by Gregory Hill
Fourteen more miles.
Let’s say the pistol did go off and fire true. The bullet’s moving in slow-motion. As I recall from a “Make Your Own Weather” article from an early-nineties issue of Popular Science, tornados can spin at up to 300 miles per hour. A bullet can travel way, way faster than that. The motion of the hellfire tornado was visible to my eyes. Assuming the pistol’s bullet is in the same time dominion as the tornado, it would travel a shitheap faster than the tornado. But if a bullet travels faster than a tornado, and if I can see a tornado move, then I should have seen the bullet exit the gun.
But I didn’t see any bullets exit the guns at the House of Pronghorn, which doesn’t make sense. Except, it does. Before a bullet exits gun, the trigger mechanism has to do whatever a trigger mechanism does. This surely involves the motion of multiple levers and a firing pin, not to mention the initial combustion of gun powder in the bullet itself. This process could easily take several seconds.
I hadn’t stuck around in the van after I’d aimed Cookie’s pistol at my head. I’d pulled the trigger, shuddered, and left.
Twelve more miles.
If the gun fired after I placed it in Sandy’s hand, and if the bullet is traveling straight, and if time in the Palace is the same as time under the hellfire storm, then there’s a better-than-even chance that Vero has been seriously injured and a worse-than-none chance that she’s headless.
Everything I know about ammunition, I learned from Dirty Harry—.38s will bounce off windshields, .44s will not. A .44 will take your head clean off. The gun I pointed at Vero was a .45. Dirty Harry didn’t say anything about a .45, but I presume that if the extra .01 made it better than a .44, he’d have owned one. Which puts it in the realm of windshield bouncers. To conclude, Vero’s just fine, assuming her face is as hard as a windshield.
Nine miles.
Before I’d left the Palace, I’d pulled the chair out from under Vero. Boy, was I angry. Maybe she’s falling down faster than the bullet is flying toward her. Maybe that’s highly unlikely.
Seven miles. Gotta get new shoes. These soles are shot. My feet are fine, but my knees are starting to get cranky.
There’s no rationalizing this. I pulled a trigger and pointed a gun at a human. Even when there are no consequences, there are consequences. This is what it means to be human. This is what it means to be a fucking butterfly. Flap yer wings today and tomorrow you’re complicit in the destruction of New Orleans.
Listen, Narwhal, even though you’re all alone, you do not exist in a vacuum. And even if you did, there’s still a thing called morality. Back in the days, I used to impose my morality on basketball teams. Recently, I’ve imposed my morality on a perverted trucker and drivers with cell phones. But my sense of morality apparently flies right out the window when I betray Vero’s confidence and read her diary. And then, when I don’t like what I learn from this diary that I have no business reading, I point a pistol.
What ludicrous hiccup of idiocy inspired me to point the pistol?
As a referee, I altered rules to fit my moods. I did this because it was the only way to guarantee that the correct team won. I’ve been doing the same thing on a much larger scale ever since I became the only moving human on earth. It’s my duty. I’m the adjudicator.
No, I’m not. I’m a lousy cheater.
28
Vero doesn’t care for penguins, never has. As she tells it, one day, when she was a sophomore in high school, she was visiting her Auntia in St. Louis and a PBS penguin documentary came on the TV. During a pause for fundraising, Vero shouted to her Auntia. Auntia was in the kitchen and Vero shouted, “¡Tía! ¡Tía! ¡Los pinguinos son más lindo que el pelo del bebé!” For reasons that Vero was unable to adequately explain in her recollection, this statement caused Auntia to laugh so hard that wine came out of her nostrils. As a joke, when Vero’s next birthday rolled around, Auntia mailed Vero a stuffed penguin doll.
Vero’s big sisters saw the penguin perched on her nightstand and decided, as a joke, that her Christmas gift that year would be a penguin poster that they’d seen at the poster store at the mall. ‘Twas an image of two penguins walking down a beach, flipper in flipper. At the bottom of the poster, a single word: Friendship.
