STYLUS

Richard Hahn

THE FIRST-PERSON COMES SO EASILY

She thought that she'd never have fun again. For a long time, even as the knife of it was moving through her, she knew how selfish and self-pitying she was to think it. She'd said aloud before, to no one, the foolproof way is to drink as much wine without throwing up as possible, which must be better than grief, even if it didn't make her laugh.

But then, she'd never have the same laugh ever again. The new laughs, based as they were on a chilly new universe, were broken by frames she'd never imagined for herself. Maybe they were meaner laughs, or more desperate. They all craved so much to be born. In them her doubts were choking below the surface like smoky horizons. At times she couldn't imagine surviving.

Then she could. Not all at once, but together they decided to move on. It was like taking a first wet gulp of air after staying under too long. It was like being in a world you recognize with all your senses.

Still, loud noises frightened her, even though she hadn't heard it. No one had heard it. She'd been asleep thousands of miles away, while her mother had been in leafy sunlight, as if her body and all it's blood had poured through the blinds just before her father found them, five hours after the shot.

Five hours isn't quite an unforgivable amount of time. Half her head had been on the wall, cooling as the light changed and shadows of leaves played over the globular masses, and slid with them back onto her and the floor.

There was no hope, of course. They left that out at first, only told her after she called again from Iceland, where she'd been laid over. It was blisteringly cold outside the airport, but she couldn't be inside warm and happy spaces while something was wrong with her mother. The clean brass and open plains revolted her. She sat folded into a pea coat, out in a blizzard, listening to her father.

They'll keep her alive long enough for you to get home, he said. It was a matter of machines now, and it would cost a fortune for six hours, but they'd keep her alive so she could still be warm when her daughter touched American soil. Then they'd let her die.

But she was dead already when she got to the hospital.

Because she never saw her mother there, these are the things she remembers instead: The televisions were all in use. There were vertical cracks in the plaster walls in every room. She wondered where the shell casing was, if it was still lodged in the wall at home. Fleetingly, she'd craved it.

Her mother's ring smelled of the plastic bag it was kept in at the coroner's office, of the soap used to clean it, and of burnt resin, a nitric, hateful smell. For her, the ring retained all those smells, and for her, glistening red and white jewels would always emit those three concentric smells. But she wore it like a lighthouse wears its beacon, as a sign of optimism, however petulant. A foghorn through the mist her days had become, the ring lay so heavy on her hand that the bones in her finger began to atrophy beneath it, but her mother's friends couldn't tell, could only see and remember the jewels on another hand.

Before she realized she would have fun again one day, she hid in public. People understood and told her they understood. They were her friends too, they told her. They were there for her when she needed them. Her mouth became sore from smiling and saying thank you. Her ears became sore from hearing people say, we had no idea; she would have told us. The proportions and menace of the word why expanded in her mind.

And then all the ambience was diluted again, and the days showed their faces, one at a time.

II.

Donnie looked stupid and mean; an easy face to hate, she thought. His eyes were shrewd, bland, feminine. He had a bottle, which he didn't share with anyone except girls he was trying to sleep with, and he sat in the middle of the party in the dark (because the only lights that worked were in the kitchen) as people coagulated in immanent circles of violence around him.

The house was his and reeked of things a house was never meant to contain. She didn't know why she was there and didn't question. This was, she remembered, part of learning how to have fun again.

Even though it was his house, she wouldn't have spoken to him, actually went out of her way not to speak to him. She was in the kitchen, under a fluorescent light with ancient bugs splayed inside, staring out into the darkness in which he sat.

Other people in the kitchen didn't see what happened out there in a small puddle of light, and maybe never even found out until later.

Donnie had put up a Coleman lamp by his bottle, just enough light for five people to sit around. She let her eyes drown briefly out into the warm, distant piss yellow. One second the gun wasn't there, the next it was, flashing, metallic, another species and at once dominant. The first man in the room. She saw it, but before she could see it she knew what it was, could read it broadcasted in the lit faces. They all seemed to jump back far enough so their foreheads weren't in the light anymore.

