The Medicine Burns

I was working determinations at the unemployment office. During a structured interview, I found myself staring at his blunt fingers. He tapped them at the edge of the desk, nervous. His voice was so soft, so I was forced to incline myself toward him. This mismatch of troubled speech and the tapping of his fingers distracted me—a difficult simplicity to both gestures, an equal inarticulation. I asked again about his last job—why he’d walked off the jobsite and not returned. To this, he responded, “there just wasn’t a point to it.”

A week later, he stood behind me at the coffee shop. “Remember me?” he asked, “you denied my claim.”

“You don’t have to explain. I’ve been making some money fixing cars, and I do the swap meet on Sundays.”

He continued talking. “It keeps me busy—that and the house.” When I asked for the coffee to go, he asked me if I’d like to look at his truck.

He wasn’t kidding about fixing things; the truck was patched and soldered like an old furnace. He opened the truck door for me, lifting a box marked “Biohazard” from the front seat and placing it in the back. “Hop in.” He closed the unpaneled door behind me. The window was down. He asked, “can we go for a short ride?”

I can usually tell a pick up, but it was tough with him. He had a darkness about him that made an advance seem improbable—there just wasn’t a point to it. There was something about him, or his isolation, that I was familiar with—a transience, an insubstantiality that reminded me of the men I’d gone home with before I’d settled with Tom. Glimpsing into these men’s lives held all the fascination for me of a Diane Arbus photograph. They were shop owners, truckers, fathers, addicts, and drifters. I’d sit with them in donut shops and cafeterias, have sex with them in trailers and parks, marvel at their failings, and catch them on their way down. Before Tom, I sort of accepted the temporariness of these encounters, and even began to enjoy their brevity. You could share a lot very quickly, or nothing at all.

I watched him walk around the front of the truck. He patted the hood like a service station attendant. The thought occurred to me he might be holding some kind of grudge because of my determination; I wondered if I should be concerned with my safety. At that moment, it was the fact that I would have to trust him that excited me.

“Maybe the park,” I suggested. “I’ve only got about a half hour before my next appointment.” The thought of the window-less basement I worked in, the rigid scheduling of people, the rote questions, and legal responses I communicate seemed suddenly suffocating. I felt compelled to have this encounter—I imagined myself living by swap meets, keeping old appliances running years past their warranties, possessing a surgeon’s hands with parts and wires. A fantasy of brute strength and primitive invention overtook me as we walked into the park.

“You’re not thinking I took special pleasure in denying your claim?” I asked. It sounded bitter; I could teach him a thing or two about what he and I meant in the scheme of things. He laughed though, and for the first time it occurred to me that we might mean something to each other.

“I’m just curious about what you like to do,” he said, before leaning into the water fountain. I thought of William Holden in Picnic: the depths of simple men that threaten to drown or liberate us. His hair was black and wavy, dense as sealskin. His eyes seemed to have a perpetual squint—one, he explained, was glass. He turned the handle on the water fountain and drank. His lips were still wet when he looked up. He wiped them with the back of his hand. I noticed the U.S. Navy tattoo on his forearm.

The tattoo reminded me of a dealer I knew. I remembered him cleaning his gun after I’d purchased a gram of heroin. He said, “don’t leave until you’ve cut me some.”

“I don’t think so.” I said this walking backward out of the hotel room. I never took my eyes off the gun. It had been a test, and I remembered feeling exhilirated and fearless walking away from it.

“That’s good,” he said. “Be glad for that. I don’t know why you’d want to, living in the city.”

I hadn’t put my finger on the strange rage I’d been feeling, angry about altercations with Tom. Just that morning he threw his pills after me, and I left him in tears.

“The city is the best place to have a gun these days,” I said, “and besides, if post office workers can get a little crazy, unemployment workers deserve scheduled holidays for massacres.”

“They get all the other holidays,” he said. Then looking at my expression added, “just kidding.”

We walked to a bench perched over the San Francisco Bay—outside the park a row of mansions were developed around the same view. I pointed out the old Spreckles mansion that Danielle Steele had acquired and was now living in. Beneath the large, draped windows, cherubs held open folds of cement fabric. I imagined it as the palace outside Florence in The Decameron, where the wealthy told delicious stories against death, a reprieve from a landscape of plague. When I imagine cloistering myself, I think more of the movie Salo, where Italian fascists exercise the unchecked power of the libertine over a select, abducted group of youths. The abductors, having divested themselves of all but their own law, can only learn from their own cruelty.

