Echos
I awoke to the sound of a gunshot resolving out of the white noise of a fan near our bed. You can tell the sound of a bullet because it has a tail. I remember those nights after we first moved to South Seattle, listening and playing gunshot or firework. I bet most of the white folks gentrifying the area at the time couldn't tell the difference, but we could.
This is maybe the third or fourth time I've woken from a nightmare tonight, but it wasn't a nightmare this time. It was a sound… a sound that wasn't a sound. It took me a few moments to realize I didn't hear it with my ears, but with the skin above where my solar plexus was. There's skin there now, above the missing cartilage and bone, where there once, and for almost a year, was only a hole.
The next question, when we would identify a gunshot, was “whom?” You could hear the police shooting range in the neighborhood. Sometimes the sound was far off and ambiguous. Others it was close and there was no mistaking. Sometimes it was followed by screeching tires. Most of the time we didn't hear an ambulance.
If you were by the elementary school during recess as kids played, the sound of gunfire from the range would occasionally mix with the screaming of children.
I didn't hear the gunshot that night. At least, I don't remember hearing it. I didn't know I'd been shot until I saw the blood, then someone came up and told me. Those moments, of the actual shooting, were blank and remainded so for a long time. It took me years to put together what happened. Sometimes remembering is still a little like unscrambling an egg.
People want to know what it's like getting shot. When they ask, they're always wondering about the moment, or the time from the instant where everything stops making sense until it stops being interesting to them: when they knock you out in the ambulance, your first surgery, whatever.
Movies only seem to show those moments, and everyone knows, at least on some level, that they usually get those moments wrong. But even if they got them right, that's not what matters. That's not the experience. It's never that strange and narrow stretching minutes that feel like hours. It's the months that feel like days and years that feel like weeks that follow.
There is no easy way with sound and motion to convey the time dilation of trauma, the roller coaster of a long recovery. Nor is there a way any way to convey the spontaneousness of body horror that interrupts it.
It isn't the sound, the bullet, the blood, the shock, the moments that are important. It's the nurse coming in and roughly shoving you aside to change the sheets from under you, days or hours after surgery, leaving the gaping wide wound, from sternum to groin, agonizing and bleeding again, yet another reminder of the fact that your fragile humanity is an inconvenience to a world built to tighten schedules and drive numbers.
It's talking to a friend in the kitchen, a few weeks after getting out of the hospital, before you crumble to the floor as your muscles seize. It's waiting for most of the night to find out that, despite the fact they told you the it might be in there forever, the bullet was pushing out right then and had to be cut out. Fortunately there's someone who needs surgery practice, otherwise you'd have to wait, in overwhelming pain, until the next day.
It's the nightmare 6 months later about being hunted by a sniper, as you try to find place to hide, in a building entirely made of glass.
It's the anger the comes out of nowhere, the terror that surprises you. It's remembering, for the first time, being grabbed and held right before being shot, five years after it all happened. It's remembering the sound of the gunshot in your body more than 8 years later.
In the hospital, under ketamine, I was able to focus on my pain, to see it as signals coming from my nerves, to follow it down to my wound, and to watch the muscles and nerves weave together. Pain became healing. There were different types of pain though. There was the constant pain and there was a different nerve pain that would come and go, sometimes bringing memories.
I saw a language in my nerves, communicating between each other, signaling up when appropriate. Some nerves were severed by the bullet, others were walled off in my mind to protect my psyche from the enormity of it all. I imagined them screaming, unable to reach the rest of my body, unable to tell my brain. I imagine them reconnecting after screaming for so long. For years they have been trying to tell me that something horrible happened, and some new path opened up to allow the signals back in.
So here I am, waking up, at 4 am, 8 years after the shooting, hearing the gunshot for the first time as sensation in my body as. This is how you experience a shooting, not in the chaos of the moment but bit by bit, over the years that follow, as experiences in your body, as echos.