She walked through the doorframe. Donnie sat forward on his tailbone like an eager demon. His own forehead was a ramp sloping back fast into his skull. He was small and defiantly fragile. He had ugly tattoos of scales on his wrists. The corners of the room crackled and popped with red illusions. Why did she move toward the gun? The kitchen swelled and ebbed behind her.

The gun was a .38 blue steel and nickel snub-nose revolver. It should have shocked her, it resembled so much what she'd imagined, but her mother used a .22 Ruger automatic and she'd never seen it anyway.

Like a wraith, she was on the edge of light, dwindling into the circle. Embarrassed, most of the faces looked at her and looked down, and looked again at the gun. It couldn't be left unwatched. She was thankful that none of them knew her, that none of them would try to put it away to spare her. By the lantern and bottle was an open box of shells.

Donnie looked at her and she felt that in his stupidity he had thoroughly judged her in that instant. Then he took his eyes away from her. He was entranced by his own hands.

He said to them, What you reckon I'm gonna do with this ol' buddy here? His hands didn't answer; the circle didn't answer. Someone trilled in the kitchen behind her. The six were cloistered in the messianic embrace of their light and their queer prophet.

Don't tell me none a ya'll seen this trick. He looked up and moistly arced the crowd. He reached across himself, grabbed the bottle, and tipped it to his face. It bubbled and frothed and lathered and his throat contracted like a piston three times. The gas lantern, playing its part, flickered to let them know the show was beginning again. Through the bottle it looked like a delirious sun, shot from heaven and miserable.

With his single hand he tossed the chamber open. She heard it click a second late. He palmed a shell and shoved it into the dark place she was afraid to imagine. The chamber could have been a sketch, a print. The darkness within could have been cool shaved graphite.

He flicked it closed and again she heard the metal fall late, as you hear a firework after it's already popped. There's a sense of being divided from the present, of having it meted out in doses.

That's a .38 hollow-tip bullet I just put in this pistol. In about a minute it's got bout a one in six chance a meetin the other side a my head.

Hunderd bucks says you don't do it, somebody said. The girl beside that somebody took her hand from between his legs.

I do this shit for free… but since you're offerin. He punctuated himself like breaths from a ventilator. He paced himself like a lethal injection. A plate smashed dully in the kitchen behind her as he took the hundred-dollar bill and placed it beside him.

You better say you prayers, a shrill, angular girl drawled from the darkness.

You right, you right. He bowed his head and she saw in his fierce topographical stubble, patches of hair missing. He said to his bitten fingernails and to the gun, Dear Father protect us your servants in you heavenly merciful name. Amen.

Go ahead and pray it ain't the one, dawg.

He spun the chamber. I already know it ain't the one, dawg. His voice absorbed into the velvet dark around his legs.

Then, all at once, the gun was beside him and he looked like a bandit, or a clown playing a bandit. He cocked the piece with his chapped thumb and shook his wrist as if he had bangles on it. Or handcuffs he was getting free of.

Anybody else say I ain't gonna do it?

She should have thought he was going to shoot them. She was suspended. She was dangling in the gelatin space he created by doing something for money that she would never do for anything. In an instant she thought she saw the inceptions of the bullet, whisky, and lantern, all of them leading to this, but not the gun, which was different. She thought she smelled a chemical fire.

Nobody else tryin' to make some money sayin' I'm chickenshit then? Nobody else got the guts to say I'm a pussy?

All possible combinations of epitaphs for his life could have been written in this pause. Meanwhile the blue flames of electricity within the softness of her skull, the blazed ions smelling of wet paint, warmed her and made her brave. Inside, deep inside on the green seat of power, a decree was made which was already stoked with the refuse of a hundred carbon report cards, a thousand reams of composition paper, a million microscopic globules of information, each emitting themselves for their own sake.

And then she shocked herself. She gave him some money, she didn't know how much. She moved fully into the light and she imagined it's warmth on her face, but really she was blushing. He folded the bills in two and put them on top of the crisp hundred.

I don't think you'll do it, she said. Then, Don't do it, with the whispers of a question. Again he only spent half a second looking at her face. He breathed a mist of whisky. She said, If you don't you can keep the money.

