fiction: waterford crystal and space bullet trauma.

Greg drinks a beer, then an Appletini, then an Irish Car Bomb.
“If you have sex with a model,” I say, “and then fuck a guy in the ass, and then have sex with another gorgeous model, I still have the right to give you shit about the sodomy.”
“Whatever,” he says. He shrugs and moves towards the pool table, on the other end of the bar.
He’s a fuckin' wanker anyway.
About then Sheila walks in. Stomps in, really.
My girlfriend is bi-polar, and not in the fun “I have two girlfriends in one” kinda way, but in the “kill you in your sleep” way. It seems to me that very obvious and rational concepts, things even autistic children can comprehend, continually elude her understanding.
Sometimes, after making a very basic statement, something short and lacking in superfluous adjectives, or when I say something simple and inarguable, like, “I like pie,” she’ll get this look on her face, her brows lifted, her lips tightly pursed, her jaw clenching as she breathes out, cheeks sucking in so subtly as she inhales. Eventually she’ll stop, moving her bottom lip sideways, generally to the right (my right), and say something like “No,” or, “That’s impossible.”
The idea then is to refuse to take the unintentional bait generated by her stupidity, to nod and say “I guess you’re right,” and then get her in the bedroom and fuck her so you can sorta remember why you keep her around - even though she has the tendency to steal your prescriptions (especially antibiotics, never pain killers), hog the TV remote (to watch shows about remodeling ugly rooms into uglier rooms), and continually sneak small bites out of expensive blocks of cheese.
I don’t hate women. Just Sheila.

Gunshot wounds to the head have become the leading cause of head injury in most U.S. cities. They’re the most lethal of all firearm injuries - only about five percent of people who get shot in the head live through it. Because of this high mortality rate, cranial gunshot wounds account for only about ten percent of all traumatic brain injury patients who survive. Two thirds of victims die before getting to a hospital. Doctors call it a “blown mind.”

I think she’s mad about something.
“How can you do this?” she’s asking, but I don’t know what in God’s name she’s going on about.
“What? What?” I say, straining to hear over the din of the bar. It’s getting close to midnight, and the place is about full to capacity. I notice that in her righteous fury, Sheila has taken the time to get two glasses of champagne. I don’t know if one is for me. It might be. It’s Sheila-logic.
I haven’t had champagne in a long time.
“You think you get away with everything, don’t you? You think you’re so much smarter than me!” she says.
“Well, I got news for you,” she yells, “you’re not.”
I still have no idea what the fuck she’s talking about. It’s still half an hour to midnight and the entire place has erupted into Auld Lang Syne. Fucking drunks.
Across the bar, Greg raises a pool cue in victory. I want to make my way over to him, but I’m pinned up in the corner, thigh pressing awkwardly into a stool. Periodically I get bumped and I can feel it digging in, the bruise getting bigger and bigger. Dick Clark yells at me from a hundred TV screens. Sheila’s talking again.
Turn your head and cough, New York City. Turn your head and cough. They say that the way you spend New Year’s Eve is a prediction for the entire year to follow.
I wonder if the fancier bars’ glassware is made by Waterford Crystal. I wonder if anyone, anywhere, at a fancy bar tonight thinks that’s interesting.
“I thought you were going to be with your girlfriends tonight,” I say to Sheila, and as I lean forward she winces ever so slightly. I don’t know why, because I didn’t mean anything by it, and it’s not like the move was sudden.
“You hurt me,” she says. “Don’t you get it? You fucking hurt me,” and while I do hate her, I don’t think she knows it for sure, and I haven’t done a goddamn thing to her lately, and some fucking asshole in a polo shirt is asking Sheila, “Hey, is this guy bothering you?”
The easiest thing to do would be to walk away, but of course there are people everywhere and it really just ends up being awkward for everyone involved. I say, “Whatever,“ and try to slide out of my prison and immediately receive an angry bump of retaliation. I push through, past the others, and make my way toward the pool table, leaving Sheila to wash down a bottle of roofies with a quart of vodka alongside polo shirt.

Virtually all cranial gunshot victims are aggressively resuscitated upon arrival at the hospital. If blood pressure and oxygenation can be regularly maintained, a CT scan of the brain is obtained. The decision to go in surgically is made based on the patient’s level of consciousness, the degree of brainstem neurological function, and the findings of a CT scan.
If you’re deeply comatose, based on the Glasgow scale, with minimal evidence of brainstem function, and there’s no intracranial hematoma,
they don’t even fuckin' bother.

