The gun in my pocket is making me lighter.
It's as if earth's gravity has decreased so that even the tiniest step I take makes me feel like I'm trapped inside the suit of a astronaut and taking a stroll on the moon. It feels like if I let go, I would simply evaporate and float up towards the atmosphere.
Amir is the only thing keeping me grounded.
Amir is the ballast.
(In fact, I'm so swollen with helium my brain burns like the Hindenburg)
I'm smoking another cigarette. I know that they'll kill me. I know that the smoke is turning my lungs into sooty chimney walls. I am completely aware that if the bomb hadn't gotten to mother first, lung cancer was next in line.
But it's the poppies.
It's the way her skirt smelled.
Secretly, I'm glad that the cigarette is stealing all my breath. The smoke that pours out of my mouth and nostrils like ugly black-gray pollution streaming from the second story windows of apartments set on fire traps my screams inside my chest like children that the firemen are trying rescue with ladders. The children are burning up. But they'll live in the end. They'll be rescued by the firemen and taken to the hospitals with their faces all twisted up. And the firemen will take pride in the fact that they've saved another life.
They will live because I lived.
I stop walking once I reach the middle of the bridge off of 42nd street.
The water is iron colored and it roars under me, as empty sounding as canned laughter. I wonder how many people have jumped off of this bridge and have been carried away by the water flow. I wonder where all the bodies end up, all limp and bloated, like deflated whoopee cushions. I wonder if it's someone's job to pull them out before they empty into the Atlantic ocean and poison all the fish with their sorrow.
I take the gun out of my pocket.
Amir shrinks into the corners of my head, because he knows what I'm thinking now.
He knows that one of has to go.
This civil war has to end. I have to secede from the captivity of someone who doesn't even know I exist, who doesn't care if I live or die or if I breathe or choke or smile or frown. It's so impersonal. Being given all this hate is like being given a form letter from the government that says your son/daughter died fighting overseas and his/her remains will be delivered to your doorstep soon.
I decide:
the gun is for him, not for me, even though either way, Amir will no longer be a murderer of innocent thoughts.
I know where he is right now, in fact.
I know that his hands are playing up and down Heather's spine like a piano. I know that they're mixing breath and heat and that all of their thoughts are locked up safe where no one can get to them.
The air needles at my skin like the spikes on the inside of an iron maiden and I can feel my feet lifting off of the bridge off of 42nd street now that the gun is out of my pocket and in my hand. Some kind of tractor beam from heaven must be pulling me into its bowels. Pulling me up and up and up.
But gravity is a jealous lover.
Amir is shivering now in his corner, his teeth chattering like the keys on a typewriter as the stenographer takes down court proceedings. I, the judge, look down at him with my gunpowder gavel. The jury (the ghosts of my dead thoughts all pressed together into one compartment ) have announced their decision.
Guilty.
Guilty.
Guilty.
Of a thousand counts of homicide.
But.
What,
what am I doing?
I'm here with a gun and I'm ready to shoplift someone else's heartbeats right out of their chest. I'm ready to walk right into his bedroom and kill him there with Heather watching every second of it. This close. I'm this close to hanging a wet paint sign on the wall above his headboard after I take his blood to make portraits and skull pieces to make mosaics.
Paint everything as red as the faces of little boys watching women undress.
What am I doing?
I'm sinking.
I'm a penny dropped into a wishing well.
All my weightlessness is gone.
I look at the gun now with a little shame and a lot of regret. Regret for what was done and what could have been and regret for letting a thought worse (almost) than Amir into my head. I can't. I can't, not yet. I'm not. I'm not dead enough yet.
Beneath me, the water roars and carries armfuls of bodies from the last bridge behind me.
I wind my arm up and pitch the gun into the water.
There it goes.
I wonder what the man who fishes for bodies will think when he finds it.
(Gravity has reclaimed my feet.)
