Jennings, Brittany

I AM NOT A SERIOUS MAN. I thought Carol understood this about me by our fifth date. I thought it was something I'd established the night of our third date, after we had sex the first time. We lay together for an hour afterward, discussing the vast range of bra sizes and the prehistoric giant sloth, extinct now for thousands of years. It stood twenty feet tall and had massive claws, Carol said. When she added that people who lived when the sloths roamed the earth didn't wear bras, I said, "They were the Greatest Generation." She laughed.

Two dates later, I confessed to her my long-standing fascination with guns. I thought she would understand that I was only half-serious about this, though I was honest when I speculated that guns were an interest American men were conditioned for, starting when we're toddlers. Guns intrigued me for reasons I could not explain. I showed her with my hands the size of what I imagined was the perfect gun for me. I mimed pulling it from a shoulder holster and aiming it at my calzone. I said, "Put the knife down, lady. Drop that knife or I swear to God I'll drop you."

Had I known how Carol would react to this, I never would have done it-because she was not amused, not in the least. She leaned back in her chair, increasing her distance from me and her spaghetti. The look she gave me was the look of a woman who never wanted to see the man she was looking at again. She would never let a gun into her house, she said. In four and a half dates I had not upset her. Now I had. I thought I'd blown it, had taken a wrong turn and could not retrace my steps. This, I thought, was the end of date five.

Soon, though, my future wife pulled her chair back to the table. For the next five minutes she wouldn't look at me. She took a bite of her spaghetti from time to time. She gave me a series of insincere smiles, as if to let me know she knew I was still there. As if to remind me I was being ignored. We ate like someone had ordered us to finish our meals and we had to obey. I felt as if I'd been demoted. I paid the waiter and drove Carol home in silence.

When we arrived, she asked me to come inside.

I was only beginning to understand how Carol works. I had taken her silence to mean that all she wanted was to finish her spaghetti and never see me again. It didn't mean that. She merely wanted to get me to a private space so we could have a proper argument. Carol doesn't like public altercations. She doesn't like to make a scene, and I respect that. Inside her apartment, she said she had almost been frightened of me when I spoke so passionately about deadly weapons. "I hate guns," she said in a way that made it clear that hers was not the passing disdain of the typical liberal arts graduate. She had given it serious thought. She couldn't believe that this man she was falling in love with might want to divide his affections between her and a lethal weapon.

I had not known she was falling in love with me. I said I was sorry and meant it. I told her I knew better than to ever buy a gun. I would never take my interest in them that far. She nodded and said, "Good." Then we took each other's clothes off and forgot the whole thing.

I did my best, for Carol's sake, to put guns out of my mind. For several years after that night, other things occupied my mind-as Carol and I moved in together, as we got married, as we moved from our first house to a bigger house, and as Carol quit taking birth control after some long conversations about whether the time was right to have a child. We concluded that no time would be right to have a child, so we might as well do it before we got old.

Our lives settled. We were content with our jobs. We had a system that articulated which of us would make dinner each night of the week. I had Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. We knew there would be no surprises in our lives, until the baby came and there would be nothing but surprises.

Then something changed. Or maybe nothing changed. Perhaps it was a matter of something I had buried re-emerging, despite Carol. In the calm before the birth of our child, when my greatest worry was whether we had enough eggs to make quiche on a Sunday, Tuesday, or Thursday-if we didn't, I would have to go to Kroger and get more­ l found that I was lacking something, something I could load bullets into, something with a trigger I could squeeze.

I wanted a gun in the old-fashioned sense of the word want. I didn't just desire a gun. I was lacking it, and its absence from my life was deeply felt. I wanted a gun with the same urgency our son would want Carol's breast when he was born.

I had no reason to own a gun. My friends didn't carry them. I didn't know how to shoot or clean one. I hadn't offended members of a local criminal organization. It simply seemed unthinkable that I lived in a country where I could so easily go out and buy a gun and I hadn't done so. There was also disbelief-that I had lived so long in a world that contained both me and guns and I'd never handled one. And I grew up in Kentucky.

 

ONE SATURDAY MORNING when Carol was at yoga, I went to Lion Pawn. For days I'd staked it out online. They had a black and yellow website, with big letters at the top that read WE BUY GOLD. Below that was a window with a short commercial full of sweeping shots of their inventory, followed by close-ups of excited children. The owner wanted his pawn shop to be a family-friendly establishment. He went so far as to flash the words FAMILY FRIENDLY across the screen.

