The Gnome Stories, page 10
The third time was enough to get it done. Shotgun number two, a second take, this time with feeling and a larger gauge, and with that he was done with the world, and vice versa. Walmart again, and if it seemed like a year later to the day that probably seemed to most like a coincidence. Biorhythms, she figured. And then she’d always wondered: Why even return the gun after the first attempt? Was it fear, optimism, or shame that drove him back to the store? Maybe the new one was shinier, or it held fewer memories of failure. Actually, she thought to herself, you would have to blame the equipment. How hard is it to shoot your face off? And then to take care of the rest of it? Idly, Lucia wondered what happened to the gun after he was gone. Every time she heard the booms from down the street she thought: shotgun.
There was no reason that he’d want to kill himself this time, as the pastor had counterintuitively intoned at the final service. He had, by the great and gracious grace of God himself, persisted through the first with half a face, and he had a job until he was fired from it after the break room incident, and it’s true that his wife had left him, but she was no good, a tool, from the beginning, maybe the cause of all his misery, so it was like a blessing, or like the divorce had amounted to a cosmic wash. God never wants your death, he said: what he wants is your devotion. That’s what the card had said that Lucia sent to his finally ex-wife who was not technically an ex-, since they’d never gotten around to the divorce, meaning that she inherited the unspent sum he had received after settling his ridiculous lawsuit against the shotgun manufacturer, and this seemed to Lucia sort of unfair whenever she thought about it, but much of her life had turned out this way, so who was to say?
There! A light! It flickered and kept flickering. Something new was burning. It was moving, like a keg of powder on a skateboard rattling halfway down the street before it overturned and sat there on its side. Or maybe something attached to a dog, or in a bottle, designed to save you from the cold. It was hard to tell. She winced and waited for the boom. When it came it silenced all of that. Off went the car alarms. Great, she thought. This was her least favorite holiday after Thanksgiving.
Her daughter—Cherelle—had died. Slipped off a bridge was what the police report had said. Slipped: maybe. Was she pushed? Did she jump? Indeterminate, it read. It was a kindness to have left it so, perhaps. They hadn’t done much investigating. They had rounded up no suspects, had no solid theory of the crime, because they thought of it as probably not a crime at all, or not a solvable one. Here was what might had happened, they said. It was cold. Sometimes they found a body down there. It was a beautiful ravine. It was a long way down. From beneath you could see and listen to the world above go by. Lucia had gone down there and stayed down there, thinking.
The final disposition of her eternal soul was of course at stake, being confirmed (though lapsed) Catholic (why she’d ever been attached to religion Lucia had never understood: look what it did for her, she’d think later), and Lucia wished to find her way across the border keeping the living from the dead—if she could find a way to get past it and return, she would, she would find out the truth from Cherelle. That border was porous: this much she knew. But how to stretch across the gap she wasn’t sure. Wasn’t sure, not yet.
She couldn’t think, mostly on account of the douchebags, and she hated not being able to think.
It felt good to call them douchebags, though this thought was interrupted by a colossal boom, something really special, she concluded from the cheers coming somewhere down the street. Having had enough, Boyle, her bravest cat, flew by, scrabbling on the hardwood floors toward the basement where the whole crew of beasts cleaned themselves, dismembered bugs, and plotted their revenge.
Maybe they had graduated to guns, she thought. Could they be? Maybe she should call the cops, she thought. The neighborhood had diversified, and some people had moved out to the suburb ring, as if that was any kind of solution. Had she ever been in love with flame like this, in love with the trajectory of bullet? It was in her family, surely. What was it with guns? With homemade bombs? With improvised explosives seen in movies and video games? You had to be careful with homemade bombs particularly, she knew. Just a touch of static could set one off if you didn’t ground yourself.
Another firelight lit up the shapes of a couple of them, douchebags both, scurrying away from the dumpster and laughing. Everyone went batshit about this time of year, lighting wicks and fuses and firing up the whole neighborhood. Lucia was tempted to show them a real big bomb, the kind that would take out a garage or a whole house, something they’d miss when it was gone. But then: a short break. Hot air. Silence.
