Friendly fire, p.1
Friendly Fire, page 1
For my family
COPYRIGHT
Friendly Fire
Copyright © 2024 by Paul Rousseau
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ISBN 978-1-4002-4796-7 (eBook)
ISBN 978-1-4002-4795-0 (HC)
Epub Edition AUGUST 2024 9781400247967
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
1. Part I
2. Part II
3. Part III
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All names and locations have been either changed or redacted. The following does not infringe upon any nondisclosure agreement and is proven factual by both law enforcement and Public Safety reports.
PART I
HOLES
It is April 7, 2017, around 6:30 p.m. My roommate Mark and I are in the on-campus apartment we’ve cohabited for three years. We are best friends. I love him. No one else is home. We are on the couch, side by side, laptops on laps. Television on for white noise.
“Want to grab a beer?” he asks.
I’m not feeling well. Woke up with a head cold. A little throat thing. I absolutely do not want to go to the doctor. Camaraderie and a deep-fried pickle might just get me out the door.
“Groveland after 10:00 has got really cheap drinks for happy hour,” I say.
“That could be fun. Wings sound good too. I’m trying to decide if getting a little buzzed would be considered a warm-up, or actually hurt my performance tomorrow,” he says.
Tomorrow he is supposed to drink an entire box of wine and then participate in a bike race relay, dubbed infamously the Tour de Franzia. An event I would be a great spectator at, though this is with his other friend group.
“If it’s beer tonight I don’t think it would impair your efforts,” I say. Mark is no stranger to alcohol. I have every confidence he’ll do just fine.
“I kinda want to get buzzed up a lot today though,” he says. As if baiting me for resistance. Who am I to tell him otherwise?
“I don’t see why not,” I say.
He turns the TV off and exits behind me, passing our roommate’s empty room. Keith is at co-ed intramural volleyball practice with his girlfriend, Rachel.
I stay in the main living area, centerpiece of our apartment and great divider of each of our personal spaces. I’m writing a research paper for my capstone English class on humor and levity in speculative fiction. I realize I left a book on my dresser. I get up, take a few steps toward my room, and pause. I turn one hundred and eighty degrees, face the couch, then notice just how much of Mark’s shit is everywhere. Bags, jackets, dirty dishes. Empty Mellow Yellow bottles turned chewing-tobacco spittoons. I’m not the tidiest person in the world, but the place is really turning into a sty. I figure I should do my part to clean up a little, set an example. It couldn’t hurt. I lean over to grab something off the floor. A scrap of paper maybe, a dead battery, or guitar pick, I don’t know. I don’t hear it. I don’t see it. But something comes at me through the wall.
INJURY
I’ve trudged through this story some thirty times now, to nurses, doctors, therapists, cops, lawyers, strangers, and one private investigator. I know the words. The words are simple: I got shot in the head by my best friend at school. No words over two syllables. It kind of sounds like a jingle, or nursery rhyme. But making the words come out is no fun. When I know they are coming, when I can feel it, I prolong the words as much as possible with lots of ums and ahs and back-of-head scratching. Once I finally get on with it, my voice finds a new register, as if my real voice wants nothing to do with what happened. I can’t help but rock back and forth, elbows on knees, tense, shoulders high. I tend to get the shakes, kinking my neck weird. Talking is too quick, too sensory, too much all at once.
Writing is like a buffer against the physical aversion. It’s control in a situation where I had none. I’m the dominant voice over everything that hurt me. It’s a slick recovery tactic where I’m allowed to process things at my own pace. I get to muck about in the sandbox of the past and dig wherever and whenever I please. Most importantly, this chronicle affords my experience due respect and proper distance. A literal and figurative book on a shelf to be revisited in earnest, if and when necessary, but otherwise, on those good days, tucked away in my mind’s library.
My post-injury brain wants to fixate and obsess. I can’t focus for long, sometimes just fifteen-minute spurts here and there. The brevity of this book is an exact reflection, these fractured chapters a direct result. If I try to write for longer than my brain allows, it becomes hollow. I lose the ability to connect dots, maintain interest. I have to ask myself, what am I really saying? I rush to get it over with, unable to find substance. If I write anyhow, passing that point, ignoring my brain, it’s murder, straight through the meat grinder. I become a fixture to the nearest couch, system overload.
A traumatic brain injury (TBI) is just that, an injury that traumatizes the brain, usually resulting from a violent blow to the head. More than five million Americans are currently living with a brain injury.1 According to the CDC, there were approximately 214,110 TBI-related hospitalizations in 2020 and 69,473 TBI-related deaths in 2021. In the United States, guns are the most common cause of TBI-related deaths, above falls, motor vehicle crashes, and assaults.2
In many cases, the lasting effects of TBI—be them physical, cognitive, psychosocial—interfere with, if not entirely impede the ability to work.3 In my case, I’ve experienced just about every symptom of a severe TBI. Problems with coordination and balance, changes in sensory perception. Difficulty thinking clearly, problems concentrating, understanding information, memory issues. Personality changes, trouble controlling behavior, nervousness, depression, anger, impulsivity. I qualify as Disabled. I identify as Disabled. In a world increasingly attuned to the damage of ableism, I want to add to this conversation and show what my disability can do. It is a challenge. I still want people to know what happened.
