Three Guns

Paula K. Speck

buenos aires, argentina, october 24, 1976.
I got off the subway and climbed the stairs in front of the university, a vast complex of gray stone buildings built in neoclassical style: pillars, pediments, cornices, niches with statues covered in pigeon droppings. The university had been placed under military control, and classes had been suspended indefinitely, but a skeleton staff reported to work, and I extracted an official letter permitting me to visit the collection I needed to see. The complex looked more like an army secretariat than a college: instead of students lugging backpacks full of books, guards blocked the front steps.
    Behind the columns of the main entrance, the unspeaking guard motioned me to a uniformed figure sitting behind a desk in the dark foyer. This officer fingered my permission letter with a sour expression and demanded my passport. He took his time examining it, and his face did not change; in the end he motioned me down the corridor opening up behind him. I held out a hand for my passport, but he informed me curtly that he would keep it as security against my return.
    My instincts rebelled against leaving it behind. I had stepped off the jet at Ezeiza Airport without realizing how lucky I was to have a return ticket to the United States, the rest of my dissertation fellowship in dollar-denominated traveler’s checks, and a dark blue U.S. passport with a golden eagle spreading its wings over the front cover. I was there to do research on a group of modern, left-leaning writers in a city suffering a “dirty war” between a recently installed military government and leftist guerrillas. During a single month I had sat in buses stopped and invaded by plainclothes soldiers who had demanded documents of each passenger and hauled out the unlucky ones; I had been warned not to keep an address book for fear I would bring trouble on the people in it; I had walked past the blackened remains of car bombs; I had crossed off names in my contact list as “disappeared.” I began to have nightmares about coming to a checkpoint, reaching into a pocket for my dark blue safety shield, and feeling only lint and small coins.
    But the officer’s face closed against my request, and I was barely able to extract from him short, confusing directions about how to reach the archives. The directions, as I had feared, quickly became useless. The complex was a labyrinth out of Borges, the master of nightmares who knew this city so well. I walked down long, deserted corridors lined with tall, bombastic windows that lit up when the sun emerged outside and darkened when it went behind a cloud. I climbed one staircase with slippery marble steps and descended another. I asked for help from a short, gray-haired woman carrying a stack of papers, and she directed me across a weed-covered interior courtyard surrounded by a colonnade into a connecting building.
    I came to another marble staircase with a brass sign and an arrow pointing to Archivos de Literatura. At the foot of this staircase was another guard in fatigues, carrying what had to be a machine gun. As I walked self-consciously toward him across the velvet carpet, he stared at me and swung the gun so that it pointed at my stomach. Closer, he seemed about sixteen years old, and he had the dark skin and thick black hair of the interior provinces: a country-boy draftee who might well be the age he seemed, the kind assigned hours of guard duty at doorways where he would be the first to be blown up in a car bomb attack.
    I kept my hands in view, assumed what I hoped was a deferential and innocent expression, and focused my eyes on the top button of his uniform, avoiding a challenging look to the face or a suspiciously evasive glance to the side. I explained that I had permission to visit the archives and held out my letter. He made no move to take it from my hands, so I was left foolishly holding the paper, like an ineffective shield, in the line between his gun muzzle and my chest. He probably couldn’t read it, but perhaps he recognized the ministerial seal. He asked for my identification papers. I told him that I had left my passport at the main entrance, naming the street. He gave no sign of understanding, so I repeated my answer in a louder voice, adding that I was an American citizen.
    This did not seem to impress him. I cast about for something else to say, to make him understand the magic of the letter and its seal, to convince him that, though looking like an Argentine student, I came from a country far to the north where people like me generally felt safe in office buildings in daylight. Sweat on my outstretched hand made the paper stick to the tips of my fingers. The soldier gripped the machine gun tighter and made a hand motion near the trigger end. I wished for enough knowledge about guns to be able to tell whether he had disengaged the safety catch. We waited for what seemed minutes, I holding up my ministerial letter and he staring at me with glassy eyes. A shaft of light broke through the high, neoclassical windows, highlighting a column of dust motes that slanted down the red-carpeted stairs. Finally he stepped backward, still looking at me and aiming the gun at my midsection. He fumbled for a phone sitting on the table behind him, dialed, and mumbled a question into the black receiver. I couldn’t catch the words in his thick backcountry accent. He listened to a reply I couldn’t hear and put the receiver down. Finally he shifted the gun a few inches to the left of my stomach, detached one hand, and gestured toward the stairway. No response to my “Gracias.”
