A. Homes - Music for Torching

Daniel is in the room. He appears on the monitor, screaming at Nate. "You little fucking jerk. You pathetic putz. Such a fucking asshole." He lifts Sammy up. "Get the fuck out of my way."

More shots. The monitor goes black.

"Nate?"

Elaine turns. Her arms are raised up-near her ears, terrified, protecting. She moves to run-the opposite way. A fireman catches her and points her in the right direction.

"We've lost audio and visual"-an official report.

And then Daniel is coming out of the building, holding Sammy in his arms. The front of his shirt is bright with blood. He's staggering. "Help me," he bleats. "Help me."

There is a stampede. Paramedics race across the parking lot. The SWAT team descends from the roof, breaking glass, crashing through windows; heavy hooves pound down the hall, moving on all fronts simultaneously. It is as though they could do nothing until something happened, and now they do everything-all at once.

Paul is rushing toward Daniel.

"I can't carry him," Daniel says, collapsing into Paul, knocking him down, like a football tackle.

The medics sort out the heap. They lay Sammy and Daniel out in the parking lot, between the yellow lines. They are cutting away Daniel's shirt, they are looking at Sammy's head.

Radios crackle. "We're gonna need a medevac chopper to shock trauma. We have a white male, nine years old, with a gunshot wound to the head."

"His head," Elaine says, stunned. "He shot him in the head." "He has a hard head," Paul says, pulling himself up. It's the stupidest thing he's ever said.

Paul and Elaine are at the edge of a human circle. They can't get closer; no one will let them in.

There are ten men bent over Sammy, men on their hands and knees, crawling.

"Pulse?"

"Rapid, one sixty-two."

"Blood pressure?"

"Trying to get it."

"Respiration?"

"Fast."

"Can we get something to pack it with?"

"There's bone missing."

"Where's the chopper?"

"ETA six minutes, landing on the lower school playground." "Oxygen."

"Can I get a line in?"

Fragments, bits and pieces.

"Did they find the eye?" someone asks.

There is no response.

It is beyond their control. Out of their hands.

"Why aren't they asking us any questions?" Elaine says to Paul. Paul has no answers.

"This one's fine," one of the paramedics says. Daniel sits up. "It was his brother's blood." His shirt is off. They're giving him oxygen. They're checking the other parts of him. "He's fine, just a little shocky."

"He's fine," Elaine says. "I heard them say he's fine."

Paul shakes his head.

Not Sammy.

"Should we bag him? Intubate?"

"Can we get an EKG?"

"He has asthma," Elaine tells a paramedic. "He uses a puffer. And he can't take penicillin, it gives him a terrible rash."

"What was the ammo? Hollow-point?"

"We don't know."

They stand helpless.

"Is he breathing?" Elaine asks, pleading, as she watches the paramedics squeezing the plastic ball.

"He's getting air."

"Could someone call my mother?" Elaine asks softly.

"Nate?"

The Bomb Squad has Nate. They're moving him to the playground at the top of the hill carefully-afraid he might explode.

They set him down in the outfield near second base.

Someone from the Bomb Squad approaches, takes out a pair of scissors, and cuts off Nate's shirt.

Nate, the boy bomb, has cans taped to his torso, cans taped up and down his arms: Raid, Magic Sizing, Reddi Wip, Easy-Off, Cheez Whiz. Cans and wires.

The trained dogs sniff him.

"Don't move."

People run up the side of the hill to see what's happening.

His mother is held back behind a line.

The area is sealed off.

"Arms and legs spread wide."

The man from the Bomb Squad cuts up one leg of Nate's pants and down the other. Nate's pants fall away; smoke bombs roll out of the pockets. Nate is on the playground in his underwear, a steak knife taped to his leg.

"He's got wires running from can to can, and it looks like three kinds of tape-silver duct, some sort of a black fiber, and what looks like regular old Scotch Magic. The cans appear to be attached by a white wire that ends in an outlet-I think he's done it with some sort of extension cord." The man pushes down Nate's socks with a pencil. "There's two sets of double-A batteries around the ankles."

"Check him for a timer." The squawk of the walkie-talkie.

"I hope they don't have to detonate him," an ambulance driver says. "In 'Nam, they medevaced a guy with a live grenade embedded in his head. It hit him and didn't detonate. The doc came out to the chopper pad, shot him full of morphine, and we set him off-like smashing pumpkins. Kaboom!"

"No timer."

"Go ahead and cut the wires."

The man from the Bomb Squad snips a wire, separating the spray starch from the Reddi Wip. Nothing happens. He reaches out and slowly pulls a piece of duct tape off Nate, peeling the cans away from Nate's skin.

Nate whines.

"Neutralized. Disarmed."

The chopper comes in over the hill. They hear it before they see it, thumping through the air.

Smoky red flares mark the spot.

It lands, kicking up a hot, dry wind.

"Stay with Mrs. Hansen," Paul yells at Daniel over the din.

The door slides open.

One, two, three, they lift Sammy off the ground. The medic holds the IV bags in his teeth, the oxygen tank under his arm. Whatever is not attached falls away, wrappers, scraps.

Sammy's head is swathed in an enormous wad of white gauze. There is a bandage over one eye. The other eye is open, pupil dilated, fixed as though it has seen something horrible.

"You did a good thing," Paul says, draping his jacket over Daniel's shoulders.

"Go," Daniel says.

Elaine is pulled into the helicopter after Sammy. She sits curled into the half seat by the door, the rivets of the low ceiling brushing her hair.

"It's all right," she tells Sammy. "You've had quite a hit in the head, but you're fine. Everything is fine."

The medic checks Sammy's vital signs. His helmet hides his face; he speaks into his headset. "Pulse one-twenty. Respiration shallow." He pumps the blood-pressure cuff.

Paul is last on board, crammed into a corner.

The door is slammed closed, locked. The whir is louder now, wings bladishly beating, a deafening metallic din.

The chopper takes off, thrusting up, hovering above foursquare, hopscotch, a diamond painted yellow.

Rising.

Pulling back on the scene.

"Chopper four, we are en route."

They are up and away, over the trees, clear of the wires, looking down on the familiar, a crooked cartography, houses, streets, the neighbors' yards, home. They are looking in on themselves from a peculiar perspective-everything in miniature, their lives made small.

Elaine is holding Sammy's hand; it is flaccid, unresponsive. He's getting whiter and whiter, and the gauze is staining red. When no one is looking, she pinches his finger, hard. Nothing happens.

"Pressure is falling," the medic says, pumping.

The sun glints off something metallic, a split second of shattering light.

Shiny, Elaine thinks.

They are into the blue.

Paul checks his watch-it beeps. Four forty-five.

Elaine looks at him. "It's over," she says.

For their enormous generosity of spirit, I would like to thank: Sarah Chalfant, Jill Ciment, Gregory Crewdson, Marc H. Glick, Amy Hempel, Erika Ineson, R. S. Jones, Randall Kenan, M. G. Lord, Rick Moody, Karen Murphy, Marie V. Sanford, Helen Schulman, Laurie Simmons, Andrew Solomon, Ben Taylor, Liza Walworth, Rob Weisbach, Karl Willers, and Andrew Wylie.

For a much needed and much appreciated grant given at just the right moment, I thank the Guggenheim Foundation, and for the great gift of time, the Corporation of Yaddo.