I wanted to want to fire the gun. I wanted to be prepared for the revolution, when it came. I wanted to be an agent of praxis, the unity of theory and practice. I read about it in college, underlined, made notes in the margins. The theory was that we could liberate ourselves and overthrow them, all of them. But if all our talk really came to action it would require instruments of liberation. The gun would be the instrument. From its barrels would come the physical enactment of the ideas.

I wanted it to be like in the movies, like the Jews who didn't die in the Holocaust because they took to the woods and got themselves some guns, like Angelina Jolie, badass, firing in all directions, firing two guns from a wingspan outstreched around Brad Pitt's torso, as he embraced her and fired two guns around her torso, the sexual effect of firing these guns so powerful it crumbled Brad Pitt's previous marriage and brought six children into its embrace, safe within the perimeter of bullets traveling in all directions from an epicenter of hotness.

You could say so many things about the gun-as-phallus and therefore the woman with the gun as pansexual conflation of sex and violence, fertility and destruction, birth and death all wrapped into one. I wanted to know all these things and be all these things and live all these things and say all these things, but say nothing, because the gun was the possibility of communication beyond words.

I wanted to know about gun safety, to know that it was a tool like any other tool, it had its proper uses. What if the revolution did not come, but instead the apocalypse did? What if anarchy reigned in the streets and it was dangerous? Didn't I want to be able to defend myself and my family, if it came to that? It probably wouldn't come to that, but if it did, didn't I want to do it right?

I wanted to see how guns united America, and how small and stupid was my world of independent cinema and goat cheese and late-night many-layered witticisms made by me and all my androgynous poseur friends as we tried to impress one another, and how this (whatever it was) was real and true and alive and immediate and we all deserved to die.

At the gun range, however, I was full of judgment. Before we even went in, a teenaged boy stepped outside and jammed a cigarette behind his upper lip, where it hung like an overgrown tooth. He was pimply, weak-jawed. He was a ringer for the undersocialized borderline personalities I feared would blow me away on a whim.

"If you weren't here jerking off explosive firearms all the time in a pathetic attempt to combine masturbation with violence you might get laid more and then you wouldn't have so many violent impulses, you stupid fuck," I thought. The hippies were mostly style over substance, but I do agree with their concisely stated insight that war occurs because certain parties do not have enough sex. (Case in point: Clinton: blown in office, did not enact war.) If this teenaged boy would exit the gun range and relate a bit more to his chosen gender of attraction we might be spared another random shooting, or so was my oversimplified hope.

Inside, at the counter of the gun range the guns were hanging on racks, neatly arranged in size order. I found them pleasing as I find all organized things pleasing, but I felt sick.

"Sick sick sick sick sick," I muttered.

I tried to be open-minded and tell myself that I had pastimes other people might not approve of, but I was terrified of everyone in there. Any one of them might be psychotic. What if someone opened fire in the gun store? That would be too ironic. But pinned right above the counter was a flyer offering a reward for anyone with information leading to the arrest of the person responsible for the robbery and shooting at another gun store.

What did gun store owners say when they got shot in their own stores? Gun don't shoot people bullets shoot people?

There were, in fact, posters all over the gun store. "Not your father's gun," said one. It was too easy. It was such an obvious penis metaphor there was no point in pointing it out. This is my rifle, said one poster. There are many others like it but this one is mine. This was the mantra of the Marine Scount/Sniper corps, the STA, the Surveillience and Target Acquisition, I knew this from the book Jarhead, which I liked very much. Wonderful words, beautiful poetry. I heard it in movies. It was so romantic, how a man could come to relate to a killing machine with the same tenderness and specificity he might reserve for the love of his life. I wanted to know the poetry of the gun.

There was the performance artist who had his friend shoot him. There were Rimbaud and Verlaine and William Bourroughs and poor Joan Vollmer. Those were all bad stories of the improper use of firearms but the point was that guns were everywhere, they were in many great stories, they brought men together and tore lovers apart and were important in the world. The natural extension of the wildest loves was bullets.

And the boys had been going to the gun range and invited me with them. It was something boys did and something I could do to be like a boy, to be with the boys, to be better than the boys. It was an equalizer. I could get one and shoot all the rapists.

Last time they had shot a Glock so this time they wanted a Beretta. They discussed the comparative merits of the Glock and the Beretta with the guy at the counter. He favored the Beretta. They all agreed it was more substantial.

