Mark Was My Best Friend. He Shot Me in the Head

I only know these next details because of the police and Public Safety reports.
At 6:50 p.m., the fire alarm is wailing. The bullet tripped it when it tore through the drywall—same wall as the sensor. A tamper mechanism, I assume. The sound is contained to our room only. If anyone else in the entire seven-floor dorm building has heard the gunshot, they must have dismissed it as no big deal.
Mark lets the campus Public Safety officer in. I remain blacked out in my bedroom. Mark must have shut the door.
“Hey. Any idea why your alarm is going off?” she asks.
“I was smoking my e-cig,” Mark lies. Help has come, but Mark is more concerned with his life fifteen years from now than he is with my life in the next fifteen minutes.
“I smell something burnt,” she says.
“I had something in the oven for too long.” Another lie.
“I’ll have to write you up for smoking in the room,” she says. No penalty for a first offense.
“Yep,” he says. She makes note in her report that Mark is noticeably shaking. Abnormal, full-body spasms. His hands have it especially bad.
“Is there something wrong?” she asks. “Anything you want to tell me?”
“I get really nervous when I’m in trouble,” Mark says. I believe he means it.
“Technically this is just a warning,” she says, indicating her report. “But if it happens again, there will be more consequences.”
The Public Safety officer sees Mark’s empty holster on our loveseat, in plain view of the front door. Two steps inside, and she would have been standing exactly where I got shot.
“Where is the gun?” she asks. Mark’s body probably goes faint, scratchy and gray like a freshly shaken Etch-A-Sketch.
“Car,” he says. This is the first time he tells the truth since before the gun went off.
“Where is your car?” she asks.
“Off campus,” he says. Back to the lies.
The officer takes a beat. Crosses her arms. Maybe rubs her chin or cheek, adjusts her hat.
“Okay,” she says.
According to her account, she turns to walk out. But something new comes into view. A pool of blood on the linoleum. Above it, at least two stains on the wall shaped like claw marks. My bloody handprints.
“What’s all that?” she asks, pointing at the ground. Her line of sight makes the hole above the couch difficult to see. But the red flags are everywhere. There’s plenty of evidence. There’s no need for a literal smoking gun.
“My roommate had a really bad bloody nose earlier.”
You would think she might register concern, suspicion—something in her report to show that things were off. She has to investigate more. Right? There is no way this wellness check is routine, all things considered. But her report omits any indication that things are unusual.
“That should probably get cleaned up. Sooner rather than later,” the officer says, exiting.
* * *
I wanted to go back to school. Immediately. I had been forcibly removed, unable to hit the end of college in stride. Robbed of graduation jitters, the communal are we ready for this? with friends and classmates. I didn’t get to make those memories. And I’d be forever absent in theirs. I should have been applying for jobs and internships, but there was no way my mind or body could physically handle it. I remember thinking I’d wear a beanie to any future interviews so I wouldn’t have to explain the mess on my head.
On social media, my friends and classmates were doing readings in the University library next to big, beautiful stained-glass windows and worn leather couches, winning annual workshop awards, having fun at school, listening to tunes in the quad, kicking a soccer ball around—together. The stuff that would become nostalgic years later.
Meanwhile, I was swinging a Wii-mote sloppily at digital tennis balls, on the verge of tears, continuously losing against a computer doubles pair named Yoshi and Haru. Four years of hard work at a university for nothing. I felt erased by the school, left behind to rot.
My professors and classmates assumed I was cutting class. Where is Paul? This isn’t like him. Mom and Anna took it upon themselves to correct the narrative: Yes, as I said, it was a lot more severe than first mentioned; yes, it required surgery.
No, Paul didn’t get grazed in the shoulder or clipped on the leg. Surgery. Yes, neurosurgery. Neuro, Greek for “Paul got shot in the head, he is recuperating, he can’t write this email for himself, let alone a research paper.” What do I have to do for you to understand that? They made mention of past performances, my studious history. Dean’s list all four years. He has an A in your class as it stands, kind Sir or Madam. We would really appreciate any accommodations.