HOLES II
I’m blindsided, tackled into a pool of cough syrup. Soaked in thick liquid while wearing layers of yarn. My ears buzz, as if someone hit the monkey bars in my brain with a tree branch. The sensation becomes a chronic, caustic companion. I lift a forearm. My sight is a television color quality test. I stand and get a head rush. I’m fighting this sensory ambush and trying to figure out what it is at the same time. There is no pain yet.
I tell my legs to get up and walk but they’ve forgotten how, and I stumble. I am missing steps, evaluating the depth of the floor all wrong. There are no bodily boundaries. The material world is in revolt, continuously shifting around me. Is this the result of a natural disaster? Nuclear warfare? An earthquake in Minnesota? That must be how I ended up tossed into a couple of wooden dining room chairs. The fire alarm is wailing.
There is sweat or water all over my face. With two fingers I discover I’m bleeding heavily.
Mark comes rushing out of his room.
“Shit! Shit shit shit fuck. I didn’t know it was loaded!” he says, one hand over his mouth, the other limply holding a pistol down at his side. I should be angry, or sad. But all I can think is, I did my best. It must be time to go.
He wants to help. He wants me to say something and keeps asking me to. But I can’t talk right now. I am determined to go look in the bathroom mirror.
Mark disappears for a minute. I pull myself up. I don’t know where the blood is coming from exactly. Somewhere on my head or face. I trip on silly putty feet and leave red handprints on the chair, the kitchen island, the walls. The path is random and disorderly, a child picking which house next on Halloween.
My face is strung with a thousand fishhooks towing five hundred bags of sand. My jaw is dangling like an undead decaying thing. I use my palms as kickstands on the edge of the bathroom sink. I hesitate to look at myself.
A hole in the middle of my forehead or through an eye would mean death is already happening. I’m shaky, weightless and top heavy at the same time, pinwheeling repeatedly in midair. I’m another dead kid.
I part my already clumping hair to each side. My bangs are a drawn curtain, below my widow’s peak is a stage in a theater. I make way for the devastation by wiping excessive blood to an imaginary drum roll.
Nothing. Just skin.
I poke around the top of my skull, discovering an indent the length of a peppermint candy. I see only pink, red, and white. I move in close to my reflection and tilt my head like a holographic trading card to spot the bullet. Nothing glimmers or refracts. I look back toward the main room. Mark is carrying a red pouch. The drywall above our couch is pretty messed up.
HAIR
When they first got married, my oldest sister and her husband went to a psychic. Let’s call this psychic Deb. No crystal ball or tapestries or heavy eye makeup, just a nice older lady from Burlington, Wisconsin, who loved buying lawn ornaments at renaissance festivals and smoking cigarettes.
They asked about kids and jobs and houses and happiness. They asked about my dad, who, according to Deb, wouldn’t realize how much he wronged my mom and us kids until the very end. Then they asked about me, a sixth grader with only one thing on his mind: the guitar.
“He is desperate to know if he’s going to be a rich and famous musician.”
I imagine Deb took a long pause. Stared at the blank space between her and the newlyweds while she massaged her jaw, TMJ-laden from talking to complete strangers about their futures for God knows how many years.
My sister took notes.
Not a famous musician, though music will always be very important to him. Seeing a golden pineapple. Wealthy. Will help pay for my kid’s college tuition. Hair. Hair also means a lot to him. He will be a writer who gets rich and writes about hair.
HOLES III
Mark leads me to my room and lays me down in bed with a pillow under my neck, ostensibly to minimize any swelling. He opens the pouch, a first-aid kit he purchased for solo hikes in California, and places pressure with some gauze.
“You must really fucking hate me right now,” he says, speaking loudly over the fire alarm. There wasn’t any smoke, I realized. The alarm was tripped, I think, because the wall it was mounted to had been shot through. Mark ignored it.
“No,” I say.
“There is no way, dude. You must really fucking hate me right now,” he says.
“No,” I say.
He says he needs to get a better look at the wound. He says I should shower, so I tightrope over to the bathroom on my own volition, step by step, arms out to keep balance, because I trust him. He runs off somewhere again. I remove my clothes and start the water myself, sort of swaying on the balls of my feet, swirling like a glass of red wine, waiting for the shower to steam. I think about Mark’s race tomorrow and wonder if he’ll still feel up to going after all this. Hearing the front door open, I peek my head out of the bathroom and see him rush out of the apartment carrying multiple gym bags.
