by P.D. Booth
The barman presents Mary Anne with the broad, blank expanse of his white oxford shirt. He is plunging empty tumblers into gleaming stainless basins of sanitizer and rinse water, drying them on a towel that drapes his shoulder. Plunge, rinse, dry, plunge, rinse, dry, he froths up a lather of detergent, lofting the occasional raft of bubbles into an atmosphere thick with stale beer. One lazy cluster drifts her way and she blows gently, sending it looping over her shoulder toward Matson on the next stool, where he sits poking limply at his phone. “WiFi here won’t pull up The Google,” he says, bubbles sliding past his profile. They sail on, bursting in open air over the host of unoccupied tables. Apart from the two men shooting pool, she and Matson are alone, it being too early yet for anyone but the burnouts and lit-majors to be imbibing.
Reports had just begun to air: Breaking News. The clack and patter on the pool table ceases. Mary Anne watches in the bar mirror as the players turn their cue sticks, resting their palms on the chalked tips like old highlanders at ease on their claymores. The one with the graying push broom on his lip, biting an unlit, half-smoked cigar, dismisses the broadcast with a wave of his hand. The dot on his palm winks to her. His friend merely shakes his head, wagging a loose crop of thick curls at the grimed linoleum tile.
“See her eyes? They’re practically bobbing!” says Matson, pointing to the nearest of several large screens craning from the ceiling like extraterrestrial chaperones. Most are playing footage of a survivor’s testimony. “Now look at her. I don’t know what she’s bound up with, but the knots are straining. Look at those brown eyes. Could any real poet have harmed her? Harmed any of them for that matter? Problem is there’s no poetry left in people…”
Burying her focus in the footage, Mary Anne wills her own eyes not to roll. But it is difficult to watch the survivor speak. There is something unsettling in her expression, something familiar she is suppressing. So Mary Anne activates her phone, thumbing half-attentively down a scroll of text and images, eyes perching tentatively on this thread, now that one, as a gull might perch upon the flotsam of some great wreck. She rafts about on this foundered baggage, taking a hard swallow to suppress the rising inflammation in her gut. Flaking the paint off a plum-colored thumbnail, she races deeper into distraction, until the flurry of words and images become an unlimited chain of non-sequiturs: an acquaintance checks in at a fashionable restaurant; a testy Maine Coon growls at an inquisitive macaw; a skater racks his groin on a handrail; someones’s grandmother joggles her slack flesh on a child’s trampoline…
Finally, Mary Anne closes her phone down, resolving to ignore it for a healthy interval. She casts around for the shelter of a new distraction, but there is little cover from the bombardment. All screens are running footage of that savage event. All but one. The smallest by comparison, it hangs above the far end of the bar, showing a movie that features a handsome youth, a highschool senior perhaps only a few years younger than she, wearing a faded concert tee and black leather bomber’s jacket. He is plugging hollow point rounds into the vacant apertures of a revolver’s cylinder. He checks his reflection in a full length mirror and swings the chamber shut with a flick of his wrist. Mary Anne finds she cannot shelter with him and the severity of his intent, so she looks away. Beside her, Matson is saying something about people missing the glorious in the mundane, an awareness which poetics are uniquely equipped to engender, and… she tunes the room down to a hum as his throat clears the way to a fresh tirade.
Tiny bubbles ascend invisible guide wires to the foam collar of her beer. Racing in their lanes, they rush up from within the deep amber-red to jostle among the multitude at the surface. She watches them, working herself into a superficial fascination. Since girlhood she has imagined stepping inside one of those swirling, enchained, yet flawlessly hermetic, securely finite little worlds, lifting her to benign landscapes of perpetual comfort. She runs her thumbnail down a long gouge in the bar, deep enough to stand a dime in. When again she raises her eyes, the survivor has broken into unguarded sobs. Closed captions render her anguish uppercase: FROZEN…I WANTED SO…DESPERATELY TO HELP…SOMEONE…(SOBBING)…BUT COULDN’T MOVE…PEOPLE…FALLING ALL AROUND ME…I…SO TERRIFIED…
“When is the nation going to say ‘enough already!’ How long are we going to keep swallowing this?” shouts Matson. “I wonder if Canada would take me?”