I don’t like to walk into buildings I've not been in before. When I do, I have the creeping sensation that everyone's eyes are on me. This was the case at Lion Pawn, where there was just one other person in the store. A bearded man in a hat stood behind the counter and said hello as I came in. I said hi and turned to the guitars, so as to seem less eager to reach the guns.

I had never been to a pawn shop. I was struck by how like a thrift store it was, but without the useless junk crowding the shelves. They had dozens of guitars and display cases of jewelry and guns-more than I'd expected-enough to arm a Boy Scout troop and make them child soldiers. Behind the counter leaned a long row of shotguns, with a few assault rifles at one end. I could see them from where I stood among the guitars.

I didn't want to be with the guitars. I made my way through them, glancing at price tags to look interested. After a few long minutes of fake browsing, I made my way to the handguns in a big glass case. Some were little single-shot pistols. Others looked like flare guns, with big, fat barrels. I saw a .44 Magnum, and it was like seeing a celebrity in the flesh; there was no way not to notice it, and there was nothing else it could have been. It looked lethally heavy. It wasn't just any gun. It was a gun with a product line of huge condoms named after it.

Half the display case was reserved for semi-automatics, but I didn't want those. Berettas, Clocks-they're more machine than pistol. They look like they have something to hide. You can't see the bullets or where they go. They're stacked in the handle. I wanted something simpler, more naked. I wanted a revolver. Made to greet the hand that grips it, the curves of a revolver are as smooth as young flesh. Its mechanism is ingenious. Pull the trigger and a bullet fires as the wheel turns to present another round. I have not had to study this design; thanks to TV and movies, it's as familiar to me as the recipe for scrambled eggs.

I was disappointed in the revolvers on display at Lion Pawn. I'd expected their metal parts to shine more brightly. I thought the wooden handles would look recently Pledged. These guns looked used and worn, like they'd been fired too many times by men who never washed their hands.

But one revolver did stand out, even though it had the same faults. It was the simplest looking gun, the one most like what I imagined when I pictured the perfect gun for me, my Platonic ideal. I pointed it out to the man behind the counter and said, "I'd like to see that one, please."

It was a Ruger Security Six. Its body was black steel, big letters on the barrel reading STURM, RUGER & co., INC. Its handle was wooden, with diamonds formed from divots etched on both sides. Above each diamond was a metal circle, half the size of a dime, bearing the image of an eagle. At first it looked like a phoenix-I mistook the broad feathers for flames-but when I looked closer I found it wasn't burning. It was in flight.

Here was a pistol with character, one I could take home that day if I wanted. There are no laws where I live to slow such a transaction. I paid the man his five hundred dollars. He put my gun in a cardboard box. I bought a box of bullets-fifty for forty dollars. I wouldn't have thought to get them, but the man asked, "You got ammo for that?" Of course I didn't. I had not thought ahead to the projectiles I would shoot from my gun, why I would want to shoot them, or where they would go when I did.

All this took fifteen minutes. I spent another twenty walking home with the box in a plastic bag. I arrived before Carol, and stowed the gun in the basement, in a desk my grandfather had kept in his shop before I was born. I don't have a shop. I have an office. My desk there is metal, and its drawers barely slide when you pull them. The sturdy desk of my father's father has kept me in mind of what a desk once was. I would keep my gun there-not locked in a place where Carol couldn't reach it. But where she wouldn't look in the first place.

The basement is a place that belongs to me, more or less. Carol goes there only for laundry purposes. In the years we've lived together, she hasn't touched the desk once.

I had a breakfast of toast and scrambled eggs ready by the time she arrived home. She would not know what I had done that morning. She would not see that I'd spent five hundred dollars at Lion Pawn with my debit card, because although we're married, we maintain separate bank accounts. Carol had other things on her mind, anyway. She was just beginning to show, and was thinking more and more of the baby. She was reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which I'd bought her after her last pregnancy test, remarking that soon I would need a different book-What Do You Expect Me to Do While You're Expecting? She laughed at that.

She would not laugh if she knew what I had placed in the drawer of my grandfather's desk. She would scream at a rocket's pace to the nearest divorce lawyer.