I find out later that, while I’m in the shower, Mark goes to the parking garage beneath our building to hide everything in case the police come. Into the trunk of his car, he throws the handgun he shot me with, three additional firearms, including a small-caliber rifle, a second handgun, and an AR-15, along with enough ammo to outfit a small militia. He hides the AR-15 inside a guitar case. Afterward, he returns to our apartment. I’m still rinsing off.
Blood and loose hair run down the drain like sediment. I have a haircut scheduled tomorrow. I consider excuses for the hole in my head, things I’ll make up to tell the stylist: Just cut around the gash. I’m under the illusion that things can and will go back to normal. Perhaps even soon.
I dry off and carefully pull a clean sweater over my head, stretching the neck hole to get more than enough clearance around the wound. It’s my favorite sweater, a minimalist black crewneck with my university’s crest at the center, my clan. It reminds me of the fringe emo-skater fashion I was always a fan of in high school, but never wore myself. Oversized tops with extra slim pants that show off a name brand sneaker of choice. Since college, I put the jokey graphic tee to rest and really bought in to that aesthetic.
I lie back down in bed, head where I normally put my feet, and pain begins to loom. Liquid pressure; my brain is in a heat pipe. A headache to the bone, pain in my flesh like fresh cauterization by laser. The gut reaction is to touch the wound. I do. Parts of my skull move, and my eyes lace shut. It pangs as if the hole is one big cavity fixed with silver filling, and my fingers are wrapped in tin foil.
We get a knock at the door. I black out.
GHOSTWRITING
As a young person, instead of writing fiction and entering the mind of made-up characters—before I knew the term; before I knew it even had a term—I preferred ghostwriting. I liked getting into real people’s skin, people I knew, and writing as if I were them instead, in the first person. I wrote short vignettes of friends and classmates. I kept track of our conversations, the setting, my sensations, the sensations I speculated they were having, and drafted out the scenes I found most stimulating. I wrote these in an ongoing computer document prophetically titled “The Messenger Always Gets Shot.” Partly to sound evocative. Partly because, on some level, I felt conflicted about using others’ stories to level up my own writing chops.
I rejected the idea of writing openly and honestly about myself. I felt uninteresting, like I had no problems worth exploring. I had self-esteem issues. So did everybody else. My parents were divorced. So were everybody else’s. Somehow, Mom still managed to be my safety net and resource for everything. My ego told me to look elsewhere. I knew what I had and what others didn’t.
I was accepted to a music school for guitar performance and recording. That had been the dream since I was eight years old: to become a studio musician, fairy-dusting layers of guitar onto famous people’s generic music with a cigarette tucked behind the strings on the headstock until I was discovered and could tour with my own band. Mom, the purveyor of reality with all the right intentions, recommended I go into dentistry.
We met in the middle with English, and off I went to a local liberal arts private university, courtesy of both federal and private student loans. A little over $100,000 worth of debt by the time I finished school. I could be an educator, copywriter, or proofreader, at least in her eyes. Something with a 401(k). Somewhere in the back of my mind, the idea of ghostwriting still had me by the throat. Writing celebrity memoir would be a thrilling life—just like the movies, and not too far off from being a famous musician. I could still dream.
In a course modestly titled Nonfiction, I wrote my first legitimate essay, something a professor would read and grade, bearing the name “The Messenger Always Gets Shot.” It was a terrible montage of ultra-personal snapshots of my closest friends at the time, Mark among them. Some of the same themes have migrated here from the original essay, maybe even a scene or two, though hopefully improved since then. My first go at it was mostly a medley of poorly timed fart jokes and grotesque descriptions. Too much exposition. A little campy. I was a trailblazer, I thought. Surely I was the first person to write about this amalgamation of comedy and tragedy known as the Human Condition. Like a dweeb, I opened the piece with the dictionary definition of cognitive dissonance.
I’m embarrassed to read it to this day, but it does, in a way, work for me. The pages are weighty. The binaries feel magnetized. But it is a cheap weight. A dollar-store magnet. The title plays into the content by design. My subtle way of saying, yes, I know it is wrong to exploit tragedy for unearned feeling. It is a wink to the reader: Reader, I know—to write gruesome for gruesome’s sake, and then turn to laugh, merits certain punishment. The essay was published by my university’s on-campus literary magazine out of pity, I think. The students who ran the magazine were in my class.
HOLES IV
I only know these next details because of the police and Public Safety reports.
At 6:50 p.m., the fire alarm is wailing. The bullet tripped it when it tore through the drywall—same wall as the sensor. A tamper mechanism, I assume. The sound is contained to our room only. If anyone else in the entire seven-floor dorm building has heard the gunshot, they must have dismissed it as no big deal.
