The Theme of Identity in The Briefcase and The Bullet in the Brain - Essay Example

“The Briefcase” and “The Bullet in the Brain”: The Theme of Identity. . In Rebecca Makkai's story “The Briefcase,” a political prisoner, a chef by trade, escapes from a chain gang. This unnamed protagonist finds himself in possession of the briefcase of a physics professor who has been arrested in his stead. He goes on to live out his life in the persona of the professor. He is finally unmasked by the professor’s wife. Tobias Wolff’s “The Bullet in the Brain,” relates the tale of a hold up at a bank. The protagonist, Anders, provokes the robbers, and is shot in the head. At the instant of his death, his past life flashes before his eyes. At first glance, the two stories are completely different. The first story is set in a period of revolution, and the action moves from one town to another, and covers a period of years; in the second story, the setting is a mundane bank, and the action is over within an hour. “The Briefcase,” ends in exposure, while “The Bullet” ends in death. The former chef in “The Briefcase,” and Anders in “The Bullet in the Brain,” are as different as chalk from cheese: particularly in the matter of their respective education. However, a closer reading reveals a thematic link between the two narratives. “The Briefcase,” and “The Bullet in the Brain,” both deal with the theme of identity. The stories deal with the defining characteristic of the protagonists’ identities, their respective changes of identity, and their persistence with their identities at the climax of the stories. In “The Briefcase,” the defining characteristic of the former chef’s identity is the strength of his urge for survival. In the case of Anders in “The Bullet in the Brain,” it is his love for the language. The chef is obviously a resourceful man, who does not run unnecessary risks. He becomes a part of the chain gang, not for his own revolutionary beliefs, but only because his restaurant is frequented by customers who discuss politics. He attempts to evade arrest: “he had run and hidden and gone without food” (Makkai, 6). He is resourceful enough to escape the chain gang, hide from the soldiers, and run out to grab the Professor’s briefcase. In contrast, Anders demonstrates a brazen attitude towards the armed robbers, which is extremely foolhardy. He ignores the woman’s plea to “Please be quiet,” (Wolffe, 12), and continues to provoke the robbers with his talk. The chef quickly assumes the professor’s identity realizing that “If he wanted to live through the next year, the chef would have to learn this life and fill it” (Makkai, 7). He moves five cities away from the place of his escape; he has no scruples in soliciting money from the professor’s friends and students; he is willing to mislead the professor’s wife into thinking her husband to be alive: “And what of it, if she kept her happiness another few months, another year?” (Makkai,7). On the other hand, Ander’s love for the language overrides his instinct for survival. Even when he is threatened with imminent death, his murderer’s stereotypical speech makes him “burst out laughing” (Wolff, 13). The chef survives, while Anders dies. As the two stories unfold, both the protagonists are shown to undergo a change in identity. In the case of the chef in “The Briefcase,” he assumes a false identity, and then goes on to live the part. He attempts to become the Professor who taught at “the university he had never attended” (Makkai, 6). With an education “which had ended for him at the age of sixteen,” (Makkai, 7), the chef determines that he will transform himself into the Professor. Ignorant of Physics, he now draws pictures of the universe, and attempts to answer the Professor’s exam question. He tells his lover that he is a Professor of Physics, and is so totally into his false identity that he believes that, “If the professor takes it back, there will be no name left for the chef, no place on the Earth” (Makkai, 9). In “The Bullet in the Brain,” Anders’ change in identity occurs over a much longer period, and is very subtly told through the flashbacks, as he dies. Anders is shown to be a bad-tempered, critical man, who “never was in the best of tempers” (Wolffe, 11). He responds to the woman in front of him with scathing sarcasm, and brazenly laughs at the robber’s use of clichés. He exhibits an attitude of superiority and condescension, considering the bank “a pompous old building” (Wolffe, 12), and criticizes the paintings on the ceiling. But, as the flashback unfolds, Anders’ change in identity over the years is evident. The cynical critic of the present has a past in which he is the passionate lover, the fond father who lingers outside his daughter’s bedroom to hear her talk with her Teddy bear, the man who “could give himself the shivers” (Wolffe, 13) with the delight of poetry, or be moved to tears at the resonance of Greek. Above all, the cynical critic was once a boy who, instead of criticizing his playmate’s grammar, celebrates the words, “they is” for “their pure unexpectedness