From the Corner of His Eye

been in the dream, not in the real world. If silence didn't settle him, he went into the living room, only to discover that she was always where he had left her, fork-and-fan-blade face wrenched in a soundless scream.
        This is, of course, the purpose of art: to disturb you, to leave you uneasy with yourself and wary of the world, to undermine your sense of reality in order to make you reconsider all that you think you know. The finest art should shatter you emotionally, devastate you intellectually, leave you physically ill, and fill you with loathing for those cultural traditions that bind us and weigh us down and drown us in a sea of conformity. Junior had learned this much, already, from his art appreciation course.
        In early May, he sought self-improvement by taking French lessons. The language of love.
        In June, he bought a pistol.
        He didn't intend to use it to kill anyone.
        Indeed, he would get through the rest of 1965 without resorting to another homicide. The nonfatal shooting in September would be regrettable, quite messy, painful-but necessary, and calculated to do as little damage as possible.
        But first, in early July, he stopped taking French lessons. It was an impossible language. Difficult to pronounce. Ridiculous sentence constructions. Anyway, none of the good-looking women he met spoke French or cared whether he did.
        In August, he developed an interest in meditation. He began with concentrative meditation-the form called meditation "with seed"-in which you must close your eyes, mentally focus on a visualized object, and clear your mind of all else.
        His instructor, Bob Chicane-who visited twice a week for an hour-advised him to imagine a perfect fruit as the object of his meditation. An apple, a grape, an orange, whatever.
        This didn't work for Junior. Strangely, when he focused on a mental image of any fruit-apple, peach, banana-his thoughts drifted to sex. He became aroused and had no hope of clearing his mind.
        Eventually, he settled on a mental image of a bowling pin as his "seed." This was a smooth, elegantly shaped object that invited languorous contemplation, but it did not tease his libido.
        On Tuesday evening, September 7, after half an hour in the lotus position, thinking about nothing whatsoever but a white pin with two black bands at its neck and the number I painted on its head, Junior went to bed at eleven o'clock and set his alarm for three in the morning, when he intended to shoot himself.
        He slept well, woke refreshed, and threw back the covers.
        On the nightstand waited a glass of water on a coaster and a pharmacy bottle containing several capsules of a potent painkiller.
        This analgesic was among several prescription substances that he had stolen, over time, from the drug locker at the rehab hospital where he once worked. Some he had sold; these he had retained.
        He swallowed one capsule and washed it down with water. He returned the pharmacy bottle to the nightstand.
        Sitting up in bed, he passed a little time reading favorite, marked passages in Zedd's You Are the World. The book presented a brilliant argument that selfishness was the most misunderstood, moral, rational, and courageous of all human motivations.
        The painkiller was not morphine-based, and it did not signal its presence in the system by inducing sleepiness or even a faint blurring of the senses. After forty minutes, however, he was sure that it must be effective, and he put the book aside.
        The pistol was in the nightstand, fully loaded.
        Barefoot, in midnight-blue silk pajamas, he walked through his rooms turning on lights in a considered pattern, which he had settled upon after much thought and planning.
        In the kitchen, he plucked a clean dishtowel from a drawer, carried it to the granite-topped secretary, and sat in front of the telephone. Previously, he had sat here with a pencil, making shopping lists. Now, instead of a pencil, there was the Italian-made.22 pistol.
        After mentally reviewing what he must say, after working up a nervous edge, he dialed the SFPD emergency number.
        When the police operator answered, Junior shrieked, "I've been shot! Jesus! Shot! Help me, an ambulance, oooohhhh shit! Hurry!"
        The operator attempted to calm him, but he remained hysterical. Between gasps and sharp squeals of pretended pain, he