    I climbed the stairway, trying to walk neither too slowly nor too fast. When I reached the tall, leather and brass-studded door at the top, I gave a quick glance downward. The teenage soldier was already facing away from me, and I quickly pushed the door open and went inside.
    That evening, meeting other graduate students from the U.S. and England in a confitería near the National Library, I found myself unable to shape my three minutes facing the soldier into the kind of amusing anecdote we traded over glasses of strong red wine. It felt too small to tell, but also too raw.

arlington, virginia, 7:15 pm, february 13, 1991.
I was walking from my subway stop down a suburban side street. A light rain was falling; I turned the corner and continued between two rows of houses with wet, mown lawns and parked cars, toward where my car was parked. A street light glistened on black asphalt; keeping my head down to escape the raindrops, I saw no one. I was halfway up the block when a man in a windbreaker and jeans entered my peripheral vision; a second later, I noticed that he was walking toward me. I slowed and glanced at him, then looked away. He advanced, reducing the space between us. The streetlight was behind him, lighting the fine droplets of rain as they fell into its cone then out again into the invisible darkness, throwing his face and the front of his body into shadow.
    When he was about four feet away, I was able to see that he had a gun in his hand, close to his chest, almost covered by the flaps of the windbreaker, and pointed at me. The gun was dead black, with no metallic gleams, and its long barrel was squared for the last four inches. Someone has told me since that the squared-off end could have been a silencer.
    He stopped two feet away, pointing the gun at a spot somewhere between my waist and neck. He declared, slowly, with an edge of impatience in his neutral tenor voice, “This is a gun. If you don’t do anything stupid, I won’t hurt you. I just want a little sex.”
    I can’t remember if I said anything. He continued, as if speaking to a stupid child: “Walk over here.” He moved to my right, still holding the gun pointed levelly at my chest. His mouth was shut, and his face showed no anger or excitement. I can’t die here on this rainy street, just a few blocks from my house, I thought. What would happen to my little girls?
    As he walked about a foot to my right, I decided to keep my eyes away from his face. Maybe I can persuade him that I won’t be able to identify him later. Then he might not kill me. He led me across the street diagonally, making for one of the houses. I realized, with the feeling that my lungs were being squeezed in a vise, that he was not trying to hide his face and that perhaps he had already decided to use the gun afterwards.
    We started up a grassy slope and pushed past some scraggly bushes with broad leaves (rhododendrons?) that unloaded big, sloppy drops onto my hair and shoulders. We came to a muddy patch partly screened by bushes, against the brick side of the house. He took a stand facing me, but since I was still trying not to look at his face, I saw only his body—pocked by light from the streetlight coming through the bushes—from the chest down, and the black gun that he pointed steadily at my stomach.
    “Take off all your clothes,” he said.
    With my back to the brick wall, I dropped my purse and backpack, unbuttoned my coat, and began undoing my jacket. I spoke, and my voice sounded weak and cringing in my ears: “I’m not looking at your face. I don’t think I could tell anyone what you look like.”
    He gave an indecipherable grunt. I had trouble with a fastening. I said, “I’m not trying to stall; these buttons are stiff.” He said nothing. Even though we were facing each other across a few inches, I was trying so hard not to look at his face that I imagined him headless, or that he had a boar’s, a bear’s, a snake’s head.
    I tried once more: “I have two little girls. Very little girls.”
    He snapped, “Just hurry up, for crissake.”