and their Music” (Wolffe, 14). The uneducated chef becomes a Professor of Physics; Anders, the sympathetic, sensitive boy, becomes a sarcastic critic, with only his love for language remaining the same. The change in identity is complete in both the stories. As the action in the narratives draws to the climax, the protagonists are given the opportunity to change their identities. However, both the chef and Anders cling to the identity they hold, and do not revert to the past. The chef is unmasked by the Professor’s wife, who asks for his explanation. Instead of confessing the chain of events which lead to his assumed identity, asking pardon, and making amends, he persists in holding on to the false persona. Showing no remorse for his deception, he pleads with the wife: “Let me go home with you. I’ll be a father to your son, and I’ll warm your bed, and I’ll keep you safe” (Makkai, 10). His makeover is so complete, it hinges on the border of insanity. He is ready to confront the police, the judge, and even the Professor’s own son. Armed with the evidence of the briefcase, “he feels confident he can prove to them that he is the professor” (Makkai,10). In the case of Anders, even at the point of death, he is unable to break out of the hard shell of superiority, and pretension, which has become the hallmark of his identity. He cannot let go of the persona he has come to portray: the supercilious, cynical, critic. Even when the bank robber “stuck the pistol under Anders’ chin and pushed it upward” (Wolffe, 12), and threatens to kill him if he does not keep quiet, Anders laughs at the man’s “Capiche?” Anders cannot abandon his posture even when his life depends on it. Anders has changed everything in his identity over the years, except his love for the language. It is this love, corrupted with cynical sarcasm, which indirectly causes his death. The chef and Anders stick to their assumed identities. Due to this, the former is headed towards certain punishment, and the latter faces death. “The Briefcase,” and “The Bullet in the Brain,” are largely focused on the exploration of the identities of their respective protagonists. The chief characteristic of the chef’s identity is his caution, and his strong survival instinct. While his love for the music of language rules his life, Anders is foolhardy and courts death. Both of them undergo a change of identity. The uneducated chef dramatically transforms himself into a learned Professor of Physics, and convinces himself that he is the Professor. Anders transformation takes place slowly over a period of years. The sensitive boy who refrains from criticizing, and knows the pleasure of showing respect, becomes the callous wit, who reflexively resorts to rude antagonism. Both the protagonists hold on to their assumed personas at the climax. The chef is determined to perpetuate the ruse at any cost, even when he is definitely exposed. Anders persists in his sardonic wit, even when it costs him his life. The strongest thematic link between “The Briefcase,” and “The Bullet in the Brain,” is the exploration of identity. Both the stories are grounded on the exploration of the identities of their protagonists. Works Cited. Makkai, Rebecca. “The Briefcase.” Name of Book. Ed. Editor’s Name. City of Publication: Publisher, Year. Page range of story. Print. Wolff, Tobias. “The Bullet in the Brain.” Name of Book. Ed. Editor’s Name. City of Publication: Publisher, Year. Page range of story. Print.  He thought how strange that a political prisoner, marched through town in a line, chained to the man behind and chained to the man ahead, should take comfort in the fact that this had all happened before. He thought of other chains of men on other islands of the Earth, and he thought how since there have been men there have been prisoners. He thought of mankind as a line of miserable monkeys chained at the wrist, dragging each other back into the ground.    In the early morning of December first, the sun was finally warming them all, enough to walk faster. With his left hand, he adjusted the loop of steel that cuffed his right hand to the line of doomed men. His hand was starved, his wrist was thin, his body was cold: the cuff slipped off. In one beat of the heart he looked back to the man behind him and forward to the man limping ahead, and knew that neither saw his naked red wrist; each saw only his own mother weeping in a kitchen, his own love lying on a bed in white sheets and sunlight.     He walked in step with them to the end of the block.    Before the war this man had been a chef, and his one crime was feeding the people who sat at his tables in small clouds of smoke and talked politics. He served them the wine that fueled their underground newspaper, their aborted revolution. And after the night his restaurant disappeared in fire, he had run and hidden and gone without food—he who had roasted ducks until the meat jumped from the bone, he who had evaporated three bottles of wine into one pot of cream soup, he who had peeled the skin from small pumpkins with a twist of his hand.     