by Nino Ricci
“Not to mention the cameras.”
“Sorry?”
“The security cameras. Greg says they’re everywhere.”
“Right.” Her eyes shift uncomfortably. “I always forget about them.”
Her fear of a moment earlier, which had seemed pure, turbid with possibility, feels tainted now. It has been enough simply to bring up Greg’s name.
“I guess you better get going. Greg’s probably got breakfast waiting.”
He begins to vary the times of his runs, wondering at the demon in him that always wants to drive him to the most destructive thing. The days go by without his seeing her again and yet still she is there in his thoughts, is there in his dreams at night. His mind keeps returning to the moment when he might have pushed things with her, to the black wave that rose up before him then that was less conscience or reason or fear than simply the fatigue of a lifetime, the impulse to turn toward what was easy, what required nothing of him. For all his new discipline the fatigue is there almost always now, a wall he has to fight his way through each time he sits down to write or make his way through some tome, each time he starts a conversation or heads out to class. It is born, perhaps, of his disorder and yet is somehow larger than it, seems to take in every wrong turn he has ever made, everything he has ever risked or lost, every delusion he has laboured under or bauble he has let himself covet. Every pat on the back that he pretends to himself now is the sign of a resurgence when perhaps he is just reverting to all the old compromises, all the old lies, to the sleep his life had become before his disorder, in its twisted way, had dragged him kicking and screaming from it.
Mornings, now, instead of running, he drives out to a gun club he has joined, where he fires rounds from his SIG and from a vintage Colt revolver he has picked up to break the monotony of the SIG’s relentless precision. With the Colt there is no mistaking what he is at, the fire bursting from the chamber with each shot with an addictive violence. Often he is at the range before sunrise so he can have the bays to himself, letting himself in with his key card and clustering round after round in the kill zone to kick-start the day.
The Colt he picked up at a local gun show. Row after row of banquet tables lined with guns heaped up like underwear in a discount bin, cookie-cutter handguns in black polymer, derringers and revolvers, assault rifles and sniper rifles, semi-automatic shotguns with massive 30-round drums. At the NRA booth he ended up signing on for a free on-the-spot safety class that qualified takers for concealed carry.
“Believe me, it’s a whole different experience,” the bleached-blond at the sign-up desk told him. “The first time you go out you’ll feel like you just swallowed a box of Viagra.”
The instructor turned out to be little more than a kid, greasy-haired and scrawny, dressed in an ill-fitting blazer that at the outset of the class he opened with a studied casualness to reveal a Glock 17 at his hip.
“First bit of advice: you want a high-volume mag. The law says, you’ve got time to reload, you’ve got time to think. Which means you’ve just seen self-defence ratchet up to first-degree.”
He trotted out the colour code of alertness that was popular in gun circles, Condition White, Condition Yellow, Condition Red. For a few minutes then he almost rose to the poetic.
“Condition White is every jogger or boarder going down the street with earbuds jammed in their ears. It’s everyone texting or talking on the phone hardly noticing what’s two feet in front of them. Condition White, basically, is asleep. It’s what almost everyone is almost all of the time, which is why people like you can’t be. Why every minute of every day, as soon as you step out your door, you have to be alert. Because when the time comes to do something, it’s on you.”
The pitch sounded like an ode to the hope guns imparted. They made of everyone, even this scrawny kid with his Glock 17, a potential warrior, a potential hero.
Afterwards everyone had their photos taken and filled out the paperwork that would get sent on to whatever office it was that issued the permits. David was sure there would be some glitch, that the class had been little more than a hook to get him on an NRA mailing list. But one day he opens his mail and the permit is there, a flimsy plasticized card with the bad graphics and grainy print of something run off in someone’s basement. License to Carry a Concealed Handgun. A strange charge goes through him. He has been given the right to arm himself like a vigilante, could walk out his door with a handgun in every pocket and enough ammo to take out an entire schoolyard or platoon, and no one could stop him.
For the rest of the day he floats in a kind of suspended animation. Then toward sunset he gets out his SIG and loads the magazine, pulls the slide back to draw a round into the chamber. He’ll need to get a holster of some sort; for now he simply sets the gun in a side pocket of his coat. His heart is already pounding. It is the first time outside of a shooting bay that he has carried the gun loaded. Apart from an auto-lock that keeps it from firing if it is jostled or dropped, the gun’s only safety is the 5.5 pounds of pressure it takes to pull the trigger.
He steps outside. Despite himself, the instructor’s spiel comes back to him, every detail around him suddenly sharp, important, the baring branches, the dying leaves. He starts down the dirt path behind his house that leads into the woods. He can hear every twig that snaps and make out every smell, of earth and bark and decay and something else, vaguely out of place, like the smell that warns a prey or the one that betrays it.
He passes a brown security car. In the twilight all he makes out through the tinted windows is the barest silhouette of a face, featureless and dark like a comic book rendering of a villain or spy. He thinks of the two of them with their guns and a shadow crosses him of what feels like a primordial fear, the sense of what it might mean to live in a lawlessness where every stranger had to be reckoned a threat, like those isolate tribes you heard of for whom every meeting on the road carried the prospect of death. He is only playing at this, he knows it, and yet for the first time he thinks he gets what the real thrall of a gun is beyond the blood lust and compensations, this feeling of being alone on the road without judges or gods, beholden to no authority but your own. The terrible freedom of that, of making the hard choice. Anything less, it seems, is only for sleepwalkers.
