The Reckonings

by Lacy M. Johnson

  “Sometimes bad guys take girls,” she says, the tiny lift of a question mark at the end, to show me she wants to understand the terrible story about the kidnapped school girls we have heard on the news.

  “Yes,” I say, sitting down on the edge of her bed. “Sometimes bad guys take girls.” And I do not say this out loud to her, but this is what keeps me up at night checking all the locks on the doors. I sleep with one eye open because of a danger that I know is real. I do not go running in the dark of early morning without the dog I have trained to protect me because I have been told since birth that I am not strong enough to protect myself. It’s why I do not take my eyes off her when she walks away from me, except to see who else might have their eyes on her. It is a lesson I want, very much, to unlearn.

  In the darkness of her tiny room, I can see her eyebrows fold together as she hands me the empty cup.

  “I don’t want to be a girl.”

  * * *

  The barking begins while the dog is lying right beside me on the bed and grows louder and louder as he races through the house, sliding toward the door, sounding his frantic alarm. Outside, a man walks his dog in the darkness past our house. Tomorrow, it will be the man who comes to install the washing machine, or to paint the walls, or to deliver a package; the man who delivers pizzas, or flowers, or offers to update our security system; the man who wants to bring us into the fold with his pamphlets and his skinny black tie. The dog growls, his nose to the window, his hair standing up on end. He listens for the threat he believes may be outside.

  I stand beside him, my hand on his back, listening also.

  THE PRECARIOUS

  My father kept two guns in the house where I lived as a child: a shotgun for hunting quail and a rifle that had been his father’s, which is what he used to hunt deer. One winter, he showed me how to hold the gun against my shoulder, where the safety was, how to pull the trigger, when to brace for the kick. He emphasized, in his solemn, intimidating way, that shooting even one bullet has an effect that you can’t take back. He tossed clay pigeons toward the forest while I fired bullets after them. Each clay pigeon exploded into dozens of pieces once I got the hang of it. He made me learn how to load the rifle—bullets as long and slender as my fingers—and how to load the shotgun, each round a casing that held tiny metal pebbles that would spray in a wide stream, like so many seeds on the wind.

  On quail-hunting days, I woke early to dress in my warmest clothes, ate breakfast quietly in the kitchen, and then went into the garage to put on someone else’s coveralls, a kelly green John Deere ski cap, and gloves stiff with someone else’s sweat. I slipped into someone’s tall boots, left sitting by the back door for all the months and years of my memory. My father opened the garage door, and as the cold blew in toward us, he gave me a look that contained all the gravity of the moment and held out the shotgun to me.

  My father and I walked through the frozen pasture down to the creek bottom while the dog ran ahead, listening, smelling, rooting out the birds. The Earth is so quiet in the winter, the sound turned down, and the color turned down, and also the temperature. I could hear my feet crunching the ground between the frozen turned-down cornstalks, and my breath in the scarf over my face, and my father’s feet and the quiet grunts he made getting over a hill. The dog stopped and pointed into a bush. My father gave the signal for me to turn the safety off, to raise the gun and get ready. He reminded me with his eyes to be careful, not to shoot the dog or him or myself accidentally, and gave the command to the dog to flush the birds. My heart raced. The dog followed its nose into the bush. The birds exploded in every direction into the sky. I raised the gun and looked down the end of my barrel, my finger on the trigger.

  * * *

  The words autopsy and atrocity share an ancient root, I recently learned, a single proto-Indo-European syllable from which we derive dozens of words about seeing—words like biopsy, binocular, and optics, as well as panopticon, a device like a telescope once used to “see everything” and also a prison where the warden can see everyone else but remain unseen.

  I stumbled across this little fact while looking for a word that might describe all the violence I find myself seeing lately. It seems that not very long ago, I saw a photograph in the newspaper of three people, shot dead, lying side by side in an empty lot littered with plastic cups and water bottles and bits of trash. I will never forget this photograph and wish I had a word to describe its effect. In the background, there are more people, out of focus. People take cover behind a fence. Emergency responders perform CPR. Right there in the newspaper, next to headlines about the stock market and on the same page as an ad for toothpaste.

  What kind of seeing is required to take a photograph like this? What kind of seeing is required to look at it? I learn from the story accompanying this photograph that half an hour earlier, these people were dancing and singing and having a great time. From his hotel room window, the shooter saw thousands of people in the crowd below. From that distance, they were anonymous, meaningless, vulnerable to harm. More vulnerable than me, the shooter must have thought, while he spread an arsenal of semiautomatic weapons at his feet.

  * * *

  I was eleven when I went quail hunting with my father for the first and last time. Later that same year, my great-grandmother died of natural causes. She was eighty-nine. I’d never been to a funeral before, but my mother told me I should put on tights and a dress. I rode in the back of a car and sat with my cousins in pews at the church. We passed notes and poked one another in the ribs until the time came to approach the casket. I stood in line, head bowed, until my turn came. I almost didn’t recognize her: hands crossed and eyes closed under the too-thick makeup, the too-poofed hair. I couldn’t hold back the tears that came and came. I hadn’t known her very well, and I wasn’t even very sad. But there she was, dead, and before that she had been alive, sitting in a wheelchair in the sunroom of a smelly nursing home and calling us all by the wrong names. In my memory, the light in that sunroom seems to come from everywhere.