And here was his hand, twisted free of the chain, and here he was running and crawling, until he was through a doorway. It was a building of empty classrooms—part of the university he had never attended. He watched from the bottom corner of a second-story window as the young soldiers stopped the line, counted 199 men, shouted to each other, shouted at the men in the panicked voices of children who barely filled the shoulders of their uniforms. One soldier, a bigger one, a louder one, stopped a man walking by. A man in a suit, with a briefcase, a beard—some sort of professor. The soldiers stripped him of his coat, his shirt, his leather case, cuffed him to the chain. They marched again. And as soon as they were past—no, not that soon; many minutes later, when he had the stomach—the chef ran down to the street and collected the man’s briefcase, coat, and shirt.    In the alley, the chef sat against a wall and buttoned the professor’s shirt over his own ribs. When he opened the briefcase, papers flew out, a thousand doves flailing against the walls of the alley. The chef ran after them all, stopped them with his feet and arms, herded them back into the case. Pages of numbers, of arrows and notes and hand-drawn star maps. Here were business cards: a professor of physics. Envelopes showed his name and address—information that might have been useful in some other lifetime, one where the chef could ring the bell of this man’s house and explain to his wife about empty chains, empty wrists, empty classrooms. Here were graded papers, a fall syllabus, the typed draft of an exam. The question at the end, a good one: “Using modern astronomical data, construct, to the best of your ability, a proof that the Sun revolves around the Earth.”    The chef knew nothing of physics. He understood chemistry only insofar as it related to the baking time of bread at various elevations or the evaporation rate of alcohol. His knowledge of biology was limited to the deboning of chickens and the behavior of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, common bread yeast. And what did he know at all of moving bodies and gravity? He knew this: he had moved from his line of men, creating a vacuum—one that had sucked the good professor in to fill the void.     The chef sat on his bed in the widow K——’s basement and felt, in the cool leather of the briefcase, a second vacuum: here was a vacated life. Here were salary receipts, travel records, train tickets, a small address book. And these belonged to a man whose name was not blackened like his own, a man whose life was not hunted. If he wanted to live through the next year, the chef would have to learn this life and fill it—and oddly, this felt not like a robbery but an apology, a way to put the world back in balance. The professor would not die, because he himself would become the professor, and he would live.     Surely he could not teach at the university; surely he could not slip into the man’s bed unnoticed. But what was in this leather case, it seemed, had been left for him to use. These addresses of friends; this card of identification; this riddle about the inversion of the universe.    Five cities east, he now gave his name as the professor’s, and grew out his beard so it would match the photograph on the card he now carried in his pocket. They did not, anymore, look entirely dissimilar. To the first man in the address book, the chef had written a typed letter: “Am in trouble and have fled the city . . . Tell my dear wife I am safe, but for her safety do not tell her where I am . . . If you are able to help a poor old man, send money to the following post box . . . I hope to remain your friend, Professor T——.”     He had to write this about the wife; how could he ask these men for money if she held a funeral? And what of it, if she kept her happiness another few months, another year?    The next twenty-six letters were similar in nature, and money arrived now in brown envelopes and white ones. The bills came wrapped in notes—was his life in danger? did he have his health?—and with the money he paid another widow for another basement, and he bought weak cigarettes. He sat on café chairs and drew pictures of the universe, showed stars and planets looping each other in light. He felt, perhaps, that if he used the other papers in the briefcase, he must also make use of this question. Or perhaps he felt that if he could answer it, he could put the universe back together. Or perhaps it was something to do with his empty days.    He wrote in his small notebook: “The light of my cigarette is a fire like the Sun. From where I sit, all the universe is equidistant from my cigarette. Ergo, my cigarette is the center of the universe. My cigarette is on Earth. Ergo, the Earth is the center of the universe. If all heavenly bodies move, they must therefore move in relation to the Earth, and in relation to my cigarette.”    