But my own escape, for better or worse, was almost impossible to imagine anymore—requiring the kind of wealth I’d never touch in this lifetime, built on tawdry stories and generic endings. Still, I could not take my eyes off that impressive estate as we left the park.

Ever since Tom got sick, I started to feel only his disease could reel me back in, the urgency of his condition was the only thing I could respond to. Tom had a fatherly streak: he’d helped me stay clean, paid for my rehabilitation and continuing therapy. He respected me at my depths, and consoled me through a tenuous period of learning to live without heroin. He’d helped me back to life before he shared with me what he’d accepted as his impending death by AIDS. It was our struggles, our eternal vigilance that came to explain our being with each other. It became a way to explain the attraction to our skeptical friends.

I used to talk about the two of us going to India, but Tom resisted. He didn’t like the idea that we’d have to entrust ourselves to strangers for directions, accommodations, and well-being. As long as I’d been with Tom, we’d forgotten how to do that. Once he started to get sick, I started to think about others, about the revelations of the hundreds of men before him, about how our life together was different from that, and how it wasn’t.

Complicated men have always disappointed me: an economy to their intelligence where brilliance in one area leaves a deficit in another. I thought of Tom, how he carefully probed and reconfigured me, so that I saw myself as someone responsible: a bureaucrat by day, lover of a dying man by night. It didn’t surprise me—this new breed of bureaucrat/caretaker. But I’d come to notice a widening blind spot in myself, a kind of painless execution of duties, and then there were the physical manifestations—a numbness that would spread from my fingers to my chest.

It was easy being with John Mason; I had already failed him by denying his claim. My excuse was legislated. These limits are imposed on me. He must be used to this. We sat in his truck in front of my workplace.

“I had a nice time,” he said. He leaned over and surprised me by closing my hand in his. “Would you come out to my house on the weekend?”

He wants us to get to know each other—as though anyone has time for this anymore. He tried to explain it. He lived outside the city, he’d like to take me shooting. “I’m not real outgoing. It takes me time to open up.”

He had a charm that scared me. Like heroin, he exuded a kind of peace approximating death—his whole face conforming to the still, tranquil, blue patience of his glass eye. Tom was there, a sceptered skeleton presiding over death, shaking his pills like an instrument of voodoo. I said yes.

I came home after work and caught myself trying to silence the turn of the key in the lock—a tactic I remembered from childhood, arriving after my parents’ proscribed hour. That fatherly streak in Torn had had its effect—I’d gone back to secrecy. They’d warned me of this in my rehab at Saint Mary’s—secrecy and isolation were addict behaviors. I was letting myself have just a little.

Though I’d discontinued going to meetings after about a year, I’d convinced Tom to help me pay for psychoanalysis. Freud’s Eros and Thanatos instincts were practically a schematic for my life. Above all, I was looking for a transmission of Freud himself. Freud, who had created this artificial relationship, suggesting the minutes of the psychoanalytic hour, and who had come to psychoanalysis by conducting a self-analysis. This was the question I regularly posited to my analyst: Can’t I do this on my own? Answering, Freud did.

Dr. Klein had mastered the screen—a kind of neutral presence upon which the analysand could direct their love and aggression. I saw fit to withhold payment from her for weeks, even when Tom was paying for them, or I’d demand an explanation of her enormous fee. I would constantly test her, certain and uncertain of the person beneath the ever-patient veneer. She was insufferably reflective. You don’t think you deserve this, do you?

No one deserves this. But I’d continued seeing her, attracted by the almost inanimate aspect of her personality, the deflecting surface I would later project with Tom, but never master. For me, listening and compassion were merged. I wanted to learn the trick of her disengagement. I assured Tom analysis would make me stronger for him, a better lover. My therapy eased his mind. He became more cautious of my potential for self-destruction when he got sick—I suppose because I’d asked him to lock his drugs in a cabinet, and to keep count of his syringes.

Dr. Klein had reproached me for not addressing my anger over Tom’s dying. Why should I be angry? If dying is anything like my last OD, and I think it probably is, he’s in for the time of his life.

Tom heard me, slowly emerging from the bathroom with an expression I knew too well—unwanted discovery. Perhaps there was a new lesion, a rash. He never spoke of them anymore. “I hope you had a better day than I did.”

“I usually do,” I answered, sidestepping him and moving into the bedroom. He followed me in, and leaned naked on the chest of drawers. I remember his body of just a year ago, not terribly muscular, but certainly there had been shape to his arms and chest. AZT has rubbed out this history, detaching muscles from the bone so that they hang on him and let the bones express themselves beneath his skin.

