Story Thirty-Six
the thing I wrote right after I got the phone call
I listen to the hails of gunfire, in which thousands of shells hit the ground while our hero somehow remains whole, because the sound of the gunfire is soothing. When it’s hailstorms of Hollywood, I know I’m safe. Actually getting shot is a very quiet thing, something you don’t notice until after a few stunned seconds which are eternity while your brain attempts to process what’s just happened to your body. I am calmest when I’m watching action movies and cop shows, which reliably bring me the mundane sounds of firefights and they do not smell like anything, which is another way I know I’m safe. Actual firefights, the ones where you might lose a limb or a life, smell like sweat and gunpowder and the Fourth of July and honeysuckle, sweet and spicy and loud but oh, so very quiet.
If I listen to nothing, if I try to sit in my own liminal space, I smell gunpowder. I get shot from a thousand angles, my brain still trying to sort out just what happened here, and this is why we should not allow mentally unwell people to have firearms. Because if I had one, I would take it somewhere and shoot it to smell the gunpowder and know I’m not dead, but I wouldn’t necessarily know where that bullet wound up. I lack muzzle control, because I have no depth perception. I have no wish to harm anyone, I just want to know that I’m not dead, and feeling the kick of the recoil and hearing the casing drop and smelling it all, this wild glorious feeling of not-dead would be too addictive. I wouldn’t care where the bullet wound up, because I am not dead.
So I listen, constantly, to something. Books, podcasts, music, action movies, tv shows that are riveting but utterly meaningless, anything so I don’t have to sit in my own head and try to think over the sound of my ears ringing. If I try to sit in silence, that is where death and madness lie, and I have learned that even in my sleep I need to keep that part of my brain, the part that man killed that day, busy. If I let it out, if I let it exercise, that will be the day I die. Even when I’m asleep, I am listening, always listening, for actual blessed silence, which I will never experience again until I die. Although, knowing my luck, the afterlife will be loud.
I’m the luckiest bastard you ever met, and it kills me a little bit every day, as I disappoint my closest loves and my children grow and realize that there really is something wrong in our house, most people don’t have mommies that don’t get out of bed for days on end, and most kids don’t live with the specter of the man who shot Mommy one day because for all my strength I was never particularly agile and I just failed to duck the one time it counted.
But who can measure that, anyway? Who knows how many times they were just walking down the street minding their business and ten minutes later a car crashed into that very spot? Most people don’t count their lives since they didn’t die, because most people don’t know that they’re wasting what borrowed time they have left. It all sounds insane, I know that, but that’s what brain damage does. You wonder things, after you know you should have died. You wonder about Feynman and the brushstrokes on Cezanne’s best work and how it is that humans can sing so clearly that it actually sounds like they’re singing in two octaves at once. I can spend hours marveling at a single blade of grass that somehow escaped the lawnmower; why that blade? What about it is special? And by extension, why any of us? Life is capricious, and death is always there. Why it chooses, when and how, seems more like roulette than anything.
All of life spreads out, all the majesty and horror and wonder of it all, and you realize that nothing can kill a man; one must choose to die. Unless you’re very lucky and have no choice, have a random car crash or a stroke and you just die right there, and then you find out what comes next. It is all in a snow globe, to make a crude metaphor, but it’s the universe in a tiny sphere you can hold in your hand and to even talk to a person is to shake it up and have to watch the snow inside settle. Safer, really, to listen to gunfire and know that it doesn’t smell like anything.
The key is this: don’t ever tell anyone about it. People ask, but they don’t want to know, because then they’d be a little bit entwined, and nobody wants that. People want jump scares, they want true crime, they want to hear bullets but not taste war. The people you can tell don’t need a word said, because they also taste gunmetal and so they pass you a smoke or a bourbon or a shot in your arm, and you don’t care what they give you even if maybe you don’t escape like that. It’s in the giving, the communion of it all.
Tom Morello would get it. I’ve never spoken to the man about it, but he has this song called Stray Bullets and it’s the most angrily proud or possibly proudly angry song I’ve ever heard in my life. You can look it up and listen to it, but you won’t taste the bloodthirsty defiant release in it unless you’re the sort who doesn’t need the explanation. It’s about futility and survival and being a dirty fucker who sees the world in a snow marble in their hands.