His hand ached; these words were the most he had written since school, which had ended for him at age sixteen. He had been a smart boy, even talented in languages and mathematics, but his mother knew these were no way to make a living. He was not blessed, like the professor, with years of scholarship and quiet offices and leather books. He was blessed instead with chicken stocks and herbs and sherry. Thirty years had passed since his last day of school, and his hand was accustomed now to wooden spoon, mandolin, peeling knife, rolling pin.     Today, his hands smelled of ink, when for thirty years they had smelled of leeks. They were the hands of the professor; ergo, he was now the professor.    He had written to friends A through L, and now he saved the rest and wrote instead to students. Here in the briefcase’s outermost pocket were class rosters from the past two years; letters addressed to those young men care of the university were sure to reach them. The amounts they sent were smaller, the notes that accompanied them more inquisitive. What exactly had transpired? Could they come to the city and meet him?     The post box, of course, was in a city different from the one where he stayed. He arrived at the post office just before closing, and came only once every two or three weeks. He always looked through the window first to check that the lobby was empty. If it was not, he would leave and come again another day. Surely, one of these days a friend of the professor would be waiting there for him. He prepared a story, that he was the honored professor’s assistant, that he could not reveal the man’s location but would certainly pass on your kindest regards, sir.    If the Earth moved, all it would take for a man to travel its distance would be a strong balloon. Rise twenty feet above, and wait for the Earth to turn under you; you would be home again in a day. But this was not true, and a man could not escape his spot on the Earth but to run along the surface. Ergo, the Earth was still. Ergo, the Sun was the moving body of the two.    No, he did not believe it. He wanted only to know who this professor was, this man who would, instead of teaching his students the laws of the universe, ask them to prove as true what was false.    On the wall of the café: plate-sized canvas, delicate oils of an apple, half-peeled. Signed, below, by a girl he had known in school. The price was more than three weeks of groceries, and so he did not buy it, but for weeks he read his news under the apple and drank his coffee. Staining his fingers in cheap black ink were the signal fires of the world, the distress sirens, the dispatches from the trenches and hospitals and abattoirs of the war; but here, on the wall, a sign from another world. He had known this girl as well as any other: had spoken with her every day, but had not made love to her; had gone to her home one winter holiday, but knew nothing of her life since then. And here, a clue, perfect and round and unfathomable. After all this time: apple.     After he finished the news, he worked at the proof and saw in the coil of green-edged skin some model of spiraling, of expansion. The stars were at one time part of the Earth, until the hand of God peeled them away, leaving us in the dark. They do not revolve around us: they escape in widening circles. The Milky Way is the edge of this peel.    After eight months in the new city, the chef stopped buying his newspapers on the street by the café and began instead to read the year-old news the widow gave him for his fires. Here, fourteen months ago: Minister P—— of the Interior predicts war. One day he found that in a box near the widow’s furnace were papers three, four, five years old. Pages were missing, edges eaten. He took his fragments of yellowed paper to the café and read the beginnings and ends of opinions and letters. He read reports from what used to be his country’s borders.     When he had finished the last paper of the box, he began to read the widow’s history books. The Americas, before Columbus; the oceans, before the British; the Romans, before their fall.    History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end.    He took a lover in the city and told her he was a professor of physics. He showed her the stars in the sky and explained that they circled the Earth, along with the Sun.    That’s not true at all, she said. You tease me because you think I’m a silly girl.    No, he said and touched her neck, You are the only one who might understand. The universe has been folded inside out.    A full year had passed, and he paid the widow in coins. He wrote to friends M through Z. I have been in hiding for a year, he wrote. Tell my dear wife I have my health. May time and history forgive us all.     A year had passed, but so had many years passed for many men. And after all what was a year, if the Earth did not circle the Sun?     The Earth does not circle the Sun, he wrote. Ergo, the years do not pass. The Earth, being stationary, does not erase the past nor escape toward the future. Rather, the years pile on like blankets, existing all at once. The year is 1848; the year is 1789; the year is 1956.     