Tom was a historian with a particular love of the Elizabethan poets. He taught classes at State until six months ago, when he felt he had to quit. He used to ask his students to record themselves reciting the poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The students’ disembodied voices would surround his dark desk until late in the evening. They would stammer on the words, step on the music, but he’d listen patiently to their tapes of Donne’s “First Anniversarie.” I think of Donne and his idiosyncratic imagery of commingling elements—the blood of lovers mixing in the body of a flea—and how his poems, recited in the terrible earnestness of his students, seemed to articulate the love and dread between Tom and me.

When I am dead, and Doctors know not why,

And my friends curiositie

Will have me cut up to survay each part,

When they shall finde your Picture in my heart,

You thinke a sodaine dampe of love

Will through all their senses move,

And worke on them as mee, and so preferred

Your murder to the name of Massacre.

I helped Torn into the bed. “I’m sorry about today,” he said. “The medicines make me cranky.”

I wondered if I’d ever make love to him again. I leaned over and kissed his mouth, explored it with my tongue. I imagined the inside of his mouth, black and flinty like a mine. I didn’t look at the resistance in his eyes, but went about kissing him as though restoring his breathing, doing this to him like an emergency worker. But once I’d let him go, I realized I’d held my breath, afraid to smell or taste him. I felt dirty for wanting and not wanting him.

“I want to die.” He always says this, but clings, as though addicted to dying. His prescriptions of Demerol are in a cabinet not far from the bed. I ask if he is in pain.

My efforts feel like nothing, because they are efforts. Today his liver is bloated. “Stay off the drip,” I suggest.

We were driving out of the city to San Carlos where John has a large home. We didn’t talk much, and it was different than our day at the park; everything tinged with a strange quality of intent, a sexual quality that seemed to concern more than excite us. It was dark and I couldn’t see much off the side of the highway.

John reached over and pulled a flashlight from the glove compartment. He pushed a tape into a deck roughly incised in the dashboard. All music from the sixties, early seventies, the Supremes, the Stones, the Doors—co-opted soundtrack music for Vietnam films.

The music had a rich melancholy. I imagined John seeking comfort through heroin and Vietnamese boys on rivers burning like a Coppola set. Static, napalm…the hiss of I love yous taught in the absence of maps, weapons, reason. I imagined him confronting the potentialities of his death, forced to pantomime his fear for a boy whose name he can’t pronounce, whose feelings he can’t determine.

“It makes me think of Vietnam, even though I was just a kid during that time. But somehow, it’s the war I’m most intrigued by. Maybe because it was televised—but televised without censoring the ugliness.”

“I don’t think about that stuff,” he said. “I couldn’t live if I did.”

The Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” swarmed the cab, impossible to remove from the green of jungles and camouflage.

“You remind me of my last lover—not in a morbid way—just the opposite. You seem very determined about life.”

I didn’t know what to say, it was such an odd attribute—the rare and complicated quality of the survivor in me, something mistaken for cold efficiency, untroubled acceptance.

“I don’t know. Your getting off heroin, holding a job. I don’t take that for granted. You want to live.” He’s unnecessarily convincing.

He pulled the truck off the side of the road and we rattled across a path of dirt and stones.

“This is Crystal Springs,” he said. “People cruise up there sometimes.” He pointed at a darker patch. “That’s where I met Antonio.”

He reached beneath the seat and pulled out an old pillowcase. “I only did this once,” he explained. “After he died, I started doing a lot of cocaine, and I was sort of at the end of my wire, and I came out here.” He reached into the bag. “I just had, you know, some of his underwear with me, and some pictures of him.” He pulled out old T-shirts, jock straps. The smell was so pungent and moldering I sickened. I cranked the window open. I watched him in silence, handling the items, shining the flashlight into the pillowcase, illuminating it from inside like an old skin. I wondered if he was going to perform some masturbatory magic with them. I thought of Tom’s clothes.

He looked startled. “No,” he said, still looking at them. “It’s probably not right.” He put them back in the pillowcase, and stuffed them back beneath the seat.

We arrived at his house and pulled into the garage. Along the walls of the garage were tall gray shelving units, stacked with numerous boxes, and all draped with thick plastic tarps. The garage was as orderly as a supermarket; along one wall, an enormous collection of canned goods seemed almost displayed, the labels turned out, attesting to either his military background, or his unemployment.