You couldn't rent a gun if you were alone and unarmed. In order to rent a gun you needed to either bring a gun or a friend. I didn't understand this logic until it was explained to me that if you came alone with no gun of your own it might be the case that you planned to shoot yourself. If you had a friend it proved you weren't suicidal. If you had a gun already it proved that even if you were friendless and suicidal, you already had the means to shoot yourself and so you had no particular incentive to do it here.

The first serious clue I got that I might not be able to fire the gun came when the guy put the gun on the counter unloaded and I asked him to arm the safety. I realized then that I wanted to leave the safety on all the time. The next clue I got that I might not be able to fire the gun was when he showed us how to load it. I realized that I did not want to load the gun. I wanted to keep the gun unloaded with the safety on. I wanted to do as much as possible to keep the gun from being a gun and keep it from its intended purpose. I realized that I had very little interest in guns and even less interest in shooting them.

When the man put the box of ammunition on the counter and I wanted him to put it away. I much preferred the gun without the bullets, with the safety on.

We put on our ear protection and went into the shooting lanes. We were alone there for a while. Doug shot a clip. My brother Noah shot a clip. Noah left the gun on the counter of our lane with the clip out. I was to load it and fire it now.

My target was hung. I had asked for the human target. I was being snide and facetious at the counter. "I want a human target," I said. "Isn't that what handguns are for, shooting and killing humans? I want to kill humans!" I said this with a false and slightly maniacal enthusiasm. I hoped that my remark would prove to the people in the gun store how sick and twisted and stupid they were. I hoped that in my one snide remark they would see the error of their ways, herd us gently out of the gun store and torch the place. I hoped it would prove that the Second Amendment was totally psychotic, because it was a mildly psychotic thing for me to say, and if it went unnoticed it would prove that our culture was so psychotically violent that it accepted psychotically violent statements as normal.

The only person who noticed my remark was my brother. He looked alarmed and somewhat annoyed. He knew it portended more further inappropriate ranting. My brother is somewhat the same way. He and I had recently enjoyed ourselves at a Michael's craft store in Long Island, running around saying mildly psychotic things and laughing maniacally. The Michael's craft store in Long Island offended us both equally. My brother kept muttering that he was going to expose himself to the security cameras, within earshot of the middle-aged women fondling packages of mosaic tile and vials of beads. I hated the Michael's craft store, the way it pre-packaged the components of art for people who were too lazy to make real art in the same way I now hated the gun range for the way it allowed people to play at doing violence in similarly toothless ways.

At another Michael's craft store in Spotsylvania, Virginia, the D.C. snipers wounded one of their thirteen victims. They fired the opening shot of their 2002 spree through the window of yet another Michael's craft store. Then they killed ten people dead in twenty-three days, many of them while they filled their cars with gas. The snipers bought their gun from a gun store and shooting gallery much like the one I visited. One of the snipers was a domestic abuser, the other a minor. Neither was supposed to be able to buy a gun, but the former Army Ranger who ran the Bull's Eye Shooter Supply of Tacoma, Washington didn't check.

While Noah and Doug were taking their turns, another man had entered the shooting lanes. He appeared to be some kind of serious gun enthusiast. He had special bags. They looked like camera bags but they were designed especially for guns. Just as there are online stores with all kinds of yoga equipment and photography equipment and special bags to put it in there must be similar accessories for gun enthusiasts, including clever little bags with little pouches for ammunition. I thought about how lame and dorky any enthusiast looks slung with the perfectly-designed ballistic-nylon luggage of his trade--the birdwatcher, the amateur photographer. It's good to be properly prepared but past a certain point the gear overshadows its use. Rambo didn't have a little shoulder bag full of ammo.

The man had an instructor with him. They started shooting. The noise was deafening, and much louder now that I was standing in line with the other shooter and not back by the wall. Each shot terrified me, and in between shots I held myself tense, waiting for the next one. I thought I might drop the gun, misfire the gun, accidentally fire the gun and kill myself or one of my two loved ones, or the gun enthusiast with the special bags. I was there to learn gun safety, to get comfortable, but I was not satisfied that there was any such thing as gun safety, and I knew I would never be comfortable in this place with its awful noises, bad smells and terrifying machines.

I started to load the gun. I hated each mean little bullet. The casings were two-toned, yellowish brass shafts and pinker metal at the dull, deadly point. Phallic just like everything else that kills, I thought. I was dealing in stereotypes, in obsolete paradigms, in unhelpful dichotomies, but I couldn't stop. What was the opposite of misogyny? I was becoming that. (It was misandry--the hatred of men. I had to look this word up. You know what is another lesser-known word? The feminine analogue to phallic, which is "yonic.")

