McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  A right hand that seems made entirely of long pale fingers goes to the tails of the white shirt, and Lisey suddenly understands (George Wallace oh Christ Wallace and Bremmer) exactly what’s going on here, although it comes to her in a series of shorthand TV images from her childhood. She looks at Scott and sees Scott is speaking to Dashmiel. Dashmiel is looking at Stefan Queensland, the irritated frown on Dashmiel’s face saying he’s had Quite! Enough! Photographs! For one day! Thank! You! Queensland himself is looking down at his camera, making some adjustment, and C. Anthony “Toneh” Eddington is making a note on his pad. She even spies the older campus security cop, he of the khaki uniform and the puffickly huh-yooge batch of orifice; this worthy is looking at the crowd, but it is the wrong part of the crowd. It’s impossible that she can see all these folks and Blondie too, but she can, she does; she can even see Scott’s lips forming the words think that went pretty well, which is a testing comment he often makes after events like this . . . and oh Jesus Mary and JoJo the Carpenter, she tries to scream out Scott’s name and warn him but her throat locks up, dry and spitless, she can’t say anything, and Blondie’s got the tails of that lolloping big white shirt all the way up, and underneath are empty belt loops and a flat hairless belly and lying against his white skin is the butt of a gun which he now lays hold of and she hears him say, closing in on Scott a little from the right, “If it closes the lips of the bells, it will have done the job. I’m sorry, Papa.”

  I’m sorry, Papa.

  She’s running forward, or trying to, but oh God she’s got such a puffickly huh-yooge case of gluefoot and someone shoulders in front of her, a coed with her hair tied up in a wide white silk ribbon with NASHVILLE printed on it in blue (see how she sees everything?), and Lisey pushes her with one hand, the hand not holding the silver spade, and the coed caws “ Hey!” except it sounds slower and draggier than that, like the word hey recorded at 45 RPM and then played back at 331⁄3 or maybe even 16 RPM. The whole world has gone to hot tar and for an eternity Scott and Dashmiel are blocked from her view; she can see only Tony Eddington, making more of his idiotic notes—a slow starter, but once he gets going . . . whooo! Boy takes notes like a house afire! Then the coed with the NASHVILLE ribbon stumbles clear of Lisey’s field of vision— finally! —and as Dashmiel and her husband come into view again, Lisey sees Dashmiel’s body language go from a drone to a startled cry of fear. It happens in the space of an instant.

  Lisey sees what Dashmiel sees. She sees Blondie now with the gun (it will prove to be a Ladysmith .22, made in Korea and bought at a pawn-and-loan in South Nashville for thirty-seven dollars) pointed at her husband, who has at last seen his danger and stopped. In Lisey-time, all of this happens very, very slowly. She doesn’t actually see the bullet fly out of the .22’s muzzle—not quite—but she hears Scott say, very mildly, seeming to drawl the words over the course of ten or even fifteen seconds: “Let’s talk about it, son, right?” And then she sees fire bloom from the gun’s nickel-plated muzzle in a yellow-white corsage. She hears a pop—stupid, insignificant: the sound of someone breaking a paper lunch sack with the palm of his hand. She sees Dashmiel, that chickenshit southern-fried asshole, turn and plunge away to his immediate left. She sees Scott buck backward on his heels. At the same time his chin thrusts forward. The combination is weirdly graceful, like a dance-floor move. A black hole opens in the right side of his summer sport coat. “Son, you honest-to-God don’t want to do that,” he says, and even in Lisey-time she hears the way his voice thins a little more on every word until he sounds like a test pilot in a high-altitude chamber. Yet Lisey is almost positive he doesn’t know he has been shot. His sport coat swings open as he puts his hand out in a commanding stop-this-shit gesture, and she realizes two things simultaneously: that she can see gouts of blood soaking into the front of his shirt and that she has at last—oh thank God for small favors—broken into some semblance of a run.