Then another bang, another douchebag, but this one was followed by a pause, like something else had happened, and then a shriek that sounded an awful lot like pain, Lucia thought. She could hear whooping that quickly ceased, incredulous, and then whimpering and a couple of voices, a wild moan that sounded like something never seen on earth, and, a couple of minutes later, banging on the door at the bottom of the street. Then nothing. A shout but not with words. Banging on the door next door, where the senile guy lives with his pickup truck completely filled with newspaper-dispensing boxes, clearly winched up from the ground, with bits of concrete and bolts trailing and shaking as the truck bounced by on its slow everyday patrol down to the VFW. Nothing at that door either. It was lightning moving quickly up her way.
She went downstairs. She was already feeling vindicated.
She opened up the door before the douchebag had had time to bang on it. That it was a crying boy she had not expected. She saw blood and a hand wadded up inside a T-shirt that advertised a band she didn’t know.
It was obvious something had gone wrong between the douchebag and his fun and now she would be expected to help.
Of course his friends had gone.
She had him come in, got a bunch of ice and put it in one of her daughter’s socks, which she still found strewn throughout the house in unlikely places, and that she had collected in the kitchen, her favorite room, in a sort of laundry shrine, ever since her death. She told him just hold this on it. Keep it compressed. It wasn’t healthy to keep all the stuff, she knew, or she was told from another show, but it was good she did, she thought now, because she was prepared to help.
He blubbered but did what he was told. His face was a page of streaks and ashes. Lucia asked him where he lived, if anyone else was home. No such luck. She’d have to get him to the hospital herself. Or else watch him continue to cry like this for hours, and bleed out. She weighed her options.
She thought about herself weighing her options and weighed that as an option. Sometimes when she thought about herself thinking she got really recursive and would have to bottom out or go on, paused, nearly forever. These times she forgot the right human interaction, and it often came off as strange.
He moaned though, and it brought her back.
Are all the fingers there or do we have to find them? Give me a look, she said.
They were there. They were mostly there. What was left of them was still attached as far as she could tell, so she wouldn’t have to take a flashlight and ice-filled cooler out into the street. Was the kid looking at her? Analyzing her inaction? Wondering about her own family with all the deaths? The kid just looked at her. His eyes were zeros, giving nothing back. It looked like shock to say the least. The clock was moving on the wall. She clapped the fan system off and went for the door. At least she wouldn’t have to touch him, probably.
Waiting for him in the emergency room where it seemed like everyone was covered in blood or had something protruding from their body—that was some familiar fun. She hated being in the world like this, so close to the bloody and dispirited, the deranged and lame. They were all so fucking present, with their weeping and their remonstrations. They took all your attention. That’s why they had to wait in the waiting room. They would not die, but their wounds looked so terrible that triage could not come quickly enough. Of course she could handle it, but after her house emptied itself out, she had thought she’d had the last of that.
Probable suicide daughter had at the least outlived her brother, who had died in a car accident when he was fifteen, before he had any right to be driving a car at all, and certainly before Lucia would have okayed him getting his learner’s permit, given his family history of recklessness. He had stolen his friend’s parents’ car and flipped it on the interstate. You could consider that suicide, too, but the police did not, and spared her that. Maybe it was. It sure seemed that way to her. But the space between suicide and recklessness is occupied by teenagers, and was inaccessible once you left those years behind.
Almost as if to make exactly that point, Cherelle had gone a year later off a footbridge at the college she was attending, and Lucia wondered if Cherelle had waited out of spite or out of politeness, if she had waited for her mother to recover from the first loss before getting the second one underway?
Or was it really possible that she had slipped?
What did it feel like? It felt like Lucia was in a forest, as it went from twilight to black, so gradually that you couldn’t even tell that you could no longer see your surroundings, and she found herself alone. Everything she saw seemed weakened after that: colors, light, the appealing precision of her instruments at the lab, sexual arousal, even the birds as they streaked south: there seemed to be fewer (and had she finished the survey she considered, she would have seen that she was in fact correct). She assured herself she noticed less, but as her world had changed, so did the one outside her windows.