Oh you sick, sick bastards, I thought as I picked up each bullet, you sick fucks with your little lead penises. Why is it not enough, the penis you have? Why did you have to make these awful noisy penises? Why must we also have penises that kill, penises that explode? Isn't it nice that your actual penis explodes with the seeds of life? Why did you make this one that explodes with little seeds of death? Why did you make a metal death penis? There is something wrong with this. There is something wrong with you. I was getting so angry I wanted to shoot the men who made the guns.

Except I didn't want to shoot anybody. I didn't want to shoot the gun at all. I only loaded three bullets and then I put the gun down. It repulsed me. I didn't want to touch it. I went outside and fumed. Any man who wants to fire a gun should be forced to masturbate until all the testosterone has spurted out the end of his dick, I thought. They couldn't possibly have the energy or the ill will to use these things for sport or in seriousness if they simply had enough orgasms. They can say what they want about "defending their families" but I can see with all objective fairness that the firearm is a replacement for the orgasm. It was not fair for them to jerk off with these noisy, dangerous explosives when they could jerk off quietly into tissues or socks. I realized that this left out the question of female gun enthusiasts. For them I had no answers, for I now realized I was a female gun nonenthusiast.

In my attempt to be, for at least one ten-bullet clip, a female gun enthusiast I was hoping to become a gender-transcending Omniscient Investigator of All Experience, to follow in the footsteps of my more masculine literary heroes and gain claim to all the ego and snobbery their gunplay licensed them. I envisioned myself a Zen mistress of acceptance. I would accept that violence was part of the world, I would loosen my grip on the prissiness of pacifism, I would move past musty kumbaya whinings about peace in a world where everyone wanted to kill one another, where love was about hate and sex was about death and birth was about death and death was about life. I would lay claim to my revolutionary ideals with the skills to enact them. I would liberate myself from the fear of dying at the hands of my fellow barbaric humans, secure in the knowledge that I could handle the One Great Equalizer, the firearm.

Guns did not work out for me the way I planned. I wonder if they ever do for anyone.

Labels: ammo, D.C. snipers, guns, masculinity, masturbation, metal death penis, Michael's craft store, misandry, misogyny, sex, violence, weapons

I

There is only one place that hasn't changed in my entire life, and I am in it. I am in the country.

My grandparents own a country house about an hour outside the city, near a lake called Lake Celeste. When I was a kid, we called it, simply, "the country." It looked like the country in books. My grandmother doesn't call it "the country." She calls it, grandly, "Celeste."

It's really not the country. It's more like an outlying suburb. It's kind of country lite. It's within earshot of some major highways, and it's not high enough in the mountains or far enough from the city for the air to taste like gaseous crack. You can hear the romantic whistling of Metro-North trains on the Hudson line, along with plenty of other civilized noise. Still, there are trees, and there is a lake--Lake Celeste.

The lake is man-made and therefore an ecological nightmare. Aquatic weeds grow up from the bottom and a weird algae forms on the top. Still, the water in between the weeds and the algae is cool and clear. "Like velvet," my grandmother is fond of saying. "Like velvet."

At the edges of the lake, lily pads grow with supernatural force. It's quite possible they are not normal lily pads. The Indian Point nuclear power plant is just a few miles away, lending this place an ominous touch. If Indian Point were to blow, Celeste would be in the kill zone.

West Point is also nearby. Some days, you can hear the heavy artillery firing as the cadets prepare to depart to foreign countries as commissioned officers, where they will orchestrate the controlled chaos of state-sanctioned murder.

Lake Celeste, however, is an enclave apart from these grim realities. It's a respite, an idyll, a safe cluster. It's a former bungalow colony, a place where in the summer aging Jewish women stand in the shallows wearing bathing suits with skirts. It's a place where you drag large, rusty devices across the clay tennis court between sets. This place and this house are cluttered with forgotten objects, and they are weighty with memory.

There is a plastic salad bowl full of maracas. There are lamps that would command several hundred apiece in the used furniture stores of Williamsburg, kitsch the hipsters would lap like Pabst. There are rotary phones here. I dialed my cell on one, but they are disconnected, save for 911. All outgoing calls are emergent.