If the Earth hangs still in space, does it spin? If the Earth were to spin, the space I occupy I will therefore vacate in an instant. This city will leave its spot, and the city to the west will usurp its place. Ergo, this city is all cities at all times. This is Kabul; this is Dresden; this is Johannesburg.     I run by standing still.    At the post office, he collects his envelopes of money. He has learned from the notes of concerned colleagues and students and friends that the professor suffered from infections of the inner ear that often threw his balance. He has learned of the professor’s wife, A——, whose father died the year they married. He has learned that he has a young son. Rather, the professor has a son.     At each visit to the post office, he fears he will forget the combination. It is an old lock, and complicated: F1, clockwise to B3, back to A6, forward again to J3. He must shake the little latch before it opens. More than forgetting, perhaps what he fears is that he will be denied access—that the little box will one day recognize him behind his thick and convincing beard, will decide he has no right of entry.     One night, asleep with his head on his lover’s leg, he dreams that a letter has arrived from the professor himself. They freed me at the end of the march, it says, and I crawled my way home. My hands are bloody and my knees are worn through, and I want my briefcase back.     In his dream, the chef takes the case and runs west. If the professor takes it back, there will be no name left for the chef, no place on the Earth. The moment his fingers leave the leather loop of the handle, he will fall off the planet.    He sits in a wooden chair on the lawn behind the widow’s house. Inside, he hears her washing dishes. In exchange for the room, he cooks all her meals. It is March, and the cold makes the hairs rise from his arms, but the sun warms the arm beneath them. He thinks, The tragedy of a moving Sun is that it leaves us each day. Hence the Aztec sacrifices, the ancient rites of the eclipse. If the Sun so willingly leaves us, each morning it returns is a stay of execution, an undeserved gift.     Whereas: if it is we who turn, how can we so flagrantly leave behind that which has warmed us and given us light? If we are moving, then each turn is a turn away. Each revolution a revolt.    The money comes less often, and even old friends who used to write monthly now send only rare, apologetic notes, a few small bills. Things are more difficult now, their letters say. No one understood when he first ran away, but now it is clear: after they finished with the artists, the journalists, the fighters, they came for the professors. How wise he was to leave when he did. Some letters come back unopened, with a black stamp.    Life is harder here, too. Half the shops are closed. His lover has left him. The little café is filled with soldiers.     One afternoon, he enters the post office two minutes before closing. The lobby is empty but for the postman and his broom.     The mailbox is empty as well, and he turns to leave but hears the voice of the postman behind him. You are the good Professor T——, no? I have something for you in the back.     Yes, he says, I am the professor. And it feels as if this is true, and he will have no guilt over the professor’s signature when the box is brought out. He is even wearing the professor’s shirt, as loose again over his hungry ribs as it was the day he slipped it on in the alley.    From behind the counter, the postman brings no box, but a woman in a long gray dress, a white handkerchief in her fingers.     She moves toward him, looks at his hands and his shoes and his face. Forgive me for coming, she says, and the postman pulls the cover down over his window and disappears. She says, No one would tell me anything, only that my husband had his health. And then a student gave me the number of the box and the name of the city.  He begins to say, You are the widow. But why would he say this? What proof is there that the professor is dead? Only that it must be; that it follows logically.    She says, I don’t understand what has happened.     He begins to say, I am the good professor’s assistant, madam—but then what next? She would ask questions he had no way to answer.     I don’t understand, she says again.     All he can say is, This is his shirt. He holds out an arm so she can see the gaping sleeve.    She says, What have you done with him? She has a calm voice and wet, brown eyes. He feels he has seen her before, in the streets of the old city. Perhaps he served her a meal, a bottle of wine. Perhaps, in another lifetime, she was the center of his universe.    This is his beard, he says.    She begins to cry into the handkerchief. She says, Then he is dead. He sees now from the quiet of her voice that she must have known this long ago. She has come here only to confirm.    He feels the floor of the post office move beneath him, and he tries to turn his eyes from her, to ground his gaze in something solid: postbox, ceiling tile, window. He finds he cannot turn away. She is a force of gravity in her long gray dress.    No, he says. No, no, no, no, no, I am right here.     