And I do. She’s standing at the other end of the hallway, by the doorway to the kitchen, holding the black pistol in both hands, my father’s Luger, holding it the way he taught her to years ago, when we used to shoot at bottles and cans in the desert: well out in front of her, away from her face.

She holds the gun out, and she waits; I stand in the line of fire, and I wait.

And now we’re in a movie: oh God, a safety movie. I can only see us—them—through a diminishing lens, the telescope’s wrong end: they’re tiny, in the impossibly elongated hall, the mother swaying a little from side to side in order to maintain her balance, her eye lined up with the sight at the top of the pistol, lined up with the heart of the boy, who stands with his hands at his side, as if in acquiescence. They’ve been moving toward this moment for years, mother and son, and now they don’t move at all, except for her slight swaying.

What I don’t know is: does she pull the trigger?

Does she hesitate, does her hand refuse the task she’s set it? I want her to hesitate, but perhaps she merely goes ahead and squeezes, maybe again and again, I don’t know. I don’t know because I’m not there. I’m closed, gone away, already dead behind the eyes, no longer at home, halfway to the next life already and good riddance to this one. Where is it we go, when we leave the body? Maybe I’m thinking I won’t miss it, this sorry stubborn queer flesh, maybe I’m thinking nothing at all, merely empty, ready to receive what my mother offers.

FANFARE & FINALE

Firebird

That hallway opens on and on, in the nightmare house of the perspective box, a narrow gullet of space telescoping further and further, boy at one end, mother at the other, the bullet—fired or unfired, does it matter?—traversing that length, never arriving, since time dilates there, too, the hallway traveling on for years, the uncertain duration of a lifetime.

They are the twin poles of an education, these two images, the terms which establish the parameters of my life. A boy lifted by music, his body become aerial and bright as the phoenix that music portrays—and that boy, years later, turning to ash, held in the sights of his mother’s gun. The gun his father’s taught her to use, the father who’ll come home in a while and find them standing there, and find that his wife hasn’t killed his son because she can’t get the safety off.