There is a framed certificate thanking my grandfather for his decades of accounting service to the Lake Celeste Community Association. There is an oversized painted spoon with a tiny mariachi band inside made of wire and cloth. There are drawers full of partly melted candles and incomplete sets of poker chips and power adapters for nations long since immolated in civil conflict. There are rusted fans and dead flashlights. There is a closet filled exclusively with raincoats, another filled exclusively with tennis attire circa 1981. There are twelve boxes of aluminum foil.

Among the thick tomes about history, Freud and the Jews (including, but not limited to, one book called The Jews), flanked by moldering second-best-selling paperbacks of decades past, there is the copy of The Joy of Sex I read wide-eyed one day I stayed in from some family activity, claiming to have a cold. Illustrated in the seventies, it put in my head a permanent association between sex and unshaven armpits, sex and brown leather boots. It may be this copy of The Joy of Sex that is responsible for the conflation of the two governing desires in my life, the basic human desire to have sex and the basic stoner desire to time-travel to the seventies.

A quick revisiting of The Joy of Sex reveals that the text was written by a complete lunatic. It is as if no one expected the text to be read at all. Indeed, it took me fifteen years to read the text, now that I have seen sex in places other than between the covers of The Joy of Sex.

There is an ancient phone list of all the houses here, updated over three decades with pencil. There is a newer yellow piece of paper with the words BRENDA CALLED in scrawled pencil, followed by the words SHIRLEY GOODMAN (I CALLED). Underneath, in pen, it says:

She has lost 6" in height
Jason is at Bard
Peter decided he did not want to go to school anymore--he is
recovering from his lapse.
Edwin + Mark are OK.
She is to get back to me about situation with the burial plot
Margaret Marin has Alzheimer's she is in an assisted living facility

(all names have been changed to protect the lapsed)

Are these notes on a recent phone conversation or a phone message from one grandparent to the other? Or notes to assist in the relaying of a phone message? I didn't know that they were taking notes on their phone conversations now, that they are that forgetful. Still, I am encouraged. They are thorough notes, and it is a clever solution.

I've noticed that my grandparents say that people are losing their minds the way someone my age might say someone can't hold their liquor. It's understood that it's not the person's fault, but there's an element of judgment in it. It's accepted, but it's not admired.

One of my students asked adorably the other day if I could teach her enough math to enable her to build a time machine. She is in fifth grade and still curious and cute. At my tutoring jobs I observe what the hormones that send us to The Joy of Sex do to humans. They turn us into monsters. Ten-year-olds are sweet and inquisitive. Teenagers are dark and insane. There is no math to explain it, nor to build time machines. But, I am going to tell her next week, if you want to travel through time just make sure one place, one house, stays unchanged your whole life. You don't need math to build a time machine. Only, ironically, time itself.

II

Lake Celeste briefly achieved a moment of unparalleled hipness when a celebrity bought a house here. Several years ago at Passover, my grandfather gestured at the Times magazine, which had Moby on the cover that week.

"Hey, that's Moby," said my grandfather. "I know him."

"You know Moby?" I asked incredulously. "How?"

"He had a house up at Celeste."

"Moby had a house up at Celeste? That Moby? The musician?"

"Well, he's not a musician the way I understand it," my Grandpa said. "He makes music with computers. He told me all about it."

"Moby told you all about it."

"Yeah. He's a very nice guy. Though we had a terrible time getting him and his friends to stop jumping off the dock."

Moby eventually sold his house at Lake Celeste. Perhaps he realized he had bought into a bungalow colony of aging Jews within the kill zone of nuclear power plant, and he said, "Hey! I'm a multimillionaire! I can buy any country house I want!"

III

We would go up there some weekends. "Kids," my parents would say, "We're going to the country." My mom would make me lists on tiny pieces of paper so I could pack my own clothes. Before I could read she'd use pictograms. She'd write, "3" and then draw a picture of underpants. Sometimes she'd cross out "3" and write "4." "It's never a bad idea to have an extra pair of underpants," she'd say.

The road was narrow. My dad would beep the horn going around blind curves. He didn't want to, but my mom would make him. "Hunk, Carl, hunk!" she'd say. For some reason her faint but discernible New York accent causes her say "hunk" instead of "honk."

"I'm hunking, Annie, I'm hunking!" my dad would say. My parents' identical accents continue to make the dying and flawed argument for marrying within your cultural group.

The final turn led onto a dirt road. I was obsessed with the line between the paved road and the dirt road. It occurred just after Ron's Kwik Stop. I would hold my breath as we approached Ron's Kwik Stop, listening for the sound of asphalt changing into dirt. I was also a big fan of the Queens-Manhattan sign in the Midtown Tunnel. I always liked crossing lines.

