The gun was so beautiful laying
there on the table, so perfectly and inarguably designed for dealing death,
that it was almost impossible not to pick it up and use it. A light sheen
of oil coated the metal and scented the air. Keith knew the taste of that
oil; he knew the way it lingered on the tongue.
He was trying to think of
a reason. Every Friday evening afer work he cleaned and loaded the gun,
placed the barrel carefully into his mouth, and searched himself for a
good reason not to pull the trigger. He sat, frozen, while the clock ticked
and the fluorescent lights hummed, and each week the clock ticked a little
longer and the reason became a little more trivial.
Tonight the thought crossed
his mind that he had plenty of cash and the bar down the street was still
open, and somehow he managed to convince himself that a drink would be
more satisfying than a bullet. He removed the gun from his mouth and put
it away before he could change his mind.
The bar was nearly empty. Keith
bought a double shot of scotch whiskey and a beer and sat down near the
pool table. An angular young woman dressed in black, with a black leather
jacket and black scarf draped over her chair was listlessly chalking a
pool cue.
He studied her as she lined
up her shot. She was boyish, just this side of butch, and he idly wondered
if she were a lesbian.
She sank the eight ball
without smiling and gestured at him with her cue.
"Rack 'em."
They played
slowly and spoke quietly of inconsequential things, and she won.
They bought
each other drinks and shared the rare air of the quiet bar. Neither of
them had anything in particular to say, but the tones they spoke in seemed
to draw them together somehow, and the gun seemed very far away with her
sitting next to him because he knew without being told that she had a
gun, or a razor, or a bottle of pills at home too. Something in the years
behind her had delicately ravaged her, and her soul turned on a spit over
the slow fire in the hearth of her eyes. He was certain that if she pulled
up her sleeves, he would see scars.
"Last call. . . for alcohol!"
bellowed the bartender.
She surprised him by asking if
he wanted to come to her place for another drink, and he surprised himself
by saying yes.
Her apartment was almost as bare
as his place. There were more clothes, and more empty bottles. The bed
was a mattress on the floor like his, and like his, it was unmade. When
she opened the refrigerator to get ice, he saw things growing inside.
They sat on the stained mattress
and drank scotch from old marmalade jars, and he looked politely at a
picture of a little girl she said was her daughter. He almost asked her
where the child was, but the look on her face stopped him. For a moment
he was afraid she would tell him the whole ugly story anyway, break down
and spill her guts to him, and then he would be obliged to make sympathetic
noises and describe his own life's slow erosion. The unspoken thing that
drew them together would crumble beneath their words, fall on them like
dust and insulate them from each other, and the foot or two of space between
them would stretch out into yawning light-years of emptiness. At last,
mercifully, she put the photograph away and clinked her glass against
his.
When the scotch was gone and they
had run out of meaningless things to say, Keith laid his hand gently on
top of hers. It seemed like the thing to do. She stiffened slightly and
looked at the floor, and then her palm turned toward his and she squeezed
hard. Their thumbs drew soft circles around each other, and when she finally
looked up at him her eyes dropped almost immediately to his mouth. Something
that felt like gravity pulled their faces together.
The first kiss was tentative,
a dry, miniscule peck of lip on lip. They breathed each other's breath
and he felt his pulse quicken. The second kiss was a brutal mashing of
flesh, a clash of teeth, a war of tongues. To Keith it felt as though
they had fallen through a hole in the world, straight out into the void
to tumble endlessly in the dark. When it ended, he opened his eyes and
she was glaring hotly at him, face flushed and nostrils flaring, and he
wondered crazily if she could taste the gun oil.
The third kiss was softer,
more polite, and it died and turned to ashes on their lips in less than
ten seconds. The heat was gone as suddenly as it had come, and as they
disengaged, he saw on her face the same bitter and ironic half-smile that
he could feel on his own. They shared it for a frozen tick of the clock,
and some final flash of understanding passed between them.
They lay next to each other
on the mattress for the next hour, studying the ceiling and talking while
the distance between them grew.
He asked her if she knew any good
reasons for being alive, but she couldn't think of a single one that he
hadn't long since discarded, and the sharpness of his logic effortlessly
deflated every hope she held out to him. He was disappointed and slightly
shocked when she began crying.
"If everything's so awful
and pointless," she blurted through her tears, "then why don't you just
k-kill yourself and get it over with?"
He stared at her briefly, the
way a lepidopterist might stare at a specimen stretched out and pinned
to a piece of cardboard.
"Thanks for the drink."
Keith swam through the next week in a blank fog.
He saw nothing, did nothing and said nothing that was in any way other
than routine. He ate without tasting, slept without dreaming and worked
without thinking. On Friday, he cleaned and oiled the gun.
There were no reasons left. He felt empty from
the soles of his feet to the top of his head. The only desire in him that
had not been crushed out like a cigarette butt was for the burst and spatter
of blood, bone and brain that would make it all stop.
He put the barrel in his mouth and flicked the
safety off with his thumb. The clock ticked. The fluorescent lights hummed.
At the last moment, his eye fell on the newspaper
spread open on the table in front of him, and he recognized her despite
the small size of the photograph and the smile on her face. He began to
read, and the pressure of his finger on the trigger slackened as the words
sank in.
She had been dead for a week.
The estimated time of death was shortly after
he had left her there, crying and drunk, alone in her bare apartment with
a picture of her absent daughter.
He flicked the safety on and put the gun down
on the table. There must be thousands of them out there, he thought. Thousands
of people living thousands of half-lives, camped out permanently on the
edge, just waiting to be pushed. Just waiting.
Something stirred and unfolded within him then,
filling him with a missionary zeal.
He spat out the taste of gun oil and smiled.
