The Shooting (23 page)

—Sir? Is this your son?

He can barely spit out that it is. She has tissues. Of course she does. Hands him one. He throws it off to the side and it drifts down like a feather to the floor. Silent now, she puts the sheet back over Clayton. He grabs her dainty wrist, stops her.

—Is this what we went through it all for? he asks her in his language.

She does not understand. She is nervous—he is squeezing harder than he means. She yanks her wrist away and hurries toward the door and opens it. —Our grief liaison, Michael Kapper, she says, —will be more than happy to go over the many resources we offer, if you would like to wait for him in our waiting room.

He ignores her. He pulls the sheet back again.

—Sir, she says, not knowing how to handle this.

He touches his son's face. Blood in his hair they missed when they cleaned him. His last bath. He remembers bathing him as a baby. Eyes wide open, mouth grimacing in terror. Small hole through his cheek. Lips pulled back. Teeth shattered. He remembers when those teeth came in. Clayton was so proud of them. Now they will soon be dust. He kisses his son. His son, Clayton. His baby, who will soon be dust. Feels her about to speak, to try to get him out of the room away from Clayton. —I stay, he says before she can speak.

—I'm so sorry, sir, but we do have a policy, we—

He says to her, —I stay.

She leaves, returns with security and a man in a suit. —He won't leave, he hears her whisper to them.

—Okay, okay, the man in the suit whispers back to her. Then the door closes again and does not open, and he stays there all night, undisturbed, with the body of his son.

A knock on the door. He sits up in bed, puts his feet on the floor. His wife beside him in bed says, —Who is it? Who is knocking at this time of night? He is standing up, saying, —I don't know. He is leaving the bedroom, she is saying, —Why are you going to answer it if you do not know who it is?

He walks across the living room to the front door. The banging is very insistent, urgent.

—Hello? calls a voice he does not recognize. —Doctor?

Maybe someone is ill or injured. He pulls aside the curtain to peek out the window. It is someone he does not recognize, a short foreign man. The accent he speaks in is very heavy and strange. Looking out beyond the man, all he sees is darkness.

—Yes? he asks the man, through the window. —Yes? Are you sick?

The man does not answer. He looks very nervous. —Yes, he finally says. —I am sick.

The doctor steps away from the window, makes sure the door is locked, then returns to the bedroom. —It's nothing, he tells her. —Kids playing around.

—Are you sure? she says.

—Yes. Something should be done about them. They're hooligans. Where are their parents?

—It is them, isn't it?

—No.

—Isn't it?

—I don't know.

—What will we do?

—Just wait. They will go away.

The knocking stops.

—See? he says. —Now let's go back to sleep.

He lies down on his side, his back to her. She lies down on her back, facing up. He sleeps, she does not. In the morning he makes contact with an organization that helps people at risk of death at the hands of the regime, which demands religious extremity and are known to behead in public those who represent Western culture, which is unholy and evil, even those caught practicing Western medicine. Somehow to them he has become the symbol representing Western medicine. The organization says there is little they can do, the regime has won control of all borders and travel in and out is near impossible, but they are working to find him and his wife passage out. They wait. Neighbor tries to give him a gun, a thirty-year-old Soviet AK-47.

—I can't take it, the doctor says, —these are very hard to come by, you will need it yourself, you already have very little.

—That is true, says the neighbor, —just a small home and a cow and a bicycle and my family, but they are not coming for me, only for you, you must take it. I saw them last night. I do not know where they are from but not from here. See?

The neighbor points at the dirt where there are seemingly hundreds of boot prints.

—These are in front of no one else's house, Doctor. Please. Take the gun.

He does. That night they come again.

—Don't answer it, she says.

