I pull my phone out of the pocket of my scrubs for the thousandth time. Working in the emergency department of a veterinary hospital is rarely as dramatic as I think it’ll be. Mostly it’s a bunch of dogs coming through with vomiting or diarrhea or both. I spend a lot of my shift standing around the treatment room, leaning on exam tables and waiting for doctors to tell me what to do. Sometimes I find an unoccupied computer and scroll through a news story.
Yesterday I read an article in The California Sunday about Gwen Woods, and the state of her life since her son Mario was shot and killed by police in a neighborhood adjacent to this hospital. Today, I’ve been working my way through a New York Times article by a writer who grew up in gun culture and now “fears for what it’s become.” Fearing for what it’s become seems sort of violently belated, or jokingly understated, but this writer evidently is earnest. I saw the headline earlier but didn’t open it; I only read it now because a friend sent the link in an email.
When I click my phone’s side button, there’s a message from Melissa on the screen, in the group chat we share with Erica. We’re looking for a place to live together, and trying to coordinate a viewing of a two-bedroom on Valencia later this evening.
dude!!
I just saw a news report there’s a shooter on your campus!
I keep my eyes open and my body still. Melissa doesn’t name who she’s directing this message at, but it has to be Erica. She got a contract job at YouTube a few months after we started dating, and all these Silicon Valley companies call their workplaces campuses because they’re so sprawling. I grip my phone with both hands and speedwalk to the back stairwell. By the time I step off the treatment floor, I’m already dialing Erica. Stress-diarrhea roils in my intestines. She answers after the third ring.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” I say.
No hi, baby girl! or hi, angel! like usual.
I wait a moment, both for her to say something and to absorb the fact that she is currently unharmed. She doesn’t speak, so I say, “Did you see Melissa’s message?”
She says yes, and again nothing else. We are aggressively calm. This is something I see the veterinarians do in the emergency room all the time. I know before I even see it that an animal has come in critical when there’s a particular laser-sharp quiet in the atmosphere.
“Okay,” I say. “What’s going on? Which campus are you on?” YouTube’s headquarters are in
San Bruno, but Erica lives closer to Google’s Mountain View campus. She works out of both and I never know which she’ll be at on a given day. I also don’t know which campus the shooter is on, or if this report is even real.
“There’s an active shooter on the San Bruno campus right now. I’m in Mountain View today.” My hand twitches involuntarily. I notice that I’m pressing my left palm against my chest.
“Okay,” I repeat, even though I want to scream at her to run from the building.
She tells me she doesn’t have any more information but she’s safe right now. I tell her I love her.
We hang up and I walk back to the treatment floor. Dr. Roth catches my eyes, asks if I can present a treatment plan to the owners in room three. I nod, take the sheets of paper she’s holding out to me. I enter room three and walk through the plan with the owners and my voice sounds childish. The people want to remove something from the list, so I shuffle back to Dr. Roth. She updates the paperwork then clicks back to the news story she’d been reading. I look at it over her shoulder.
“Are you reading about the shooting at YouTube.” I say it rather than ask it. My capacity for vocal intonation seems to have receded.
“Yeah,” she says, without looking up. “My cousin works there.”
“Oh,” I say. “My girlfriend works there.”
She turns. “Oh, shit,” she says. “Is she okay?”
I love Dr. Roth. She’s my favorite of the doctors, even though I hardly know her.
“She is,” I say. “Is your cousin?”
“Yes,” she says. She looks at me a moment. “You can take some time. You can go outside for a walk if you want.”
“I was going to take my lunch,” I say. I hope I don’t cry.
“Yeah, yeah,” she nods. “Go.”
I get my backpack and push through the treatment-room door then the building’s front door. I dial Erica. She answers.
“What are you doing?” I ask. “Can you leave?”
“Yes,” she says. “Everyone else already has. I’m just wrapping up some things and then I’m going.”
“Please hurry,” I say. I think of her, barely larger than a pubescent girl, alone in her section. With her co-workers gone, she’d be the first and only target. I know Erica thinks everything is fine, but I’m trampled down by ideas of copycats or second gunmen or group efforts. Someone working in tandem with the San Bruno shooter, firing bullets through glass doors and keycard-activated entrances just as the Mountain View workers start to feel an uncomfortable relief that they worked from another building today.
