Some friends were out of town, and I was called to house sit. They were leaving Friday and, as it happened, so was my wife. After work that night, I helped her pack for Vegas. A friend’s trip, to see some women she had not seen in some time. It felt good to see her smile, and I said so. We’d had a tough month. Then she was in the car, and it was time to go.
“I’ll see you Sunday,” Alice said.
“OK,” I said.
She kissed me goodbye and drove off down the street.
I watched her taillights turn and stood there looking at the Los Angeles night. Nothing much to speak of: no stars, just a dark orange haze and some powerlines. But I stood there staring nonetheless. Do you ever get a feeling like this? Standing and staring at a familiar nothing, you’re suddenly peaceful, suspended; you don’t want to move an inch. I had that feeling then. But I could not stay. I had to house sit, and it was growing late.
I grabbed my sleeping bag, said goodbye to our cat, who I planned to return to and feed in the morning, then biked to the friend’s house, several blocks west and then a few blocks north. The night was cool, and banana leaves hung over me as I pedaled. Quiet. Just music floating from windows and my swish swish swish. I kind of liked it. But it was a lonely sound, and my mind soon wandered to our troubles: Alice’s mother sick, my depression deep again, the money tight, a car accident, a totaled car. There were some triumphs too. But right now, down as I was, these were hard to remember.
When I reached the house, I locked my bike to the gate and unlocked the door. Inside, I opened one of the beers that a handwritten note said had been left for me, played with their cat for a bit, then wandered the house aimlessly, as one does when one is alone in a space one has never been alone in before.
It was a small place with a few built-ins and an old-style fireplace. A nice little house. I looked at the pictures of their family and their daughter, just two years old. They were probably in Chicago by now, enjoying the grandparents. I imagined the scene. Warm lights, wholeness, a sense of belonging, their toddler running from embrace to embrace. The thought pleased me. And then it did not. Alice and I did not have kids. We said we were waiting, but maybe it would be never. But this did not stop me from sometimes staring at the photographs of young families on mantles, or from looking at the photos of children in the deluge of my Instagram feed, and feeling with great certainty that I and I alone was being left out of something from which I had already removed myself long ago.
It was hard to explain. I had tried with Alice, my therapist, a few friends, but had only gotten so far. Now, looking at these pictures, these feelings were back again. I didn’t like it. Emptiness. Longing for meaning. An accusation. Sometimes, when things got really bad, I would drive the freeways and glance at passenger after passenger, marveling at the ease and steadiness their lives seemed to display, happily slipping down the road while adjusting the radio, or applying makeup, or laughing with a sister or a husband or a mother, seemingly unburdened by the heaviness that gripped me.
My therapist always reminded me this was only an illusion, and of course, I agreed. Who knows what troubles lurk in us all? But knowing this did not stop the feelings. Probably it never would. My therapist encouraged this perspective. Radical acceptance, I said, and she said: Correct.
I finished the beer, moved on from the pictures, went to the kitchen, and opened another drink. Then I stood there on the linoleum in the overhead glare and flipped through my phone: no word from Alice, the news all bad, our football team doing poorly. Instagram: the same. Twitter: upsetting. Then back to the news all bad again.
I set the phone down and sipped my beer. Traffic hissed past. Shouts from a barbeque; a couple fighting on a balcony. The silent TV beckoned. I went over to the couch, sat down with my beer, and turned on the television. The bright image bloomed, and my depression retreated a step. But only a step. I flipped through the channels, hoping that if I found the right thing to watch, I’d feel better.
I’ll never know how I missed it before, but it was only when I had tuned to SportsCenter that I noticed the handgun on a side table a few feet to my right, a plain black pistol that looked like the kind cops use in movies. I stood up and looked around as if there had been some kind of mistake. But there was no mistake. The gun was really sitting there.
There was a note beside it on the table. JUST IN CASE, it read. dan.