 

I DIDN’T TOUCH  THE GUN again that day. I had other things to do, and I wanted to spend time with Carol. Plus, I'd become a victim of buyer's remorse. I have made it sound as if my purchase of the gun was planned in advance. And I did plan it, in a way, over all those years I considered buying a gun. But I didn't leave the house that morning expecting to return with a pistol. Now that I'd gone through with the purchase, though, I thought it might have been wise if I'd kept my desire for a gun in check. I'd spent five hundred dollars on something I didn't need.

I was couch-bound that afternoon, reading online. I visited a site that was nothing but one page of nearly unreadable text-white words on a black background. I found it by searching the phrase, "Should I buy a gun?" The question was irrelevant, as of that morning, but I asked anyway.

The site was addressed to anyone who thought he should own a gun but wasn't convinced it was right for him. It was written for the man I had been just hours before. It started like this:

Before you buy a gun the first thing is to look in yourself and ask, is a gun the right for me? If a bad guy threatens me and/or my family can I bring myself to pull the trigger and risk killing him/her? Will I live with myself after the taking someone’s life not with a knife but with a bullet?

I failed to see why it would be easier to live with stabbing a man than shooting him. A gun would be louder, yes, but if anything, I thought it would be far worse to stab someone and get covered with his/her blood than it would be to shoot an assailant from a distance, even a near distance. Yes, I thought, I could live with myself under these circumstances. I continued reading:

One of the most talked about but misunderstood part of the Bill of Rights is the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is responsible for protecting many Americans from trouble, hostility and danger. Scholars have even said Amendment One and Two will change place, for freedom to speak will always turn to the gun for its defense.

Part of that was true, I thought. The second amendment was misunderstood. To Carol and so many others, amendment number two exists for the sole purpose of arming and boosting the confidence of rednecks. It's something they associate with drunken hunters, murderers, and Charlton Heston. I'd been inclined to see it that way, too, in my pre-pistol years.

Now things were different. Now I was a man with a gun in his house. And while I wasn't about to join the NRA or visit their website, I was exercising a right I'd never given a workout before. I had owned deadly things all my life-kitchen knives, cars, blunt objects heavy enough for murder- but they didn't have amendments devoted to them. Of all my possessions, my gun was the one our founding fathers had arranged for me to have the right to possess.

I shut my laptop and joined Carol upstairs. I placed my hand on her belly and gave her a husband's kiss. I didn't want to hold the gun that morning. I wanted to hold Carol.

 

JUST BEFORE I BOUGHT MY GUN I'd started to feel that whenever I entered a room I would not be able to leave it. "I don't mean this literally," I told Dale, my therapist, two weeks before I entered Lion Pawn. "I don't think an earthquake will level Kroger when I'm there and trap me under the wreckage." It was worse than that, I said. Certain places, certain rooms, were haunting me.

"But places," he said, "don't haunt people."

"Then forget the word haunting," I said. It was like I could still feel a room inhabiting me after I walked out its door. There were certain situations dinners with friends of Carol's, for example, friends who make no effort to hide that they want to sleep with her despite how married we are and how pregnant with my child she is-that I could not shake off. I would replay these evenings for myself and picture Carol's friend arranging herself as we entered the restaurant, so that she would sit beside Carol, leaving me at the far end of our table of eight. I watched her swill wine, put her hand on Carol's arm, and lean against her practically the whole time we were there.

And it wasn't just that. There was more to this than mere jealousy. There were other places I could still feel inside me. Like Kroger. When I stopped there on my way home from work one Wednesday, I'd had a bad interaction with a cashier regarding the accuracy of his scale. Our encounter ended with my hands shaking and everyone watching me sulk through the automatic doors. I couldn't return to Kroger for a month, I was so humiliated. And I couldn't tell Carol, because she would not understand.

Dale taught me a breathing exercise. Inhale for six seconds, hold for six, exhale for another six. But I couldn't do that constantly. I couldn't breathe like that when I was out walking.

FOR A LONG TIME the gun did not leave the basement. There was nowhere I wanted to take it, nothing I wanted to shoot. I loaded it often, but only for the sake of doing so. I would stand six bullets in a row on the desk, and slide them into their chambers, one by one.