I tell her twice that I love her before we hang up. I eat my lunch at an outdoor table. Usually I try to make some calls or read a book on my break. Today I do nothing. I only place my phone face-up on the table and wait for it to light up with the message that says Erica’s home. By the end of thirty minutes, it hasn’t come.
*
When people ask where I live, I say I’m at the top of 17th and Cole, which isn’t actually true. The real top is several blocks uphill of my address, but the climb from the grocery store to my doorstep makes me so breathless that claiming the peak feels fair enough. And even though the gayborhood is less than a mile away, Erica and I have walked there exactly one time in two years because the sharp and sustained climb back up 17th Street is so punishing.
There is a group of boys in San Francisco who skateboard through the city together and sometimes their route takes them near our apartment. They climb up Stanyan, mostly walking with boards in hands, but a few propel themselves with one foot on the deck and another pushing over and over off the ground. Then they pass our house on 17th, and by the time they reach the descent towards Castro, they’re moving so fast it seems like their bodies are ripping gashes in the air. They’re black and brown and white, and they never move to the side of the road for drivers. Instead, they sweep S shapes across the blacktop and make lines of cars pile up behind them.
The first time I had to jam on my brakes because of them I got mad, muttering to myself about how unsafe it was and how they weren’t even wearing helmets and how would someone feel if they hurt one of these reckless boys. But as they continued to stream past me, rangy and not sorry and so powerful, my stomach felt like it was catching on fire. The beauty of them, the family of them, the flesh-colored rainbow—my indignation was irrelevant in the face of it. Their grace made cars seem like the aberration.
They were so connected, so clearly doing this thing together, they might as well have been holding hands. In my memory of it, they almost are.
*
I clock back in, and feel bright inside myself, like a violet light has been turned on somewhere around my throat. Melissa sends some speculation to our group text. It was a drugged-out guy in a van, she says. Previously, Erica said she heard it was a female shooter. No, no, Melissa says now. Definitely a male shooter. According to this eyewitness report, at least! Finally, I text Erica. She just got home, she says. A lot of people had reached out to make sure she was okay. She didn’t want to leave them hanging. My temples unclench. I’m too relieved to be frustrated.
Four hours later, Dr. Hammer puts a hand on my shoulder. She’s never done anything so tender before; maybe she’s about to ask me to process euthanasia forms for a particularly gruesome case or something.
“Was it your girlfriend who works at YouTube?” she asks me. Oh. Dr. Roth must have told her. I’m startled. Dr. Hammer and I haven’t talked about a single personal thing before. I’m certain she doesn’t even know my last name. “Yes,” I say.
“Is she okay?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
I nod.
“It’s pretty worrying, isn’t it?” she says.
I say yes again. It’s all I can say, evidently. Dr. Hammer nods kindly—I think about the bedside-manner thing—and when she walks away, I look around the treatment room. A black web around the edges of my vision begins to recede. Talking with her about something intimate, even so briefly, yanked me out of the haze I didn’t know I’d been in. I think about the afternoon. What happened? What had I done? I can’t recall. The past hours aren’t even cloudy, they’re just a textureless void. Even the moments before Dr. Hammer came to speak to me are empty. I shake my arms out a little bit, attempting to reinhabit myself. The doctors are starting to gather for rounds; it’s almost the end of my workday. So much time is behind me, but I can’t put detail to any of it.
Oh well, I think. Who cares. I sigh and look at the time. I’m exhausted, engined by low-grade anxiety and not much else. There are still twenty minutes left in my shift, but I walk through the garage to the employee lockers and gather my belongings.
By the time I get to the apartment we’re viewing, Erica’s already there. The landlord meets me at the entrance gate and puts out his hand. “Hi, I’m Dave,” he says. Erica comes around the corner and says, “Hi, I’m Erica.” I laugh and shake her hand, even though what I want to do is dig my fingernails into her palms, throw my arms around her neck. I want to inhabit her so I can keep her safe, and if I can’t keep her safe, at least I could be there if she goes down. At least I could go with her. I keep lingering behind Dave, squeezing Erica’s hand and looking meaningfully into her eyes, trying, in the presence of this stranger, to communicate something to her about the value of her life.
