Bullet in the Brain

Anders gets shot in the head. The bullet courses through his brain, “scattering shards of bone” and igniting “a crackling chain of ion transports and neuro-transmissions” (203-04). Despite the lethal destruction, “the bullet came under the mediation of brain time” (204), and the rules of consciousness shift to give Anders a pure and long-lasting moment in which he contemplates a shining memory from his past.

From the moment the bullet crashes into Anders’s skull, the story focuses on memories—those he doesn’t think of and one sublime memory that he does recall.

The memories not triggered add up to a brief biography of Anders’s failures: His first lover, whose attractive traits finally irritated him; his wife, who “exhausted him with her predictability” (204); his daughter, “now a sullen professor of economics” (204); hundreds of memorized poems; a woman who leapt to her death before his eyes; getting kicked in the ribs by police at an anti-war rally.

The story’s climactic memory, set off by the bullet, recalls a sublime moment in Anders’s life from his childhood 40 years earlier. The summer heat, insects buzzing, a baseball field with its yellow grass, a tree against which he leans—all these details enchant Anders. At the center are the words of a visitor, a Mississippi cousin of another player, whose casual comment that shortstop “is the best position they is” (205) causes Anders to feel “strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music” (206).