Of course it matters, that the bullet wasn’t fired. I lived. I wanted to live, or at least, now, in the reinvention of the past that remembering is, I want to; I don’t want to miss my life, I don’t want to miss anything.

And yet, once attempted, the act of obliteration isn’t erasable. To raise a gun and aim is to will a death, and that act of will is ineradicable; it is that moment of willed darkness that is still traveling down the hallway toward me, and though the tunnel stretches on and on, though I run ahead, am propelled forward in time away from the bullet and its fierce momentum, that gesture never ends. From that moment on I am a boy whose mother wanted him to die (but, oh, I was that before, wasn’t I?) and I hurry, running ahead of her wish.

Just as that hallway narrows on and on, the familiar limits of space dilated, the trustworthy nature of rooms and houses violated, so that any familiar space might suddenly open out, endlessly—just so, time begins to move differently, too, now, in this story. A life hurtles forward, tumbles out and ahead from these twin poles: firebird and revolver, diametrical opposites like the yes and no which rule the Ouija board: twin magnetic poles which cause a kind of gyroscopic spin, advancing the motion of my tale.

Much remains in the margin, of course, much at the edges that isn’t part of this narrative. Having pulled back the curtains on a source of light and an equally potent wellspring of darkness, what more could I say, to tell you how I began?