He opened a door at the back of the garage, and we took a carpeted stairwell into the house. There were pictures too dark to discern in overwhelming frames. The silhouettes of the furniture looked almost Jacobean: high-backed chairs with grotesque animal heads, griffins, lions, and phoenixes. I wondered if Tom would appreciate this gaudy tribute to his favorite period. What would he think of these lions in their permanent ferocity, or the desk, large as our dining room table with legs thick as Atlas’s? I imagined Tom dwarfed by it, unable to pull out its drawers, or push it from the center of this room. We walk up three steps to the master bedroom. How does he afford this? Some pension? Losing an eye…

There is a large bed at the center, a dark brown chest of drawers, and a writing desk. The light above, on a dimmer switch, casts faint, gold light.

I sat at the edge of the bed. John pointed out a handtinted photograph in a circular frame above the headboard. I took off my shirt despite the cold. “That’s Antonio,” he said, as though introducing us. The face is intelligent—dark and pockmarked, with thick, circular glasses that make him appear a scientist or aviator.

“A writer.” He was standing by the desk, still clothed. He turned to open a drawer, and I worried he might pull out a Bible, or worse, a photo album.

He took out paper folded like a business letter and joined me at the bedside, pulling the chain on a small lamp. I put my arm around him and sat close, reading over the letter as he read it aloud.

I’ve never been one to complain about pain, to acknowledge it, even. There wasn’t the place or time for it though there was much of it. My lover tells me that terminal people suffer more from their fear around pain than the pain itself. He talks of pain management like time management, efforts that improve us, make us more efficient and vital. But if this pain could be contained, first to just my body and not my fearful and lamenting mind—if it could be shrunk down to the organs in which it originates, or made distinguishable and discrete like tumors, or lesions—it would still not serve to improve my condition or outcome. From the moment this started three years ago with my first pneumonia, I feel I’ve been on an expedition from which there is no turning back, like I’ve entered some dense forest where light can’t penetrate. My supplies are cumbersome: nuclear medicines for the retinitis, rolling stands the drip bags, hang from. I rely on other senses now, some natural, some implanted, and am as foreign to myself as this terrain. I am a habitat overrun with technologies.

My lover will not assist me, Dr. K., he insists he’s in it for the “long haul.” Perhaps I’ve worked too hard to take the terror out of this transformation. I wake up from fevers and describe the perfect beading of perspiration on my body like a suit of gems. I describe my fever dreams as though I’ve been communicating with God. The dreams bring back friends we’ve lost, and I think he envies these hallucinations. Because he is negative, he will be our survivor, nursing us through lost faculties and tempers, remembering us with photographs, or by cold absence. Even now he’s running food and prescriptions over to our friend, Patrick. He pleads with us not to shut him out, now that we’re so close to death. He wants inclusion in a process that often I’m excluded from. I’m only holding on to the parts that aren’t being taken away. I’ve told him I no longer wish to hold on.

I don’t believe in God, Dr. K., but I do believe in angels. The dead surround the dying and bring comfort. My lover leaves the TV on when he leaves the house, and the voices change—no longer bringing game shows and the news, but the words of the dead. I saw you on the television last night, sitting gaunt in a Michigan courtroom. The retinitis has blinded my left eye, so it was difficult to make you out. Your skeletal face gave you an appearance I’m used to—so many of us have shrunken down like that.

I thought you were an angel that would bring relief to my bedside. My lover will not assist me, but you would make it painless and final. I felt your presence beside me, unafraid of my will which, despite my weakness, is still strong.

It is wrong to ask a loved one to take these measures—it’s a job for angels.

I look up at the photograph. It is a face capable of those feelings, a poet’s face, slim and hawkish and brooding. John refolds the letter and places it on the bedside table.

“Was he angry with me, I mean, do you think he was letting me off the hook?” John asks, already aware of the impotence of an answer.

We are sitting on the bed his lover died in, in a room too cold from the air conditioning. I wonder if I’m the first person he’ll sleep with since his lover died. I look again at his lover’s photograph: his face with sharp, critical, perhaps criticizing features. John’s resistance to participate in his lover’s euthanasia expressed a quality I admired: a clinging to the known, perhaps even a fear of hell. My mind raced to pity him, his abandonment. Perhaps there is no landscape free of the plague. It stays with us—like decisions we continue to atone. The dead don’t comfort, but condemn. John’s lover’s mouth is pronouncing his curse while I raise the shirt up over John’s head, and kiss the tattoo of Vietnam over his breastbone. We lie beneath the animated photograph in our enviable senses.