That's dead, he burped, and pocketed the bills.

If you don't you can have more.

He depressed the safety. She didn't see it flash its angry red tongue.

How much you got? For a moment he looked interested and flashed her his dog-blue eyes. They looked heavy with liner, moist tar liner. His small face looked cruel as a child mocking credulity.

She touched her pockets again. She felt her answer would settle some scales between them. She felt elated, that he was giving her a hand in deciding what he felt about her. She pulled her pockets out, inside out, rummaging through the little refuse in her hands, digging for the power to give life.

The other bills were crumpled and wet and wrapped in Kleenex, and they amounted to nothing - seven dollars. She was found lacking. In his stupid eyes, everything was worthless.

That all?

She wished he'd call her bitch, or sugar, or something demeaning. She'd bet on his death, after all.

She nodded. In no circumstances did she want to reveal her voice, to give more fuel to the convulsions of his unspoken broadsides.

Well that ain't gonna cut it.

She smelled the sourness, she felt it as her gaze fell from the ramp of his chin, down his neck, down his taut, childish torso. From the depths of her appeared this message: These are the times that try men's souls. The sunshine… she had lost and was demolished under the immensity of his disregard. She was just part of the world, and he wished her no peace.

He took off his shirt and a broad tattoo rippled over his fragile shoulder. Beneath the skin his tendons collapsed, anticipated the effort of raising and firing the gun.

Nobody else anxious to see me die then?

Why doesn't he tell them he doesn't even know her? Why didn't he ask her who she was?

She couldn't stand to be covered in blood. She couldn't stand to hear the cooling brain hissing under her eyelids in her tears. She backed away, terminally slow, clasping the seven dollars.

Nothin else to it. Militarily he snapped the barrel to his temple. Heart or head then?… Head it is.

As in all things like this, he'd pulled the trigger long before she knew it. The click fell back on her like a report from another planet. The barren click. The dry click. The sharp thistle of savannah weed, gone in dust, in flint. Powder.

She was surprised he didn't smile. She'd wanted him to smile large and show what bad teeth he had. No one sighed, as if no one but her had been holding their breath, and she couldn't sigh. She couldn't exhale.

The flurries of her heart, hail on a tin roof, she couldn't hear until after the flush of fluids. Crimson adrenalin and bile shot through her stomach and outward.

Gimme a break, someone said. When's he gonna stop?

You don't like it you ain't gotta watch, the shrill voice blared. It came from a girl in impossibly tight white shorts and a magenta halter-top, beautiful and flat chested. She begged to be hated too.

The someone and the somebody were conferring behind their hands as Donnie shook another shell out of the box and went through the same clockwork motions as before:

How bout double or nothin', stick?

Hands apart now, the two boys said alright. I got the pink slip to my car says you won't do it again.

Lemme see the som-bitch then.

The one took out a skull and crossbones wallet and spread from it a piece of salmon paper covered in labial creases. This here's for a '02 Honda, turbo charged, all the modifications indicated right there. Got four grand in it. But you gotta use three bullets this time.

For a moment Donnie seemed to pick her up with one glance. When the adrenalin had subsided she could feel her heart beating like hail, irresistibly fast. In the quickness of that moment she realized, even said to herself, that all the most important decisions, all the things we really learn about ourselves, happen in less time than can be measured by time. She didn't know if this made any sense.

In that moment, smelling the stink from his naked torso, she realized that she wanted a man who would do anything he wanted to do to her. It must be unique, the sticks and stones mentality of a life unpossessed by dying. He was the hard limestone of earth, stupid, drunk, and undead. In that moment and ever after when she could think of it, she wanted to fuck the cold earth in his form.

He loaded the other bullets and magnetically raised the piece to his forehead so it touched the shore of his hair.

The shrill girl said, Get ready for it this time. He gets it, I ain't staying to clean up.

He ain't gonna do it. Shit, man have to be crazy for that.

Sure he is; he got a half gallon a whisky in 'em, he'll do bout anything.

Hell, let him. No skin off my ass.

There was a bark from the kitchen. Somebody'd let a dog in.