“What’s up?” asks Greg. He just won twenty dollars from some idiot who’s actually wearing leather pants.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Sheila’s wiggin' the fuck out.”
“I saw her come in,” he says.
“Whatever,” I say.
He starts up another game with some dude named Wes, a regular we see every Friday night. He’s always yammering on about some new life philosophy he’s picked up. I decided I hated him when he introduced himself as “Wes, the existentialist absurdist.”
Now I think he’s “Wes, the daoist modernist.” His shirt has a large Asian symbol on it, and I’m sure he has no idea what it means. I’m going to translate it to “douchebag.”
“Hey, Wes,” I say. “How’s it hanging?”
“Everything just is, man,” he says, racking the balls. He’s drinking Tuaca. Tuaca.
I turn to Greg. “When’d we decide to pick up Dickface McGee, here?” I ask.
Greg sighs, rolls his eyes. He walks around the table, breaks. I didn’t notice it but he’s managed to take over one of those thin, tall bar tables against the wall. I sit down, look around. For a shitty bar in a shitty part of town, it’s amazing how crowded it is with young professionals. Everyone’s smiling, talking, laughing. I smile.
“Did you guys know,” I say, “for New Year’s Eve, in Flagstaff, they drop a big pine cone?”
Greg knocks the 9 into the corner pocket.
“In Tempe, Arizona, they drop a big tortilla chip into a giant jar of salsa.”
“In Brasstown, North Carolina, they drop a live possum in a cage.”
“In Knoxville, Tennessee, the ball rises, instead of falling.”
“Ignore him,” says Greg. “He thinks he’s smarter than everyone.”

Someone’s playing the jukebox. Love ya/ I need ya / I think I wanna squeeze ya/ Nightly so tightly, girl/ you know you really blow my mind.
Say it again/ Just one more time/ I've got to know/ How you came to blow my mind.

Greg’s somehow managed to sink everything, and now he’s going for the eight ball. He has a perfect shot. I stand up and walk around the table, getting in his way. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but I grab the cue ball and roll it into the eight, knocking it into the pocket.
“What the fuck, dude?” yells Greg.
“Fuck you,” I say. “You suck anyway.”
“You’re such an asshole,” says Wes.
“Fuck you too, Wes, you sanctimonious piece of shit.”
People are moving outside. There’s only a few minutes left in the year. In a few minutes people get their fresh starts. They kiss their sweethearts and feel all loved and shit.

I start to walk out and get halfway there when I hear a voice.
“Hey!”
Shiela’s managed to find me again, and she’s managed to get herself half-drunk in the twenty minutes since I’ve last seen her. She opens her mouth to say something else, but before she can I decide that it doesn’t really matter and I step forward, in close, grabbing her shoulder and ramming my fist into her stomach. She lets out a sound like she’s dry heaving and bends over, gasping. She drops to her knees and I adjust my collar and I turn around and walk outside, into the night air. Look up.

The sky is clearer than I could ever remember seeing it before. The stars seem to shimmer in the sky. Everyone smells like sweat and booze and cigarettes. The countdown starts. I breathe in and start to speak, my voice joining the crowd’s, in perfect unison. As we move on I get louder and louder with every number until I’m screaming at the top of my lungs and as we hit zero I’m screaming “Happy New Year!” and turning and hugging strangers and fireworks are going off everywhere and you can hear people screaming and cheering and firing guns into the air and blowing into party squeakers.

Someone fires in a perfect parabola a thousand feet away and the bullet rams into the top right side of my skull, spinning into the bone and inflating into a perfect hollow point mushroom. It tears through the lobes of my brain and rips its way into my ventricular, and I drop to the ground without a thought or a yell or a mumble or a well-timed sarcastic remark. No one notices. People walk back into the bar, smiling and laughing and talking. I lay on the pavement, cold.

Everything hurts. Nothing hurts. I slowly roll over, onto my back. I exhale smoke rings and cough, but I do my best to stop it, not move, fearful that something else will rip inside if I move my head around too much. I slowly raise my head, look down at my feet. Stop. Lay on my back. Ease my head back, look up again. The fireworks are still going, and I change color with the light, from blue to red, from red to green, from green to white, and then nothing. Smoke makes everything hazy. The clouds roll in.

I turn my head to the side and spit. “Fuck it,” I say.
I stand up, stare at the ground. Looks like I landed in a puddle of motor oil.
I pull off the jacket, look at the back - it’s covered in black fluid. I throw the motherfucker onto the pavement.
Perfect. Just perfect. Seems like a fitting end.