  Something changed when I saw my great-grandmother’s dead body. Something in me broke a little, and then it broke again when a friend crashed her motorcycle in the forest and snapped her neck. There was a wake for her in the middle school gym, all of us looking at the photos of her propped on easels next to her coffin. We held hands, leaned our heads together, passed tissues back and forth down the rows of seats. A year later, one friend drove his truck head-first into another truck on the way home from a football game. I already knew by then what to expect, how to prepare. Another was missing for days before they found him in the barn, a gun still in his mouth, his finger still on the trigger. I stood in the line, looked, one last time, into a face that no longer looked like a person I knew. I feel much older in this memory than the date, 1993, tells me I actually am.

  Suddenly I noticed that there was always someone on the bus or at my lunch table talking about a movie a friend or cousin had seen that was rumored to show real footage of people dying—of being killed in executions, suicides, and particularly gruesome road accidents. Traces of Death, it was called. I never wanted to watch that movie, but I’ve since grown so numb to images of extreme violence that it isn’t even particularly disturbing to watch it. In the footage of Pennsylvania state treasurer R. Budd Dwyer’s live televised suicide, for instance, Dwyer reads a long prepared statement before passing sealed envelopes to his staff. A final brown envelope in his open briefcase on the table contains a .357 Magnum. He pulls it out, waves it around carelessly while people in the audience begin screaming. He holds out his hands, telling them to stop, “or someone is going to get hurt.” They go on screaming. He puts the gun in his mouth, pulls the trigger, and slumps to the floor. I barely even flinch.

  * * *

  Both autopsy and atrocity require a witness—someone who survives, who sees for herself, with her own eyes. But the violence changes the person who looks. I remember seeing a set of photographs of atomic bomb explosions in a requi
red textbook in college: the first three milliseconds of the Trinity test in July 1945. In the first photograph, there is a flash of light; in the second, a warbled, wrinkled, uneven quantum marble, then a larger one, and then a round orb of brilliant light that consumes itself, rolling inward and inward, up and up into the atmosphere. The photographs were taken by Harold Edgerton, an engineer at MIT who invented a device that allowed him to capture images of stopped time: photographs of birds in flight, of gymnasts somersaulting in midair, of a bullet shooting through an apple, exploding from both sides; a bullet shooting through a lemon, a banana, a balloon, a bullet through shattering glass.

  The photographs of the Trinity test were in the same textbook as photographs of the carnage of the war that bomb eventually ended, if wars ever in fact end. Right there in our textbooks: a violence that didn’t announce itself as violence but as history—piles of bodies in mass graves, arms and legs and shoeless feet, too many bodies to even understand as bodies, as people who had once been.

  * * *

  I met the man who would later kidnap and rape me around that time. He also kept guns in the home where we lived together: one, a rifle for hunting, he said, the other an assault rifle for I knew not what. It was a gun that was illegal to acquire in the state where we lived, though I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know much of anything then.

  One weekend near the end, we took a trip to his stepfather’s cabin in the southern part of the state. There was snow on the ground already, and no one had thought to turn the heat on in the cabin or to stock it with firewood so early in the season. His much-younger brother was sitting on the porch when we arrived, a beer in his hand. I got along well with his brother; we were closer in age, and in many ways we had more in common. That night his brother and I were talking about music, maybe, while the man I lived with made dinner, until he came into the room and suggested that if I wasn’t planning to fuck him, I should go to bed. I was humiliated but not surprised. It was not the first time he had said something to embarrass me, or more likely to shame me, when he felt like I was getting too relaxed, having too much fun, behaving in a way that was too free. The two of them stayed up late drinking, smoking pot, playing backgammon or chess, while I listened from the bed in the other room, watching my breath billow like a cloud in front of my face, wishing I had a lamp so I could read. I woke up hours later with him pulling my pants to my knees.

  The next morning, dressed in the warm clothes I’d brought with me, I put on a pair of hiking boots and a ski cap and Day-Glo vest and followed him to a rickety tree stand, where we sat for hours watching for antlers, listening for the rustling of leaves. We didn’t say much to each other, didn’t have much to say. We couldn’t talk while hunting anyway since it scares away the deer. I watched birds flit from branch to branch, watched light play on the feathers of their wings. We walked through the trees, across the road, down to the bottoms, the gray-brown mud nearly frozen already, the crops long since harvested or plowed back under the earth. We saw no deer the entire day: no buck, no doe, not even a fawn—only a rafter of turkeys, but it wasn’t their season. I felt relieved, since I didn’t really want to shoot anything anyway. We climbed back through the woods, back toward the cabin, where we spotted his brother’s buck hanging from a tree, antlers grazing the ground, the red gash of its belly gaping open, a noose around its hind feet. I gasped, I think.