What is lost you gave away
Stray bullets raining on down
15 months stuck in Iraq
We got stop-lossed, they sent us back
Why the fuck we’re even here we’ll never know
Me and Steve, we went out walking
Few of us, we started talking
And now we’ve got a mission of our own
Cause now we’re coming for the captain
To reap the seeds he’s sown
Everybody hit the deck
Cause his tent’s about to blow
Tell the general when we find him
He’ll be the next to go
We’re coming for the captain
And then we’re going home
But everyone who hears the joy in that song, the whisperscream of reclamation, knows there’s no such place as home anymore. You can’t step in the same river twice, and once you know the taste of honeysuckle and ash you simply don’t exist anymore.
It’s difficult, you see, because for all the awards and accolades I’ve won as a journalist, a true thing is that most of my colleagues simply bitched out. They aren’t built for this, don’t want the risk. They want the awards, sure, and many of them are far more diligent and hardworking than I am, but very few have the sheer balls to walk into a structure fire to get the good picture. (This is not an insult, that’s a stupid fucking thing to do, and it’s also how you take award-winning photographs: take a photo that nobody else took.) Every time I smile and thank someone for admiring my work, I think to myself that they could have been me, if they wanted to be. If they really wanted to be the fourth estate. If they worked for living. It is unkind and unfair, but it makes me angry to smile and nod.
So my colleagues aren’t my peers. My peers tend to be cops and veterans, broken people who saw shit you would never want to know about. They are the people who escaped death because they happened to be in the second truck in the convoy and it was the fourth truck that blew up and filled the world with blood and metal and flying bits of people and machines. Only, I never served. And the cops, well. They were stuck in the same war I was, but cops and journalists shouldn’t ever get along, even if we worked side by side through whole humanitarian crises for months. So while cops and vets might be my peers, I am not theirs. But they tend to let me hang out with them, offering them smokes and bourbon and they offer me their poisons of choice and we simply never talk about anything, because we don’t have to.
There is a wordless heavy-hearted glance you give someone, when you recognize your kin. It shows in the back of your eyes if you know that life is death and death is life and it’s all a mystery that’s best not spoken about. Even if you hate them, even if they’re people that you’d usually never speak to, even if you’d usually be embarrassed to be seen with them in public, once you’ve had that shared unspoken moment they are safety, to the extent they can be. We are all little broken parts of a child’s puzzle, who recognize other cast-off pieces.
I had to explain to my firstborn what it was like to be disabled. She’s young, and I can’t burden her, but she also is old enough to deserve an explanation, and I told her that when I went into the hospital the last time, I had to let a strange man watch me poop. They had given me a new medication, which made me dizzy and might cause seizures, and so I wasn’t allowed to be alone in the bathroom. he was respectful, and turned his back, but that is an intimacy that, however needed, is humiliating. She understood that. Some days, I’m not allowed to dictate who watches me use the toilet. I don’t get to decide which days those are, but I have come to appreciate my cats, who always join me in the bathroom and turn their backs to me because they have accepted me as one of theirs and they want to protect me when I am most vulnerable.
That man, that nurse, was the same way. He was a cat, only he wasn’t. He was far less curious. He also applied my heart monitor, which consisted of twelve electrodes paired down my torso between my collarbones and hips, and came with a not-at-all handy control panel. I had just been checked in, and he was my duty nurse, and he had to touch my breasts. He asked me, or rather gently informed me, that he needed to get up close and personal. I laughed, because I have spent years with strange men putting wires and small boxes down my shirt when I’ve done TV spots: that’s how lapel microphones work. So I merely got fully topless, thinking it would make him more comfortable if I could signal to him somehow that I knew I was just another body he had to tend and make healthy if he could. I am not particularly caught up in modesty, and it seemed to me that it would just be easier if he could see my front rather than having to awkwardly try to place twelve electrodes under my shirt without touching my inescabably ample deposits of adipose tissue while pretending to preserve the modesty that I wasn’t allowed to have that day. It was kindness from him, and I tried to do a kindness back. It’s fine, just do your job. I know I’m safe with you. You don’t have to spend emotion on me. Because I only exist in my head; I was killed years ago. What point pretension?
I write all this, in a stream of consciousness, because I can’t write in any other style anymore. We’re all just made up out of flesh and bone and blood, accidents of cells that split and grew, and I can’t write pointed and measured and well-researched, because I can’t hold a thought for as long as it would take to write your average seventh-grade book report. That isn’t my strength; mine is running into the structure fires.
Still, I’m not dead, and I have to work and remember to eat and bathe and hug my children, and all the time I am listening to something, because silence is death.
Stray bullets, raining on down.
Editor’s Note: Sav here. There are no right words to say when one’s mentor is dying in slow motion because someone took aim at her face and pulled the trigger. However, saying nothing feels worse and the job continues regardless. Help Linda and her family below.
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