He does not. They shatter the window and are climbing in through it. She is screaming. He has the gun. How does it work? He goes to the doorway of the bedroom and points it and holds the trigger down, it comes to life, squirms and jolts in his arms like a small pig. In the flashes it makes in the dark he can see their faces, their bodies hunching and falling and running away and dying. He fires until it does not fire anymore. When he stops his home is filled with smoke and the smell of eggs, and his hearing is muffled and his ears hurt. Bodies lie all over. They are kids—eighteen, nineteen years old. Outside through the shattered window he can see one more running away into the night. Then he sees his neighbor run out of his house and chase him and tackle him and wrestle him to the dirt and bash
him in the head with a rock. Goes to his wife who is under the bed and screaming. As he is attending to her one of them appears in the bedroom doorway. He is very small and very young, maybe twelve or thirteen. He holds his hands over his bleeding torso. He is crying.

—Help me, he says.

The doctor puts him in the empty bathtub and fetches his medicine kit stashed under the floorboards of the kitchen. Cauterizes the gunshot wound and tries to get the bullet but it is impossible, too deep inside his chest cavity.

—I am not a surgeon, he says. —There is nothing I can do for you but try to prevent infection. Take this. It is an antibiotic. You will probably die anyway. You are probably bleeding to death inside right now. It is good if you are. You deserve to die.

He leaves the boy in the tub dying, God willing, while he and the neighbor drag the bodies out and line them along the front yard.

—It was like killing a goat, the neighbor says, —killing that man.

—That's because these aren't men, the doctor says.

—That's right, the neighbor says, —they are animals.

But that is not what the doctor meant. Back inside he has to stop his wife from slitting the boy's throat with the scalpel in his medicine kit. In the morning the boy is still alive and the doctor and the neighbor start burning the ones who are not. They burn them in the same pit they use for burning their trash. In the fire are burned their penises and their testicles and their sperm. One of the testicles burned contains genetic material that would have created half an American boy named Clayton. The whole town comes out to watch the bodies burn. Children peep through the doctor's broken window hoping for a glimpse of the one they caught alive. The men of the town are impatient for the boy to heal so they can execute him.

—You will not touch him, the doctor says.

He delivered most of their children, has cured each of them of something at one point or another. They listen to the doctor. The boy does not die. The doctor's wife feeds him. The doctor insists on tasting the food first, to make sure she does not poison it. They talk to the boy. Learn the story of his life. His brother convinced him to join the mercenaries. His brother is everything to him. They
were starving to death in their home country. No farming, no work of any kind. Both parents dead. No reason to live.
Here
, his brother told him,
is our chance for a good life, to make the world a better place. If you are not fighting to save the world,
his brother told him,
you are fighting to ruin it.
Made him choose one or the other. His brother was a murderer. He had watched him slit three boys' throats for smoking hashish. He did not want his throat slit, he did not want to ruin the world, he wanted to have a good life. —It all made sense before, the boy says, crying. —Now it makes none. What have I done?

One day the bullet pushes itself up from beneath the boy's skin in his armpit. The doctor cuts it out. Soon the boy is able to walk around. Flips through their books. —Will you teach me to read? he says. The doctor begins giving him literacy lessons. Then arithmetic. He learns very quickly. He is very smart. Helps repair the damage from the gunfire, helps the neighbor with his cow. Stands guard at night with his gun. The doctor and his wife become used to caring for him. It feels very good. His wife, he can tell though she tries to hide it, enjoys cooking meals for him and checking his arithmetic and looking after his health.

—What will we do with him? she says.

—I don't know, he says.

The boy makes friends with the boys his age in the village. He is very funny and kind. People flock to him. He begins wearing his pants with one leg rolled halfway up the shin and soon all the boys in the village are wearing their pants with one leg rolled halfway up the shin. The doctor thinks,
He could be prime minister one day.
The organization gets in touch. A position at a hospital in Alberta, Canada. Transport out of the country tonight on a military truck under the direction of an officer who has been bribed.

The doctor tells his wife, —Pack only one small suitcase, everything else must be left behind.

She says, —Good riddance to it all.

The boy is standing there listening. —What about me? he says.

The doctor and his wife look at each other. —What about him? the doctor asks her. She sighs, groans; she cries out in frustration.