We can only hope, thinks Mary Anne, and her unwillingness to validate Matson’s pontificating by even a micron pushes her into an automatically opposing stance. “I think people are reeling from chaos on all sides. I think that no one knows what to make of our world these days. I know I sure can’t.”
“But you’re a smart person. Can’t you see we’re all consenting to this, at least to some extent?”
“How do you figure that one? I know I certainly didn’t consent to the slaughter of all those people, most of whom were students, no different from you or me.”
“I get that. But this is an age of scarcity, right? We’re all complicit in some kind of crime. And I’ll admit, I don’t have it all worked out yet, but everytime you press “like” on a piece of slanted journalism, everytime you opt to watch some spandex-wearing bozo punch his way to justice, or post some piece of personal judgment to the internet from an electronic device produced by child labor, aren’t you contributing, if only in a very small way, to the ugliness that belies all of our worst evils? Has the world not become so interconnected that the notion of individual innocence has to be abandoned?”
Mary Anne’s eyes narrow. Her lips purse. “Look,” she says, “just because you can’t help projecting your guilt issues on the rest of us, doesn’t mean we’re all part of some great passive conspiracy.”
Matson snorts into his beer, flecking the bartop with foam. “‘Passive conspiracy,’” he repeats. “Love it.” He leans back, musing for a moment with hands folded on his belly. “Answer me seriously though. I believe we all have a moment in our lives, usually in childhood, when we learn suppress potent emotions- such as guilt or regret or sadness- either by letting ourselves off the hook, or by shoving them down deep into some thoughtless place. Tell me, when did you first learn to swallow your heart?”
“I’d say about five minutes after our first date,” says Mary Anne, without pause.
Matson laughs again. He downs another mouthful and nods. “That’s why I love these conversations. You’re a good sparring partner. Keep me rhetorically fit.” He pats her knee and she flinches at the unexpected contact, though she suppresses a smile at his compliment. He wasn’t such a bad sort; he just lived a little too far down in his own head, making him sometimes oblivious to anything outside himself. He orders up another pint and continues on: “It’s all about paradigms, Mare. See, my theory is that the appreciation of beauty…”
Mary Anne opens a game on her phone and begins bifurcating pixilated ninjas with deft swipes of her finger, taking care not to harm the geishas or shopkeepers that occasionally generate to add a modest element of challenge. The rote action of her fingers occupies a level of thought generally occupied by anxious chatter. She begins to enter a state of meditative contemplation. Her pupils dilate. Her breathing smooths. Matson talks on, but her brain has divorced her eardrums. It is the cadence of his ranting that transports her thoughts to a scene, late one evening in the drunken stages of a party’s unraveling, when her roommate introduced her to “Maestro Cameron J. Matson III.” They spent a long time talking in whispers over a chorus of snoring revelers. She was not put off by his smallness or watery pop-eyes. In fact, she liked to watch them dial open when he became excited. One more year, he had said, voice packed with the heft of sincerity; one more year and he would walk directly from the convocation into cultural sainthood as the dogged exposer of “truths”, and as he spoke it, that word seemed to land like platinum bullion in a room replete with treasure seekers. But now, on their third outing, on the year’s first warm afternoon, she begins to tire under the increasing weight of his goldbricking.
Matson talks on over the plink of clashing katanas until, by careless accident, Mary Anne halves a geisha, which bursts in a spray of red pixels and peal of distress, returning her to the present. The pop and clatter at the pool table has resumed. People on television move their lips silently, blocks of script scrolling their lines at the foot of the screen. Mary Anne has stopped reading, now merely watching the expressions change from the facial contortions of victims’ kin, to the survivor’s stunned leer, to the somber, worried look of those officials to whom the task of containment has fallen.
“The shooter left some half-literate diatribe, and a couple short stories, scribbled in marker in that shitbox hole-of-despair he was renting,” says Matson, his mouth resting only for long draughts of ale. “Dr. Archer wanted us to read them in class. Can you believe that? I walked right the fuck out. Right out. I mean, is that it? All someone has to do is murder a few dozen people and their ideas get plastered all over the zeitgeist? It goes with what I was saying before, that we’re somehow manufacturing these monsters…” He pauses for another slug, pushing his tumbler with a natter of chimes against the three others already consumed. The barman stopped clearing empties ten minutes ago. He stands now, looking up at the footage, head shaking, drying the same single glass.
