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He leaves his car running and doesn't bother closing the door. The walk to the school is short, only a few hundred feet, and he feels himself gliding across that distance. He feels suddenly deprived of his senses, blind and deaf and numb. There is no heaven and there is no hell and there is no afterlife there is only now. There will be no white light for him to walk toward. He himself is the light toward which others will walk. He enters the school and then feels his material form disintegrating in the heat as he turns into a red giant star and then goes supernova and collapses on himself and becomes a neutron star, impossibly dense and powerful, and everyone nearby is drawn toward him by the immense gravitational force and then he's a black hole and then he is nothing at all just cosmic dust that used to be something.
After, the sun turned gray and descended into the lake like a spider dropping from the ceiling. I saw it hit the water, I saw the steam rising up, and I felt the tremors when it crashed against the lake floor. I saw the displaced water splashing over the banks and rushing toward our houses.
The experts say the sun is too big to fit into the lake, that it can't just fall, but they can't explain the darkness, or the fog that hovered over us for weeks. They say it's basic science— a falling sun would extinguish the world— but I know what I saw. I trust the things I see. I spent much of my life trying to believe in things I'd read. I went through school. I'm educated. I know all the things I'm supposed to believe. But in what world do any of them seem right? Every fact they try to sell you can be disproven if you look in the right places. Everyone says truth is an objective thing, but what if I find a different truth that makes more sense?
* * *
I heard the gunshots, but they didn't register as gunshots. I'd only heard a gun in real life twice before that day. The first time was when I was very young, when my father made me go on a hunting trip with him and his brother. It was an attempt to bond with an estranged sibling, to reconnect with some primitive vision of masculinity. He'd fired the gun in front of me, hoping to impress me, but all I remember is the look of monstrous glee on his face. The day of the shooting at the school, I thought at first that I'd just heard distant construction or a car accident. I was home when it happened. I hadn't been at work for two weeks, because I'd been told I was not wanted at work. They had suspended me for a so- called outburst.
Suspension of the right to work. That's what the official letter from the school district had said. Rights get suspended and pants get suspended and bridges get suspended. How does it all work? I don't know; I'm not an engineer. Everyone is suspended in some way, until they're not. The sun had been suspended in our sky for eons and then it had seen enough.
* * *
I watched the news. I ignored my phone though it buzzed incessantly. My email inbox overflowed with people asking questions I could not answer. I deleted everything without reading it. My brother was trying to contact me but I was afraid to answer. What could I say to him under these circumstances? I was very bad at lying to my brother, and I didn't want to frighten him. On TV they called it a rampage, then they called it a massacre, then they called it a state of emergency, then they settled back on massacre.
* * *
I saw the faces. I saw Sara R with the blood on her blouse being led into the back of an ambulance. I saw Kelsey P in the grass where sometimes I would teach my English classes on nice days. I saw a circle of students holding hands in prayer. I saw the windows shattered and the fire smoldering in the gym. These were people I knew, lying dead in places I knew. Changing the channel did not make it disappear. Sometimes life is so graphic it's impossible to process.
Excerpted from How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister. Copyright © 2018 by Tom McAllister. Excerpted by permission of Liveright / WW Norton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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