Around him the woods stand carved in the sodium light of the lampposts as if a fog that has surrounded him all his life has suddenly lifted.
He is out in the woods the next morning before he can second-guess himself, circling them again and again until she appears coming toward him on the path as though he has conjured her by sheer force of will. At the sight of him, a flash on her face as at a gunshot.
“I haven’t seen you,” she says, but distant and muted.
“Just work. Trying to finish something up.”
For a long time they run in silence, with only the sound of their footfalls and their breaths. They reach the stairwell that goes up to her street but she doesn’t slow, and they end up circling back toward his house.
“I think I’m going to head in.” Trying to empty his voice of every false note, every hint of casualness. “I don’t suppose I could offer you a coffee.”
Her face colours like a beacon going off.
“Kateri will be getting up.”
He sees it clearly then, her other life, the closed curtains and rumpled sheets, the smell of sleep, the sound of puttering in the kitchen.
“Another time, then.”
In the end she is the one who starts toward his house, without so much as a glance at him, only a furtive look over her shoulder as if they were fugitives in a police state, making their escape. Any minute the alarm will sound, the shots will ring out.
“We have to hurry.”
It is all she offers in the way of consent.
He is on her the second they are inside. They don’t talk now, not a word, only pull at each other’s clothes until enough parts are exposed to fuck, which they do on the living room floor, still trailing bits of clothing like
patches of skin they have shed. There doesn’t seem time to think or plan or take stock, to show consideration or restraint. Afterwards there is no small talk, no fishing for endearments, only her panicked look, her brain on her face, the sense of her fear again like a tidal wave rising.
“I have to go,” she says, gathering up clothes like someone trying to piece back together a life after a hurricane or war.
When she is gone it is almost as if he has dreamed the whole episode. He feels rattled, not sure what has begun or if anything has, if he has pleased her or merely terrified her. He has no email address for her or private cell, doesn’t dare try to call her at home, so that the whole day he is on tenterhooks. When he doesn’t spot her the next morning on his run, he goes into full panic.
“We’re doing Canadian Thanksgiving Sunday night,” Greg says at their squash game. “If you’re around.”
David wonders how they imagined they could hide such a thing from someone like Greg in this fishbowl, this place where there are cameras in every tree. But then that is the kind of lie people always tell themselves at the outset, when such lies are needed.
“I’ll let you know,” he says.
At class that day he is a ticking bomb. He has grown too chummy with the students, too invested in being the hip one, the one not afraid to confront their creeping nihilism rather than dosing it with bromides. Now, all of a sudden, he can’t bear his own falseness.
One of them tries to shrug off a missed reading.
“Next time,” David says, “read the fucking text or stay home.”
The boy packs up his things and leaves the room without a word. With one lapse David has managed to undo all the weeks of hard work he has put in to win the students over.
Fuck them.
The next morning, again, there is no sign of Sophie on the trails. It is all David can do to keep from showing up at her door. She has slit her wrists for all he knows, has confessed everything, has slipped town in the dead of night.
At the height of his panic, he gets a call from Julia.
“Don’t tell me you forgot, David. We agreed to this weeks ago.”
There it is, clearly marked on his calendar: Marcus here. Julia had planned to fly him down for the weekend en route to some conference.
“It’s bad timing for me. Can’t you bring him to your dad’s?”
This is enough to send them into one of their spirals.
“Are you still his father, for fuck’s sake? Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
He drives out to the airport on the Friday afternoon for the hand-off. His first thought when he sees the boy, going on twelve but still scrawny and small, still full of quirks and tics and obscure intent, is, Let this be over.
He can’t get the image of Sophie out of his head, of fucking her on his living room floor.
“He’s only allowed an hour of internet a day and one of gaming. Don’t let him fight you on that.”
In the car Marcus’s eyes are on him the whole time. Then at the house he is finicky and brooding, avoiding surfaces as if the place seethed with contaminants. He sits hunched over the laptop Julia has sent along with him while David makes supper. Afterwards David manages to find a movie on pay-per-view he is willing to watch, though when he goes through the options for the next day Marcus offers only unreadable twitches and shrugs.
“We’ll work something out in the morning. If I’m not here when you wake up I’m just out for my run.”
He goes out early, in the cold and dark, scouring the trails for Sophie until dawn has given way to full daylight. Julia would be livid if she knew he’d left Marcus alone for so long. He returns home expecting to find him still in his bed, but from the entrance hall he hears sounds from the upstairs office. A thought shifts at the edge of his brain like a movement in his peripheral vision. Then he starts up the stairs and catches sight of Marcus through the office doorway.
His blood freezes.
“Pee-uw. Pee-uw.”
Marcus is panning the room with David’s SIG Sauer. Somehow, with a child’s instinct, he has known where to look to find the most precious thing, the most forbidden one.