We walk through the entire apartment in under three minutes, but it feels too soon to just say thanks and leave. I keep trying to wrap it up, saying, “Well, great,” but Erica asks a couple of questions, asks to see the garage we’d have the option of renting for two-hundred extra dollars a month. Dave walks us out and through the garage and we shuffle around in there for a couple of minutes, examine doorframes, peer at light switches, nod pensively. Finally, we manage to extract ourselves from each other, offering yet another round of thank-yous, promising follow-up emails. As soon as we make it out of the front gate and onto the sidewalk, I pull Erica as close to me as I can. She runs her hands up and down my back and I cry against her neck until she says softly, “Come on, baby. Let’s go.”
*
Reader: I’m simply recording things I notice or things I experience. I’m not trying to make a statement. I’m not trying to change your mind or issue a call-to-action. I’m not asking you to call your senators.
I don’t want you to come away from here inspired.
*
I become sort of recreationally obsessed with the boys, searching them online, reading articles and watching videos. I expect the videos to be boring, full of the same hill bombs over and over or technical maneuvers that mean nothing to my untrained eye. And while it’s true that there’s a lot of repetition, it isn’t boring. The athleticism is too compelling, and the mistakes too cringey and visceral—metal rails in the crotch, asphalt against a high-velocity cheekbone, a shoulder crammed into concrete.
Quality in the videos varies. Some are professional, posted on Thrasher, etc.; others are amateur and grainy. One of the coarser captures follows a guy down a hill in what looks like the Sunset district. He streaks toward the ocean and the camera increasingly struggles to differentiate his body from the asphalt.
The best part is watching the unsuspecting pedestrians on the edges of the frame. They are going to the corner store or carrying groceries or walking the dog, and not expecting a blaze of a boy in loose, rippling clothes to streak past. When he does, they stand in the street and stare after him, quiet, a little disbelieving, looking exactly as I feel.
The second time I saw the boys on the street, I was ready. I didn’t waste time on indignation; I let them sweep me straight to awe.
It was Pride Weekend on the edge of the Castro and the sun shone bright and unusual. A line of traffic snaked all the way down 17th Street, so dense and impatient the cars themselves seemed breathless.
And then boys started pouring down the incline, like streams of hot oil on a warm pan, like the crest of the hill opened up and birthed them. None smiled. They were deadly serious, and maybe a little antagonistic. I made eye contact with a couple of them and it was clear that I, from behind my windshield, was part of the enemy. Or at least it was clear to me.
I must have imagined it. But I felt like I could sense tension building in the drivers around us. I was braced, vaguely, for some kind of confrontation, for windows to roll open and empty plastic water bottles to be lobbed at speeding bodies. I braced for a revolt against their beauty. It didn’t come, but perhaps only because the boys were too quick. Perhaps only because they moved while we stood still.
Every time I see them pass my living room window, I long to stop them and ask if they think about mortality. I want to know if there is, within each of these vulnerable unprotected bodies, a well-formed philosophy about pain and impermanence. I want to know if their fierce, violent movement through space is a rebuke. But I don’t. I never ask. I never interact with them at all.
*
We’re housesitting for a family in Mountain View, so I drive us the hour south while Erica feeds me tortilla chips from the bag of burritos we picked up at a shop around the corner from the Valencia apartment. Normally we love staying in other people's houses. No roommates to hear us fucking, no reason to muffle cries or hold back on spankings. But I have a feeling that tonight she won’t be pulling my hair and fucking me from behind with our strap-on.
Instead, we get in their unfamiliar bed, whose sheets and pillowcases are bright, primary-color red, and wrap tightly around each other. My eyes are rough and hot from the evening’s tears, and when I fall asleep the shift out of wakefulness happens so fast it’s more like fainting or blacking out.