Anybody wanna buy em out of it this time?

She stood there, married to the moment and, as in a dream, unable to foretell anything in the coming second. The gun was there. By all rights he should have already fired. Donnie stared straight ahead and slightly up, like a man saluting his flag. The tension in his cheeks and a hairline smile made him look young and womanly. His throat seemed primed to say, Kill me, get it the fuck over with, do your best.

She said to herself, like a magic spell over and over, I love him I love him I love him, inside, behind her tongue, where the words lodged and festered unspoken.

Then she yelled, Do you want to die!

From his crystal clear, flag-saluting gaze he turned and looked at her. And his voice sounded like furniture being shoved:

Course I don't wanna die. Not even halfway. Not even one percent�but I do wanna shoot myself. And he smiled and spewed spittle toward her, which he licked off his own lips.

There was husky, far-off laughter.

This was the moment when spurs should have clinked and leather belts should have groaned in dusty alleys in different places, a century ago. The lantern flickered, the show must go on.

Into this moment she blurted, I'll pay it. Give me a second, I'll pay it. You don't ask a rock why; you don't ask a piece of sediment why; they follow their own laws better than we follow ours.

You ain't got the money.

She wanted to be called shit-for-brains. She wanted to be called cunt. She wanted to feel the same as him.

Give me a second. Come on. Give me a second. How much would it take? More than four thousand, right? More than that?

Her heart was letting her make a decision, was letting her tap out of the ring and allow someone else, a different her, to finish the job, or be thrashed.

He said, Hell yes more than four thousand, I'd say. I'd say a lot more.

Why it was a lot more didn't matter, she recalled.

Then, she said, gaining traction with her slippery mouth, then this ring ought to cover it if you please don't kill yourself. She unharnessed the ring with a twist and handed it to him, afraid all the while it would fall and disappear in the velvet darkness and he'd have to kill himself again. His hand was open; hers above it scraped open, and in between them, on a wave of wet air, the ring slid down and away from her warmth. His hand was gone.

It's real diamonds, around a ruby.

What's it cost?

At least eight thousand. At least. Please. This is stupid. This is stupid.

She wanted to be told to stop repeating herself. She wanted to be called a whore. She wanted to be thanked.

There was a tectonic pause in which all the slag and shells and slate and scat the earth had ever created were suddenly relevant to her. She felt the mental processes of his brain needlessly looping; she felt the scrotum-tightening air lock closer around her.

Then he said, Sure. Alright. Sorry ya'll have to get disappointed… ’less anybody can beat that?

She imagined she saw a tear in his eye, though of course you can't squeeze water from a rock. She imagined all at once the tears he must have cried being beaten as a child, being whipped by his father and brothers and the world for being small and girlish and evil. She felt suddenly tall. She saw him cowering as a child, looking not so different now, only meanness had replaced the empty holes of fear. She imagined him not feeling like a man, and she imagined the exultation that ran unspoken through him now that he was a man, the only man. She imagined it as unquestioning blood, rising unbidden. She thought, this must be the final achievement, this must be proof of what can be made out of cruelty and stupidity, this must be why the natural state of the world is hopelessness and waste. And in this single truth was all the fun she ever hoped for.

III.

Though she wanted him to give her something, though she wanted to be taken by him to another place she'd never imagined, she left without either, emerging slow, like dawn, and colder than she'd ever felt. Later she realized she wasn't prepared for his presence in the world. And in time, he became another smoky aberration on the horizon.

After she was gone, the circle fell again into sullen silence, punctuated by the lantern's subtle moods. In the kitchen, a man strummed a guitar over the din in the diminishing flicker of the fluorescent bulb. Everything in the house was burning out. More faces were visible now in the violet glare of a bug zapper.

Someone in the circle hummed and the shrill girl in the halter-top scratched the dead skin beneath her shorts.

Hmmmf, somebody muttered, a crossbreed between a smirk and a commentary on the world. The gun was pointed at the bottle now.

It only took a split second, a whisper and a rattle covered by a cough, for Donnie to slip out of his pocket one, two, three brass shells onto the floor.