I touch my forehead, and my fingers come back sticky - blood runs down the right side of my face. I pick my jacket back up and wipe it away, trying to get as much as I can off. I manage to get as much as I can without any kind of mirror and throw the jacket back onto the ground, kicking it away. I roll my sleeves up and go back inside.

I walk back into the drunken din and immediately wish I had waited another minute, until someone had chosen another song on the jukebox. I look around for Sheila and Greg but I don’t see either of them - they’re probably comparing “he’s such a dick” stories. I push my way to the bar and order a vodka soda.
“Keep it coming,” I tell the bartender. He pours without looking at me. He’s avoiding my eyes. My head.
“Do you have a fucking problem?” I ask. I start to blink my right eye quickly and uncontrollably. Like the twitch you get when you haven’t slept.
“You don’t look so good,” he says. “There’s something wrong with your eye.”
“Well,” I say, finishing off the next drink, “there’s obviously many things wrong with both your eyes, asshole. Because I feel great.” My eye starts to water. I close it and turn around to stare at the bartender with my left.
“I just wink in slow-motion,” I say.

Less than five percent of people who get shot in the head live through it. Two thirds of victims die before reaching a hospital. Doctors call it a blown mind.
In ballistics, space bullet trauma occurs when a bullet is discharged into the air and falls onto a person. A recent study by the CDC found that eighty percent of celebratory gunfire-related injuries are to the feet, shoulders, and head. In Arizona it’s a criminal felony to discharge a firearm randomly into the air, but in all the other states, it’s a misdemeanor.

I finish another drink and while I’m standing there I feel a pain in the back of my mouth, on the right. I tongue at my gums, searching it out. Something crumbles. I reach into my morals with my index finger and thumb, push back until I can feel the powdery residue. I grab a hold of the tooth and pull, very gently, and it just slides ever so easily out of my gum, the root coming up, like I’m planning on replanting it in another place.
I turn to walk to the bathroom and bump into Wes, the “irritating megalomaniac,” and he spills both his beer and his Tuaca all over his asian character shirt.
“It looks like there’s something in your hair, dude,” he says, and I push past him, slapping the Waterford glassware down and out of his hands. The glasses hit the ground and shatter, spreading across the floor. I watch pieces of it spiral out and disseminate through the crowd, and I hit the bathroom door, accidentally dropping my tooth. It falls and I open the door and press inside into the cool florescent light. I bolt the door behind me.

The bathroom is unexpectedly spotless. It smells like bleach and pine cleaner. Everything is white. White tile on white grout. White toilet and white sink. Silver handles. I turn the one marked “hot” and let it run.
I still haven’t looked at myself in the mirror.

I start washing my hands, the hot water steaming and turning them bright red and raw. On the second or third round I look up, abruptly rather than gradually, and see that my right eye is overflowing with blood. I blink and little bits of coagulated blood stick to my eyelashes. I realize as I move my eye back and forth there’s the slightest bit of resistance, a thickness.
I try to wipe it with a paper towel but just end up sticking little bits of paper all over it, and I have to try to pull them off slowly and one by one, letting little droplets of water roll off my index finger and into my sclera, moistening the paper enough so it’ll stay together.
I’ve just pulled the last piece off of my eye, leaving it all marbled with blood, when someone starts pounding on the door. I ignore it.
The pounding comes again - “I know it’s you in there!” Greg. Jesus H. Christ.
“Of course it’s me, jackass!” I yell back. “Gimme a fucking second!”
He shuts up and stops pounding, probably just leans against the door, thinking I may open it and try to make a break for it. He should know better. As if I give a shit about him.
I lean forward as far as I can over the sink, into the mirror, pulling back my hair, parting it. The hole is big enough for me to stick my index finger into. The hair around it is singed and tangled, matted by dried blood, and the hole is nothing but black. It’s not how I thought it would be. It’s sloppy. The bullet must have slowed down some, because I can see little pieces of skull lurking underneath or around the skin, like it was cracked, hit - not penetrated. I do my best to pull hair back from around it, try to maneuver into a good position to see inside. I pick at the scab surrounding it with my fingernail, and pull part of it off, but there’s no blood. I lean forward more, peering into my head, standing on my toes. I stop. This is stupid. And wrong, probably. No telling how messed up I am. Things are ripped up in there. Might still be ripping.