No, he does not believe it, but he knows that if he had time, he could prove it. And he must, because he is the only piece of the professor left alive. The woman does not see how she is murdering her husband, right here in the post office lobby. He whispers to her: Let me go home with you. I’ll be a father to your son, and I’ll warm your bed, and I’ll keep you safe.    He wraps his hands around her small, cold wrists, but she pulls loose. She might be the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.     As if from far away, he hears her call to the postmaster to send for the police.    His head is light, and he feels he might float away from the post office forever. It is an act of will not to fly off, but instead to hold tight to the Earth and wait. If the police aren’t too busy to come, he feels confident he can prove to them that he is the professor. He has the papers, after all, and in the havoc of war, what else will they have the time to look for?     She is backing away from him on steady feet, and he feels it like a peeling off of skin.    If not the police, perhaps he’ll convince a city judge. The witnesses who would denounce him are mostly gone or killed, and the others would fear to come before the law. If the city judge will not listen, he can prove it to the high court. One day he might try to convince the professor’s own child. He feels certain that somewhere down the line, someone will believe him.  Bullet in the Brain Tobias Wolff Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders – a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed. With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the tellers stuck a “POSITION CLOSED” sign in her window and walked to the back of the bank, where she leaned against a desk and began to pass the time with a man shuffling papers. The women in front of Anders broke off their conversation and watched the teller with hatred. “Oh, that’s nice,” one of them said. She turned to Anders and add, confident of his accord, “One of those little human touches that keep us coming back for more.” Anders had conceived his own towering hatred of the teller, but he immediately turned it on the presumptuous crybaby in front of him. “Damned unfair,” he said. “Tragic, really. If they’re not chopping off the wrong leg, or bombing your ancestral village, they’re closing their positions.” She stood her ground. “I didn’t say it was tragic,” she said. “I just think it’s a pretty lousy way to treat your customers.” “Unforgivable,” Anders said. “Heaven will take note.” She sucked in her cheeks but stared pas him and said nothing. Anders saw that the other woman, her friend, was looking in the same direction. And then the tellers stopped what they were doing, and the customers slowly turned, and silence came over the bank. Two men wearing black ski masks and blue business suits were standing to the side of the door. One of them had a pistol pressed against the guard’s neck. The guard’s eyes were closed, and his lips were moving. The other man had a sawed-off shotgun. “Keep your big mouth shut!” the man with the pistol said, though no one had spoken a word. “One of you tellers hits the alarm, you’re all dead meat. Got it?” The tellers nodded. “Oh, bravo, “Anders said. “Dead meat.” He turned to the woman in front of him. “Great script, eh? The stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.” She looked at him with drowning eyes. The man with the shotgun pushed the guard to his knees. He handed up the shotgun to his partner and yanked the guard’s wrists up behind his back and locked them together with a pair of handcuffs. He toppled him onto the floor with a kick between the shoulder blades. Then he took his shotgun back and went over to the security gate at the end of the counter. He was short and heavy and moved with peculiar slowness, even torpor. “Buzz him in,” his partner said. The man with the shotgun opened the gate and sauntered along the line of tellers, handing each of them a Hefty bag. When he came to the empty position he looked over at the man with the pistol, who said, “Whose slot is that?” Anders watched the teller. She put her hand to her throat and turned to the man she’d been talking to. He nodded. “Mine,” she said. “Then get your ugly ass in gear and fill that bag.” “There you go,” Anders said to the woman in front of him. “Justice is done.” “Hey! Bright boy! Did I tell you talk?” “No,” Anders said. “Then shut your trap.” “Did you hear that?” Anders said. “’Bright boy.’ Right out of ‘The Killers’.” “Please be quiet,” the woman said. “Hey, you deaf or what?” The man with the pistol walked over to Anders. He poked the weapon into Anders’ gut. “You think I’m playing games?” “No,” Anders said, but the barrel tickled like a stiff finger and he had to fight back the titters. He did this by making himself stare into the man’s eyes, which were clearly visible behind the holes in the mask: pale blue, and rawly red-rimmed. The man’s left eyelid kept twitching. He breathed out a piercing, ammoniac smell that shocked Anders more than anything that had happened, and he was beginning to develop a sense of unease when the man prodded him again with the pistol. “You like me, bright boy?” he said. “You want to suck my dick?” “No,” Anders said. “Then stop looking at me.” Anders fixed his gaze on the man’s shiny wing-top shoes. “Not down there. Up there.” He stuck the pistol under Anders’ chin and pushed it upward until Anders was looking at the ceiling. Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank, a pompous old building with marble floors and counters and pillars, and gilt scrollwork over the tellers’ cages. The domed ceiling had been decorated with mythological figures whose fleshy, toga-draped ugliness Anders had taken in at a glance many years earlier and afterward declined to notice. Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter’s work. It was even worse than he remembered, and all of it executed with the utmost gravity. The artist had a few tricks up his sleeve and used them again and again – a certain rosy blush on the underside of the clouds, a coy backward glance on the faces of the cupids and fauns. The ceiling was crowded with various dramas, but the one that caught Anders’ eye was Zeus and Europa – portrayed, in this rendition, as a bull ogling a cow from behind a haystack. To make the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopy eyelashes through which she gazed back at the bull with sultry welcome. The bull wore a smirk and his eyebrows were arched. If there’d been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said, “Hubba hubba.” “What’s so funny, bright boy?” “Nothing.” “You think I’m comical? You think I’m some kind of clown?” “No.” “You think you can fuck with me?” “No.” “Fuck with me again, you’re history. Capiche?” Anders burst our laughing. He covered his mouth with both hands and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” then snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, “Capiche – oh, God, capiche,” and at that the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head. The bullet smashed Anders’ skull and ploughed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus. But before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neuro-transmissions. Because of their peculiar origin these traced a peculiar patter, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory. After striking the cranium the bullet was moving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lighting that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, “passed before his eyes.” It is worth noting what Ambers did not remember, given what he did remember. He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him – her unembarrassed carnality, and especially the cordial way she had with his unit, which she called Mr. Mole, as in, “Uh-oh, looks like Mr. Mole wants to play,” and “Let’s hide Mr. Mole!” Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth. He did not remember standing just outside his daughter’s door as she lectured her bear about his naughtiness and described the truly appalling punishments Paws would receive unless he changed his ways. He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will – not “Silent, upon a peak in Darien,” or “My God, I heard this day,” or “All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?” None of these did he remember; not one. Anders did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, “I should have stabbed him in his sleep.” He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenian prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could recite Aeschylus, and then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in the Greek. Anders did not remember how his eyes had burned at those sounds. He did not remember the surprise of seeing a college classmate’s name on the jacket of a novel not long after they graduated, or the respect he had felt after reading the book. He did not remember the pleasure of giving respect. Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did not remember shouting, “Lord have mercy!” He did not remember deliberately crashing his father’s car in to a tree, of having his ribs kicked in by three policemen at an anti-war rally, or waking himself up with laughter. He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else. This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders: an oppression, like the heat. Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his from Mississippi. Anders has never met Coyle’s cousin before and will never see him again. He says hi with the rest but takes no further notice of him until they’ve chosen sides and some asks the cousin what position he wants to play. “Shortstop,” the boy says. “Short’s the best position they is.” Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle’s cousin repeat what he’s just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he’s being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn’t it, not at all – it’s that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself. The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.   Read More