Something guns have going for them is that they are sleek, metal objects. Other notable manufactured items have benefited from this status, Zippo lighters and pocket flasks among them.

My grandfather had a flask. It's small, but holds just enough to get its user drunk. His initials-JHC-are engraved on its front. I keep it in my desk, full of whiskey, but I never take it with me out in the world. That would be the surest sign of a problem. I don't want to carry a metal container full of the very thing that killed the man who owned it before me. I want to live long enough to see my child grow old.

No one carries anything metal anymore. All accessories for men are now plastic, like my phone and my most recent pre-revolver acquisition, an Amazon Kindle.

On my Kindle I was reading The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, a book my friend Jamey recommended. I thought it might enhance my reading experience to hold the gun in one hand and the Kindle in the other as I thumbed through electronic pages. I suppose there's something about the feel of a pistol that makes despairing prose go down easier. When Carol wasn't home, I would go to the basement and sit in my chair, my feet on the desk, and hold the unloaded pistol, dicking the hammer back and pulling the trigger with an informal rhythm.

I did not do the things you might expect a man in his basement to do with a gun. When news came of the death of Osama bin Laden-just one week after I brought the gun home-I didn't hold it aloft, or point it at the wall, picturing him there and wishing I could have been the one to pull the trigger that ended his life. I didn't imagine the gun's barrel in Saddam Hussein's mouth as he begged for mercy. Nor did I picture making Qaddafi beg, or Putin.

My gun did not make me feel powerful. Many men seem to own guns for that purpose alone. They want to be grave threats, and lack the patience for martial arts training. On message boards, they post footage of themselves at shooting ranges.

When I held my gun, I felt endangered, not dangerous. I was humbled. I knew what my gun could let me do, the swift end it could bring to my life and Carol's status as a married woman. There was fear in my fascination with the gun, but unlike other fears, like my fears of heights and spiders, it pulled me closer to its object.

I put the gun in my mouth on only one occasion. It was cold. It tasted, predictably, like metal. I held it there for a few seconds, then pulled it out. I put it back in my mouth a few more seconds and put it down, barrel wet. I hadn’t bought the gun for suicide purposes­ I could not do that to Carol. I merely wanted to experiment, and now the experiment was over.

THE NEXT TIME I SAW MY THERAPIST, I told him I'd bought the gun. He was dumbfounded. He said, "What possessed you to do that?"

The question irked me. I didn't want to list reasons. I wanted to discuss my latest enthusiasm. ''I’ve always been interested in guns," I said. "I didn't grow up around them, but I knew people who did. So they've never been that foreign to me."

"But Carol doesn't want you to have one. Right?"

"Carol doesn't know about it."

"You've hidden it from her?"

"If she wanted to find it, she could."

"Mark."

What followed was a long effort to get to the bottom of what it was that had led me to spend so much money on something so hazardous to my life with Carol, and to life in general. He dug through several layers of explanation, each of which was sufficient for me, but not for him.

"I think it has something to do with jealousy," I told him. "I think I've always felt resentful because Carol has The Clitoral Hulk."

Carol had spent the last three years on our local roller derby team. The Clitoral Hulk was her alias. She'd wanted to call herself The Clitoral Hoodlum, but that name was taken by someone in California. There's an online database of alter egos of all the roller derby team members in America, created so that no one uses a name that's already in use. When I learned about that practice, it seemed polite and ladylike to me, even if it led some women to choose aliases like Carol's.

The way Carol talked about The Clitoral Hulk among friends made it sound like she had a secret identity. She would refer to The Hulk as if she were another person, as if it weren't just Carol wearing roller skates and a homemade uniform. "I wanted something like that," I told Dale. "I wanted something to identify with that no one would expect."

Dale wouldn't take that for an answer. We plodded on. I tried to tell him about the beauty I see in the design of a good pistol, but he shook his head and frowned, looking at me like I was a stranger he'd rather not know. He looked at me like Carol had looked at me the night of our fifth date. For a second I thought he was doing an unannounced kind of role-playing, in which he played Carol and I played myself I told Dale I was sorry. "Sorry?" he said, looking more disgusted. "I am not the one to whom you owe an apology." He was as appalled as Carol would be if she found my gun.

"I want you to get rid of the gun," he said. "Take it back where you found it. Do the right thing, do it tonight, and come back next week."