  “I got to end all this ding-dong for the freesias,” says Gerd Allen Cole with perfect fretful clarity, and Lisey is suddenly sure that once Scott is dead, once the damage is done, Blondie will either kill himself or pretend to try. For the time being, however, he has this first business to finish. The business of the author. Blondie turns his wrist slightly so that the smoking and somehow cuntish muzzle of the Ladysmith .22 points at the left side of Scott’s chest; in Lisey-time the move is smooth and slow. Blondie has done the lung; his second bullet will be a heart shot, she thinks, and knows she can’t allow that to happen. If her husband is to have any chance at all, this loony tune must not be allowed to put any more lead into him.

  As if hearing her, repudiating her, Gerd Allen Cole says, “It never ends until you are. You’re responsible for all these repetitions, old boy. You are hell, and you are a monkey, and now you are my monkey!”

  This speech is the closest he comes to making sense, and making it gives Lisey just enough time to first wind up with the silver spade—her hands, somehow knowing their business in their own way, have already found their position near the top of the thing’s forty-inch handle—and then swing it. Still, it’s close. If it had been a horse race, the tote board would undoubtedly have flashed the HOLD TICKETS WAIT FOR PHOTO message. But when the race is between a man with a gun and a woman with a shovel, you don’t need a photo. And in slowed-down Lisey-time there’s no chance of a missed perception, anyway. She sees it all. She sees the spade’s silver scoop strike the gun, driving it upward, just as that corsage blooms again (she can see only part of the flame and none of the muzzle; the muzzle is hidden by the blade of the spade). She sees the spade carry on forward and upward as the second shot goes harmlessly into the hot August sky. She sees the gun fly loose, and there is time to think, Holy smuck! I really put a charge into this one! before the commemorative spade connects with the blond fruitcake’s face. His hand is still in there (three of those slim long fingers will be broken and Lisey could give Shit One about Monsieur Deep-Space Fruitcake Cole’s fingers), but all the hand ends up protecting is his forehead. The spade’s silver bowl connects solidly with the lower part of the would-be assassin’s face, breaking his nose, shattering his right cheekbone and the bony orbit around his staring right eye, mashing his lips back against his teeth (and pretty well exploding the upper lip), breaking nine teeth, as well—the four in front will prove to be shattered right down to the gum line. All in all, it’s quite a job. A Mafia goon with a set of brass knucks couldn’t have done better.

  Now—still slow, still in Lisey-time—the elements of Stefan Queensland’s award-winning photograph are assembling themselves.

  Captain S. Heffernan has seen what’s happening only a second or two after Lisey, but he has also had to deal with the bystander problem, in his case a fat bepimpled fella wearing baggy Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt with Scott Landon’s smiling face on the front. Captain Heffernan first grapples with this young fella and then shunts him aside with one muscular shoulder. The young fella goes flying with a dismayed what-the-fuck? expression on the speckled moon face beneath his crew cut.

  By then Lisey has administered the silver spade to the would-be assassin. Gerd Allen Cole, aka Blondie, is sinking to the ground (and out of the photo’s field) with a dazed expression in one eye and blood pouring from the other one. Blood is also gushing from the hole that was his mouth. Heffernan completely misses the actual hit.

  Roger Dashmiel, suddenly remembering that he is supposed to be the master of ceremonies and not a jackrabbit, turns back toward Eddington, his protégé, and Landon, his troublesome guest of honor, just in time to take his place as a staring, slightly blurred face in the photo’s background.