Mary Anne’s eyes stray toward the pool table. The player with long helices of brown hair and the chain on his wallet feeds three dollars into the jukebox, deliberating for several moment’s, his forearm braced against the touchscreen. The other player withdraws the dark, damp stump of cigar from under his mustache, and, noticing Mary Anne’s blatant surveillance, whistles through the gap in his teeth, loosing a shrill, puncturing sound that caves his face as it escapes. Mary Anne spins on her stool. “Hey Curt, no Beyoncé this time,” she hears him shout. The response: “Fuck you, Roy.” Both men laugh. Suddenly all things seem menacing and tight.
“Well they’re charming,” says Matson. “Starting to feel like everything could just boil over, you know?”
The opening chords of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” sound in the speakers over head. More blocks of script cycle over a montage of firearms and stacks of ammunition and a photo of the shooter, wearing a tactical vest, brandishing a claw hammer.
“How accurate do you think these stats are Mare, and where would you go to check? All depends on whose signal you’re on, doesn’t it?” Matson turns on his stool to face her, his expression luring the words “Sure, I suppose” from her unsuspecting diaphragm.
“It certainly does,” he returns, rapping his conviction on the bar. The empties ring faintly. “That’s the problem with living in our info-saturated age: there’s more than you can process. On top of that, it’s hard to separate the bullshit from actual facts. It leads to the sort of disconnect that leads to this very act. Furthermore…” and she’s lost him again. The screens show images of a building, its grey stone façade darkly pocked where copper slugs have burrowed. Tracers of yellow tape festoon its grounds, gently curving against the breeze.
“So, to my previous question about your heart…” she hears Matson say. But the bubbles are still licking up from the crystalline base of her pint glass, itself containing immobilized bubbles. She is sliding into recollections of a day in her early youth, a bit later in spring, when warm air had lost its novelty…
She was running, her little legs kicking hard over the soft, uneven ground. She ran so hard her lungs burned, her tears streaming sideways across her face. Holding his kill at arm’s length, the Belden boy called out to her, but she let his tiny figure shrink into the distance behind her. She would never speak to him again after that day.
Timmy Belden had, until that moment, been one of her favorite playmates. When, earlier that morning, he had shown her his new birthday present— a special edition Henry pellet gun, built like an old west repeater— her eyes went wide in amazement. The sun glinted on its varnished stock, its matte blue barrel a perfect and imposing cylinder. Timmy shouldered the rifle and marched very professionally. They set off toward the small wooded plot at the center of the subdivision where they lived. They went as pioneers, hunters, and theirs were the first eyes to encounter that new wilderness. As they crossed the verge into the shade of its canopy, they crouched.
Timmy pointed his gun at a tree branch, where a runtish squirrel sat with hands folded around some trinket of the forest floor. “Think I can hit it?” he said.
Mary Anne drew a breath. She pressed her lips to her fists and did not reply to his question. She felt a thrilling current of curiosity course through her body. Could he actually do it? There was a jolt of anticipation as they felt the approach of some kind of threshold. The air smelled of mulch and yard clippings and crackled with potential like ball-lightning, each child longing only to impress and be impressed.
Timmy levered the pump under the forestock, sighting down the barrel. He pulled the trigger and the weapon discharged a breathy hiss. Mary Anne thought for split second that she saw the faintest stipple of crimson erupt on the creature’s pelt, where the pellet had entered just behind its shoulder. Then, the squirrel turned over and plunked from the branch.
She and Timmy spun to face each other, his face mirroring her breathless shock. Together they crept forward, terrified yet undeterred, a terrible sense of curiosity drawing them on.
When they came upon the animal, it was not dead. Its breathing was rapid and panicked. Its wound welled and seeped off with every other exhalation, two of its legs cranking uselessly in the dirt.
“What do we do?” shouted Timmy Belden and Mary Anne screamed.
On the ground, the squirrel convulsed. Mary Anne could feel its supplicating eyes boring into points of her psyche she could not even name.
“What do we do!” Timmy bawled again.
“Just do something!” she shrieked and Timmy brought the gun barrel close to the squirrel’s head, so close that to miss would be impossible. She heard the riffle spit and before she knew what she was doing, she was sprinting as fast as she could.