It wasn’t so terrible, though, after all, to have survived her children, she thought, in spite of the advice and knowing looks she had been given by people who meant well, who thought they knew what losing all your children meant because they’d read about it in a book that won a prize. You just go on. You get divorced if you weren’t before. No one stays together, not really, after that. Even if one of you somehow made it back to hope, the other wouldn’t, and would resent the one who’d found the path, and the marriage would burst from there. The only exceptions were those who believed in gods who mandated never splitting under any circumstances and whose authority bizarrely remained intact, even in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
In a way it’s freeing, Lucia said, eliciting shocked looks. She wondered if something had broken off in her. There’s less to hold you here, to hold on to, less gravity and fewer dishes, she said. She made a chemistry simile that was not well recieved. You don’t feel as bad closing your windows now. You stay in. There wasn’t much out there left to see, honestly. Present company excepted, of course: you, my friends, remain important. (They did not.) She felt so unbound—light, really, she told herself; it was lightness she was feeling—she found it hard to believe that if she tipped a cup off the counter edge, it would fall and shatter. Later, her friends would explain Lucia’s comments to their husbands and to each other as a response to shock, surely that was what it was.
Sometimes Lucia felt like she was going back in time, the years unwinding from a giant wooden spool, the kind on which power lines came wrapped, the kind you could flip up and use as a table if you were a kid.
Quite obviously Lucia was not much of a parent, or else her family got the wrong idea about the afterlife, or how bad their lives were, or possibly there was something in the blood or, more likely, in their brain chemistry. At one time she tried to track it down, tried to isolate the variables and assess the data. That both kids had died suggested correlation, if nothing more. And with them gone was she even a parent anymore? Could one have that title stripped for cheating or failure or whatever? Or was it a resting state you remained in for the rest of your existence? Instead she watched the neighborhood, tracked what she could, took copious notes. She had binders full of data: numbers of explosions per minute, per hour, per day; average rate of speed of cars; the incidence of revving sounds heard at night from a mile or two away as men raced in their souped-up Civics; instances of attempted and successful conversational interactions on the sidewalk, in the driveway, and at the entrance to her house. How many days it took the power company to rescue the tied-together pairs of shoes kids threw over power lines to signify whatever it was they were supposed to be signifying.
And, to be honest, if asked, Lucia would tell you that she herself had thought of suicide. Who wouldn’t? Of course she had. She had thought it was the only way to know for sure. It became all she could think about sometimes. Her life was surrounded by it. Attenuated by it. She attended to it, and to the rigmarole that came along with it: support groups, stupid calls, being surrounded by bodies at the memorial service wanting to touch her except they wouldn’t, most of them, because they were afraid her story might rub off on them, as if bad luck could be communicated by touch. She wondered sometimes: Could it? Certainly it gathered and it weighed. If she could disperse it like static electricity with a touch, should she, even if she could? It made no sense, of course: the world she had spent her life investigating did not work like that. But still the thought kept coming back in unguarded moments. Who could blame her if she had thought of suicide? Was it not her life? Couldn’t that much of it drive someone to, well, anything? But Lucia would be damned, she said, if she would not persist until the world would yield or reveal its long-hidden heart. She clapped her hands and the clapper mechanism shut the air-conditioning off. This, she thought, was not something you just threw away.
The kid’s name was Luis, he said. Or maybe Louis. He seemed ethnic, so she assumed. He sort of looked like a murderer—grim and bandaged, penitent, empty, stunned, as if he’d done something he’d have to answer for in the next life or when he got home. To him she looked like just another white disconnected lady neighbor, so they had this mutual opacity in common. Who knew anyone’s story really?