 

I CALLED JAMEY and invited him out for drinks. I was holding my gun when I called him.

At the bar, he asked how Carol was doing. I asked after his pregnant wife. I didn't tell him I had bought a gun. Unlike Dale, he was not obliged to keep my secrets from Carol, so I brought up gun ownership as a hypothetical proposition. I said, "Is there anything that would make you want to buy a gun?"

He looked away for a few long seconds. Thinking. Sometimes he gets a look in his eyes that means he's got something good to say. He gazed at the bottles behind the bar, and said, "You could put all that money, all that manpower, into making anything." He took a deep breath and scratched his nose. "When you manufacture something, when you produce a thing that wasn't in the world before, you change the world. You can make an Elmo doll or a vibrator-those won't harm anybody. But when you bring a gun into the world, something that's made to do one thing, which is hurt people, you make the world more violent. More dangerous. You make it less likely that a person will make it safely from point A to point B."

He leaned aside and looked sidelong into my eyes.

I didn't tell him he was wrong. I didn't point out that a gun was just a thing, that its role in the world was determined by its owner. I didn't say that you could kill someone with a vibrator or an Elmo doll, that a human being could choke on anything, conceivably. Sometimes a gun is not a weapon, I didn't argue. Sometimes it's just a gun.

"I'm with you," I said.

 

A FEW NIGHTS AFTER I INVITED CRAIG to the same bar. Craig is different from Jamey- taller, for one, and with a beard. He doesn't orate the way Jamey will. Even though Craig is from rural Tennessee and I grew up in an upper-middle-class part of Lexington, and no one believes I'm from Kentucky when I tell them because I never took on the accent, I've always felt a certain kinship with him that I never felt with Jamey, who's from Vermont.

To my surprise, I didn't even have to introduce guns into my conversation with Craig. He brought them up himself. He told me about a man at his store who had come in looking for shotguns. "That's not a problem, usually," he said. "But this man had on a shirt that said, 'Fuck that bitch,' and this crazy look in his eyes. Something was wrong with his ears, too. I wanted to sell him some shampoo. I had to explain to him that we can refuse service to whoever we want, whenever we want, and we were refusing service to him. He did not take that lying down.

“He said, 'You kidding me?' He said, 'You know I can just go across town and get this same thing at another store.’” Craig shook his head.

“And then what?”

"I asked him what he thought he was going to do with his shotgun then. He said, 'What do you think I'm gonna do with it?' I said, 'I don't want to say what I think.' He laughed at that. He said, 'Listen, either you're gonna let me pay for this or else you're gonna pay for not letting me.' And that was it. I said, ‘Out.’

"He just walked away and I was like, Asshole, you think I don't hear this shit all the time?"

"Wait. You do?"

"Yes, Mark. Every day. Not usually like that. But you wouldn't believe the guys who come in to buy a gun. Normal people do it, but there are plenty of guys who look like they just wandered in off the street, like they were out for a stroll and just decided to buy a gun, and it's like, who knows what they're gonna do with it. Sit in their kitchen and start making a list, maybe."

I said, ''I'd buy a gun if I was allowed to."

"You say that," he said. "But I don't think it's true."

"I mean it," I said, and I told Craig what I'd been wanting to tell someone since I bought the gun. I told him about wanting a revolver, rather than any other sort of gun.

''And it has everything to do with that word-revolver," I said.

I went on to explain that revolver was a near-perfect word. Almost but not quite a palindrome, it evokes, in its movement, the smooth rotation of the gun's cylinder from one chamber to the next.

I thought Craig would be sympathetic to this. He probably says revolver several times a day. But he looked down at the bar. "Mark," he asked. "What makes you think you should have a gun?"

I explained that I've never been an especially handy guy, that I didn't grow up with a hands-on father, which I thought he'd understand, since he grew up without any father. No one taught him to fix a broken door or change a tire, and I never learned to do those things either.

I told him that when I'd bought a house with Carol, I thought I'd learn to patch a leaky pipe and replace a hinge. But it didn't work out that way. Most of the time I'm busy at my job. There's no need for me to fix things. If a pipe breaks, we call a man who comes from a long line of hands-on dads, and pay him to come fix it for us. In fact, if I suggest fixing something on my own, Carol calls one of those well­ fathered men instead, someone who knows what he's doing.

