Bullet in the Brain

“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.” 

Anders is long practiced in the art of eviscerating books, a cruel task that he performs with gusto. Someone who dislikes and scorns everything, however, is doomed to unhappiness and may eventually break down. Anders sits on an emotional powder keg of his own making; shortly, someone will light its fuse.

“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 added, confident of his accord, ‘One of those little human touches that keep us coming back for more.’”

The women are right to resent the callous disregard shown by a teller who abandons her post at the most crowded bank hour. Anders understands this, but his previous irritation with their inane conversation, makes him vent his rage at the women instead of the teller.

“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.’”

Anders hates that, at the most crowded moment in the bank’s day, a teller abandons her station; so do the women standing in line in front of him. Unable to do much about it, Anders instead aims his hostility at the women. He lampoons their indignation, comparing a merely inconvenient situation to great tragedies like medical malpractice or the wartime slaughter of innocents. Always the critic, Anders is lost in his accumulated rage against everything he deems incompetent.

“The man with the shotgun pushed the guard to his knees. He handed 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.” 

The bank robbers behave with businesslike efficiency. They know what they’re doing; they’re pros in the field of crime. Everyone in the bank is afraid of them—except for Anders.

“‘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.’” 

During a bank robbery, Anders comments aloud on the criminals’ unoriginal dialog, as if they were merely acting in a movie. His career as literary critic has spilled over into the rest of his life; he can no longer distinguish between his profession and the reality around him: Everything appears to him as a work of fiction.

“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 […].”

Something’s wrong with the bank robber’s health. Ammonia breath, red-rimmed eyes, a twitch—the man is stressed and suffering. Anders realizes he must behave himself, but the man’s actions will undo his resolve.

“‘Fuck with me again, you’re history. Capiche?’ Anders burst out 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 stress of the moment causes Anders to respond, not with fear, but with hysterical laughter—laughter at the absurdity of his situation, laughter at the cheesiness of the bank robbers, laughter at the ineptness of his life and of those around him. His emotional breakdown proves fatal.

“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 pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory.” 

As the bullet drills a path through Anders’s brain, it happens to trigger a beautiful memory from his past, a memory that, even at the moment of his death, entrances him.

“[T]he 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.’” 

Somehow, the bullet triggers a shift in Anders’s perception of time, slowing it way down so that he can lose himself in an old memory. His dying mind is lost in the beauty of a remembered moment from childhood, a moment long gone but suddenly vivid and enchanting.

“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.” 

The other potential memories Anders might have experienced, suggest in a few phrases the scope of Anders’s unhappy life—his love for his boring wife faded, his daughter’s distinguished but troubled life implies a childhood beset by troubled parents. These details hint at the frustrations and disappointments of a man who did too much critiquing and not enough appreciating.

“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.” 

Anders’s professional spirit decays to the point where his ability to see things freshly is gone and everything in his life becomes a continuous blur of mediocrity.

“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.” 

Anders is smitten by the memory of a childhood afternoon spent playing baseball with other boys, a summer’s day of innocence and of youth yet unsullied by the disappointments of adulthood.

“‘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.” 

Young Anders relishes an ungrammatical idiom for its altered imagery of a standard expression. Decades later, exhausted by boredom and rage, his head suffering a fatal intrusion from a bullet, Anders finds himself immersed in this one lovely moment of recall, a flash of aesthetic purity, something long lost and now found for one last remembrance.