    Finally I was naked, but the cold didn’t reach me. He said, in a sharp, impatient tone, “Kneel down here.” I knelt, and he undid his pants and moved closer, holding the top of my head with his left hand and forcing his penis into my mouth. He held the gun with his right hand, and I felt a cold metal circle against my left temple. After a short time he said, “Get down.” The ground was mud studded with pebbles and twigs. He thrust his penis between my legs. He didn’t seem to climax or feel any satisfaction, but he must, at some point, have put the gun down, because I felt two hands on either side of my hips. Then he pulled away, and even with my head down, I could see the gun in his hand again.
    “Lie down and put your coat over your head,” he said distinctly, calmly, dismissively. I stretched out face down in the mud, pulling my coat over the upper half of my body. Now is when he will shoot me. As I pulled on the coat, I moved my hands up to my head, made a tent of the cloth over them, and spread the fingers to create what I hoped was a rounded, headlike shape just above my real head. Maybe, if he decides to shoot, he’ll aim there. Has he noticed the motion?
    “Count to a hundred,” I heard him say. “And don’t tell anyone about this. I know where you live.”
    Loudly—but not too loudly—I counted: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen . . .” Muffled by cloth I heard the numbers coming out of my mouth faster, and forced myself to slow down. I reached a hundred and kept going. At one hundred and twenty-five, I stopped and listened. There was only a faint hiss from the rain striking the leaves; no footsteps on the wet grass and mud, no start of a car engine. An image projected itself against the fabric blocking my eyes: the man in the windbreaker standing, the tips of his shoes an inch from my shoulders, holding the gun pointed downward and waiting for me to emerge. If I push the coat off my face and look up, I’ll see the black circle of the gun muzzle two feet away. Now I felt how the pebbles were digging into my naked stomach and breasts, how wet the mud was, and how it coated my skin. Slowly I lifted up the coat flap to peek out but could see nothing. Another wait. I said, as loudly as I could, “Are you still there? I’m coming out now.” Trying to move quickly I threw the coat off, drew my legs under my body, and stood up.
    It hurt to raise my head after holding it down for so long. That stillness and a scrape of February wind across my bare skin were all I felt. The space where the man in the windbreaker had stood was empty, except for the darkness, the shaft of the remote streetlight, bushes, a brick house wall, and steady dotted lines of rain falling into the light and out again; I was alone.
    I had to do the recommended, the responsible things. I had to wrap my coat around my mud-caked body, find a house with lighted windows, and ask for the telephone to call 911. Four police cars lit up the damp street; I gave samples in the emergency room, returned for two more interviews at the station house, talked a sketch onto the police portrait artist’s pad, looked through mug-shot albums. Over the next four months, three more women were attacked on rainy nights in the same neighborhood. The police told me that a fifth—a sixteen-year-old girl—had been raped before me. Posters with the police sketch went up; a female officer in plainclothes strolled the area on rainy nights. A man with a history of mental illness walked into the station to confess and was quickly eliminated by a DNA test.
    Then the attacks stopped; the leads stopped; the police completed their tests on my clothes and allowed me to pick them up, wash them, and return them to their hangers. One night two Februarys later, a nightmare picked me up and frog marched me, in my sleep, across my house to my front door. I woke clawing at the wood and trying to scream, as if the emotions that I did not let myself feel that evening two years before—because I was busy trying to save my own life and then trying to help the police—had been crammed onto the top shelf of a kind of overstuffed mental closet and had fallen on my head when I opened the door.
    I had no more nightmares, only a constant ache, like the soreness of a poorly healed scar hidden under my clothes, stabbing in pain at odd moments and repelling anyone who glimpsed it. I tried asking about the other four women. Politely, professionally, a policewoman told me that she could not give out any information about how they were doing and certainly not their names and addresses. We five had heard the same words, felt the end of the same gun, had the same sperm thrust inside us. What could we say to each other, all the same? This road ended in a pile of rubble. This story had no last page. 

fairfax, virginia, march 20, 1999.
From time to time I told friends about the rape. One of them—a boyfriend actually—heard me out, told me I was brave, and never mentioned the subject again. A few months later he suggested that I learn how to use a gun. We lay side by side in the bedroom, in the dark. He said that if I bought a gun and learned to aim and fire it, I would feel safer, I would be safer, and he would worry less about me. I knew him better by that time, and I didn’t ask him to elaborate. I thought the suggestion over for almost a year, and one day I said yes.
