A hole in the wall
This piece appears in my forthcoming book We Had It Coming.
They slaughtered a score of kids and a mess of their teachers an hour from here. This was all supposed to be happening somewhere else. Somewhere we could fret about it sure but not be made to weep deeply over it. The kind of thing you give an afternoon of attention before forgetting.
An iceberg melting and collapsing into the water in Antarctica is one thing but now imagine it happened right there off the side of the highway on your commute to work.
It was an individual shooter not a plural they or a gendered they. But they did it nevertheless. All of them.
We despaired and so could think of nothing to do but post. To write something beautiful or angry. Both at once. Devastated but not defeated. Not fully defeated. Not even now. To reassert our collective humanity. To remind ourselves that this is all worth it somehow. All of this living.
A shortage of beauty of late as it happens. We've dug the beauty mines clean. The children we sent down into them to burrow haven’t returned.
It was enough to make you want to get a gun.
Perhaps it would be better to post something profane. There's no shortage of ugliness to be found in this latest massacre.
Everyone we knew knew someone who knew someone.
I punched a hole in the goddamned wall. I’ve never done that.
Ok once during a football game I was watching.
It wasn’t even that poorly received at home. The punching. How a family would normally look upon a father doing that. I thought briefly my wife might even punch a smaller hole of her own and then the kids too one by one. Each hole smaller than the previous one on down the line as per relative fist size. Having to hold the hand of the youngest to manage it.
Later after another shooting we could use the holes to measure how much bigger they had grown. Little pencil marks scribbled onto the crumbled plaster.
I should not have done that. I know that. But then again what should I have done?
Living in this place on a baseline violent day is already like taking part in a sick lottery. We wake up and spin the wheel and wait to find out later if we ourselves or someone we love will have our names read on the news. One of the roughly three hundred who are shot per day. One of the roughly one hundred who die.
But being well acquainted with a newly infamous school or mall or concert wrenches that grim gamble from a sort of abstraction into starkest reality. The moment when the wheel stops and the ball bounces into its slot.
A bullet makes such a small hole in a wall but such a large hole in a body.
I don't think agony is a strong enough word. I don't know if we have a word strong enough in the language to accurately convey how that would feel. There are sounds though.
I had a friend in college whose father was a funeral home director and he told me once he could never watch Law & Order or anything like that with him because the old man always got pissed off about how badly the actors conveyed the abominable cacophony of sudden grief.
Those aren’t the noises people make he always said
People say we've become numb to this blizzard of killing but I don't feel numb right now do you? I'm still furious and horrified and for some reason I am taking a perverse solace in that. That I retain my capacity to feel anything at all. At least I have this anger and sadness. It's the thinnest gruel.
Not that anger or sadness seem to be mounting much of a defense against anything. What does grief do against a gun? Against this many guns. You might as well try putting out a fire with gasoline. Grief isn't the antidote to gun violence it's just the byproduct of it and a gun is a machine designed to spread as much grief around as quickly as possible. They're cancerously good at what they're made to do.
We all have our routines we repeat. Have our patter down. The Onion headline. Do our wry jokes cut with darkness. Cuss all of them out. Our little superstitious rituals. Like a baseball player at bat adjusting his gloves just so.
We get an awful lot of awful at bats.
There’s a poem about this that we all share every time. Every other month. Well it's a lovely enough poem that one poem but who gives a shit? What does it change? What can a poem do? I’m afraid the poets are on a very bad losing streak. They’re going to have to rewrite the record books.
I wrote that exact sentiment somewhere online after a previous massacre I believe. Whichever one. It doesn’t matter. I’ll post it again soon.
The father of one of the latest batch of dead little girls went on the TV. I don’t know how he did that. How he could stand up never mind speak in sentences. He told us about his daughter. He said she always brushed her teeth. She was so young that that’s what he was most recently proud of her for having learned to do. She had only made it as far as that developmental milestone.
She always brushed her teeth.
Sometimes I even forget to do that and I am however old I am.
This is stupid I know but I still kind of think it will never happen to us. My specific children. Even knowing what I know which is that there isn't a type of place where these things cannot and will not happen except almost every other country in the world.
Yet I still think that. What a weird thing to think. You kind of have to do so to function right?
I know I said I'm not numb a minute ago but you have to numb some parts of yourself or else who could ever get out of bed?
Here's something else ugly.
It's hard to pick just a few things to reflect on from this one but you can't comprehend all the ugliness at once. Instead you focus on one or two waves and they give you a general idea of the tide they came from.
The husband of one of the freshly dead teachers died of a heart attack the next day. You could maybe convince yourself there is something beautiful about that. Loving someone so much that losing them literally breaks your heart.
I'm not inclined to feel that way at the moment. That it had cause to happen in the first place is one of the ugliest things imaginable. I don't know what happened specifically but it's very easy to think of this guy sobbing so hard that his body gave in.
Maybe he had punched so many holes in the wall that his entire suddenly empty house had collapsed around him.
Metaphors are useless now I’m sorry.
He was murdered by them. All of them. The same killer using the same gun that killed his wife.
What an invention these guns are. One bullet toppling an entire family.
The efficiency of it.
They all must delight in this kind of thing. They plural. The gun people. I wonder if they see anything beautiful in a bullet’s trajectory. How far they can fly. Killing people they weren't even aimed at.