When we got to the country my dad would sing, "We're here, because we're here, because we're here, because we're here." He is tone deaf and so the inflection in the song was imparted by escalating volume. When we got in the car to go home on Sunday he'd sing, "We're going ho-ome, we're going ho-ome!" I'd always fall asleep and wake up as Shea Stadium came into view. Maybe it was because my dad would read that year's team motto aloud. "Catch the rising stars!" he'd shout, or "The magic is back!" Sometimes the Met game would be on the radio, other times Springsteen. Life was simple in the mid-eighties. We hated Reagan, we loved the Mets, and one of the many hit singles from Born in the USA was on the radio all the time.

When we'd get back from the country our apartment in Queens would smell weird from being closed up for a few days. Not bad, just weird. I was obsessed with smelling the smell of the apartment being closed up. When we got back I would rush inside and try to get a good smelling in before the closed-up smell disappeared out the open door. While I was inside sniffing out the smell of a place without people I'd hear my parents yelling, "Who is going to help unload the car? Who is going to schlep? I don't see anyone schlepping! Come help! Come schlep!"

IV

The country house consists of a living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a screened-in porch on one level, and then a separate bedroom downstairs accessible by an outside stairway. That room is called, "The room downstairs." It was where my parents and I would stay when I was very little, before my brother was born. My parents were actually married in the room downstairs, because it rained on the day of their wedding, and they could not be married outside by the lake like they planned. They wanted to get a tent but my grandfather said, "Trust to luck."

My grandmother would come and get me from the room downstairs early in the morning and make me Cream of Wheat. She never stirred it so it was full of chewy, undercooked lumps. I loved it that way and would nag my mom to make it lumpy, too, but she could never get as many lumps.

My grandmother would wear an orange terrycloth bathrobe. My grandfather would sleep late. He'd come shuffling out of the bedroom in his slippers and blue terrycloth bathrobe, sans hearing aid and teeth.

"Sammy," my grandmother would snap, "Put your teeth in for God's sake." It was the first command of the day. Many others would follow.

After a while my parents would emerge from the room downstairs. They were always in a really good mood. It only recently occurred to me how they might have been using their private time in the room downstairs.

After breakfast, it would be time to "go around the lake." Though the house has lakefront property, the other side of lake has a communal sandy beach, and the weeds and muck have been cleared to make a sandy bottom. There is also the tennis court where a person can "hit a few balls." My grandparents were tennis fiends and always hoped to instill a similar love of tennis in the next generation. My mom wasn't too into it and my grandmother seemed annoyed about this. "Your mother really has a very nice forehand," my grandmother would sometimes say to me, as if this were a sad secret.

There'd be much discussion of how to dress around the lake, because around the lake the temperature would be several degrees warmer. The outdoor thermometer on the deck would be consulted, and then the discussion would ensue of how many degrees warmer it might be today around the lake. It might be as much as five to ten degrees warmer around the lake. There was also a thermometer around the lake, and my grandmother would often take readings over there and compare them.

"Yesterday, over here, seventy-eight," she'd say. "But that thermometer around the lake, do you know what it said?" She'd pause for effect.

"Eighty-five! Can you imagine? It's like a whole different climate."

Bathing suits would be put on. Tennis rackets would be liberated from their hexagonal presses, new cans of balls opened. I really liked the smell of a new can of tennis balls, but would never be allowed to open one, because the lid had a sharp edge.

Tote bags would be packed with towels and changes of clothes. My mother would remind me to bring my underwear for after I swam. Then my grandmother would remind me to bring my "panties." I tried to no avail to get her to stop using the word "panties," which I still can't hear without cringing.

What is this family obsession with having underwear? I have some insight, because one of my grandmother's charming habits is repeatedly telling traumatic stories from her childhood. During the Depression, my grandmother's family was so poor that she and each of her three sisters only had one pair of underwear, or panties, as she would say. The elastic was all worn out and the underwear had to be held up with safety pins. One day in the stairwell at school the pins came undone and the panties fell off. She tried to abandon them on the stairs but all the kids screamed and laughed, "Ruthie lost her panties!"

Many survivors of the Depression have an obsession with abundance and hoarding. In my family this expresses itself through having enough underwear.

After it was confirmed that everyone had enough underwear and towels, we'd go around the lake, where when I was really little I could run around naked. Hands would periodically descend from above and slather me in sun lotion. Hunger would be staved by partially damp rice cakes. Wholesome and well-supervised outdoor aquatic fun would be had by all.