John has asked me to stay the weekend, so neither of us are disturbed by the premature dissipation of our passion. We have not removed our underwear. We lie side by side, out of breath, hands clasped between us. I feel we need this touching, but sense it blocked by the letter on the night table, unfolding under the dim lamp as though his lover were rereading it.

I ask John about his lover—not so much out of curiosity, but because he is there, occupying John’s mind. “Storytelling,” I explain, “is what people do during the plague—they hole up somewhere and have a round table.”

“Antonio always wanted to talk,” he said. “That’s why he wrote, I think. There was never an end to what was on his mind.

“After he killed himself—that’s when I found his letter—I just went crazy for a couple of years. Whatever got me through Vietnam, I couldn’t find. And I’ve seen a lot of death. I lost my eye.” He turned toward me on the pillow. “But when Tony went, I felt like I went blind. I started using drugs, going out on the weekends and through the week. You asked me why I left my job. I couldn’t keep a job. I started having all this unsafe sex, a kind of Russian roulette y’know? Then last year, I found out I had AIDS. Funny, I felt relieved. I stopped looking for whatever it was I was looking for.”

He closes his eyes, and I find myself touching him the way I do Tom. Not with dread, but resignation—a tiredness all my own. He is sleeping, or pretending to sleep, because he pulls me toward him, muttering words into my chest, and his penis presses hard against my leg. Perhaps he’s embarrassed about it. He doesn’t remove his underwear.

I start to fall off, but for a few moments feel the narcotic half-sleep where Tom can move freely into my thoughts. We walk through a dirty street strung with lights, in perfect health, and only at the periphery do we notice the thin hands of beggars and their pleading eyes.

I wake up to a wetness on my skin that has also permeated my underwear. The light on the night table is still on. I move away from John’s body, the evident source of this sweat—the hair on his body and head are slicked down as though he’s showered. The corners of his mouth are white, like a child who’s drunk milk before bed. I notice the moisture all the way across the covers and mattress.

I decide to take a cold shower, already wondering whether he’d be offended if I slept on a couch, or even on the floor by the bed. I quietly make my way to the door, and begin walking through the long hallway—my hand gliding lightly over the wall, and its numerous frames. What felt solid about the home, its upkeep and abundance, makes it also suspect, fortressed, warred upon. I stumble upon a mounted rack. My hand glides over a long hunter’s gun. I draw my hand back, worried I might inadvertently trigger it. I move close to a door slightly ajar, further down the hall.

I hear moaning, at first not different from the hum of air conditioners in the house, then pitched oddly and broken as I approach the door. I look behind me to see if John has awoken. Perhaps it’s his dogs. I imagine John’s lover, Antonio, and mine, Tom. Ghosts, though Tom’s living. The pained breathing is louder—I see plastic draperies around a hospital bed, the thin body of a man sleeping beneath a drip bag, the flickering eyelids of his uneasy sleep. I notice the stubble over his sunken cheeks like an etched-in shadow.

I move further down the hallway, find the bathroom, and lock myself behind the door.

The world is full of suffering—we can pretend to help, like Dr. Klein, jotting impeccable notes for herself, or like me, making unemployment determinations, asking questions with answers already weighed and evaluated. Or John, whose empathy or guilt will kill him, thin him out like the specter in the room next door. But in every effort to assist the suffering, there’s the safety we’re forced to maintain to survive. We’re emotionally set apart like dominoes that cannot touch each other should one fall. It is why Antonio sought an intervening angel to assist him in his suicide. Even then, the alarming sense of his aloneness, which necessitated his faith in the first place, was all he could count on. I step into the shower and wash John’s sweat off my body.

When I return to the room, cold and naked now, I find John still sleeping, though turned in the bed. I feel exhausted, but at the same time my mind is racing. The light on the night table reminds me of Tom’s desk, and I’m struck with a certainty that he has died tonight and has cast his pall over this home. I shut out the light and step back into the bed, my body bringing its own moisture to these sheets. I close my eyes and hear Tom’s recitation, binding me to him, as though we’ve never been bound.

Marke but this flea, and marke in this,

How little that which thou deny’st me is;

It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee;

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sinne, nor shame, nor losse of maidenhead,

Yet this enjoyes before it wooe,

And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two,

And this, alas, is more than wee would doe.

John is up, and I wonder if he always wakes this early, or he wants to introduce me to his housemate—first thing.

“I met your roommate last night,” I answer, lifting myself up on forearms and leaning back against the headboard.