“From there,” Vero told me, “word got out that I was a penguin lover. It must have been a relief for my friends. Why do something thoughtful for me when you can buy a shitty bobblehead penguin or an ice-cube tray decorated with penguins or a Pittsburgh hockey jersey and wrap it in penguin wrapping paper? I have whole a closet full of penguin shit.”
Aloud, I laughed. Inside, I was jealous; no one has ever given me a penguin.
On the glorious day, all those months ago, when Vero moved out of her place and into mine, I was with her as she opened the closet in the empty, echoing bedroom in her soon-to-be-former apartment and I found myself gazing upon at least a thousand dollars’ worth of ironic penguin gifts. It was almost dreamlike, actually, a grotesque exhibit of what it means to wish to be thought of as thoughtful.
Vero said, “Stare while you can, boyfriend.” She then reached into her beehive hair and pulled out a tube of something called UltraGlue, which she proceeded to squeeze all along the door frame. She tossed the empty glue tube onto the closet floor and said, “Lean with me.”
She pressed the closet door closed and the two of us rested our shoulders against it until the glue dried.
At this point, the dream may have ended.
Vero, I will not allow your affair with The Blad to become your new penguin, nor will I allow it to become my butterfly. Which is to say, in layman’s terms, I will neither allow your affair to create a new definition of who I think you are, nor will I allow it to cause a hurricane. I forgive you, sweetheart. Please have a head when I see you next.
I’ve made visual contact with the grain elevators of Holliday. And, look, here’s my Mack truck with its watermelon fetishist and trailer full of wheat. I jog past without stopping, but I do glance back. The magazine photos I’d placed in the windshield have fallen down.
I’ve been incredibly wrong. Time is moving, gang. It’s just moving really, really slow.
As I enter town, I reach up and slap the Welcome to Holliday sign. I salute skyward in the general direction of the one-legged seagull, who, if anything, has flown even higher, now a prick of white, nearly invisible.
After my twenty-five mile dash, I’m wheezing, my chest is heaving, my legs have no bones, and my eyebrows are dusted with grains of sweat salt.
My feet bring me to the Palace Diner’s parking lot and to the front door. I lean my shoulder against the door for a moment, then I pull it open and enter.
Nobody is moving, but everything has moved. Veronica is sitting splay-legged on the floor with her right hand pressed against her forehead. Her face is intact, a swirl of fear and anger with a healthy dose of pain. Sandy is running toward Veronica, her arms outstretched.
Old Timer leans forward on his stool, gazing at the pistol, which Sandy has dropped on the floor.
The evidence strongly suggests that I’m too late.
29
A while ago, Vero and I were watching the local news and there was a story about one of the mass shootings that are so popular in the States these days. One of the witnesses, a young woman shivering in the cold, her face illuminated by the twirling lights of emergency vehicles, was asked by a reporter to describe what it had been like to witness such mayhem.
“It was unsurreal.”
Until I found the tornado and discovered that time is moving, my frozen diorama had been a dreamscape where I could do whatever I wanted. It’s not a dream anymore. It’s chaos in slow motion, and it is most assuredly unsurreal.
With my over-jogged lungs still gasping for air, I creep to Vero where she’s seated upon the floor. I squat before her. The tendons in her neck are taut, her fingers are white where they press against her forehead. This is a wartime magazine photo. Innocent woman struck by crossfire, possibly.
The wall behind her is clean. No splash of brain, no skull fragments. The back of Vero’s head has no visible damage. I rub my hand against her hair all around her head. No sign of an exit wound. This leaves open the possibility that the bullet is still inside her skull.
Her right hand is still tight against her forehead. Underneath her hand, that’s where I’ll find the hole.
At this moment, I don’t know if Vero is alive or dead. The only way to preserve the illusion that she might be alive would be for me to leave her hand where it is and get the hell out of here and never look back. We can all agree that that would take some serious courage, walking out in the midst of such a potent moment. We can also agree that courage requires only a gentle nudge upon the sternum before it teeters backward off the Cliff of Dignity and tumbles into the River of Shame.