    We drove to a shooting range in a strip mall between a gas station and a furniture store. We walked down a flight of concrete steps. The attendant took our money and handed us ear protectors and six paper targets each.
    We pushed open a soundproof door and went into the range itself. It was a converted, unfinished basement room, unexpectedly small, with linoleum floors and unpainted concrete walls. The walls were striped with water stains. Seven booths about the size of toilet stalls formed a row just inside the door. The darkness and stains increased the range’s resemblance to a seldom-cleaned restroom. We were the only customers on this Saturday morning.
    To shoot, you clipped one of your paper targets to a clothesline-and-pulley assembly and reeled it to the back wall about ten yards away. Then you adjusted your ear protectors, loaded your gun on the narrow wooden shelf at the front of the booth, and fired when you felt like it. My boyfriend squeezed off a few opening shots. The small space quickly filled with a gray haze. We both coughed; it was like a room full of cigarette smoke.
    My friend carefully explained how he braced his hand and arm against the recoil, released the safety, and slowly squeezed the trigger. He handed the gun to me and supervised my grasp and stance. It was a 9 mm handgun, dull gunmetal gray, about six inches long and now slightly hot to the hand. It felt heavy for its size. I took the grip in both hands, planted my feet eighteen inches apart, pointed the muzzle in the direction of the target, bit my lip, and squeezed the trigger. I succeeded—mostly—in controlling the recoil, but it still took a nick out of the inside of my thumb. A little dot of red oozed out.
    The noise of the shots and the backward buck of the gun were what I had been told to expect, but their raw sound and force, peremptory and cold, shook me. I took three more shots at the target. Each shot felt too powerful to have come from the piece of metal in my hands and too big to fit inside this space the size of my living room. It came to me that if the man in the windbreaker had shot my fisted hands at close range through the cloth of my coat, I would not have been able to stifle a cry of pain, and my hands would have jerked back from the impact in a way my more solid head would not have done. He would have had time to swear, pull the coat away, and take better aim. I had never put much hope in that trick anyway.
    But that was not what cut into my brain most sharply. It was the thought—not just the thought, but the brick-to-the-head conviction—that my hands, the same hands and fingers I use to zip up my daughter’s dress or type this page, could turn this steel barrel around, point it at my boyfriend or myself, and pull the trigger. The soldier in Buenos Aires, the man in the rain in Arlington, and at this mo- ment, I could do it easily; it would take only a quarter-inch contraction of one finger. The contraction would be small, but it would divide all time into two epochs: before and after the twitch.
    The idea didn’t make me feel powerful. Instead I felt that the gun wanted to take control of me through the sliver of my brain that wished I had turned and run away from the man in the windbreaker, that yearned to have chosen a bullet in the back over the weary work of survival. The gun wanted me to gouge a bloody hole in caution, maturity, responsibility. It wouldn’t be me who did it, though I would face the blame; it would be the gun itself, all guns, small, amoral, metal reptiles anxious to make up for all the times that good sense and self-interest and (maybe) morality had stopped them from doing what they were made to do.
    I felt a sharp desire to do it. For a splinter of a moment, with the sound of my boyfriend’s gunshots pounding off the stained concrete walls, I thought I had done it. The effort not to do it made me dizzy.
    I handed the gun back to my boyfriend. He was disappointed that I didn’t want to shoot any more. I felt my way through the gunpowder haze to a narrow bench behind the booths and gripped its wooden edge to damp down the shaking in my arms and legs until he finished and was ready to go.

Paula K. Speck taught Spanish at several universities after returning from Argentina and now works as a lawyer at the Department of Justice. She has essays appearing in or forthcoming from the Florida Review, the Literary Review, the Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, and other journals. Her essay about Borges and the Argentine dirty war appeared in the Autumn 1996 issue of the Gettysburg Review. She is working on a collection of essays about how violence feels.

“Three Guns” appears in our Summer 2002 issue.