I have imagined killing myself with a gun too many times to count. The technical term is ideation. This means you think about suicide a lot. For some reason, a gun has always been my first thought. But I don’t have a lot of familiarity with guns. My family did not own any growing up. And the one and only time I shot a gun myself, as an adult, at a firing range with a friend, all I could think about was how close I was to using it on myself. A turn of the wrist. I never shot a gun again.
After what must have been a minute of terrified staring, I decided to ignore the pistol on the table. I sat back down, put my hand on the purring cat, and took a long sip of my beer. It tasted flat and bitter. I turned the TV up. Basketball highlights, golf, college football previews, two men arguing over NFL anthem protests: a typical Friday sports night. And the whole time, from the corner of my eye, the gun stared back at me.
A few minutes later, I was standing over it. I didn’t want to touch it. But I had to touch it to move it. And I was unsure whether the safety was on. What did I know about guns? I decided to use my phone to find out and went to the kitchen to retrieve it. Back at the side table, I Googled my query and discovered that the safety was indeed on. I’d learned this from a video that showed how to turn off a safety. Now I knew how to do this too.
I put my phone in my pocket, took a long gulp of beer, and with the air of a man handling a bomb, picked up the gun by its grip, opened the side-table drawer, and shoved the pistol inside.
After slamming the drawer shut, I returned to the couch. And for another five minutes, I tried watching TV. But it was no use; I could feel the gun inside the drawer, looking at me. Or rather: I was looking at it. And it knew. A drawer, the table, it did not matter. The ball was in its court. All the gun had to do was wait.
After twenty more minutes of this, I removed my phone from my pocket and tried to compose a text to Alice, who, with the typical Friday Vegas traffic, was likely stuck somewhere bumper to bumper in the middle of the desert. This image and its context—her furrowed, frustrated brow, the lonely sign for gyros and the deceptive lights of Primm blinking drunkenly in the distance—was not the environment into which I wanted to send this text. Without her name in the “To:” line, I tried: THERE’S A GUN IN THE HOUSE. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. And then: THERE’S A GUN IN THE HOUSE. DO YOU THINK I SHOULD CALL THEM?
And say what, I interrupted myself: Where should I put your gun? Well, in the closet, they’d say, that’s fine. But, I’d blurt out, how do I keep it from myself? I erased the text. Then I tried: I THINK I MIGHT HAVE TO LEAVE. THERE’S A GUN IN THE HOUSE, AND I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. Delete. Too scary. Besides, the whole reason I was staying overnight was that these friends had just been robbed. It was silly, they had said, but it would really ease their minds if I stayed over. Of course, I’d agreed. And now I realized this was probably why Dan had left the gun.
I tried not to feel bitter at Dan for doing this. It wasn’t his fault. I knew many men who would have done the same. JUST IN CASE. I had never told him how I felt about suicide or guns. I had only told Alice and my therapist. Telling them was hard enough. Dan and most everyone else I knew, they just weren’t an option.
THERE’S A GUN IN THE HOUSE, I tried typing. I’M SO NERVOUS I COULD PUKE LOL :/
Erase. Fuck. I set down my phone.
Five minutes later, I was upstairs burying the gun under the mattress. When this did not work, I tried the bedroom closet, then just inside the hatch of the attic, and then, digging up a screwdriver from the garage, inside an AC vent, which I screwed back on with too much confidence, certain I had finally outsmarted it. I had not. Ten minutes later, SportsCenter incomprehensible, I unscrewed the vent and put the gun down on the kitchen counter.
I thought: you can unload it. But I knew I would only start the same cycle with the bullets all over again. I could try to hide both separately in difficult places, but of course, this wasn’t my gun. What if I lost track of it all somehow and couldn’t get the pieces back? Not to mention I knew nothing about unloading guns, nor did I want to learn. This would require handling the pistol for longer than the six or so seconds I’d held it speed-walking between locations in my attempts to hide it.
Finally, in a fit of panic, I retrieved a cloth grocery bag from under the counter, slid the gun inside, and with the handles looped shut, stepped into the backyard with the bag in my hand. A small swimming pool flanked by two eucalyptus trees and a lemon tree greeted me. A dark, flaking fence rose beyond this, the pool light shimmering in shadow against the boards. I stood there in the night, feeling the gun’s weight in the bag in my hand. And then without thinking about what I was doing, I flung the bag into the pool.