  Scott Landon, meanwhile, shock-walks right out of the award-winning photo. He walks as though unmindful of the heat, striding toward the parking lot and Nelson Hall beyond, Nelson Hall which is home of the English department, and air-conditioned. He walks with surprising briskness, at least to begin with, and a goodly part of the crowd moves with him. The crowd seems for the most part
unaware that anything has happened. Lisey is both infuriated and unsurprised. After all, how many of them actually saw Blondie with that cuntish little pistol in his hand? How many of them recognized the burst-paper-bag sounds as gunshots? The hole in Scott’s coat could be a smudge of dirt from his shoveling chore, and the blood which has soaked his shirt is as yet invisible to the outside world. He’s now making a strange and horrible whistling noise each time he inhales, but how many of them hear that? No, it’s her they’re looking at—some of them, anyway—the daffy dame who has just inexplicably hauled off and smacked some guy in the face with the ceremonial silver spade. A lot of them are grinning about it, actually grinning, as if they believe it’s all part of a show being put on for their benefit; the Scott Landon Road Show. Probably they believe exactly that. Well, fuck them, and fuck Dashmiel, and fuck the day-late-and-dollar-short campus cop with his Sam Browne belt and oversize badge. All she cares about now is Scott. She thrusts the shovel out not quite blindly to her right and Eddington, their Boswell-for-a-day, takes it. It’s either that or get smacked in the nose with it. Then, still in that dreadful slow-time, Lisey runs after her husband, whose briskness evaporates as soon as he reaches the suck-oven heat of the parking lot. He begins to stagger and weave; his upper body begins to curl into a shrimp shape. She sees this and tries to run faster and still it feels like she’s running in glue. Behind her, Tony Eddington is peering at the silver spade like a man who has no idea what he’s gotten hold of; it might be an artillery shell, a radiation detector, or the Great Lost Whang-Dang-Doodle of the Egyptian pharaohs. To him comes Captain S. Heffernan, and although Captain Heffernan will later in his secret heart doubt that it was really Eddington who laid the gun-toting nutjob low, the captain is not (even at one in the morning, even to himself, over bourbon and branch water), able to swear it was not Eddington but the wife who stopped the nutjob’s clock before said nutjob could fire a second shot—the kill shot, most likely—into the writer. The mind is a monkey; the mind is a monster. The mind is sort of a madman, actually. Captain S. Heffernan knows these things, knows it’s why so-called “eyeball witnesses” are never to be trusted, and that includes so-called professionals like himself. Besides, he tells himself, that fat kid with the zitzes and the crew cut was in my way.

  In any case, the nutjob is down, the nutjob is puling through the hole that used to be his mouth, the nutjob is toast, and Stan Heffernan seizes the Eddington kid’s free left hand and pumps it, feeling a large relieved grin spread across his face as he realizes he may just get out of this mess with his skin on and his job intact.

  Lisey runs toward her husband, who has just gone down on his hands and knees in the parking lot. And Queensland snaps his picture as she goes, catching just half of one shoe on the far right-hand side of the frame . . . something not even he will realize, then or ever.

  V

  He goes down, the Pulitzer prize winner goes down, Scott Landon goes down, and Lisey makes the supreme effort to break out of that slow and terrible Lisey-time. She must succeed because she has heard the cry of alarm from the part of the crowd that’s been moving with Scott and now she hears—in the maddening slow-speak of Lisey-time—someone saying Heeeeee’s hurrrrt! She must break free because if she doesn’t get to him before the crowd surrounds him and shuts her out, they will very likely kill him with their concern. With smother love.

  She screams at herself in her own head (strap it on RIGHT NOW!) and that does it. Suddenly she is knifing forward; all the world is noise and heat and sweat, but she blesses the speedy reality of it even as she uses her left hand to grab the left cheek of her ass and pull, raking the goddamn underwear out of the crack of her ass, there, at least one thing about this wrong and broken day is now mended.

  A coed in a shell top, the kind of top where the straps tie on the shoulders in big floppy bows, threatens to block her narrowing path to Scott, but Lisey ducks beneath her and hits the hot-top. She will not be aware of her scraped and blistered knees until much later—until the hospital, in fact, where a kindly paramedic will notice and put lotion on them, something so cool and soothing it will make her cry with relief. But that is for later. Now it might as well be just her and Scott alone here on the edge of this hot parking lot, this terrible black-and-yellow ballroom floor which must be a hundred and thirty degrees at least, maybe a hundred and fifty. Maybe more. Her mind tries to present her with the image of an egg frying sunny-side up in her Ma’s old black iron spider and she thrusts it away. Scott looks up at her and now his face is waxy pale except for the black triangles forming beneath his eyes and the blood which has begun running from the right side of his mouth and down his chin in a scarlet stream.

  “Lisey!” His voice is thin, whooping. “Did he . . . shoot me?”