The next day I feel muted, but Erica’s starting to wear through the padding of yesterday’s shock. No one’s going into the office today, but a coworker posted a video to social media about the shooting, and it’s making Erica cry. She opens her laptop and sends him a message on Gchat. He responds right away, tells her he loves her, that she’s like a sister to him. She spends much of the day on her computer, checking and rechecking work emails, and I knock around these strangers’ house, trying to stay focused on one thing long enough to complete it. Erica and I are magnetized toward one another, but cautious. We move through this uncharted emotional terrain like dogs with wounded paws, trying to avoid the tender parts and taking it out on each other when we fail.
In the afternoon, we have another apartment to view and this time Melissa’s meeting us. On the drive up Erica and I talk about gun reform, but it feels empty, at least to me. I know Erica likes talking about current events; I like it less. I don’t have anything meaningful to say. I’m tired of my own outrage and impotence. She talks about Emma Gonzalez’s speech at the march and how inspiring it was. I nod and look out the window.
When we pull up to the address, Melissa’s standing on the sidewalk. We ring the doorbell and the landlord buzzes us in. We make a lap around the apartment, then hand Kent the applications we printed before coming.
He looks at Erica’s application and says, “Oh, right, you work at YouTube. So awful what happened there, huh?”
“Mmm, yeah, yes. So awful.” We murmur in rounds. I’d rather not talk about it.
“That’s what I was doing earlier today, at my daughters’ school. My contracting company has been working on security there.”
“Oh, you have daughters? I have a son, but he’s out of college. I’m so glad he grew up before all this. Do you worry about school shootings?” Melissa says.
“Of course I worry about it,” he says.
“No, but I mean, is it, like—”
“Ever-present.” I say.
“Yeah,” Melissa says.
“Yes,” Kent says. “It is. But we’ve spent a couple years now reinforcing their campus. It was originally built like a sieve. But we added fences. And they do drills. I was there for a mock lockdown one time. It’s pretty impressive.”
Erica says, “Yeah, but in Parkland, the shooter was a student. So he’d learned all that.”
Erica clearly doesn’t give a fuck about protecting strangers’ feelings, but I tense a little watching Kent take this one in. It can’t be new information for him, of course, but it’s always a little demolishing to be confronted with the conceit you’ve bought into that makes your life livable.
“Yeah,” he says, a beat later.
“Well, anyway,” I say. “Thanks for taking the time to show us the place. Keep in touch.”
“Yeah, okay, thanks guys. I’ll try to get to this next week,” he says, though we’ll never hear from him again.
We walk to Melissa’s house around the corner and watch an episode of John Oliver. By the end, my facial muscles hurt. Lately, when I watch these kinds of shows, I find that I’m forcing more laughter than comes naturally. It’s just not fucking funny anymore.
*
If I were writing fiction, I’d never be allowed to start a work about gun violence with that shot of me reading two back-to-back news stories about gun violence. Too convenient, too contrived, too much of a setup. But here in nonfiction—in the fact of how it really happened, and is happening—convenient isn’t the right word for it at all.
*
The first time I shot a gun was in San Diego, in college, with a couple girls from my dorm. Two Latinas and one white girl and none of us had ever held a gun. Unusual, I think, considering we all came from devoutly Christian homes.
We stood in the long rectangular room with the low ceiling, in our little lane, taking turns aiming our hands and eyes at outlines meant to resemble people. I thought: any person in here could turn around and kill any one of the rest of us. Without a second’s worth of warning.
And I also thought what a mistake it was to come to a shooting range with giggly college-aged girls. I didn’t want to be controlling, or alarmist, so I just tried to keep my voice steady and make myself spongy. To suck all the nervous energy out of our circle. I sort of or maybe all the way wished that an employee would hear the laughter and squeals and make us leave.
Or at least I wished we’d be asked to:
Do some kind of training.
Not come back until we were equipped.
Treat handling a gun with all the respect and awareness of deathly potential we bring to the process of learning to drive a car.
But no one came. Nothing was asked of us. We shot and shot and shot.
*
The boys were shot for an article in GQ magazine. They’re good captures, filled, of course, with movement. The boys look honestly but incongruously chic as hell, styled in $600 shorts. There’s also a video embedded from their Instagram—five of them shriek down Twin Peaks with such ease they almost look bored.