It’s Sandy-the-waitress’s eyes that supply the nudge. She who has called me Hon, and who has brought us food, and who has been pouring coffee for Old Timer, and who doesn’t know Vero from any other city twit passing thru town, and who is wearing the onion ring I’d intended for Vero’s finger. Sandy, who does not have the luxury of pondering the meaning of unsurreal, is rushing to help a stranger in distress. If this country waitress can be bold enough to approach my gal after a phantom gunshot, then I can at least bear witness to the damage I’ve done.
I grip Vero’s thumb and, atom by atom, I peel her palm away from her lovely forehead.
The skin beneath is perfectly intact. No hole, no bruise, no evidence of gunplay at all.
Please allow me a moment to curl up on the floor and weep with relief.
Thank you.
Why the hand on the forehead? Because she thinks I snuck out of the bathroom and yanked the chair out from under her and she can’t see why I’d pull a bush-league prank like that, and so she’s imitating a gesture she learned from her oft-exasperated madre, that’s why.
I walk to where the pistol lays on the floor and I lift it up. It’s one of those square-looking jobbers with a clip in the handle, as opposed to a revolver you’d see a cowboy employ. I sniff the barrel. It has the same gunpowdery aroma as the guns from the House of Pronghorn, which suggests that the gun has fired recently. But if it had been fired, it would have projected a bullet and ejected an empty shell. I check the floors, the walls, everywhere. No empty shells, no bullets.
And so therefore. Therefore, forget this forensic nonsense. Vero’s alive, man! Bathe in the joy. I press my cheek against her chest. I pat her hair for several moments and then I walk to Sandy and slide the onion ring off her finger, with the intention of putting it on Vero’s finger. But I stop. You can’t put an engagement onion ring on someone’s finger without thon’s consent. I place it on the table, next to one of Vero’s uneaten French fries.
*
Having recently run a marathon, and now being embraced by the warm calmness that one encounters when one realizes that one has not murdered one’s almost-fiancée, I was suddenly beset by exhaustion and dehydration and the desire to eat as much food as possible.
I devoured a bottle of water and then another. I reckoned I needed to get some calories in my belly before I took a nap, so I went to the kitchen. Cookie the chef was in the process of opening the door to see what all the commotion was about. I had to shove him out of the way before I could enter.
I pulled the basket out of the oil and attempted to eat a French fry. God almighty, they were hot. If I really want a French fry, I can eat one of Veronica’s. Perhaps I will, someday. For the time being, my repast shall consist of hamburger buns upon which I smear grape jelly scooped from single serving plastic containers.
I went outside the diner and ate on the front step. I plowed thru half a dozen buns, eating another couple of bottles of water as well. I fell asleep halfway thru bun number seven, awoke with jelly on my forehead. To hell with the front step. I crawled sleepily into Cookie’s van and passed out on his mattress.
I haven’t spoken of my sleeping habits. When I’m on the road, I try to find a bed in a dark room and I lie down and then I wait. The mattress never properly squishes under my weight and, as a consequence, my back always hurts. I lie there, listening, but there’s nothing to hear. I have only the sound of my breath and my heartbeat. The moments of sleepwait are an isolation chamber. You think that’d be dreamy, but it ain’t. I’m already completely isolated. Sleepwait isolates me from my isolation. It’s like going to jail and then getting sent to solitary confinement, and then being straitjacketed, weighted down, and tossed into a lake.
Deep breaths, count sheep, recite freshman French vocabulary, you know the shtick. Eventually, the anxiety gives way to the vacuum and I drift away.
Lately, occasionally, I’ll dream. Same thing every time: I’m stuck in dream freeze—the one where I can’t speak or move—and everyone else is buzzing around me in a blur. When the dream gets too intense, I awake sweating, pulse out of control. That part’s familiar to anyone who’s had a nightmare. But coming to in the dark on an unfamiliar bed that doesn’t squish, with no clock or any idea of how long I’ve been out—what a shit way to start the day.