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The sound of the approaching school buses hummed like meditating Buddhist monks and made the air tremble a little; shiver and chatter the same way teacups do in an earthquake. The air was cold and it made Charlie's nose run and so he sniffed as he shoved his hands all the way inside his pockets. He was careful not to get too close to the other group of children waiting for the school buses, because he didn't want to infect them with what he was feeling.
He was also careful not to make eye-contact with the beautiful boy, even though he was so tempted to. Charlie didn't want him to laugh again. The laugh was hot and red, like a cattle brand, and had printed raised-dough scar tissue on his chest in the shape of the beautiful boy's humor.
The faces of the children as they waited for the bus were as pink as the palms of black slaves.
As pink as tufts of fiber glass insulation.
The buses pulled up.
They were big, yellow panzers that swallowed up all the children until only Charlie was left standing in front of the school.
Patiently, the bus driver waited.
And then yelled.
Charlie took heavy steps towards the bus, steps that he was sure were leaving craters in the school parking lot. His feet were bombs dropped on Afghan cities. His feet seemed to sink into the pavement as it were sand newly uncovered by the ocean's tide.
He stepped onto the bus, the driver swore under his breath, and the doors squeaked shut behind him. All of the seats had at least one person in them. And they all looked so big. They all looked so hard and imposing.
He took the seat directly behind the driver next to a pretty girl with a pony-tail as limp as seaweed. She smiled at him.
The bus lurched.
Stalled.
Gasped.
And began stuttering up the road.
“Hello,” the pretty girl said.
Charlie's mouth was full of words – words that had built up behind his mouth because he hadn't spoken the entire day, built up like sandbags before a flood, and he didn't want to split his lips open now, in front of the girl, because then the ugly words that had been created because of the beautiful boy's laughter would spill onto her lacy dress and stain it black.
“Yeah, I know. It's tough to be the new kid. Last year my mom and I moved here from Albany. You know Albany? Capital of New York. Not the big greasy New York, but the old New York. Lots and lots of trees instead of giant buildings like the ones in Manhattan. You know?”
Charlie glanced at her.
“Anyway, we moved here because daddy got awfully sick and then he couldn't work any more and then all the money dried up, so we had to live with grandma. The first day of school is always scary. All the kids look as big as trains and you feel so itty-bitty. So small that you're afraid to move, because if you did people might loose track of where you are in the carpet and wind up stepping on you like a bug. But you get over it. Things get better.”
The pretty girl's voice was probably one of the most wonderful things Charlie had ever heard in his life. It tinkled like a wind-up music box and when she laughed her eyes lit up as cheerfully and as desperately as the last crumpled cigarette smoked by trenched in soldiers. Charlie wondered what his voice sounded like; it had been such a long time since it had last been used. It was probably rusty, like a bicycle left in the front yard for the rain to eat it all up. It probably hissed and squeaked and crunched.
And his laugh.
Laugh?
Probably sickly and small, wasted away.
Behind them, the bus was leaking smoke like blood leaking out of the toes of ballerinas en pointe. The inside of the bus was so noisy, that everything seemed almost absolutely silent, as if the all of the students were listening in to the pretty girl's monologue like the government listening in on private phone calls. Charlie turned away from the girl and closed his eyes.
“How is he doing?” he said.
His voice was hoarse and squeaking, like an out-of-tune violin with broken strings.
“What?” she asked.
“How is he doing?”
“How's who doing?”
Charlie paused. “You're dad.”
“Oh.” The girl glanced out of her window and the silence leaned in a little closer. “He's not with us any more. But that doesn't bother me so much because he died while I was holding my hand and now he's sitting up there with our Lord God and waiting for me.”
She turned to him and smiled.
A smile as optimistic as flowers at the bedside of a cancer patient.
And Charlie couldn't help it.
He started to cry.
All the words that were blocked up and suppressed at the back of his throat translated themselves into tears that made his pillowcase all wet.
