Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (5 page)

Bob blows his smoke discreetly in my direction and waits for Chris to finish talking to Gang Lu, who is answering questions in a monotone — yes or no, or I don’t know. Another Chinese student named Shan lets himself in after knocking lightly. He nods and smiles at me and then stands at a respectful distance, waiting to ask Chris a question.

It’s like a physics conference in here. I wish they’d all leave so I could make my usual midafternoon spate of personal calls. I begin thumbing through papers in a businesslike way.

Bob pokes at his pipe with a bent paper clip. Shan yawns hugely and then looks embarrassed. Chris erases what he put on the blackboard and tries unsuccessfully to redraw my pecking parakeet. “I don’t know how it goes,” he says to me.

Gang Lu looks around the room idly with expressionless eyes. He’s sick of physics and sick of the buffoons who practice it. The tall glacial German, Chris, who tells him what to do; the crass idiot Bob who talks to him like he is a dog; the student Shan whose ideas about plasma physics are treated with reverence and praised at every meeting. The woman who puts her feet on the desk and dismisses him with her eyes. Gang Lu no longer spends his evenings in the computer lab, running simulations and thinking about magnetic forces and invisible particles; he now spends them at the firing range, learning to hit a moving target with the gun he purchased last spring. He pictures himself holding the gun with both hands, arms straight out and steady; Clint Eastwood, only smarter. Clint Eastwood as a rocket scientist.

He stares at each person in turn, trying to gauge how much respect each of them has for him. One by one. Behind black-rimmed glasses, he counts with his eyes. In each case the verdict is clear: not enough.

The collie fell down the basement stairs. I don’t know if she was disoriented and looking for me or what. But when I was at work she used her long nose like a lever and got the door to the basement open and tried to go down there except her legs wouldn’t do it and she fell. I found her sleeping on the concrete floor in an unnatural position, one leg still awkwardly resting on the last step. I repositioned the leg and sat down next to her and petted her. We used to play a game called Maserati, where I’d grab her nose like a gearshift and put her through all the gears, first second third fourth, until we were going a hundred miles an hour through town. She thought it was funny.

Now I’m at work but this morning there’s nothing to do, and every time I turn around I see her sprawled, eyes mute, leg bent upward. We’re breaking each other’s hearts. I draw a picture of her on the blackboard using brown chalk. I make
X
s where her eyes should be. Chris walks in with the morning paper and a cup of coffee. He looks around the clean office.

“Why are you here when there’s no work to do?” he asks.

“I’m hiding from my life, what else,” I tell him. This sounds perfectly reasonable to him. He gives me part of the paper.

His mother is visiting from Germany, a robust woman of eighty who is depressed and hoping to be cheered up. In the last year she has lost her one-hundred-year-old mother and her husband of sixty years. She mostly can’t be cheered up, but she likes going to art galleries so Chris has been driving her around the Midwest, to our best cities, showing her what kind of art Americans like to look at.

“How’s your mom?” I ask him.

He shrugs and makes a flat-handed so-so motion.

We read, smoke, drink coffee, and yawn. I decide to go home.

“Good idea,” he says encouragingly.

It’s November 1, 1991, the last day of the first part of my life. Before I leave I pick up the eraser and stand in front of the collie’s picture on the blackboard, thinking. I can feel him watching me, drinking his coffee. He’s wearing a gold shirt and blue jeans and a gray cardigan sweater. He is tall and lanky and white-haired, forty-seven years old. He has a wife named Ulrike, a daughter named Karcin, and a son named Goran. A dog named Mica. A mother named Ursula. A friend named me.

I erase the
X
s.

Down the hall, Linhua Shan feeds numbers into a computer and watches as a graph is formed. The computer screen is brilliant blue, and the lines appear in red and yellow and green. Four keystrokes and the green becomes purple. More keystrokes and the blue background fades to the azure of a summer sky. The wave lines arc over it, crossing against one another. He asks the computer to print, and while it chugs along he pulls up a golf game on the screen and tees off.

