Robert Thomas

When I got the box home from the gun shop, I let it sit on my kitchen table in its wax wrapping for hours before I opened it. Safe from the elements. Protected from rust and more esoteric forms of corrosion. My father gave me a rosewood chess set when I turned twelve. I’d never felt so loved through and through, almost literally, as if 
I were transparent — and it probably wasn’t love, just a lucky, last-minute guess at the toy store, which is probably what most love is, anyway. I took the set into my room, shut the door, determined to master every fork and zugzwang, that strange position where you’d be safe if only you didn’t have to make a move. Now I’d given myself a perfect gift. I imagined the gun at rest in a velvet sack next to its dainty box of   bullets. I wouldn’t need many. And no sequined wrapping paper could have been more beautiful than the brown waxed sheet the clerk had unrolled and cut along the steel edge in one long, smooth stroke. When I finally slit through the layers to open it, the paper was as delicate and rich as sheets of pastry in baklava, with a mass of dark chocolate in the center. I’d never touched a gun. I loved how perfectly its handle fit my hand: centuries of engineering and design coming together in the “unit,” and I knew it would work. Unlike toys, religious rituals, erotic techniques, and works of art, I could depend on it. The only other device I own that fulfills its function so well is my reading glasses, and I used a soft gray cloth just like the one I clean them with to wipe the oil from my fingertips as I dropped the bullets one by one into the somber chambers. I just need to know it’s there, like the extra purse I keep hidden in the closet with a money clip and a neatly folded change of clothes. I don’t need a class in safety or marksmanship. If I ever use it, it will be at close range. It may be the only way to get rid of the stranger inside. It may be the only way to get inside someone I love when every other route has been systematically barred.

It’s not just this.Every written word is a suicide note. And a love letter, too. There may be no one to talk to who would get it, but if you write it down maybe someone will get it after you’ve left the room, or in five hundred years, or maybe someone from Sirius, the Dog Star, will get it. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen claimed he was born on Sirius. You remember him: the genius who said the crashing of planes into the World Trade Center was the greatest concert ever held, although he later conceded the audience had not been given the option to not attend and that somewhat diminished its perfection. I heard Stockhausen interviewed at Davies Symphony Hall before the orchestra played one of   his works that sounded to me like the voices of   the parents in A Charlie Brown Christmas if they’d been arguing about real estate. No, I was not impressed by Karlheinz. His daughter Christel was a flautist in the orchestra, and she joined him for the interview and said her father would take her and her brother out on the lawn of their summer house outside Cologne (this was years before he was on the cover of Sgt. Pepper) and teach them to read each constellation as notes on a stave and to sing the words of their favorite nursery rhymes to the stars’ melody: “The dog ran away in the snow” and “Go get the sleigh in the cellar.” It was a game but it was hard: work and play at once. Their father explained to them, “God does not write catchy tunes.” You could tell she meant it to be a charming story, but the audience sat in silence. Suffer the little children.