  A fat brown squirrel scurried across the forest floor. The man I lived with told me to shoot it. I didn’t want to shoot it, but I knew the danger it would mean to refuse. He and his brother treed the squirrel, kept telling me to shoot it. I missed and missed and missed as the light went on fading. Finally, he came over to where I stood, put his hand on the back of my neck in a way that was not encouraging, not tender. “Aim the gun and shoot it,” he said into my ear, a command that contained within it all the violence to which I had already become accustomed. I raised the gun to my shoulder, looked down the barrel at the squirrel looking back at me, fixed my eye on where it clung to the tree.

  * * *

  Violence changes the person who survives to see it, sometimes by making us more capable of violence ourselves. Seven months before I went hunting with the man I lived with, two seventeen-year-old boys killed eleven classmates and one teacher, and then themselves, using a pistol, a machine gun, and a sawed-off shotgun that one boy’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend had purchased on their behalf at a gun show. Weeks before, they had filmed themselves practicing with the guns they would use in the massacre. In the footage, they stand on a wooded mountainside, snow still heaped in piles. They take aim at bowling pins and the surrounding cedars, laughing as they examine the slugs buried deep in the bark of the tree. “Imagine that in someone’s fucking brain,” one says.

  After the shooting, footage of children running from the school building played in a loop on the news. I watched from the apartment where I lived with the man who would later try to kill me. I’d never seen anything like it, had no words to describe its effect. The children were a few years younger than me. People blamed the parents, blamed video games, blamed Marilyn Manson, blamed themselves. People examined the photographs from the crime scene for some explanation of how these two boys could have done something like this: the boys lay sprawled together on the floor of the library, blood pooling from their heads, guns under their bodies or at the tips of their fingers. The explanation is right there, I thought at the time. When violence becomes easy to see, it becomes so much easier to look.

  * * *

  That rifle, the one I used to kill the squirrel, is the same one the man threatened to shoot me with after I left him, when he kidnapped me from the parking lot of the magazine where I worked and held me captive for five hours. It leaned against the wall outside the soundproof room he had built, where he planned to kill me but failed.

  After I escaped, I went to hide at my sister’s apartment in a city two hours away. She had a handgun when I got there: a revolver, small and silver, much heavier than it looked. She loaded it and put it in my hand before she left for work. I didn’t want to hold it—not the weight of it, not the responsibility of it—and left it sitting on the coffee table right in front of me all night. I tried to imagine myself shooting it, shooting him—I would shoot his kneecaps off, I imagined—but I kept imagining accidentally shooting myself, in the foot, in the leg, accidentally putting it to my temple and pulling the trigger. I never imagined shooting him in a way that might kill him, never in the heart, in the head, in the face. How could I destroy someone I had once loved?

  * * *

  “What allows a life to be visible in its precariousness,” Judith Butler asks, “and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way?” I once had a student, a combat veteran, who had been shot in the head in Iraq. He was in a rush, he told me during one of our first meetings, because he was going blind as a result of his injuries. There wasn’t any way to stop it, he told me, and he didn’t say much more than that about it. He was writing about the war, and in a way about his own role in it, and he needed to finish faster than either of us believed was humanly possible before he lost his sight, couldn’t type, could no longer see what he had written, couldn’t even look at himself in the mirror.

  During this time he was my student, I traveled to a conference to talk about teaching writing and sat on the plane next to another soldier; this one was being deployed for the first time. He sat by the window, his hair shaved nearly off, his face still pocked with acne. He held a piece of folded paper printed with his deployment orders: where and when and to whom to report, how to get there, when to leave, what flight to take, when to arrive. He kept rolling each end of the folded piece of paper together like a scroll, unrolling it and reading again the same few lines, rolling it, unrolling, reading, and rolling, over and over, as if maybe the message might change, as if his future might yet be undetermined. I remembered myself at that age, how wrecked my life was after I had come so close to losing it. I cried the whole
flight, wanted to tell him: run, escape, do not lose yourself, stay alive.

  * * *

  “When we are afraid, we shoot,” Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. “But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.” I am afraid almost all of the time, but I am not afraid of my own fear, which is why I do not own a gun and never will, but I have shot millions of pictures, which perhaps means I am at least as nostalgic as I am afraid. Pictures of myself in the good blue light of my office, pictures of my husband wrestling with our children, pictures of our children when they wake from sleep with messy hair, pictures of my children on their first days of school. In one photograph of my two children when they are six and two, they balance on a narrow ledge in front of a brick wall. We were on a walk, already twenty minutes in, and had made it only a few yards from our house. My daughter has her back to the camera, her arms extended as she is balancing on the ledge; my son drinks chocolate milk from a box. That was a Thursday. It was a clear, cool afternoon. We went to the park and they played on the jungle gym; both got mulch in their shoes. We walked home and I made dinner, gave them baths, and put them to bed. On Friday, I dropped them off at school in the morning, and by afternoon, I heard that a man had shot and killed his mother, two teachers, a teacher’s aide, a principal, a school psychologist, and twenty children the same age as my daughter, before shooting himself in the head. Perhaps you also saw this footage on the news: the children—the ones who survived—being led from the school in lines, each child with her hands on the shoulders of the child in front of her, each child held by the one behind: a drill they have learned for sticking together. There is safety in trusting, and being trusted by, one another.