told me that you knew “how to case a Target,” as if this was an arcane and specific skill, shoplifting from this specific megastore as compared to another, and seemed to imply an innate level of intuition: walk into a big-box store and you’ll immediately know where the cameras are, where you stand in their field of vision. That this, to you, had become automatic, a piece of the punkroutine I didn’t have as a young adult.