His hand was saved, albeit with some tendon problems. He’d have a tough time with arthritis when he passed through middle age, a doctor said. Maybe don’t take up the guitar or flute, he said, ha ha. You never know: maybe we’ll make some advances between then and now, she said. The doctor looked at her, thought her optimistic, but didn’t say so, his eyes narrowing. Calls had been made to Luis’s parents, relieving her of responsibility, and it was only a matter of time until the sobbing mother came. She would emote enough for the both of them, for the whole moaning mass of the emergency room.
Luis was almost cute, she guessed, now that they got the blood cleaned off. They were cute when they were small and guilty, even as their hands could start something loud and amazing and do things to you that you never even dreamed they could—and when she went in to see him he looked up at her, his eyes streaky, painkiller-glazed. Lucia said she was going to go, that the nurses were going to take good care of him, that his mother was surely coming, but that she had very important things to do. She had a mind to go find his friends, waiting in their own homes for news of him by text or call, wondering what kind of stand-in for all of them he had become. Luis gaped at her, and his reaction time was slow, maybe because of the medication, and in that gap, she gave him a kiss on the forehead that would leave no lasting mark and disappeared back through the hallway, her heels clicking against the tiles.
People disappeared here all the time. You brought them into the emergency room and they would disappear behind the swinging doors into the muffled world. If their injuries were not immediate they would come back out to wait like everyone else under the softly humming lights. Or if it was bad, they’d never make it back at all. At times Lucia had waited and waited, and the patient would not emerge. Her husband had disappeared here, and had not been able to come out unassisted. He had been up in his crane, towering three hundred feet above the worksite below, the set of massive holes they had blasted to make way for what everyone expected would become a new subterranean parking garage, and he had been hit by lightning in a storm. It had happened before: the cabin that controlled the crane was grounded after all, made storm-safe in theory, but something had gone wrong this time, and that was why, she’d tell herself later, she hadn’t wanted him to take the job, or at the least, to come down when the weather turned south, like she had premonitions or something. He had told her he always did, though she found out later this was a lie. In fact, he never did. It took thirty minutes to get up or down, a three-hundred-foot climb on a semi-protected ladder in the middle of the scaffolding, and he would instead just wait it out each time with his stash of pornography that she knew he had—magazines or novels, sometimes ones with a semblance of a story, something to connect yourself to, and after the lightning strikes and the silence after, when he had been removed, the other workers had tried to keep this truth from her, a thing she was thankful for, and she was happy to let them divvy his stash up among themselves.
He would sit up there with his American Spirit Ultralights and his reading material (he had confessed to her once that it gave him a feeling of power, to masturbate that far above the ordinary workings of the ordinary people moving around the streets in grids, and what was she supposed to say to that?), and he would wait out the storm.
This time, others had seen lightning strike the tower, the highest point for a couple of miles, no less than a dozen times. One of his friends had told him later it was more like a hundred, but that seemed like the sort of lie that grows with each retelling, like the one about the kid they found in the forest when they were camping. She imagined it like a plasma globe, the kind you put your hands on and all those electric lashes licked you from the center, as if for once he was the center of the universe, everything striking around him, and how it must have felt to know whatever there was to know. And then there was a short or something, and he had been struck, and had radioed down using Morse, since his voice was gone, and it took them almost an hour to decode the static clicks. They had had to go up and bring him down, and they had called her, and she’d met them at the emergency room, which was when he went through those doors and returned somewhat less than he had been before. He was an invalid, and had to stay on the top floor of their house from that day forward until he died, eventual mercy for the both of them and for the kids, just a year later. Lucia had done everything for him, and it was hard on them both, but she had done it out of love, then anger, and then respect and a vague sense of obligation after those two things had burned away. And then he, too, had disappeared. Had taken his own life, in the way of her family. It was without her knowledge, but had she known, she would have approved. That’s what she told herself later, and that’s how the memory stayed with her—like a tiny pin, the kind you’d use to stick photographs or butterflies on corkboards or point out on a map where you came here from; except she had eaten it and it had stayed lodged within her for the duration of her life, or until her stomach acids would finally digest it or it would painfully pass through.