I push my index finger into the hole, up to my knuckle, then as far as it will go. It goes in smooth, without too much force, without friction. I slowly start to wiggle my finger through the wetness, and I can just feel the spongy material that just might be what brain I have left. Either I’m very lucky, and this is all just brain matter that human’s don’t use, or I should be in a goddamn medical journal somewhere.
I should be a superhero. Bullet-in-the-head-man. Skullcap penetrator. I stretch, push as deep as I can, and my fingernail scrapes something hard. I pry at it but it’s deep, and it’s surrounded by meat. I try again and my fingernail catches instead on something soft, and it starts to come up until I shake it off. Greg pounds on the door again.
“Let me in, asshole, before I break this door down!”
He has a kind of flair for the dramatic.

I undo the bolt and the door flies open. Greg comes storming in.
“What the fuck is your problem, dude?” He says, gathering up my collar. He lifts and strains, and I think he’s trying to lift me up. He succeeds in stretching my shirt. I just look at him. Sheila bought me this shirt.
“I talked to Sheila,” he says. “She told me what you did.”
“Who gives a shit?” I say.
He just stares at me.
“You’re not even gonna do anything,” I say.
He looks at me. Glares, really. I can almost feel shit coming out of his eyes. He lets go. Takes two steps back, his toes dragging. On the second step he drags perfectly and there’s a long drawn out squeak from the sole of his shoe. I stifle a chuckle, but only enough to make sure he knows I’m stifling it. His head goes down, and he steps out of the room. Sheila comes in on fire.
“You fucking asshole,” she says. “Where the fuck do you get off?”
I lean forward, bowing, so she can see where the bullet entered my skull. The bruising, the burning, the blood. I wait for a gasp or a gag.
“You think you can just fucking do that to me?” she says.
“You think I’d just let you lay your hands on me like that?” she says.
I stand erect. She’s looking right at me, but she hasn’t. even. noticed.
“Greg and I are gonna kick your ass,” she says.
“Oh, fuck you,” I say. I push her to the side and slam the door, bolting it. Greg comes running up to stop me, but he’s slow and stupid and a fucking pansy and I’d love to see him try shit.
“You hurt me,” she says. “You really hurt me, you know that?”
I push her into the wall.
“You think you can get away with everything. But you can’t,” she says.
I grab her by the neck and shove my tongue down her throat, and there’s scarcely a “no” or a “don’t” outta her, and I realize there’s an obvious upside to having a bipolar girlfriend.
I push forward into the realm of uncomfortable - for the both of us, extending my tongue like an awkward fourteen year old, pushing my face into hers as hard as I can, pulling back and raking her top lip with my teeth. She gasps and pushes me back, and I’m off balance for a second, thinking she’s gonna swing or scream but instead she leaps at my belt buckle, pulling it loose. I find the passion of the moment inspiring, and attempt to tear her blouse, but just succeed in pulling her into a stumble, her high heels slipping across the tile.
She throws her hair back and turns around, sitting on the sink, hooking her hands under her knees and lifting her legs to her sides. I shove most of my hand into her mouth.

There is no loving contrition. I am not sorry. In fact, I feel better than I have in a long time.

Sheila reaches up and jams her middle finger as deep into the hole as it can go and I fucking scream because I can feel her Lee’s press-on nails sinking into something important and for an instant every thought I have is consumed by the word “poppycock.”
I smell eggs.

She starts screaming. I push her aside and hurl myself at the toilet.
I vomit.
I vomit until my throat burns and my voice comes out in rasps. Until I feel like I’m suffocating. It starts out a frothy brown and slowly makes its way to clear, pausing in the middle for a quick stop at pink, my mouth filling with the taste of rotten onion rings and orange juice, screwdrivers and scotch I didn’t like, gobs of yellow phlegm standing out against the thin viscosity of the contents of my stomach. I stop, start to dry heave, and gasping for air, double over in the stall - a perfect fold down my midsection.
The bullet clinks against the tile.

Both of us stop. We can’t even hear the bar outside. Everything is completely quiet. Everything slows. I can count the flicker of the florescent light. She looks at me and blinks, then starts to stammer. It’s either an insult or an apology. Anger or remorse. She adjusts her skirt, attempts to arrange her blouse. My ears are ringing. She slides open the bolt and runs out.

I stand watching.

I don’t know if I’m dying. If things are ripping apart on the inside. I don’t know if this hole will close and fill in and everything will be the same again. But it doesn’t really matter.

You can look into my eyes and see that they’re the same as they always were.
There’s simply nothing fucking there.