I watched it sink at first with glee and then with a recognition of what I had just done. Surely, the gun was ruined. Or, if it was not ruined, the longer it stayed underwater, the more likely the ruin would be. And thinking this, without removing my clothes, I dove into the pool.
How to explain how this water felt? Late winter, cool. It was like ice. But a good ice. Like waking up, but more than this: like a shock to the heart, an expansion of view. Underwater like that, my eyes briefly closed to a dark full of stars, I was once again overtaken by the feeling that I could stay suspended forever. And then I opened my eyes, and there was the bag with the gun, blurry on the bottom of the pool. I swam toward it, grabbed it, and surfaced. Rising dripping from the pool, I heard a dog snarl as a gate slammed. I took two steps toward the fence and hurled the gun into the neighbor’s yard.
Back inside, I dripped my way to the bathroom, the cat following me to lick at the puddles that formed in my wake. There, I stripped, dried my body, and lay my clothes out on the tub. I put two dry towels on the floor and walked them across the wet spots. These dry, I returned to the bathroom to retrieve my clothes, carried them to the dryer, then stood there shivering, watching the clothes spin.
I knew I needed to warn the neighbors. I knew, in fact, it was urgent. But I could not move.
The cat arrived, nuzzling my leg.
“Why did I do that?” I asked.
The cat did not answer. I took my phone from the top of the dryer.
I’VE DONE SOMETHING KIND OF CRAZY, I began to type, and then threw my phone against a nearby chair.
At my feet, the cat began to purr.
I stopped the dryer and put the damp clothes back on, skipping the underwear and socks. Then, leaning down to kiss the cat’s head, something I have done with my own cat every day since he was a kitten and which filled me with a great, useless sadness now, I went to knock on the neighbor’s door.
I heard muffled shouting inside. Perhaps they’d already found the gun. Perhaps they’d called the police.
A disheveled but attractive woman with red hair, about my age, a baby at her hip, opened the door with the kind of haste that suggested she wanted nothing to do with whomever she was about to find.
“Can I help you?” she said.
I heard a man’s voice from somewhere in the house, alongside the voice of a child and the slosh of a tub. Her eyes seemed to settle on me. Instantly, they grew skeptical. I couldn’t blame her. I must have looked bad: I was still damp, like something coughed up from the sewer.
“Hi,” I said, unsure whether I was speaking too fast or too slow. “I’m housesitting next door. I can’t really explain it. But I may have accidentally thrown a gun into your backyard.”
Her face went white.
“A gun?” she said.
“That’s right.”
“Is it loaded?”
I nodded.
“Holy shit! John!” she shouted back into the house and then turned again to face me. “What the fuck is wrong with you? My son is back there. Don’t move. My husband . . . John!” she shouted again.
I remained frozen as angry footsteps approached. A tall blond man wearing a torn V-neck T-shirt appeared in the doorway, his hands raised up near his head in a failed attempt to keep bubble bath from dripping down his arms.
“Who the hell is this?”
“Go get Adam right now.”
“Why? I’m helping Kailee dry off.”
“Please do what I say. He says he threw a gun in the yard. Over the fence. A loaded gun.”
“What?” he said, snapping to me. “Why the hell would you do that?”
I remained standing still, unsure what to say or do.
“John!” the wife shouted. “I’m serious. Right now, go get Adam.”
John glared at me but disappeared. Now the woman and I were alone with her infant beneath the same Los Angeles night in which just a few hours earlier I had lost myself, the fog drifting in like little shrouds from the port.
“I have bipolar,” I said.
“I don’t give a shit,” she said. She tapped her foot. Her face softened, and after a long silence, she said:
“My grandfather had that. He tried to hang himself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It didn’t work.”
“What do you mean?”
“The rope broke.”
“I see,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She rocked the infant on her hip and looked off down the street.
“I guess you wanted to do it,” she said. “But you didn’t.”