Several weeks after I wrote the sentence “They were so connected, they may as well have been holding hands,” I stumble upon a video of the boys holding hands.
They’re in my Instagram feed, racing, again, down Twin Peaks. One grips the underside of a moving car’s wheel well, the other grips that boy’s hand. When they’ve built sufficient momentum, which is a measurement all their own, they let go. They’re so fast it’s nauseating. I show the video to Erica. She shudders, because it’s terrifying. This video is reposted from their archives. One of the boys is named Pablo.
From the GQ article, I learn that the group is organized around the guy who does the filming. He’s the one interviewed. Referring to two of the top skaters’ differing approaches to risk, he’s quoted as saying, “Sean’s very methodical with everything. He would walk up the whole hill and look at every single crack. Pablo will go straight through a red light and not even look at all. It’s up to the driver to stop and if they don’t stop, that’s it. Somehow he always makes it. It’s really magical.”
But this article is over two years old, and I know things it doesn’t. In 2018, Pablo Ramirez was killed in a collision with a truck on a street in SoMa. His magic, like all magic, was fractured and permeable.
*
Melissa closes her laptop and we get up to go to Paul and David’s, where we gather every week to watch The Voice. When we walk through the door, I take a breath. I love this warm, low-lit hallway. I love this house full of gays, and our tradition of getting together and eating homemade food and watching embarrassing TV.
We settle into our places in the living room, and I let this gleaming entertainment engineered for the masses wash over me. A few commercial breaks in, Erica gets up to go to the bathroom. I stare ahead at the television screen, transported, and Paul leans forward on the couch and reaches across Melissa to touch my shoulder.
“I didn’t know Erica worked at YouTube,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Is she okay?”
I nod. I’m not sure why. Like yesterday with Dr. Hammer, all I can seem to do is freeze up and create conditions in which no one has a fighting chance of continuing to converse with me. Erica returns and we all sink back into the couch.
On the drive home, Erica and I are abruptly, violently, fighting. Or, I’m abruptly and violently fighting with her. She wants to stop at YouTube to pick up some sparkling waters. I’m screaming at her about how I need one fucking day, just one, after the shooting—one day that she doesn’t go to work or think about work and lean physically or psychically toward work. I hold the steering wheel with both hands, closing in on ninety. I turn the volume on the radio up to an abrasive volume. Erica says nothing, just wilts toward the passenger-side door, but I already feel better, in that way one briefly does after directing all their anxiety and phosphorescent feelings of powerlessness at a person who loves them.
At the house, we don’t speak or acknowledge each other. I crash around stony-faced, feeling very much like my mother up until the part where I know I’ll drop my anger the moment Erica reaches to me.
After I brush my teeth and get in bed, she does. She sits on the comforter next to me, and says, “Hi.” She is softer and kinder than I’ve ever thought of being.
“Hi,” I say. I try to convey with my voice and body that I’m ready to open my arms to her, but I’m almost positive my self-righteousness is still foremost.
“I’m sorry,” she says. To date, I can’t recall a time when I’ve apologized before she did.
“Thank you,” I say, finally. “I love you so much.” I pause. Touch her face. “I love you so much,” I say again. “I want you to be safe so bad. I don’t want to damage you.” I don’t ask her if she’ll work from home tomorrow, though I’m desperate for her to. Even if she does, I know I’ll have to let her go back soon enough. The day after tomorrow, latest. I know I’ll have to find some place of willful ignorance to occupy, like Kent does for his school-aged daughters. Soon enough, sooner than I even imagine, I’ll reenter my complacency. I’ll go glassy-eyed in front of newspaper reports and computer screens, I’ll make only the most perfunctory passes at social change, I’ll let it all happen and plead innocent once it does.
Hannah Anderson Harris has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sierra Nevada University, where she served as the managing editor for the Sierra Nevada Review. Her work has been published in The Rumpus and Entropy. She lives in San Francisco with her wife-to-be. Facebook: hannah.harris.121772 Instagram: @sf_rainbowfox