How this task fell to Mom and Anna, I haven’t a clue. What began as an askance head tilt toward the response from the University had become full-body animosity.
I never wanted bad blood with the school. I simply wanted a little help.
I had major cognitive deficiencies. My mother was helping me relearn the order of the months. The months themselves. I also had a personal injury case, which made progress—or at least the show of progress—my enemy. Any improvement, any impression that I wasn’t dumb and brain damaged, could undermine my case: Look! He’s using that hunk of meat beneath his skull just fine! Like it never happened! Good as new! He doesn’t need any money for medical bills or pain or suffering or any possible long-term effects we can’t conceivably know the full extent of now! He knows his months!
At the same time, school was very important to me. I was forced to try to finish my degree in secret.
At first, I snuck onto the University’s online homework portal and attempted some assignments in vain. With no lock on my bedroom door, I would angle the laptop in such a way where Mom would have to take a few steps to see the screen, granting me enough of a buffer to switch tabs to something else. I’m positive Mom would rather find me looking at porn than trying, and failing, to use my brain.
In those early days, she told me I was pushing myself too hard. Relearning the alphabet by tearing through as many George Saunders stories as I could stuff in my cranium, reading his first collection CivilWarLand In Bad Decline a thousand times over. She’d watch me hold the bridge of my nose, squeeze my eyes shut. Then tell me to drop it, take a break, just give it time.
Reading was painful. I would scan the pages like a Pac-Man who ate printed letters instead of little yellow pellets, and he’d get full after about nine or ten. Eventually, though, my persistence wore Mom down.
She didn’t want to snuff out my hope entirely. Since I was technically no longer street legal, a neurologist advised to take arcade-style simulated driving courses before getting back behind the wheel, something I never did, Mom drove me to the one class of my choosing at school. A final shebang. A bit of closure. I chose a three-hour night class, my capstone creative writing workshop. Mom dropped me off and waited for me in a Panera down the road until it was over.
On campus, in the dark, with only a few souls scattered about, I pretended I wasn’t at the school where my best friend shot me in the head. Instead, I was walking around an empty street in Oxford, a roguish fantasy outlaw sent to recover an ancient tome of unspeakable knowledge from the clutches of some evil empire.
It turns out there was something else I wanted: pity. I sought reaction, acknowledgment. I sought shock value. Something. There was a handful of us in the class, maybe fifteen—at most, only two knew what had happened. The others asked me, from what they could see under my Timberwolves knit hat, why I shaved my head. Did I lose a bet or something? To this day, most of the students from my graduating class have no idea I was shot on April 7, 2017.
Losing Mark was like losing my five senses. I was robbed of the primary way I perceived the world. Without my cues, my context.
I had lost my limbs. I was unmovable, abandoned, marooned, living on the speck of Brain Injury Island, population one, isolated, aching for phantoms to help me find purchase on the earth.
It was forgetting a birth tongue. We spent years developing a language based on arcane meme references, inexplicable social cues, and postmodern cringe comedy that the two of us will never be able to speak again. Mark was the physical embodiment of the voices in your head saying things you wouldn’t dare say to your parents.
It is a shame that my friendship with Mark never had the chance to either end on more conventional terms or grow into something more meaningful as we matured and experienced more of life. Instead, my time with Mark ended with a bang and splintered from the force, revealing it to have been a thin and brittle thing all along.
We haven’t spoken since the night he accidentally shot me.
Paul Rousseau is a disabled writer. This is an adapted excerpt from his debut, Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir is forthcoming from HarperCollins September 10, 2024. Paul’s work has also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Roxane Gay’s newsletter The Audacity, Wigleaf, Catapult, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others, and has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2024, the Wigleaf Top 50, as well as nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy.
All views expressed are the author’s own.
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