The Crater

At 3 a.m., or whatever time it happens, life in San Marino, California, isn’t much, but it’s what it is.

A gun fires in a house, and now it’s something for them.

Others in the house, mother, brother, are roughly woken up. They think about the sound, recognize it, and that’s that.

It’s the least surprise ever. Or not it, or that it happened, or with a gun, or that they had to hear it, or why now, but why.

The brother, now awake, now just the brother, stands before the noisy door. He hears Nick Drake. He says, “George,” loud enough to penetrate the door and Drake, but it’s not a question.

His mother is behind him down the hall, he can feel it, but he’s too shocked to turn and say, “Don’t come.”

What do they feel? I don’t know, but it must be very ugly since so much of it is hatred.

The door is locked. “George . . . George . . . George.”

George is, I don’t know, sitting, slumped forward. Blood is pouring from his mouth and nose. I was told that. There’s a crater in his head. The top back part. It’s full of mangled brains and skull and blood. He fired into his mouth, I was told, and so it would have to be there.

The crater can’t talk or do anything. It needs an artist.

The brother kicks the door in. The room’s very small, and he sees what I described. What I described will be the only thing he ever sees when he remembers George beginning now and more resolutely once he has to make a choice between looking at a box of ashes on his mother’s mantlepiece or remembering this. This will be like George’s album cover.

“Don’t, Mom, don’t,” he says.

Someone calls Emergency, and let’s say a vehicle arrives. Two men in uniforms get out, both men since women weren’t thought capable of transcending this much trauma in the ’80s. They enter the house. One is older, tough. The other’s young and took the job for different reasons.

They’re shown George’s body and hate it.

The young one, Joe, let’s say, is the one who has to do things around the body, and the older one, named something else, who cares, is the one who has to go into the living room and ask the family questions and then use their phone to call in a report.

“How old,” the older one asks.

“Thirty,” George’s mother says. “It’s his birthday.”

You can guess the rest.

In two days, George will be ashes. He’ll weigh 4.7 pounds. There’ll be a funeral to which almost no one is invited—the estranged father, stoners from the park that George had started hanging out with, people who’d been kids when George was and haven’t seen him since. They won’t invite me. They could call my mother’s house and try to reach me, but they won’t. Nick Drake won’t be played. There’ll be no obituary in the local paper. No one in the family will want to write it. They’ll redo the room, sell the house, move. They won’t tell the newer owners. They’ll just erase an awful, sick, depressing man.

Joe is in the room doing things he is assigned to do. He looks at the body from different angles, in detail, up close, at the bloody face, at the bloody floor, at the gun, at the hand it’s resting on, always writing notes or checking boxes on a form clamped to a clipboard.

He keeps looking at the crater, he can’t help it. He has no feelings that he knows of, and the wound is fascinating to him even though it’s what it is and there is nothing to write down about it.

“Why are you so interested?” asks the crater. The voice is male, like the body would have had, but not as hued as you’d expect the voice of someone who would do that to himself to be, and the crater doesn’t move in sync with it or even shiver like a woofer.

Joe is startled, but he’s always startled when something like that happens. Death is so unknown.

“I’m an artist,” he says. “I look at everything artistically. It’s easier that way.”

“I was an artist too,” the crater says. “Or I tried to be.”

“What kind?” Joe asks.

“My body played guitar,” the crater says.

Joe goes back to doing what he’s told to do. The crater has gone silent for a while, so maybe it has died.

“You there?” Joe asks it.

“Thinking,” the crater says.

“About what?” Joe asks.

“A friend,” the crater says.

“A good friend?” Joe asks.

“Yes, but not good enough,” the crater says.