She was slamming through the kitchen door, where her mother stood at the stove, a dinner of mac’n’cheese with hotdog slices on the burner. She ran to the woman, arms wide to gather in the protection she knew would come automatically, her face creased and red as a raisin. Her confession tumbled out without punctuation: “Timmyshotasquirrilandkilledit… andand… Iwantedtoseehimdoit… and… it’s dead, it’s dead! WE KILLED IT…”
She felt a new rack of sobs rising from the pit of her belly. Her mother gathered her in like a feathery, scented mist and held her. “Oh now, baby,” she cooed into Mary Anne’s ear. “Don’t you worry about Timmy Beldon. Did you shoot that squirrel yourself, was it your finger on the trigger?”
Marry Anne swallowed and shook her head in rapid, vehement denial.
“Okay. Then it’s okay. Honey, this is not your fault.”
Mary Anne felt close to bursting but her mother held her tight and rocked her and as she did, something new began to happen. That word, “fault”, began to crystallize in her thoughts, the seed around which a lattice of new concepts began to form. She made a hard swallow, as though gulping down an egg, shell and all. Her mother’s face blurred through a salted lens but the sobs did not come; they traveled back down inside and she held them there, her mother rocking her, quietly intoning “That’s my girl, my big, big girl” until all of the pain ebbed away…
“You seeing this Mare?” Matson’s voice pokes through. “Crying. Actually crying on broadcast television. Unbelievable. He probably shouldn’t do that. But I guess at least he’s moved.”
Mary Anne looks up and sees him, the Politician, a spangled pin in his lapel, grey-haired where he had been youthfully brilliant and full only three years ago, speaking in blocks of text while a diamond— she watches it form— wells in a depression beside his nose, sliding down like a torrent of one drop. The barman ceases his drying, his arms dropping slack at his sides. He looks on, silently inert. Mary Anne feels suddenly like reaching for him.
“Hey Curt, you seein’ this?” she hears from behind. “He’s crying! The pansy!” shouts the one called Roy, pumping his fist in the air. “Four more years! Four more years!” Mary Anne turns to look as the one called Curt picks his shot. A crack and a knot of balls scatter across the verdure of felt. He tosses his head, reshuffling its tendrilous curls. He grinds chalk onto the tip of his cue. “I hear he’s a big fan of Beyoncé,” he says, pointing toward a screen. Both men laugh.
Matson glutches down a mouthful, clutching his chest. “Stupid apes. No poetry,” he hisses. His fists ball on his lap. Mary Anne involuntarily lays a hand on his thigh, then withdraws it. A coupling of soap bubbles cartwheels up, marbled and whirling from the wash sink. Twin globules fused to a common partition, together they somersault into enshadowed outbacks beyond the ice bin.
“I don’t know. Can’t take anymore of this,” says Matson. “Hey buddy!”
The barman turns. He has a soul patch and gotee and is completely bald, wearing a powder-blue tie embroidered with tiny white florets. He says nothing, merely raises his chin.
“Could we put something else on? Is there a game? Football or something?”
“It’s March, Cameron,” Mary Anne hears herself say.
“Basketball then. Something. Anything. I’d like to watch something else.” The barman nods and begins fiddling with the remotes.
“I’m sure whatever’ll be fine with those two,” Matson says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Feeling like Jane Fucking Goodall over here.” He takes another swallow. “Wow look at that hook shot!” he says.
“That was a layup, Cam.”
“Oh. Well. Still impressive.” Then he looks down and is silent and stays that way a long time.
On the screen at the far end of the bar, the youth in his leather bomber fires a round into the chest of another, who’s body lurches backward as the bullet tears from the back of his letterman jacket. The wounded lands bleeding under the lights of a high school football stadium as the first youth empties his weapon into his victim’s body.
Mary Anne turns away. On another screen, she watches the politician ward away his tears with the back of his knuckle. She begins to feel herself unmade right there on that wobbling barstool, beside the cumbersome Matson, in full view of strangers, breathing the staleness of last night’s drunk in a dusty tavern, utterly powerless. She feels her own eyes begin to swamp, her irises swimming. The familiar bubbling rises against the back of her throat. She swallows the lather but it resurfaces, defiant of her control. In another second, she will have dissolved completely.
P. D. Booth 