“Bullet In The Brain” by Tobias Wolff

1.11.22

(this post discusses suicide)

Dear Readers,

How are you? I ask that earnestly. You can respond to this email or comment. We are in a stage of the pandemic that none of us could have predicted. Of course, we may have learned by now that we can’t truly predict anything. But here we are, and it really sucks. It almost makes the summer of 2020 look easy. We knew what to do. We had our little stimulus checks. Now it feels like we’re all adrift, navigating everything individually.

One of the places where I teach yoga, the Seattle Bouldering Project, is dropping off a rapid test for me today because I am sick. I am also on immunosuppressants. So, I hope it’s not covid. But it seems everyone has it, and those of us who haven’t had it are stragglers rather than those who have escaped. Though I may have had it, way back in March 2020 when I flew from the UK and then Reykjavik to Seattle, maskless, and spent the next 15 days feeling like I couldn’t breath. Or that could have been the stress metabolizing. Who knows. I couldn’t get tested then.

I didn’t think of my mother when I picked this story, though my mother died in the same way Anders died, except her death was self-inflicted. I think of my mother every time someone pretends to shoot themselves. It wasn’t something I noticed before, how often people shape their fingers so their hand resembles a gun, point it to their temple, and pretend to pull the trigger. It used to upset me when people do that. I got upset at them, judged them. But now I don’t get upset with them. I still picture my mom every time, just like I picture her whenever suicide or gun violence is talked about or depicted in media. Her gun was pink. Pearl-handled. I never saw it, but I saw the receipt for its purchase. The police took it when they found her body, but they left all the notes. People talk about suicide more than they realize, but the folks who are in need of talking don’t feel safe talking about it.

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In “Bullet In The Brain” Wolff demonstrates that the short story can be anything. The first paragraph establishes Anders’ profession and his savagery. The second grants him an opportunity for connection. By the third, we know that Anders would rather tear someone apart than agree with them. His savagery, the way he tears apart book because he has forgotten their beauty and only sees their sameness, dampens reality and keeps it at a safe distance. He is the authority figure, meant to put people in their place.

Anders is another iteration of Julian, from O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” In his position of intellectual authority, he refuses to see himself.

This story is so short, yet so much happens. What are the details that stood out to you? Without looking at the story, write them down on a piece of paper. When you finish reading this let me know in the comments. (Seriously, go write ‘em down).

For me, it was the sexy cow. How Anders settled on that as he stared at the ceiling- the awe at never really having noticed the details, but also how he thought the painting was so silly (it clearly was). How, in noticing and criticizing the painting, he couldn’t feel the immediacy of the situation and how that demonstrated, subtly, almost invisibly, that Anders lives outside of the present moment, away from his feelings.

“Anders had taken in at a glance many years earlier and afterward declined to notice. Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter’s work. It was worse than he remembered, and all of it executed with the utmost gravity. The artist had a few tricks up his sleeve and used them again and again—a certain rosy blush on the underside of the clouds, a coy backward glance on the faces of the cupids and fauns. The ceiling was crowded with various dramas, but the one that caught Anders’ eye was Zeus and Europa—portrayed, in this rendition, as a bull ogling a cow from behind a haystack. To make the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopy eyelashes, through which she gazed back at the bull with sultry welcome. The bull wore a smirk and his eyebrows were arched. If there’d been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said, “Hubba hubba.”

In the following moment the series of events leading to Anders’ death accelerates. As he stares at this terrible painting, one which “he had no choice but to scrutinize,” he starts laughing. His laughing threatens the man with the gun, and Anders can’t help but laugh more when the man says “capeesh,” which feels cliché to someone like him. He laughs, and the man shoots him.

There are so many ways the story could go from the moment he is shot, just like a bullet could end up anywhere. We could pan out into the perspectives of the bystanders. We could go through a succession of memories and stop there. But Wolff chooses an innovative path.

For a moment we are the path of the bullet, brought into the stark and present reality Anders avoided. Then, we see what Anders could have seen. The memories that could have passed before his eyes. Narratively, this deepens the reader’s understanding of Anders. How he first fell in love with literature. His wife and daughter. His first lover. His experience of reading his classmate’s book and the dawning respect that bloomed within him.

But in these memories we also see the Anders as who he is presently; every memory turns in on itself: how his wife exhausted him, his “sullen” daughter, his first lover who began to annoy him, and the heaps of books on his desk which he “began to regard with boredom and dread.”

And then, the final memory, what one could call an epiphany, at this point truly unexpected. How did you feel when you read those last paragraphs. An entrance into the present moment again, yet the past, too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

About Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff wrote the memoir This Boy’s Life which was adapted into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. He attended Syracuse University, joined the Army, and then later taught at Syracuse University’s MFA program. He now teaches at Stanford and lives in California with his family. He’s had an incredible life and there are many writers whose names you know who learned from him.

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