And when the military truck comes in the night to the intersection in the field as arranged, all three of them stand there waiting for it. The soldier driving, who is very nervous, says, —What the fuck is this? There are only supposed to be two, who is this?

The doctor says, —This is our son.

Soldier gives in and they hide under greasy metal equipment. The truck is extremely bouncy and the roads very bad, even the doctor vomits from the motion. But when the truck comes to a stop, after two days, and the back door opens and hot white light spills in and someone bangs twice on the outside signaling they are to get out discreetly and never look back, they are free, they are new. They fly to Calgary. He practices at a beautiful hospital, out in the country. The boy goes to school for the first time. Catches on very quickly. Makes friends here too, even without knowing the language. Soon he learns and soon he is speaking very well. And when the doctor thinks this is all a miracle, how did he get so lucky to have been given this salvation, a job offer comes from the United States. New York City. A clinic for the immigrant community and other uninsured, impoverished people. Who can say no? He goes. They move to America, into a lovely building in the West Village neighborhood. And he is safe. He is free. In America. His American family is.

The people in this building are very rich. Often he looks up at the penthouse and wonders who lives there. The richest of them all.

His adopted son has never slept well. Clayton, they name him. Even when they were treating him in that bathtub he would sleepwalk at night. They had to put a chair outside the bathroom door to stop him. So many things to hurt him out there, back in that place. They do not treat people so brutally here in America. They respect life here in America.

One night in bed, Clayton fifteen years old, a knock on the door. He goes to answer it. Notices as he passes his bedroom that Clayton is not in it.

Knock on the door, he does not open it. They come back, he shoots. Nurses the boy who has survived. Get to Canada, bring along the boy, whom they have adopted as their own, named him Clayton.
—Your new name, they say. Beautiful, peaceful life in Canada, practicing in the hospital outside Calgary. Clayton learns English, how to read. Once he is introduced to formal education, he excels brilliantly. The doctor makes many friends, is accepted among his Canadian peers. Job offer from the United States. Declines it. Is fine here. Clayton sleepwalks. No one is afraid of him. Therefore he lives. Graduates high school, goes to a small local college. Does very well, transfers to McGill in Toronto. Meets a woman. Graduates. They are in love. Moves in with her. She is white. The doctor and his wife like her very much. Clayton goes to law school, changes his mind after two semesters, goes instead to business school. Marries her. Goes to work for Nike, in the United States. Comes back to Canada shortly after when he locked himself out of his house one night and so tried to break in through a window, and his white neighbors called the police thinking he was a criminal, and when he could not find his lease he was arrested, booked, and everything, held in jail until his wife could come prove he lived there. Starts a shoe company in Canada. It fails. Works for a Canadian fast-food company, in the corporate office, not ideal, his childhood dream was not this but his own shoe company. But he supports his family. The doctor and his wife babysit. The babies call them Goo and Beeb. On the doctor's deathbed Clayton, his own hair gray now, takes his hand. —Thank you, Pops, for not being afraid of me.

When the night is over and it is morning, he lets them take Clayton away. He checks on his wife. She is still sedated. She is surrounded by flowers and cards people have already sent. He hates that people know. He kisses her lips. She murmurs something in her sleep.

He meets with the grief liaison Michael Kapper not because he wants to but because that is the direction in which things next push him. He is floating and things want to push him in certain directions and he wants to say yes to them, he needs to say yes to things right now, to people. Life has become a tire bursting on the highway, and he wants it all to stop and saying yes is the only way he can think of to try to make things stop. The grief liaison Michael
Kapper has papers for him to sign, information to get from him, information to give him—psychologists, counselors, medications, support groups. There is literature to receive from Michael Kapper and hold in his hand and even to pretend to read and pretend to not want only to tear it to bits and open the jaw of Michael Kapper and shove all the bits inside his mouth. Then the meeting with the grief liaison Michael Kapper is finished. —Thank you, he tells Michael Kapper, —this has been very helpful. Michael Kapper smiles, he seems very relieved.