Apparent Death
We won’t have come expecting gunfire. A shooter. As many times as it happens, as we see it happen on our screens, we still walk around in our lives thinking: No, not us, that happens to them, the people on the other side of the screen, the victims, their families, we don’t know those people, we don’t even know people who know those people, we’re once and twice removed from most of what we see on the other side of the screen, especially that awful man, always a man, we watch and feel the horror, the unbelievable act, for a day, for two whole days, for a week, we post and click links and like and don’t like and repost and then, and then it’s like it didn’t happen, we move on, the next thing comes. We get used to everything to the point that we even get used to getting used to everything. Or we only think we’re used to it until the shooter, until we meet him in real life, when he’s there with us, the shots will come from everywhere, inside, outside, past, future, now, and we won’t know right away where the shooter is, the bodies will drop, the depths of the booms will make our hearts skip beats, the rush of panic and spark and sweat on our skin, nothing will be more real than the moment we know in our bones the end is near.
There will be less screaming than we expect. It’ll be that prey-silence of hiding, the silence of trying to disappear, to not be out there, we’ll close our eyes and go deep inside, hope that it’s a dream or a nightmare, hope that in closing our eyes we might wake up to that other life, back on the other side of the screen, where we can watch from the safety of our couches and bedrooms, from bus and train seats, from our offices, anyplace that is not there, on the ground, playing like we’re dead so not playing at all, we’ll run like ghosts from our own dead bodies in hopes of getting away from the shots and the loud quiet of waiting for the next shot to fire, waiting for another sharp hot line to cut across a life, cut off breath, bring too quickly the heat and then cooling of too-soon death.
We’ve expected the shooter to appear in our lives in the same way we know death is and always has been coming for us, with its decisive scythe, its permanent cut. We half expect to feel the boom of shots firing nearby. To fall to the ground and cover our heads. To feel like an animal, prey in a pile on the ground. We’ve known the shooter could show up anywhere, anywhere people gathered, we’ve expected to see him in our periphery, a masked shadow moving through the crowd, picking people off at random, semiautomatic booms putting bodies down, sending them flailing through the broken air.
A bullet is a thing so fast it’s hot and so hot it’s mean and so straight it moves clean through a body, makes a hole, tears, burns, exits, goes on, hungry, or it remains, cools, lodges, poisons. When a bullet opens you up, blood pours like out of a mouth too full. A stray bullet, like a stray dog, might up and bite anyone anywhere, just because its teeth were made to bite, made to soften, tear through meat, a bullet is made to eat through as much as it can.
Something about it will make sense. The bullets have been coming from miles. Years. Their sound will break the water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.
Tony Loneman
THE BULLETS WILL COME from the Black Hills Ammunition plant in Black Hills, South Dakota. They will be packed in boxes of sixteen, driven across the country, and stored in a warehouse in Hayward, California, for seven years, then stocked and shelved and bought in Oakland at a Walmart off of Hegenberger Road by a young man by the name of Tony Loneman. The two boxes of bullets will go into his backpack. He’ll take them out again for security to check against the receipt at the exit. Tony will ride his bike down Hegenberger, across the overpass and on the sidewalk past the gas stations and fast-food chains. He’ll feel the weight and hear the jangle of the bullets at every bump and crack.
At the coliseum entrance he’ll take each of the boxes of bullets out and empty them into a pair of socks. He’ll swing and throw the socks one at a time against the wall behind the bushes past the metal detectors. When he’s done he’ll look back up at the moon, watch the fog of his breath rise between him and everything. His heart will be in his ears thinking about the bullets in the bushes, the powwow. And wondering how he had wound up here under the moon, under the looming coliseum walls, hiding bullets in bushes.
Calvin Johnson
WHEN CALVIN GETS THERE, people are doing what they always do the first hour of every powwow committee meeting he’s ever been to: making small talk and dishing up paper plates of catered Mexican food. There’s a new guy there. He’s big, and the only one without a plate. Calvin can tell he doesn’t have a plate because he’s one of those big guys who doesn’t know how to carry his weight. How to own it. Calvin’s on the bigger end of the spectrum himself, but he’s tall and wears baggy clothes, so he comes off as big but not necessarily fat.