I opened and closed my mouth. John reappeared with Adam, the former looking furious and the latter extremely confused. He had been in the treehouse and had seen or heard no gun, John explained. He held the sodden bag in one hand and the gun in the other.
“I unloaded it,” he said and held the grip-end of the pistol out to me. On instinct, I backed away. And this seemed to anger John. But though I knew it was my responsibility, I could not bring myself to take it.
“I can’t,” I said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he said.
“It’s not mine.”
“Then whose it?”
“It’s your neighbor’s.”
“So put it back where you found it.”
I struggled to find what I wanted to say. By any logical measure, he was right.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I just need to go.”
“I don’t believe this,” he said, and put a hand to his head. “Is this some kind of joke or something?”
I said nothing to this. His wife stared at me from the doorway, somewhere between disgust and concern. Adam, forgotten by everyone, looked up from his father’s legs.
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the police,” the man said.
I stared at this young family. I found I could not answer him. The next thing I knew, the door had slammed shut.
The cops showed up a few minutes later. They detained me, questioned me for nearly an hour, and asked if I wanted to make a call. But they let me go. I was lucky, and this luck made me feel worthless. In my explanation of my actions, I had been forced to admit I was a threat to myself. This meant someone would have to pick me up. Alice mostly listened in silence on the phone. She said:
“The traffic was horrible anyway. I’m only outside of Barstow. It looks smooth going back. I’ll call the girls and see you in a few hours.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, and hung up.
Three hours later, we were driving across the bridge over the port, the windows down, bringing in the smell of diesel and the sea. The officer they had left to watch me at Dan’s house told Alice when she arrived that he thought I needed help. She said I already had help. He explained they’d contacted Dan, something they had not told me. Dan had been “understanding,” he said. His cousin would finish house sitting. He lived in Indio and was on his way now.
Alice thanked him, and we left.
Halfway up the bridge, I remembered I’d left my sleeping bag at the house and texted Dan to tell him I’d pick it up when he returned. I apologized again. But, like before, he did not reply.
After a while, Alice said:
“Why didn’t you call?”
“I tried to text. But I didn’t know what to say.”
“You should have called.”
“And done what?”
“Talked through it.”
“You would have had to go eventually. And I’d still have been there with the gun.”
“You could have gone home.”
“I promised I’d stay.”
“So you threw it in the pool?”
“It’s a long story.”
“And then their backyard? I mean, what the hell were you thinking? What if their son had shot someone? Or himself?”
I said nothing. Of course, I had thought of this. And of course, I felt terrible.
“I ruined your trip,” I said.
“You did,” she said.
After another silence, she glanced at me. “Were you really going to do it?”
I put my face in my hands. “I don’t know.”
“Did you want to?”
I took a long time considering this.
“Yes,” I said. “But mostly I was afraid my impulse would be faster than me.”
“Like you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself?” she said.
I nodded.
“Or like your body would just do it for you.”
I closed my eyes. “Yes,” I said.
A silence passed between us in which I listened with unexpected relief to the sounds of the road.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what to say. Except that I’m an idiot. And I’m sorry.”
I opened my eyes to Alice shaking her head. “I wish you wouldn’t say that you’re an idiot,” she said. “In fact, don’t. For the rest of the night. No more.”
“But it’s true.”
“No. There are a lot of true things. But that isn’t one. I didn’t marry an idiot. And I’m not going to go through all this with you and pretend that the problem is stupidity. We both know that isn’t true.”
“Well then, what?” I said. “What am I?”
She took a long time thinking about it.
“You’re fortunate,” she said finally. “And ill. And that’s okay.” She glanced at me. “Even when it isn’t.”
In the silence that followed, I took her hand. And I held it. We crested the bridge with its lights glowing blue over the channels of the port. We could see a cruise ship below us, the container ships half-stacked, the cranes above them resting like giants in the night. The sky was still starless, the orange glow thick. Alice rubbed my hand with her thumb. I closed my eyes. The tires went whoosh as we flew over the road.
***
Rumpus original art by Carl Dimitri