A gun, I told Craig, is a small thing that demands maintenance, a metal thing I could learn to take apart, reassemble, and clean. One reason to own a gun, I said, would be to learn how to really use something. "I can't do that with my Kindle."

Craig laughed, and for a second that was all he did. Then he said, "Well, I guess you do need a gun then," and he laughed some more as he returned his attention to his beer.

*

ONE NIGHT, A FEW WEEKS LATER, when Carol was asleep with our baby inside her, I went to the basement and withdrew the gun and flask from the desk. I took a long drink and laid the flask before me. At two in the morning, I beheld three objects from my chair-flask, gun, Kindle. I thought the whiskey would make me tired, but as the moments passed, my insomnia went unabated.

If my grandfather's flask had his initials on it, I thought, then the gun I'd chosen as my hand-held ornament should say something more than STURM, RUGER & co., INC. I wanted to make a mark on this thing for whoever found it when I was dead or in enough of a coma to make Carol give up hope. When I can't speak for myself, I thought, I'd want to speak through this pistol. I'd want everyone to know it was mine.

My father had given me a file as one piece in a tool set that served as a housewarming present. I said to Carol at the time that I could take his gift in one of two ways-a passive-aggressive acknowledgment of how he'd never taught me to use tools, or an apology for the same. At the desk, underground, I used that file on my gun, like a convict scratching at his bars, as if l were attempting to break out of something and into the barrel of the gun.

I tried to write my name across one side of the barrel, but when I got to the letter K, I made a mistake. Somehow the K looked more like an E, with one horizontal bar missing. It looked like I had started to write MARE but my arm had gotten tired and I'd stopped filing.

I couldn't fix it. And I wasn't about to return to Lion Pawn and buy a new pistol. I thought for a minute and did the only thing I could think of. I finished the E and-very carefully now-extended the word, as if playing a game of gun-Scrabble. When I finished, it read NIGHTMARE. It wasn't what I wanted, but it was better than MARE.

 

THE NEXT NIGHT I LAY AWAKE in bed, beside Carol, past midnight, attempting again to sleep. At 1:30 I went to the basement and sat at my grandfather's desk. I pulled the gun from its drawer. It said NIGHTMARE, but this word was irrelevant to both the gun and its owner. I sipped whiskey from my grandfather's flask. I would not risk botching another word. One side of the barrel read NIGHTMARE. The other side would have a series of notches up and down its length. It would be simple, I thought. It would be enigmatic. I went to work marking the gun's barrel.

When I finished, it looked like this: / / / / / / / / / /

It looked as if I'd made each mark after using the gun to kill someone. I put the file away. I put the gun in its drawer. I returned to my bed and didn't sleep until four in the morning.

 

THE NEXT NIGHT, I took my insomnia to the basement again, but this time I brought my shoes and clothes. Carol didn't stir. This would be, I decided, the first night I took my gun outside. I would creep out through the basement window. Carol wouldn't hear me leave from up in our room. If she woke when I returned to our bed, I would tell her I'd spent those hours downstairs with my Kindle.

In my jeans and jacket I walked our little town's streets, the gun buried in my pocket, in my hand. I didn't fire it. I didn't want to get arrested. I didn't want anything. I was just walking. The gun wasn't even loaded.

Two nights later, though, I took another late walk, and before I ventured out I loaded all six chambers. I had no plans to shoot anything or anyone, or to do anything in particular. I just thought as long as I had the gun, it might as well be full of ammunition.

 

THE NEXT TIME I SAW DALE, I told him I'd taken my gun back to the pawn shop.

He told me he was  proud  of me, that I  had done the right thing. I shouldn't tell Carol, he went on. It would only hurt her, and if she didn't know about it, no harm done. After a long sigh-Dale sighs often-he said I needed a mantra. That wasn't what he called it; he called it an "affirmation," but I had prior associations with that word and didn't want it to apply to anything that came out of my mouth.

He told me his mantra had helped him find a partner. Whenever he started to doubt himself in his long hunt for a good man in our small town, he had said to himself, "I deserve to be with the perfect man for me." He repeated these words many times a day. A few months later, he was with Jon, with whom he has lived for the last seven years.