Jesus fucking Christ, Marcus, it’s not a toy!
But he doesn’t say it. Instead he comes up so quietly Marcus doesn’t notice him until he is already close enough to reach for the gun.
“Better let me take that.”
In an instant David has dropped the magazine and checked the chamber. The chamber is clear, though the magazine still carries six or seven rounds from his last trip to the club. All it would have taken to make the gun live was a pull of the slide.
Marcus looks close to tears.
“Sorry, Dad! I was only looking at it!”
Still such a child, really, still so unformed, something David forgets over and over, always imagining him as this looming fault-finder, this adversary, this judge.
“Nobody’s angry at you. It wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have left it unlocked. I shouldn’t have left it loaded.”
The boy’s relief is so palpable it sends a surge of emotion through David.
“I’ve got another one, too. A revolver. Here, I’ll show you.”
The guns end up filling the rest of the morning. David shows Marcus how to field-strip them and lets him practise on the SIG until he gets good at it. He is taken by the focus Marcus brings to the task. He can’t remember a time when the two of them have shared something so intently.
“I’ve still got that gun of your grandfather’s back home. Maybe it’ll be yours one day. I use it for target shooting, like these two.”
“Do you think I’d be able to do that? Shoot targets?”
“I don’t know, son.” He can imagine what would become of the little he has left in the way of visitation rights if Julia ever got wind of any of this. “You might be a bit young still.”
Instead of dropping the matter, he looks up the state’s minimum age for handling guns. A mere nine.
“Looks like you’re in luck. Maybe we’ll swing by my gun club this afternoon and you can try a few rounds.”
All Marcus’s hunched resistance to him has vanished by now. He asks to help with lunch, something he has never done, and the two of them move around David’s narrow kitchen bumping elbows like bachelor room-mates.
“There’s a couple of safety rules we should probably go over before we head out.”
“I know the first one. Don’t tell Mom.”
David packs only the SIG, which even at .40 calibre is so finely tuned that the recoil hardly registers. He warns Marcus not to be put off by the gun club’s clientele.
“Some of these guys, guns are like a religion for them. They’re all they live for.”
“Why do they like them so much?”
David resists the urge to launch into a lecture.
“I dunno. Why do we?”
The club is a no-frills place in a strip mall just outside the university zone. The lounge has all the charm of a halfway house, a battered vending machine, a torn vinyl sofa, a magazine rack where people dump their back issues of American Hunter and American Handgunner and Soldier of Fortune. A couple of regulars, big truck-driver types, sit watching football on a tiny flat-screen. David has a moment of doubt, wondering at what he is dragging Marcus into. Yet it has been enough simply to show some trust in the boy for him to seem to mature before David’s eyes.
The video monitor in the prep room shows two shooters already out in the gallery, the soundproofing cutting the noise of their shots down to distant pops. David fits Marcus with goggles and with earplugs and muffs.
“Whatever you do, don’t take these off. Once you’re out there the noise’ll blow out your eardrums.”
Then they are through the airlock and in their bay, staring out into the gallery’s eerie cave-like space. David can feel the thump-thump of the other shooters in every fibre now.
He has to shout to be heard.
“You all right?”
“I’m okay, Dad!�
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He sends a bull’s eye out to ten yards and takes a couple of test shots. He remembers the first time he fired the Beretta, how it twisted in his hands like something alive.
“You’re up, son! I’ll help with the first few shots.”
Marcus’s shoulders barely clear the counter of their bay. David crouches behind him and wraps his hands around Marcus’s to steady his shot. For a second he feels the same panic as when he awakens in some unlikely location from a bout of sleepwalking and can’t reconstruct what logic has brought him there.
“Just a steady pull! Like we talked about.”
The gun explodes. David, pressed up against Marcus like his shadow, feels the tremor that goes through him.
The bullet has gone wild, missing the target completely.
He squeezes the boy’s hands more firmly.
“Don’t be afraid of it. Just think where you want the bullet to go and pull!”
This time the pull is smoother and the shot lands just a few inches short of the bull’s eye.
“Great shot! Looks like you’re a natural!”
Marcus starts to relax a bit now, his next shots clustering around the second one. David is impressed at how quickly he has learned to absorb the kick of the gun instead of fighting it.
David takes a step back.
“Now try a couple on your own!”
Marcus gives him a nervous look but doesn’t lose form, keeps the gun pointing forward, like David has taught him, keeps his finger off the trigger.
“You think I’m ready?”
“You’ll be fine. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing.”
He pulls up on the first shot and misses the target again.
“Take your time. No hurry. And don’t forget to keep breathing.”
He takes his time. He is just a kid, holding this lethal thing in his hands.
On the second shot he nails the bull’s eye.
“Dad, look! It’s right in the middle! It’s right on the bull’s eye!”
“Like I said, you’re a natural!”
The high carries them through the rest of the visit. David can still feel the thrill of it when he hands Marcus back to Julia at the airport the next day. He has made his resolutions by then, that he will break off whatever it is he has started with Sophie, that he will make the six- or seven-hour drive home every weekend to spend time with Marcus. Will look into shooting lessons for him and get him signed on at his club, Julia be damned.