“I didn’t hear you get up last night,” he says, concerned and lowering himself on the bed. “Did you meet Marcus or Patrick?”

“I just saw one guy through the crack of the door. His breathing caught me off guard.”

“That’s Pat,” he says, “I probably should have told you. I’ve got a kind of hospice going here—most of the guys who’ve stayed here have been friends of mine, and I run them back and forth to the hospital, get their medications. Truck’s pretty handy—some of these guys have boxloads of medicines.”

“You’re angry now,” he says. “Maybe I shouldn’t take you shooting.” He’s smiling, mischievous.

He lays a revolver on the bed. “Start with this,” he advises. “This is a .38 caliber—not much kickback.”

“That one out there? That’s a 30-30 Winchester—’the gun that won the West.’”

He lays a rifle on the bed, next to the revolver. These two cold instruments of certainty—I try to see them as benign, controllable, but like standing at a high window ledge, I feel powerless before them, as though an accident were inevitable, some instability in me being drawn out, more certain than any protective measures.

“Once you pull the trigger,” John says, “you’ll know who’s in control.” He leans forward to gather the guns. We both hear knocking at the open door, and notice Pat standing with a bowl of cereal in his hand.

“Thank you,” he says. “I’m eating the last of your Raisin Bran, John.”

“If your doctor didn’t insist you stay in, I’d force you to replace it immediately.”

“Cereal is the best sick food—easy to prepare, and always, somehow, it reminds you of home.”

“I hope you’re not planning any vigilante-style justice. After all, it’s getting harder and harder to point fingers at anyone responsible.”

Pat looks John over. He is rolling the guns in a blanket. “I thought GI Joe already fought his war,” he says. He looks intently at me. “John never takes me out.”

“You’re not dying,” John says, walking up beside him, straightening the smock which nonetheless continues to convey sickness.

“No, you’re right. I’m presiding over death,” then, pushing John’s hand away, “C’mon, John. Who’re you kidding? I don’t wear this fashion just because it’s in.”

“I don’t mean to be so dramatic,” he explains. “Most people are lucky in that they can forget that life sometimes genuinely warrants our attention.”

John says, helping him from the bed, “sick or not, you’re as obsessed with life as you are with opera.”

John reads us with his life meter. As long as we respond to its shocks, he’s convinced of our will to live. This is what he must have felt about Antonio—his determination to die was read as determination, period. Perhaps that’s the one thing that kept John alive in Vietnam. Tom’s relationship to death is more complicated, shot through with the variables of good days, of enormous gratefulness. Death is a promise. Having been denied so many promises, he’s skeptical it will ever come. But I begin to wonder if it is my fear, and not his, that makes his suffering, his saying I want to die, a complicated thing.

The neighborhood streets are quiet. Fog drifts down from the hills and thins out over the pavement.

“Not really,” I answer, his gentle concern makes me want him, focuses the emptiness of our sexless evening. I put my head in his lap and he strokes my hair. His touch is almost too gende—deathbed touching, an understanding that’s come too late for both of us.

“I have to go home tonight,” I tell him. “I had a strange feeling last night that Tom was dead—that he waited for the moment I’d left to die.”

He doesn’t answer, but I see him looking out over the road, and his thoughts are suddenly naked, clear as sun on these mountains. I should have trusted him…

He pulls the guns from the back of the truck. “The first shot has no target, just to let you feel the gun.” He puts the pistol in my hand, and points his rifle out across a clearing of low shrubs. The mountains in the distance are muted by gray fog. I imagine towers on them, medieval castles.

“Not too high,” he says, watching me steady both hands before me, holding the gun out like it was an anxious bird. The tingling comes into my fingers, the numbness I associate with caring for Tom.

He holds the rifle by its checkered gun handle. His initials, JM, are engraved on the barrel. And though he’s comfortable cocking it, tilting the barrel up, I think of how this instrument of finality, of exactness and timing, makes no sense in his hands, and how the engraving of Vietnam on his chest seems more appropriate than his initials do on the gun. He pops the bullet into the breach, and in a moment, the deafening trajectory and pungent smell of gunfire overwhelm us. “Now it’s your turn,” he says.

For a moment, the return of stillness after the blast makes everything mute. Then a hand on mine, thin as gauze, guides the short revolver. It is Tom’s hand, I think, locking me in. Perhaps it’s Antonio’s hand. I pull the trigger, startled by the blast and the kick of the gun. But falling back, I’m held by John, whose fingers, still curled around mine, are warm and real.