I liked his mantra. It was simple. It wasn't for me, though. I had to come up with my own. Dale asked what I'd like mine to be. For a moment I thought he expected me to have my mantra figured out in a few seconds, but he told me I should think about it and tell him what I came up with when I returned.

All the rest of that day I tried out mantras in my head. I deserve to be with the perfect man. I am the perfect man for Carol. I am the perfect man. I decided I should lose the "perfect man'' foundation of Dale's mantra and make mine more specific to my needs. I am the man that I have chosen to be, I went on. I am what I have chosen to be. I am where I have chosen to be.

I am in the room where I have chosen to be.

I am in one room and there I have chosen to be. I will leave when I decide to leave.

When I decide to leave I will have left.

All the rest of that day, I recited mantras in my head. They continued to change, as if on their own, each one becoming the next without my influence.

 

WHEN CAROL AND I  FIRST MOVED to this suburb, we were amazed at how quiet it was at night. Before we moved here, we'd lived not far from Cleveland's city center, where there was constant noise out our window. At 1:00 a.m., at 3:00, at 4:00, we heard dogs barking, distant trucks, people shouting. Out here there is almost no noise at all, as if silence is something sacred to us and our neighbors, something we've agreed should never be disturbed.

Given that, one might expect a gunshot to make a stronger impression than mine seemed to make on my sixth walk with my gun, when I finally fired it. Despite the crack of the pistol and the flash, there were no consequences for what I did. I heard no sirens. Granted, the place I fired it was a footpath where no one seems to walk, especially at night. And the sound of the pistol wasn't nearly as loud as I thought it would be.

I hadn't seen the fawn until we were very near one another. She scared me. I was trudging through the poorly-lit path when I glanced aside and caught sight of her head, just six feet from where I froze. I thought she was a dog. I thought she was a pit bull poised to kill me. Her nose was tilted to one side. Her eye was on me. I don't recall raising the gun, which was already in my hand. I remember firing. I recall how hard I had to squeeze the trigger to make the gun go off.

When I fired, the barrel dropped a bit. I missed her head. I don't know where I hit her, but as I turned to run I heard her wheeze. I didn't think a deer could wheeze, not the way this one did. She sounded like a person, like a deathbed respirator. She exhaled only once before I ran as fast as I could run.

I was tempted to drop the gun, but didn't. I held it tightly all the way home. My heart was still pounding when I rejoined Carol in bed. I did not sleep that night.

*

ALL THE NEXT DAY, and the day after that, I checked the local paper online, at ten-minute intervals, for signs that someone had reported the gunshot or the wounded deer I'd left in the path. Nothing came up. Perhaps the police were keeping it quiet, or maybe dead deer don't get reported in the paper. I don't know. I didn't want to know.

I kept the gun in the desk for days, convinced I should get rid of it. I couldn't return it to the pawn shop, though. What if the police had warned them to watch for a gun like the one used on the baby deer? What would they make of the inscription I'd made? I might have thrown it away had I known where to throw it, but gradually I began to calm down. I have not fired it since, and not because I haven't had more night encounters with young mammals. I have had to think hard about what my gun means to me. I have weighed what it was made to be against what it has the potential to be.

The gun does not have to be a weapon. Like my grandfather's flask, it can be a kind of emblem. When I am dead, someone will find my gun. Whoever it is will not know about the deer or what I did in this basement when I still lived, but the gun will make a bold impression-certainly bolder than the Kindle's. It will be a sign that the people in my life did not really know me. It will tell its discoverer that there was more to me than they thought there was, that something in me defied recognition all those years I spent above ground.

 

I HAVE NOT GIVEN UP on my ever-changing mantra. I recite it through the fights I have with Carol that start when she asks why I am so distracted. I repeat it through our frantic drive to the hospital. I whisper it under my breath as I hold my son for the first time and an anaesthetized Carol dozes off.

I am in one room and there I am. I am in a perfect room.

I keep a perfect gun in a perfect room.

My gun is a perfect room.

I am nowhere but where I am.

I think my gun is my mantra. It makes a plain statement, an affirmation so simple, so perfect, it need not be repeated. And when I'm dead, it will belong to my son. He'll open the bottom drawer of his great-grandfather's desk to find a piece of me left intact, a piece he never knew, my gun, my mantra, and it will be as if he's hearing my voice for the first time.