I like my second-grade teacher because she teaches us to make things; for Christmas we’ve done a bulletin board full of elaborate angels, their bodies tubes of rolled blue paper shaped like rockets, their wings fringed white, their hair sheeny white cotton brushed up and out. Is that how our souls will look in what my grandmother used to call “the next life,” floating against the skyey backdrop of heaven? Now it’s January, almost the end of the month, and we’re making things about presidents: cherry trees and axes, log cabins. I am carrying home some such production one afternoon when there’s a scene on East Twenty-second I’ve never seen before. There are police cars in the yard next door, and in our yard, and ambulances at Mikey’s, crackly police radios, red lights twirling, and every now and then a siren letting out a little whoop as if it can’t contain itself. People are standing around watching, the police officers keeping them at a distance, a big semicircle centered on Mikey’s house, and now the neighbors are being interviewed, because Mikey’s father has taken a gun and shot Mikey, and his other son, and his wife, and himself.

That boy I was, clutch of school papers in hand, seems unable to take in these events, or rather, all he can do is take them in, all eyes and ears, a kind of recording instrument unable to interpret. Like a lunar vehicle, one of those probes which will be sent out, in a few years, onto the surface of the moon, the sort that thinks nothing, assesses nothing, merely collects. Bits and pieces of perception—neighbors standing and talking, the bits of overheard talk, the police radios fierce with staticky voices like broadcasts from satellites, something in the newspaper the next day, on the TV news? Maybe he hears his parents talking about it, in the kitchen, when he’s not supposed to hear? Something about no money, about how hard it is to have a child who’s not all right, the pain of a boy with something wrong with him?

Strange sense of a wound in the neighborhood, the continuity ripped. Once opened, the gap persists. Everybody gone. Mikey’s house empty, yard full of tumbleweeds.