One room over, at a desk, Gang Lu works on a letter to his sister in China.
The study of physics is more and more disappointing
, he tells her.
Modern physics is self-delusion and all my life I have been honest and straightforward, and I have most of all detested cunning, fawning sycophants and dishonest bureaucrats who think they are always right in everything.
Delicate Chinese characters all over a page. She was a kind and gentle sister, and he thanks her for that. He’s going to kill himself.
You yourself should not be too sad about it, for at least I have found a few traveling companions to accompany me to the grave.
Inside the coat on the back of his chair are a .38-caliber handgun and a .22-caliber revolver. They’re heavier than they look and weigh the pockets down.
My beloved elder sister, I take my eternal leave of you.

The collie’s eyes are almond-shaped; I draw them in with brown chalk and put a white bone next to her feet.

“That’s better,” Chris says kindly.

Before I leave the building I pass Gang Lu in the hallway and say hello. He has a letter in his hand and he’s wearing his coat. He doesn’t answer and I don’t expect him to. At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through.

Friday afternoon seminar, everyone is glazed over, listening as someone explains something unexplainable at the head of the long table. Gang Lu stands up and leaves the room abruptly; goes down one floor to see if the chairman, Dwight, is sitting in his office. He is. The door is open. Gang Lu turns and walks back up the stairs and enters the meeting room again. Chris Goertz is sitting near the door and takes the first bullet in the back of the head. There is a loud popping sound and then blue smoke. Shan gets the second bullet in the forehead, the lenses of his glasses shatter. More smoke and the room rings with the popping. Bob Smith tries to crawl beneath the table. Gang Lu takes two steps, holds his arms straight out, and levels the gun with both hands. Bob looks up. The third bullet in the right hand, the fourth in the chest. Smoke. Elbows and legs, people trying to get out of the way and then out of the room.

Gang Lu walks quickly down the stairs, dispelling spent cartridges and loading new ones. From the doorway of Dwight’s office: the fifth bullet in the head, the sixth strays, the seventh also in the head. A slumping. More smoke and ringing. Through the cloud an image comes forward — Bob Smith, hit in the chest, hit in the hand, still alive. Back up the stairs. Two scientists, young men, crouched over Bob, loosening his clothes, talking to him. From where he lies, Bob can see his best friend still sitting upright in a chair, head thrown back at an unnatural angle. Everything is broken and red. The two young scientists leave the room at gunpoint. Bob closes his eyes. The eighth and ninth bullets in his head. As Bob dies, Chris Goertz’s body settles in his chair, a long sigh escapes his throat. Reload. Two more for Chris, one for Shan. Exit the building, cross two streets, run across the green, into building number two and upstairs.

The administrator, Anne Cleary, is summoned from her office by the receptionist. She speaks to him for a few seconds, he produces the gun and shoots her in the face. The receptionist, a young student working as a temp, is just beginning to stand when he shoots her in the mouth. He dispels the spent cartridges in the stairwell, loads new ones. Reaches the top of the steps, looks around. Is disoriented suddenly. The ringing and the smoke and the dissatisfaction of not checking all the names off the list. A slamming and a running sound, the shout of police. He walks into an empty classroom, takes off his coat, folds it carefully, and puts it over the back of the chair. Checks his watch; twelve minutes since it began. Places the barrel against his right temple. Fires.

The first call comes at four o’clock. I’m reading on the bench in the kitchen, one foot on a sleeping dog’s back. It’s Mary, calling from work. There’s been some kind of disturbance in the building, a rumor that Dwight was shot; cops are running through the halls carrying rifles. They’re evacuating the building and she’s coming over.

Dwight, a tall likable oddball who cut off his ponytail when they made him chair of the department. Greets everyone with a famous booming hello in the morning, studies plasma, just like Chris and Bob. Chris lives two and half blocks from the physics building; he’ll be home by now if they’ve evacuated. I dial his house and his mother answers. She tells me that Chris won’t be home until five o’clock, and then they’re going to a play. Ulrike, her daughter-in-law, is coming back from a trip to Chicago and will join them. She wants to know why I’m looking for Chris; isn’t he where I am?

No, I’m at home and I just had to ask him something. Could he please call me when he comes in.

She tells me that Chris showed her a drawing I made of him sitting at his desk behind a stack of manuscripts. She’s so pleased to meet Chris’s friends, and the Midwest is lovely, really, except it’s very brown, isn’t it?

It is very brown. We hang up.

The Midwest is very brown. The phone rings. It’s a physicist. His wife, a friend of mine, is on the extension. Well, he’s not sure, but it’s possible that I should brace myself for bad news. I’ve already heard, I tell him, something happened to Dwight. There’s a long pause and then his wife says, Jo Ann. It’s possible that Chris was involved.

