The Shooting. James Boice

seeing blood crawling down the sloped aisle from the exits where the bodies were piled. The massacre lasted forty-eight seconds. Two hundred forty-three were killed. They were dead in the heaps by either exit, dead in the seats they had carefully chosen, asking the ones they were with Are these good? Can you see? unaware this was the final decision they would ever make. They were dead with popcorn still half chewed in their mouths and dopey grins on their faces from the last preview, a raunchy sex comedy starring Jason Sudeikis.

      Once the shooter decided he was finished and shot himself through the mouth with a Glock 19, I tried to lift Kaylee but her head lolled like it was made of dough and that’s how I knew what I had been feeling was only my own heart. I hated my own heartbeat. It was a liar, a traitor—it meant that I was the only survivor. Can you name me? Can you name any of the other dead? No one ever can. But can you name the shooter? Of course you can—you can state all three names, they roll off your tongue: first, middle, and last. You can point at his picture and say, That’s him. You can say what he did in his life. Can you say anything—one thing—those he killed ever did? Can you say one thing I ever did in mine?

      Then Jenny would hit them with the economic data showing the benefits of a tax on all ammunition, the polling statistics indicating growing voter support in favor of repealing the Second Amendment in favor of a new amendment, our amendment, an amendment we the people—not dead, slave-owning white guys from 250 years ago: us— would write. —This is happening, Jenny would tell them. —It is happening. The tide turns quickly. Be on the right side of it.

      I could almost see Kaylee there, in each meeting, watching me showing rich assholes her picture, watching CEOs and hedge fund managers take her picture in their small-fingered hands, pretending to care. I was using her smile and her youth and her utter perfect sweetness to try to garner votes for quixotic state legislation or small bits of money for Jenny’s organization. I was using her lolling neck. Her silent chest. I was giving her to them.

      A thousand meetings, a thousand howling escorts from the building. —I’m sorry what happened to you happened, said one Democratic state representative, —it breaks my heart. But, look, you’re talking about guns. And if that wasn’t bad enough, you’re talking about taxes. In Texas. He looked at Jenny like he was going to cry. —Are you out of your mind? Do you want any Democrats in office in this state? Do you want any kind of future political life here, Jenny? There’s a right way of doing what you want to do and a wrong way. And, darling, this is the wrong way.

      —Fuck you, Jenny told him, and left. I followed.

      People sent my family and me death threats all day every day, via phone or letter or social media or e-mail, even in person. They protested outside my house carrying guns, screaming at my family and Jenny whenever we left. A caravan of men carrying guns followed us around wherever we went, calling us enemies of the state, traitors to our nation. They called Jenny a cunt. Called me a faggot. Oftentimes walking through a crowd of these guys spitting at us and screaming, it was more terrifying than being in that movie theater. In the movie theater, I knew what was happening. By that point, it had happened so often I knew exactly what it was. And it was not personal. My and Kaylee’s being there was a result of chance. With these guys, everything about it was personal. They hated me, wanted me dead, they wanted me gone, they wanted her gone. Jenny assured me not to worry, to stay strong, but her voice picked up a stammer, and I noticed her hands shaking whenever she lifted one of her half dozen daily macchiatos to her lips. —This is what is necessary, she’d say. —They’re on the wrong side of history.

      My family and I had to move after we found a bullet hole in the siding at the front of the house. Jenny found us a new one. To keep its location secret, its deed was signed by the manager of an LLC set up by one of her donors. It was in a town fifty miles away. I did not want to live in a town fifty miles away, I wanted to live in my town.

      She and I kept giving interviews, kept writing letters and making phone calls to RSA members across the country appealing for donations to fight the Battle of Texas, in which Jenny assured them victory was close at hand but at the same time so was defeat, now more than ever their help was necessary if they wanted to save the lives of future Americans. I alone seemed to see the fight as increasingly hopeless. The more money she raised to fight the NRA, the more money the NRA was able to raise to fight Jenny. The stronger the candidates the RSA ran in local Democratic primaries, the more gusto with which the party shock-and-awed them with its vastly superior manpower, media influence, and money, tarnishing them as circus characters of the fringe Left with no chance of defeating the Republicans in the general election. Jenny and I were failing to get any lawmakers to even draft a version of the ammo tax just to get her out of their hair. The state assembly would not even hold a vote on whether to consider looking into the boxes and boxes filled with independent, peer-reviewed, rock-solid science showing the benefit of the ammo tax on the economy and public health in America. At the same time, the NRA was convincing its membership that victory for the RSA candidates in both the primary and general elections was a certainty, that Jenny Sanders’s success at passing the ammo tax and ultimately repealing the Second Amendment was imminent and assured, and, as a result, new NRA memberships, donations, and nationwide gun and ammo sales all reached heights not seen since the aftermath of Newtown.

      —Can you feel it? Jenny said to me the night one of her candidates lost a primary by thirty-three percentage points, as I sat slumped in the corner of the hotel conference room drinking, despondent. —What we’re doing is working. We’re making big progress. We’ve just got to keep doing what we’re doing.

      —Are you insane? I said. I sat up and began to rant, but she cut me off.

      —Dude, shush. She pointed up at the ceiling, the music blasting now. —Beyoncé.

      She spun and danced away to the center of the room like a drunk aunt at a wedding. I watched her dance alone, realizing what I had done. I had placed the last vapors of my faith in humanity into a callous lunatic.

      Our daily schedule consisted of: meetings, phone calls, being shouted at, meetings, lunch, getting spit on, meetings, phone calls, having our tires slashed, e-mails, writing op-eds, TV appearances, campaign rallies, door-to-door canvassing, planning tomorrow which would always be the same as today—and over it all, an incessant looping sound track of the pop queen. After a major prime-time Fox News host called me a sniveling, emasculated weasel on live television, Jenny played Beyoncé to try to cheer me up. When a former Republican governor and presidential candidate called for my and Jenny’s being added to the terrorist watch list, Jenny responded with some lyric from a Beyoncé song. And when another former Republican governor posted my picture on her Facebook page with a bull’s-eye photoshopped over my face and the message Lock and load, the vast digital army of little Jennys blew up the page with pictures of Beyoncé until the offending former governor was forced to delete the whole thing. One time I caught Jenny staring at herself in the mirror in my house and she turned to me and said, —I kind of look a little like Beyoncé, don’t I? I think the worst thing I could have done to her would have been, not joining the NRA, but confessing that I did not get Beyoncé, that Beyoncé meant nothing to me.

      —Do you think she would like me? she asked once in the car as bearded men pounded on the windows on either side with their firearms. —I mean, if she met me?

      Meanwhile every day a steady ticker tape of the day’s dead: stray bullets killing mother on her front steps, toddler shot by older brother playing with dad’s gun, road rage escalating to execution, failed news anchor shooting former colleagues on air, failed whatever killing ex-wife and her family and their kids, cop shooting unarmed black man in the back during a traffic stop, seventh grader shooting best friend in pre-algebra class, father mistaken for rival gang member shot on sidewalk, white supremacist sitting through entire service at a black church before taking out a Glock 19 equipped with a sixteen-round magazine and killing as many people as he could, then reloading and killing more…

      That time for me was like being somehow shrunken down to the cellular level and injected into a human body—it could have been anyone’s—right where the cancer is, and seeing the sickness breathing and eating and seething around me,