Shot

Someone shot a bullet at my head this morning.

I wasn’t as frightened by it as I would have thought I would be before it happened. I wasn’t frightened by it at all. Whoever fired the shot used one of those silencers, they must have done, because I didn’t hear firing, just the whistle of the bullet past my ear and the smack of it into the embankment behind me.

I was, though, frightened that there might be another following after it. I wasn’t sure whether to run. I didn’t run but I did walk a little more quickly. It seemed more suitable, somehow, than to run screaming, although I did feel like running and screaming.

It was a cool morning, the air damp but not heavy, and I had heard the bullet’s whistle, almost crackle, and a dull thud of it against earth. I allowed the thought to enter my head that if it had hit my head, that thud would be the last thing I heard.

*

I put my cappa and croissant on my desk. I turned to the guy in the next cube.

“Someone shot a bullet at my head just now,” I said.
“Really?” he said.
He didn’t sound very interested.
“Who was it?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t see.”
“Well, you’re okay.”
“Yes. It missed.”
“They weren’t a very good shot,” he said.
“Maybe they were just trying to scare me.”
“Why?”

I didn’t know.

If I rang the police, they would ask me who my enemies were. So far as I knew, I didn’t have an enemy. How could I? I had never done anything to make any.

Of course, when I thought about it, there were people who I didn’t quite rub along with. There was Alister Perks, with whom I had a couple of times had strong words – perhaps not strong, perhaps no more than a little heated. I posed him as assassin but the picture lacked something. There was too little of the coldblooded killer in him. Accountancy, I supposed, does that to a man. Bleeds out the ruthless exterminator in all of us, given time. Could he have hired someone? That was a more likely scenario, I thought, and yet, would a man really go to the trouble of having someone killed because of a dispute over too many sugars in his coffee or an inadequate order of paper? Could such things have festered, grown out of proportion? I simply couldn’t imagine it. Perks didn’t even seem to hold a grudge.

“Do you think Perks doesn’t like me?” I asked the guy in the cubicle.
“I don’t think he owns a gun,” the guy said.
I wasn’t sure this was an answer.

“He might have hired someone, don’t you think?”
“He doesn’t seem the type.”
“What is the type?”
“I don’t know, but whatever it is, Perks doesn’t seem it.”

I decided I should ring the police. It was no use my trying to puzzle out the mystery for myself. That was their job. But they – in the person of the sergeant who answered the telephone – did not seem greatly moved by the crime in question.

“Is there anyone you know of who might want to shoot you?”
“Not really,” I said. I wondered whether I should throw Perks’ name into the pot, but I wasn’t sure that there was not some sort of offence involved in falsely accusing a workmate of a grudge that had festered.
“Perhaps it was an accident.”
“Someone accidentally shot at me?”
“Perhaps they were cleaning their gun, or perhaps there was no gun at all. Perhaps you heard a car backfire.”

There was something in the policeman’s tone I didn’t like. I resolved to go out at lunchtime and find the bullet.

However, the weather turned during that morning, and by lunchtime it was raining heavily. I braved it but, to my dismay, the earthen embankment that had received the bullet had become very muddy and had largely slid into the street and been washed away into the gutter. There was no hope of retrieving a bullet.

That afternoon resentment grew in me. I did not know who I most resented – the policeman who had mocked my being shot at, the man who had shot at the bullet, or Alister Perks, who I had become convinced must have hired the assassin. Without a bullet, I had no hope of interesting the police, nor could I confront Perks. In any case, he did not seem to be in the office, but there was nothing unusual in that – he was often gallivanting around, auditing.

I gritted my teeth, swallowed back the taste in my mouth and knuckled down to work until five had come and I was released.

I ran through the rain to the subway, forcing myself to believe that it was the lack of an umbrella, and not fear that would paralyse me if I stopped to think about it, that made me hurry.

“Someone shot a bullet at my head this morning on Humboldt Street,” I said to my wife.
“Which one’s Humboldt Street?” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “What matters is that someone shot at me.”
“That’s not very nice,” she said.
I felt she did not have quite the tone of condemnation I was looking for. She seemed distracted.
“Your coat is dripping on the floor,” she said.
“It’s raining.”
“It is? Gosh. I’ve been inside all day and I wouldn’t have known.”

I went to hang up my coat. As I did so, I noticed something peculiar and out of place in the hallway. A pair of my wife’s shoes, muddied but only slightly, so that a less keen observer than I am would not have noticed, were sitting by the door, and not in the rack, their home.

I couldn’t think how to ask her why she had lied.

Over dinner, she was quiet. I would have said she was thoughtful, if I didn’t know that she disliked thinking about anything that was not practical. She forked food into her mouth with calm determination – pick, jab, pick, jab, munch – so that I almost didn’t have the heart to disturb her. But there was something I needed to ask her.

I coughed in that way one does to attract attention. She looked up to see why.

“Dear,” I said. “I don’t suppose you know Alister Perks.”

She looked back down at her food. I was not certain that her eye twitched, I would not swear so in court, but it may well have done. Perhaps she had only blinked in just the way you would if you had been looking at someone intently and now no longer wished to.

“I met him at a function,” she said. She continued eating in exactly the same manner as before.

Of course. I took my wife to functions when she wanted to come, which she sometimes did. And Perks would be there. I tried to recall, did he have a wife? But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t picture her. Something about him, when you thought very deeply about it, made it hard to imagine his having a wife at all.

posted by Dr Zen @ 6:06 pm