Three Chambers

I stopped in at this book store in the city. It was a strange place; everything was a mess. The shelves were bursting with books, and there were books piled in loose stacks on the tables and chairs and on the sill of the storefront window. Although it was a store, the place was furnished like someone lived there, with couches and tables with dirty dishes and bowls of half eaten cereal left scattered around and coats hung on a rack beside the door and an old TV in the corner of the room tuned to some game show through the fuzz and the static. It was as though someone’s obsession with books had overwhelmed their life and their living space until their apartment had somehow migrated to the commercial district and opened itself up as a shop all of its own accord.

There was a galley kitchen in the middle of the store, and the owner was there talking to his son. He was sitting in a leather desk chair that he had wheeled across the tile floor to the kitchen counter where he was filling his coffee cup from the coffee pot. Seeing him lounging there in the chair, I got the impression that he just zipped from place to place around the store and never got out of the chair if he could help it. As he sipped his coffee, he held up a pocket revolver in his other hand, twisting it around as he laughed and explained to his son about a prank that he was planning to pull. The son stood over him, tall and mopey with loose limbs and a messy nest of dark hair, and he listened with a sour frown on his face, occasionally shaking his head.

The owner explained that his old assistant was coming back to work that day after a long leave of absence. There had been an incident a few months earlier. Apparently the owner had tormented her with mind games and emotional manipulations to the point that she had finally had a mental break down and had stood over him hysterical, gripping a revolver in both hands and threatening to shoot him point blank in the chest with it. He had wheeled his chair away from her, his eyes wide and his hands up, but she had backed him into a corner of the shop, and he had sat there babbling and pleading with her and licking his lips until the police eventually showed up and managed to get the gun away from her and take her way.

So now, the owner thought it would be hilarious if he whipped out the gun and waved it at the assistant when she came in the door. He figured that they would all have a big laugh over it. It would clear the air and diffuse the situation, and everything could get back to normal. The son didn’t think it was funny at all. He tried to explain to his father that it was a bad idea. He tried to walk him through all the ways that it would just make everything worse. The owner petulantly shook away everything his son was saying, and he was about to offer a counter argument when they heard someone coming up from the back room of the shop.

The owner shooed his son away with the gun, and then he awkwardly tucked it behind his back somewhere in the folds of his chair. As the son retreated to the front of the store and grabbed a book off a shelf and tried to look as though he had been reading it all along, a blonde woman appeared from the back room, fresh and smiling and carrying a wide cake box in her hands. The owner squirmed and fumbled around in his chair, not finding the right moment of comic effect to reach for the gun behind his back, possibly reconsidering the wisdom of the whole endeavor now that he was confronted with the actual reality of the assistant in front of him.

She swept a space clear on the counter for the cake box, and then she came to the owner beaming with her arms out wide. The owner struggled up out of his chair on stiff legs, and as the assistant took him in her arms and gave him a big squeeze, I saw him slip the gun from behind his back and drop it into a blue pitcher that was sitting on the counter beside the kitchen sink. She was still holding him and resting her head on his shoulder as he felt around for the lid and popped it onto the top of the pitcher. She didn’t notice any of this, but the son watched the whole thing and then he shook his head and went back to reading his book.

I left right after that, and I didn’t give the matter another thought, but it was as though some other part of me remained there in the dark after the shop had closed, left behind to bear witness to things I wasn’t meant to see. And that part of me was still there that night, and I watched the son poke his head out of his room and creep over to the kitchen and retrieve the revolver from the blue pitcher. He stood with the gun laid flat across his hands, just standing there staring at it for a long, long time, and I heard him muttering to himself, “This gun is never going to cause anything but trouble.”

I followed the son as he slipped the gun into his pocket and took it away with him. The next day he was sitting on a large rock at the edge of a cliff, holding the gun flat across his hands again, regarding it in the same moody way that he had when he had fetched it from the pitcher. The wind tossed through his dark hair and a few afternoon clouds sailed by unnoticed. He held the gun and stared down at it for a long time, huffing and sighing and making little noises and seeming like he was thinking of other things, and then he just swung it up to his left temple and gave the trigger a slow, soft click.

There didn’t seem to be any genuine intention behind this. It seemed like mild curiosity, or just an absent-minded gesture. He held the gun up and studied it for a moment against the backdrop of the sky, and then he brought it to his temple again and gave it another click. I heard a little grunt then, maybe a little laugh. It was like he was just playing around with the gun, just going through the motions of scenes he’d watched in movies where desperate people hold guns against their heads. But I knew that he would bring the gun up and try it for a third time, and I knew that that third chamber would be the one that held the bullet. I wanted to call out to stop him, but I wasn’t really there. And sure enough, he lifted the gun again, like it was nothing, like he was tossing out a pebble to send it tumbling down the cliff, and he gave the trigger another click. But this time there was a hard punch, and I felt it, and there was a darkness that seemed to spread from the source of the sound until everything went completely black.