Lenny bent his knees and spread both arms wide, his mouth stretched in a rictus of gaped and grinning terror.
"We're all gonna die!"
He loved this line so much it was a little unnerving, especially in DeeAnn's voice, which could shatter a urinal at fifty feet. An hour later, after all the bits, the scatological asides, the improvised voices, it was this isolated line that stayed in people's mind when they went to their cars and drove home to Westwood or Brentwood or wherever, or roamed the freeways for half the night because they knew they wouldn't be able to sleep and what better place to imagine the flash and burst, where else would they go to rehearse the end of history, or actually see it-this was the meaning of the freeways and always had been and they'd always known it at some unsounded level. And so they drove half the night, at first morose and then angry and then fatalistic and then plain shaking scared, chests tight with the knowledge of how little it would take to make the thing happen-the first night on earth when the Unthinkable crept up over the horizon line and waited in an animal squat, and all the time they drove they heard the keening of that undisguisable Jewish voice repeating the line that had made them bust their guts laughing, astonishingly, only a few hours earlier.
It was a gesture without a history
You hefted the weapon and pointed it and saw an interested smile fall across his face. But after that you were in unknown country The slyest kind of shit-eating grin. But after you forced back the trigger. The trigger pull was heavy and rough. And after you force-squeezed the trigger you were in another place, absorbing the noise and movement, the gesture, the way he jerked and fell, although jerked isn't an adequate word-it was a movement beyond your competence as a witness to understand and describe.
At Staatsburg they had the woman in the office, Dr. Lindblad, and I had regular appointments, knock-knock, and she probed the subject of the shooting while I tried to get a look at her legs.
Forget for a minute that you're the one who shot him.
You can't describe the movement properly because it was a level of reality you hadn't rehearsed, either one of you. The unhinged fling of an arm, the right arm whippy and haywire, like a part that runs amuck in a machine, and the whole body spasm, an arrhythmic thing, a thing outside the limits of experience.
You don't want to forget he was sitting in a chair. The chair moved not unlike the man. The chair could have been a version of the man, so drastic was its tumble into the wall.
And of course your own shock, the trauma of perception-how can you tell what's going on if you're in shock yourself?
Dr. Lindblad said, "Do you think you'd like to have a family someday?"
"I don't know. Haven't thought about it. No," I said. "I don't think so. Kids? I don't want kids. I don't want to be a father."
"And why is that?"
"Why is that. I don't know. After what I've done? I don't think I should be a father. Do you?"
"What have you done, Nick?"
I smiled at her. I liked Dr. Lindblad. She wasn't good-looking but she was stacked. The Alley Boys liked her, the gang members, because she listened to their stones without making judgments. She did delicate twirling tricks with their rage and shame and sullen excuses. She did not try to get them to moderate their sense of inevitability. They were at war with society and what's the point of pretending otherwise. I didn't tell her anything but I liked going into her office and smelling the furniture wax and checking the titles of the books and scouting out the bulge of her breasts under the fabric of whatever snug blouse she was wearing that day.
One of the Alley Boys looked out the window of the mess and said, "That's a Disney picture, man." He was talking about the miniature golf course. 'And we're the dwarfs that supposed to be in it."
I wanted my correction to be consistent and strong. They'd made an attempt to try me as an adult even though I was only seventeen at the time and I agreed with their reasoning, that there was a coldblooded element in this crime whatever the shadings. When a judge ruled that the prosecution couldn't do this, they decided to try me for manslaughter and again I thought why not, considering the recklessness of the act, but my lawyer Imperato, a man with sallow jowls and a briefcase that was shedding skin, arranged a plea deal and they went for a lesser charge and now I stood looking at the golf course on a soft summer morning a few days before my release and saw that someone had painted names all over the ramparts and windmills, the nicknames of gang members, all hail the Alhambras, and the guys gawked and pointed and bent over laughing and I thought this was the time to start my round of guilty goodbyes.
Because you were the shooter and the witness both and you can separate these roles. The second was helpless to prevent the first from acting. The second could not stop the act, could not manage it and finally did not know how to perceive it. It was too down deep even as it reached his eyes, your eyes. The terrible spasticky thing, the whole groanlike abandon, the resignation of life and breath to this vehement depth of gesture, man and chair going different ways.
Dr. Lindblad might have said, "The gesture is extreme because the mind is closing down. It's the end of consciousness. So the body goes berserk. The body shows you what's happening to the mind. The way a person's grief bends the body. This is how consciousness looks. This is how it flails and thrashes when the end is sudden and violent and the mind is unprepared."
And I might have said, "You're talking about his mind, how the end is sudden, or mine?"
But she didn't say it and I didn't say it because I wasn't talking much. The Alley Boys were talking. They told her they were in a state of total war with society. They told her it would be that way until they were dead. Society wanted them dead. The Alley Boys were too smart not to know this. They told her they'd get released and go back to the street, which was another department of the penal system and vice versa, and they'd go back and do what they'd always done, they told her. They'd deal, steal, get the edge, carry the piece and pursue the conduct of the war.