  “Don’t try to talk,” she tells him, and puts a hand on his chest. His shirt, oh dear God, it is not wet with blood but soaked with blood, and beneath it she can feel his heart running along so fast and light; it is not the heartbeat of a human being, she thinks, but that of a bird. Pigeon-pulse, she thinks, and that is when the girl with the floppy bows tied on her shoulders falls on top of her. She would land on Scott but Lisey instinctively shields him, taking the brunt of the girl’s weight (“Hey, shit! FUCK!” the startled girl cries out) with her back . . . it is there for a moment and then gone. Lisey sees the girl shoot her hands out to break her fall—oh, the divine reflexes of the young, she thinks—and the girl is successful . . . but then she is crying, “Ow! Ow! OW!” This makes Lisey look at her own hands. They aren’t blistered, not yet, but they have gone the deep red of a perfectly cooked Maine lobster.

  “Lisey,” Scott whispers, and oh Christ how his breath screams when he pulls it in.

  “Who pushed me?” the girl with the bows on her shoulders is demanding. She is a-hunker, hair from a busted ponytail in her eyes, crying with surprise, pain, and embarrassment.

  Lisey leans close to Scott. The heat of him terrifies her and fills her with pity deeper than any she has ever felt, deeper than she thought it was possible to feel. He is actually shivering with the heat. Awkwardly, using only one arm, she strips off her jacket. “Scott, don’t try to talk. You’re right, you’ve been sh—”

  “I’m so hot,” he says, and begins to shiver harder. What comes next—convulsions? His hazel eyes stare up into her blue ones. Blood runs from the corner of his mouth. She can smell it. It stinks. Now the collar of his shirt is filling in red. “I’m so hot, please give me ice.”

  “I will,” she says, and puts her jacket under his head and neck. “I will, Scott.” Thank God for his sport coat, she thinks, not quite incoherent, and then has an idea. She grabs the hunkering, crying girl by the arm. “What’s your name?”

  The girl stares at her as if she were mad, but answers the question. “Lisa Lemke.”

  Same as mine, small world, Lisey thinks, but does not say. What she says is, “My husband has been shot, Lisa. Can you go over there to”—she cannot remember the name of the building, only its function—“to the English department and call an ambulance? Dial 911—”

  “Ma’am? Mrs. Landon, is it?” This is the campus security cop, making his way through the crowd with a lot of help from his meaty elbows. He squats beside her and his knees pop loudly. His knees are louder than Blondie’s pistol, Lisey marvels. He’s holding his walkietalkie, which was previously clipped to his Sam Browne belt in the place where a regular cop would wear his gun. When he speaks, he does so slowly and carefully, as though to a distressed child. “Mrs. Landon, I have called the campus infirmary. They are rolling their ambulance, which will take your husband to Nashville Memorial. Nashville . . . Memorial . . . Hospital. Do you understand me?”

  She does, and her gratitude to this man is almost as deep as the pity she feels for her husband, lying on the simmering pavement and bleeding from his chest and mouth, shuddering in the heat like a distempered dog. She nods, weeping the first of what will be many tears before she gets Scott back to Maine—not on a Delta f
light but on a private jet, and with a private nurse, and with another ambulance and another private nurse to meet them at the Portland Jetport’s Civil Air Terminal. And all that is later. Now she turns back to the Lemke girl and says, “Lisey, he’s burning up—is there ice, honey? Can you think of anywhere there might be ice?”

  She says this without much hope, and is therefore amazed when Lisa Lemke nods at once. “There’s a soda machine and two snack machines over there.” She points in the direction of Nelson Hall, which Lisey can’t see. All she can see is a crowding forest of bare legs, some hairy, some smooth, some tanned, some sunburned. She realizes they are completely hemmed in, that she’s tending her fallen husband in a slot the shape of a large vitamin pill or cold capsule, and feels a touch of crowd-panic. Is the word for that agoraphobia? Scott would know.

  “If you can get him some ice, please do,” Lisey says. “And hurry.” She looks at the campus security cop, who has gone to one knee on Scott’s other side and appears to be taking his pulse—a completely useless activity, in Lisey’s opinion. “Can’t you make them move back?” she almost pleads. “It’s so hot—”

  He doesn’t give her time to finish, but is up like Jack from his box, yelling, “Move it back! Let this girl through! Move it back! Let this girl through! Let him breathe, folks, let him breathe, all right, what do you say?”

  The crowd shuffles back . . . very reluctantly, Lisey thinks. They want to see all the blood, it seems to her.