I think she means Chris shot Dwight. No, she says gently, killed, too.

Mary is here. I tell them not to worry and hang up. I have two cigarettes going. Mary takes one and smokes it. She’s not looking at me. I tell her about the phone call.

“They’re out of it,” I say. “They thought Chris was involved.”

She repeats what they said: I think you should brace yourself for bad news. Pours whiskey in a coffee cup.

For a few minutes I can’t sit down. I can’t stand up. I can only smoke. The phone rings. Another physicist tells me there’s some bad news. He mentions Chris and Bob and I tell him I don’t want to talk right now. He says okay but to be prepared because it’s going to be on the news any minute. It’s 4:45.

“Now they’re trying to stir Bob into the stew,” I tell Mary. She nods; she’s heard this, too. I have the distinct feeling there is something going on that I can either understand or not understand. There’s a choice to be made.

“I don’t understand,” I tell Mary.

We sit in the darkening living room, smoking and sipping our cups of whiskey. Inside my head I keep thinking
Uh-oh
, over and over. I’m in a rattled condition; I can’t calm down and figure this out.

“I think we should brace ourselves in case something bad has happened,” I say to Mary. She nods. “Just in case. It won’t hurt to be braced.” She nods again. I realize that I don’t know what
braced
means. You hear it all the time but that doesn’t mean it makes sense. Whiskey is supposed to be bracing but what it is is awful. I want either tea or beer, no whiskey. Mary nods and heads into the kitchen.

Within an hour there are seven women in the dim living room, sitting. Switching back and forth between CNN and the special reports by the local news. There is something terrifying about the quality of the light and the way voices are echoing in the room. The phone never stops ringing, ever since the story hit the national news. Physics, University of Iowa, dead people. Names not yet released. Everyone I’ve ever known is checking in to see if I’m still alive. California calls, New York calls, Florida calls, Ohio calls twice. All the guests at a party my husband is having call, one after the other, to ask how I’m doing. Each time, fifty times, I think it might be Chris and then it isn’t.

It occurs to me once that I could call his house and talk to him directly, find out exactly what happened. Fear that his mother would answer prevents me from doing it. By this time I am getting reconciled to the fact that Shan, Gang Lu, and Dwight were killed. Also an administrator and her office assistant. The Channel 9 newslady keeps saying there are six dead and two in critical condition. They’re not saying who did the shooting. The names will be released at nine o’clock. Eventually I sacrifice all of them except Chris and Bob; they are the ones in critical condition, which is certainly not hopeless. At some point I go into the study to get away from the terrible dimness in the living room, all those eyes, all that calmness in the face of chaos. The collie tries to stand up but someone stops her with a handful of Fritos.

The study is small and cold after I shut the door, but more brightly lit than the living room. I can’t remember what anything means. The phone rings and I pick up the extension and listen. My friend Michael is calling from Illinois for the second time. He asks Shirley if I’m holding up okay. Shirley says it’s hard to tell. I go back into the living room.

The newslady breaks in at nine o’clock, and of course they drag it out as long as they can. I’ve already figured out that if they go in alphabetical order Chris will come first. Goertz, Lu, Nicholson, Shan, Smith. His name will come on first. She drones on, dead University of Iowa professors, lone gunman named Gang Lu.

Gang Lu. Lone gunman. Before I have a chance to absorb that she says, The dead are.

Chris’s picture.

Oh no, oh God. I lean against Mary’s chair and then leave the room abruptly. I have to stand in the bathroom for a while and look at myself in the mirror. I’m still Jo Ann, white face and dark hair. I have earrings on, tiny wrenches that hang from wires. In the living room she’s pronouncing all the other names. The two critically wounded are the administrator and her assistant, Miya Sioson. The administrator is already dead for all practical purposes, although they won’t disconnect the machines until the following afternoon. The student receptionist will survive but will never again be able to move more than her head. She was in Gang Lu’s path and he shot her in the mouth and the bullet lodged in the top of her spine and not only will she never dance again, she’ll never walk or write or spend a day alone. She got to keep her head but lost her body. The final victim is Chris’s mother, who will weather it all with a dignified face and an erect spine, then return to Germany and kill herself Without further words or fanfare.