We might return to the house around lunchtime. This would invariably be a can of salmon. "Let me make you a can of salmon," my grandmother would say. "Can I make you a nice can of salmon?" She actually makes a very nice can of salmon, and tuna. So does my mother. So do I.

V

I went around the lake yesterday and attempted to take out a rowboat. The rowboat was full of rainwater and despite dragging it onto the sand and shoving with all my might, I could not overturn and empty it. It's the same rowboat that's been there all my life, the same one I was permitted to take out, while wearing a moldy lifejacket, after passing the "deep water test," which consisted of being thrown from the rowboat by Sid Friedman.

Sid was in charge of administering swimming tests to the grandchildren of all the homeowners. To be allowed to progress beyond the roped-off crib, you had to prove you could survive a disaster in the middle of the lake, like your canoe overturning or an unexpected ejection from the rowboat. My grandmother always felt that Sid's tests were incomplete because they did not include the possibility of being stung by a wasp while in the rowboat. She thought you could get stung by a wasp in the rowboat, and then panic, and then knock yourself unconscious with the oar, in which case you would fall into the lake already unconscious and drown, and was Sid Friedman preparing you for this possibility? He was not.

I always wondered if my grandmother's compulsively expressed anxieties about wasp stings were really thinly veiled and accurate premonitions about the possibility of intermarriage. Despite the stillness of the lake and strength of our swimming, she harbored a fear of drowning. Was it the wasps or the WASPs she expected to submerge us, never to surface again?

"Emily," my grandmother would say, even when I was still wearing an inflatable seahorse in the crib, "the water gives us life, but it can also take it away. It can take it away in an instant. In an instant. So be careful."

This was not unlike the time she told me, "The joys...of having a body...and sharing this body...with another body...the joy of two bodies...such a joy. But there are dangers that can change your life in an instant. In an instant. So be careful."

That's pretty much my grandmother in a nutshell--a hedonist with a vivid and developed sense of impending disaster. She's all sex and death, and now so, too is the country house. Everything here is old and musty and smells of mildew, even The Joy of Sex. Only the people on its pages, frozen in eternal ecstasy, haven't aged at all.

Labels: "The Joy of Sex", death, Lake Celeste, rowboats, sex

I had skipped ahead to the end of the Hemingway novel and knew it was sad. The soldier's lover hemorrhaged after their baby was born dead. I read slowly from the middle after that, dreading the ending.

But now on the train to the airport I was close to the end. The soldier and his pregnant girlfriend were together one last time in a fancy hotel. He had deserted the Italian army while they were in retreat and come to find her on the lake in Stresa.

I hadn't realized that they could have more time together before the end came. Before the certainty of death there remained the possibility of sex. It was like the fine white wine on your tongue before the heavy red that tasted of metal and acid. In the wine country they poured the sauvignon blancs first and you sipped them while you made up your mind about the other things, and often they were the best and you loved them because they were light, and first.

As the train came to the airport you felt light, weightless, even. You existed only in the in-between places, in the airport, in the sky. You knew you might die and you made peace with it. Whether this was true all the time or perhaps even more likely on the highway or the street late at night did not matter. In the airport, on the plane you knew it might happen.

The day before a man had driven a flaming car through the gate of the airport in Glasgow. Noah told me about it while we drank vodka made from sweet potatoes.

"The car was on fire and he was on fire."

"Were many people killed or only some?"

"I don't know." He shrugged. "Maybe some. Maybe none."

I poured more vodka into the small glasses. It was cold on your tongue and burned as you swallowed.

Getting to the airport this time you felt a stillness and were not on fire. You loved no one and no one loved you. Or if you loved anyone, it was only in vestiges, like antibodies after a vaccine or virus. If someone tested your blood they would find evidence that you had had a fever once, but only from the microscopic cells you always carried that would try to fight it off if it came again. Some of the viruses you could get again, full-blown, and others you had fought off once and for all. You remembered what it was like to be sick, but only in those old soldier cells. By now it had been long enough that it could have happened to someone else. It could have happened to someone in Glasgow.

The mechanized voice in the terminal announced that the threat level was orange. Orange came before red, and maybe even amber. Amber was what dinosaur DNA could be preserved in, for millions of years, in a droplet of blood inside an ancient mosquito. Amber was worse than orange, but better than red. The voice did not say what the threat might be, only that today the color of waiting for it was orange.

Labels: airports, blood, death, DNA, Hemingway, immunity, love, sex, terrorism, travel, vodka, war, wine