I let the first bus pass, thinking myself early. Then another and no old man, no sweet or sour. I took the third, and when I got to the school, I found chains cuffing the doors. I put my fist against the glass until the guard came out from behind the building, telling me that the day was canceled on account of last night and what would take place again and more so tonight and that it wasn’t entirely safe, in his professional opinion, for me to be out on my own, and did I have someone to pick me up? I said, Don’t be silly, but if it possibly wasn’t entirely safe for me it might also possibly not be entirely safe for an old man, and I thought how he had always been as sure and steady as the downtown clock and what did he do and where did he go but outside to the people when the world terrified him?
DESPITE THE GUARD’S and the radioman’s and the newspapers’ suggestion for individuals to stay in their homes, I ventured out that evening. I had bought a new jacket, a burnt-orange number that would do well in the chill, and I wanted to show it off to the old man.
It was dark by the time I got downtown. Rounding a corner, I saw the people streaming into the square, the mass of them glowing with small fires carried in their hands. I joined the back where they kept the Sunday morning folks—old men and women, the youngest children. After reading so many reports, I felt the excite ment that came when a beloved book was made into film, all of a sudden visible and real.
The old man was nowhere in sight. I worked my way up—small candles progressing in size and heat to beer bottles to liquor bottles to torches. I stopped one row behind the frontline, where a hot silence draped itself over the crowd. Peeking up on my toes, I fought for a view between shoulders. The people leaders had stopped before the men leaders, no more than a breath between them. The men in power had covered themselves in plastic: square black helmets with tinted visors over their faces and plates of protective rubber embedded in their uniforms. Each had tucked himself behind a shield with one shoulder, holding a black club or metal blade in the opposite hand.
A teenager with a blue bandana over his face whispered down to me, You shouldn’t be up here.
It started the way anything started: with a seed of quaking static in your gut, a feeling like you’re moving but not moving, and then a wild overflow, a purging, a getting the inside out as fast as possible.
A young man in front, looking at the men, cried out, Annie!
And the crowd behind him cried, Annie! Justice!
Betsy! he cried.
Betsy! Justice! the crowd responded.
Charlie!
Charlie! Justice!
Dante!
Dante! Justice! the crowd yelled.
And Eric, Frankie, and Geoffrey; Harry, Iona, and James on down the line, each response faster, each filled to the brim with heat—all the while, the uniforms hiding men motionless—Kathy, Larry, Michael, all the way to P for Peter. I didn’t know how many Peters there were in the world, how many in our city, but in between the young man’s saying it and the crowd’s dutiful echo, I saw a particular Peter, a perfect whisper of a schoolboy, a pristine castrato who only ever sang the pains of boyhood into beauty, and after the crowd added Justice, I responded with a cry of my own, a sound that could have been the scream of a child or a mother losing that child, and the scene quickly became something confusing.
The back of the crowd surged, pushing the front of the line into the men, who pushed back with their plastic plates. They pushed and pushed until the line broke, the people and the men zipping themselves up, boy, man, boy, man, until there was no longer anything separating us. I saw one of the men’s long blades bared then made to disappear inside a young one. From behind me, rocks and more rocks, bigger rocks, and flaming bottles took flight. I covered my head with my hands, trying to move out by moving back. I ducked and dipped, muscling through while making myself as small as possible. As I was nearly out, a shoulder knocked me to the ground, and down there with me was a body, a small body, which I put into my arms. I stood. I hunched and pushed, stepping on feet and hands. I got out of the crowd to the edge of the square, where the concrete fell away to hard dirt, and the dark trees of the park picked up. I got down on my knees, cradling the small body in the bowl of my lap. The body was a child, a breathing child I did not know or recognize. A boy or girl child, a cap of short black hair with a ring of oily red around its head, red that bled down the rest of its body, as a baby pushed from the womb, covered in the messy violence of its mother’s flesh. I looked to the crowd for a mother or sister missing the child, but I saw only bodies, one against the other, and from inside the clash a man with a long blade breaking free. He moved toward me and the child, a confident march neither slow nor fast, the man as faceless and irrevocable as fear itself. The red was coming from inside the child’s head and it shone all around its face. Its eyes were looking at me with so much blank hunger, like my eyes could feed his, hers, its chest’s breaths winding down, and I said, You’re beautiful. It’s okay. You’re beautiful. You’re so beautiful; you look just like me.
GUN CONTROL
IF THERE’S A GUN IN ACT ONE, fire it in act three. Make it loud. Make it bang. Call it a climax.
If there’s a gun in act one, fire it in act two. Let the rising and falling action make a perfect, even-sided triangle. Make it a cartoon mountain peak. Call it isosceles.
If there’s a gun in act one, fire it in act one. We can see it there, we know what you want to do with it. There’s no need to be coy.
If there’s a gun in act one, push out the barrel and tip the bullets onto a quilt-covered bed in act one. The soft sound of their plunking. Guns are dangerous and more dangerous when the bullets are left inside.
Alternatively, if there’s a gun in act one, keep the bullets inside it. Do not fire it in act one, two, or three. Guns are dangerous and more dangerous when the bullets are left inside.
If there’s a gun in act one, describe the gun as cold. As smooth. Describe the gun as feeling heavier than it looks. Note the weight specifically. Compare it to something more familiar and innocuous. A wrench? A lead pipe? A bag with two or three apples inside it? Depending on the size of the apples.
If there’s a gun in act one, put it in a fenced-in backyard. Let its shots in act one, act two, act three be an annoyance, as a neighbor’s dog. Wonder why the dog won’t stop barking. Wonder whether it is barking at anyone in particular. Think, Surely it will run out of barks soon.
If there’s a gun in act one, have the dog bury it in the backyard in act two. Let the gun be a bone-dead thing we forget about and that decomposes, becomes part of the earth. Or let the gun be a seed that is watered and allowed to sprout and become tree and bear fruit that we may then pick and eat or can in jars to be placed in our cellar, lined up in rows against the wall for cold times, drought times, less plentiful gun times, so that we may never go without.
Or take the harvest to the farmers market to sell by weight in green paper cartons, cheaper the more you buy, a half peck, full peck, bushel of guns.
If there’s a gun in act one, let it instead be a banana. Let the hero slip on the peel, fall onto the third rail of the subway tracks in act two, and while he’s being electrocuted, let the banana shoot him in the head.