When I wake up I don’t get it. I don’t understand why I have been spooning the pillow so hard that it has disgorged its feathers all over the bedding. It doesn’t seem significant that I am grasping a beautiful black bra as if my life depended on it. All I know is that I am physically exhausted and that I have a terrible headache from gritting my teeth. Charlie always rubs my jaw at these moments, and I cast about fruitlessly for her. I call out her name but don’t get anything back. I bang the mattress childishly. Nothing. And still I don’t get it. But when I finally roll out of bed, it hits me.

Charlie’s not here. Charlie’s not here because she is somewhere else. With someone else. Doing something else. Something . . . unspecifiable.

I am splitting. My atoms are separating. I am fissioning with grief.

Gun Therapy

Gun Therapy

The only time it doesn’t hurt is when I am at the firing range. The irony is incomprehensible but it is nonetheless true. The sharp recoil, the smell of cordite and drop ceilings and sizzling gun oil, the bone-cracking vociferation of the blast—it heals me.

Each burst of muzzle fire sounds like a godlike “No!”

No, I will not be called Potap. No, I will not accept my family’s death. No, I will not let anybody take what doesn’t belong to them. No, I will not lose my career. No, I will not allow Pinky’s death to go unavenged. No, I will not let the Clean Getaway get away.

No, I will not turn into a miserable, muttering, soul-broken homunculus without Charlie.

If a gun is the final utterer of the final word, if it has the supreme power of absolute negation, if it says No to everything on the other end of its barrel, then the only person with the power of Yes is its wielder. Me.

In this case: Yes, I will pulse the Nakamura job successfully.

Yes, I will get my life back.

Yes, I will kill the Rat Burglar.

In the effort department, I excel. I put in the hours on the range and I have the blisters and exhausted extraocular muscles to prove it. But my early results do not earmark me for prodigy status. The first shot during my first lesson screams way wide of the target. That’s not the surprise. The surprise is the shell. Femtoseconds after the shot rockets out of the barrel, the shell discharges out of the breech. Normally its trajectory is perpendicular to the gun’s user; under normal circumstances the shell tumbles harmlessly to the side. This time, however, some gremlin of physics causes the shell to eject straight backward, an angle that sends it careening through the scorched air between the smoking gun and the flat prominence on my forehead.

Bull’s-eye.