Having said this, I slept like a fucking baby after running that marathon to discover to my eternal relief that I hadn’t killed Vero.
PART
TWO
Since there were no reference points, I had no idea whether my fall was fast or slow. Now that I think about it, there weren’t even any proofs that I was really falling: perhaps I had always remained immobile in the same place, or I was moving in an upward direction; since there was no above or below these were only nominal questions and so I might just as well go on thinking I was falling, as I was naturally led to think.
— Italo Calvino,
Cosmicomics
30
I awoke upon the mattress in the back of Cookie’s van, stretched my arms, yawned, had a brief moment of panic, remembered that Vero did not have a bullet in her head, and cheerfully vowed that this would be a great day. It was already a great day. I’d been fully awake for at least three minutes, and I hadn’t thought about The Blad once. And now that I was thinking about him, the thoughts were borderline grateful. If I hadn’t started on my quest to exact my revenge, and if I hadn’t stood there on the cusp of the town of Last Chance and looked back to the hellfire storm, I may never have seen that glorious eruption of lightning that led me to the tornado that led me to the House of Pronghorn that led me to run my ankles off to save the woman I love.
As I was backing out of the van, just about to push the passenger door shut, I saw a shaft of sunlight streaming thru a small hole in the driver’s side doorframe, just above the window. I climbed back in for a closer look. I poked my pinkie thru the hole. I sniffed several times and picked up a strong scent of burned gunpowder.
I jumped out of the van and examined the hole from the outside. Based on the tulip petals of splayed metal, this was an exit wound. I reentered the van and pawed thru the fast food wrappers and Rolling Stones CDs until I found an expelled shell with .45 stamped into the back.
I contemplated this shell for several minutes before it came to me. You’ve already figured it out.
If you recall, when I had initially removed the gun from Cookie’s glovebox, I had pointed it, the gun, at my head and pulled the trigger. The cry for help in an empty forest. Then I had released the gun to float. A short time later, after I’d left the van, the gun had silently fired a slow-motion bullet, which had pierced the frame of the van.
A day or two later, I had removed Cookie’s pistol—which, upon reflection, was not in the same place where I’d left it, sort of upward and further back—and brought it to the restaurant and placed it in Sandy’s hand, aimed at Veronica, totally harmless.
I enter the diner and say hello to everybody. I return Vero to her chair and adjust her into an approximation of the pose she’d held when Time-Out began, the soggy French fry approaching her mouth, her left eyelid halfway raised in the same goofy freeze-frame face from b
efore. I pat the top of her beehive and say, “We can work thru this.”
I arrange Sandy and Old Timer into their original positions, even down to molding a new tongue of coffee for Sandy to not-quite pour into Old Timer’s cup.
I leave my onion engagement ring on the table, next to Vero’s plate. The gun, I return to Cookie’s glove box, after wiping it clean of fingerprints.
Here’s what I’ve learned in the last two days.
1) Vero is safe.
2) Recent events (lightning, tornados, guns, etc.) strongly suggest that the world has not, as I previously believed, come to a complete stop. Rather, it’s just moving incredibly slowly.
If I’m gonna to confirm my slow-but-not-stopped theory, I’m gonna need a telescope.
I wandered the dirt streets of Holliday until I came upon, glory on high, a school. It was tucked away behind an enormous farm building, but still, there’s no reason why I hadn’t been curious enough about this town to have found it earlier.
The school is fully integrated: kindergarten thru senior, everybody in one building. Flipping thru the composite photos in the hall next to the office, the average class size has historically been somewhere between seven and twelve kids, the average haircut is high and tight (male) or tall and wide (female). K-12, 130 kids, total. This is a small school. They play six-man football, won state in 1968 and 2002.
Let’s contrast this to the experiences of young Narwhal Slotterfield. Over the course of thirteen years of education, not counting Referee classes, I had progressed from elementary to middle to high school, each with a new building with an entirely different staff, different set of rules, a different lunch lady, and a different opportunity to re-start my social life, which inevitably ended with me upside-down in a bathroom stall.
