Second Person Exercise

The morning is brisk and windy. Ice fog breaks against the Marin hills. Cold air shoots through your hair, slides inside your glasses, frosts over your eyeballs. You blink and turn up the radio until you feel Ludacris thumping along with your heartbeat.

The road is steep down and one-way. Along the road are cliffs, rocky beaches, forts, and buildings that look like military facilities. Three deer are frozen in a field, their heads fixated at your streaking silver convertible. But you’ve seen all this before, on sunnier days when the sky is crystalline and the sun is warm and you can focus on the scenery instead of the duffel bag in the trunk.

You park the car in a gravel lot reserved for park service employees. You remove the duffel bag from the trunk and gingerly strap it over your shoulder before hiking up a short hill and down a narrow cement path and across a bridge and inside Point Bonita Lighthouse. The metal framed staircase to the top is narrow but you run it two at a time until you are just below the rotating blast of light. The lighthouse hangs on the edge of the ocean, looming and imposing, with twisted facades and sloped roofs that remind you of a mansion in a horror film. There is nothing between you and Japan except sea, small dots of islands, the occasional China-bound barge. You feel the duffel bag rub against your side.

You found the bazooka in a hollowed-out wall in the utility shed in your backyard. Your father was in the army, Vietnam, which might explain it if he hadn’t turned into an outspoken critic of war, the second amendment, and guns in general. As for your mother, she’s been dead for a decade now, cancer in her brain, so while the bazooka is old and rusted and possibly from her era, it’s doubtful she’s the one who put it there.

By now you’ve missed the first three periods of school. Physics, English, and History. Angela Gicotti is in your History class, two rows in front of you, and sometimes she looks at you with a curled lip and narrowed eyes. You’ve heard stories about her, about thong underwear and two-fisted blowjobs and swallowing and all that. It’s intriguing, especially since you’re a virgin and savor every moment in her dick-sucking presence. But Angela Gicotti can wait. It’s not every day you find a bazooka in your backyard.

You haven’t seen a soul. No ranger, no Homeland Security agents, no other visitors. A television crackles somewhere and you decide that they are hiding from the cold indoors, watching game shows and talk shows and local reporters visiting gardening experts. You look out to sea, but the Farallones are nowhere to be seen, lost in the mist. Faded San Francisco is across the mouth of the bay, an army of white ant houses crawling over hills. The Golden Gate Bridge is dull orange and lifeless; you can’t believe its security cameras even know you’re alive.

The shell had been next to the bazooka in the shed, stuffed inside a moldy canvas sack. It smelled like cold metal and could very well be a dud, you realize, permanently dormant from fungus and disuse. But you cleaned the thing thoroughly with rags and water, and its gray coloring looked cool and professional after being degunked. You pull it out of the duffel bag and load it into the bazooka.

The weapon is light on your shoulder. Easy to shoot down a helicopter or airplane, you think, if you had any idea how to aim the thing. There is a primitive sight built into the barrel, but you doubt the weapon is heat-seeking or has a tracking device or any smart weaponry built-in. It’s too old for that, and whatever was there is probably worn down by its years in a dank shed. Then again, mindless guerilla fighters are always blowing up key military installations in movies and on the news. They can’t be that inaccurate.

What would Andrea Gicotti think if she knew you had a bazooka pointed towards the Golden Gate Bridge? you wonder. Probably scared shitless, but subconsciously impressed. She’d probably double fist you in the next few weeks, show you her thong underwear and then some. You imagine Andrea Gicotti in the backseat of your convertible swallowing your come and let the bazooka droop down until its tip is pointed at the guardrail.

“Hey kid!” you hear. You swivel towards the voice. A man in a wide-brimmed ranger hat is running towards you around the rim of the lighthouse turret, reaching for his belt. “Hey kid! Put it down! Put it down!”

The zap of his filtered radio. A yell for backup. You right the bazooka, point it towards his face. “Easy now,” he says. “Easy.”

The sirens will come soon, you know, with the television crews and the ambulances. They’ve probably called your parents already. Andrea Gicotti will never visit the backseat of your convertible; you’ll probably never even go to third-period History class again. This bazooka from the back of your shed has already killed one life.

You turn back towards the bridge. Even inside the drudgery of winter mist it stands proud and functional, a strip of color striking the Bay like a gangway plank. You are blindfolded, you realize, bayonets at your back. There is nothing to do but jump.

The bazooka arms with a flick of your thumb. There is a hiss, ancient battery connections fizzing to life, activating a warm embrace on your shoulder. You close one eye and pick a tower on the bridge, the one closer to Marin, and try to jam it in the crosshairs. A flock of birds dips through your sight and leaves; the rest of the world is silent.

You pull the trigger and hear a shot. Your shoulder shudders. There is a blare in your ear and you are pulled to the ground. Voices envelope you, feet press against your wrists, a wide-brimmed hat blocks your view. Blood runs from the back of your shirt.

You lie on the ground for at least twenty minutes. The paramedics are gentle and respectful; the rangers are cursing. They put you in a stretcher so the television cameras cannot see your face, then lift you in the air to go.

And just before your head dips down the metal staircase, you turn your head to the side and see it: the tower of the Golden Gate Bridge still ramrod straight in the air, the discarded bazooka surrounded by men wearing plastic gloves, the shell intact.

“Shit,” you say, closing your eyes. “Shit.”