Bullet in the Brain

Anders arrives at the bank late in the day and must wait in a long line, fuming, while other customers chatter inanely. The bank is “a pompous old building with marble floors and counters and pillars, and gilt scrollwork over the tellers’ cages. The domed ceiling had been decorated with mythological figures” painted in “fleshy, toga-draped ugliness” (202-03). Anders hates the trite, corny style of the place, which aggravates his rapidly overloading critical mind.

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.