Gun Work

Barney’s goldfish croaked eight days after he set up housekeeping at the gun range, with the benediction of owner/manager Neil Takami, who secretly appreciated the extra nighttime security. Barney awoke to find the fish floating sideways, dead as roadkill, nobody’s fault, these things just happen sometimes. Following a brief unspoken encomium, Barney gave his late fish a burial at sea with honors, if you stop to consider that every sewer pipe and outflow system in Los Angeles eventually empties into the Pacific Ocean.

Barney had never watched television while on his own. He had watched the fish. From what he had gleaned of television while immobilized in the hospital — at least, the noisy and idiotic programs Armand subjected him to during their mutual convalescence — he wasn’t missing a thing of worth. Mano had not had a TV, either, and Barney didn’t have one here.

This left Barney with nothing much to do when he was by himself, surrounded by armament he was incapable of utilizing professionally, and amateurism grated his psyche. He hung with his crew: Karlov, refining his modifications to a variety of firearms; Armand, checking in to test his latest cartridges; Sirius, to pursue an overall mission objective. It was Barney that was the albatross here, his slow healing, crippled movement and nearly insurmountable pain deftly yoking an anvil to any concept of forward motion.

These were the classic ingredients for genuine despair.

He could head-butt the pain. He had to; there were three more operations on his hands after the first one, and each of those came with mandated recovery periods with too much time spent awake and luridly aware of the pulsing of blood through throbbing fingers, even the ghost fingers.

He could rationalize the slow-motion of healing. At least it was goal-oriented.

He could become a fast-food zombie, staring glassy-eyed at a TV until his brains dribbled out his ear. No, scratch that.

He could discover or innovate adapted forms of movement to replace outmoded or restricted ones. That was forward-thinking and resourceful.

But he could not beat the sulfurous ebony cloud that swaddled his emotions, because that was the area in which Barney was least prepared for combat. He had kissed the despair in Mexico — sideswiped it — then had head-butted the emotion while imprisoned, but it had never loomed as skin-crawlingly imminent as it did now, when he was supposedly free. He saw himself as a drained vessel of exhausted resources, no surplus tanks, running on the memory of fumes. His bodily energies had been sunk into tissue regeneration and the mass production of antibodies and white cells. His brain felt as if it had been dry-cleaned, sandblasted and re-shelved, empty.

Even as mundane an activity as going to the market — once he could locomote — seemed off-kilter to Barney, as though he had rematerialized in a parallel world and was faking his way through the most ordinary moves so the natives wouldn’t notice and lynch him for being an outsider. He developed a fondness for an energy drink called Primer Pop, but apart from that and the booze in his miniature fridge at the gun range, he had seemingly lost the ability to discern foodstuffs. He generally ate with his crew, or ate something they bagged along. He found himself standing in an overlit aisle, his ears assaulted by Beatles muzak, unable to determine exactly which flavor of Ape-Os cereal to buy. Orangutan flavor? Gorilla Granola? It was as though some essential program in his head had been deleted.

He had to fill himself back up with something, and all he had was a dormant vein of raw hatred.

They took Erica; they got her, man, grabbed her ass right out from under me, I haven’t got a pot to piss in... there’s nobody else I can trust in a shitstorm like this... will you help me?

It was an art, that kind of simulated feeling. Hysteria helped sell the mark. The best users always advantaged a ticking clock and ego — help is needed now; you are the only candidate, and a yes vote means they’ve just hooked their latest sucker. Your utility was the outer limit of friendship.

In Iraq, Carl had performed a long spiel about who might live and who might die and who might keep in touch, after. About the kind of friends you don’t see for years, then pick up right where you left off. That had sounded warm and inviting, all right, an ideal to wish for in the face of daily death. But — all cards down — it was about using people.