That night, wracked with guilt, I had to write in order to keep myself from going crazy. I closed myself in the library and worked away at the typewriter for a while, occasionally stopping to make corrections. I intended to talk about what had happened to Aaron, but ended up with something much different. This is one of the emanations from the typewriter:

When had it all started? When were the foundations of the current catastrophe laid? Well, at the beginning of course – in 1776 with the founding, 1492 with the discovery, 476 with the fall, 33 with the resurrection, 600BC with coin currency, 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But this is facile, of course, a fallacious Zeno’s paradox applied to causality. Achilles most certainly can catch up with the tortoise, and the historian can identify a beginning, and an end. Nineteen eighty-nine seems as good a date as any – at least within my direct experience. But how could a moment of triumph for America, for “the western idea”, and indeed for the world – the falling of a wall physical, political, economic, emotional – be the beginning of the downfall? Because it was a moment of forgetting, the collective crossing of ameles potamos. Looking back on a time when someone could say, with seeming sincerity, that, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, we can now see that perhaps that was the most dangerous moment, the birthing of the end of history, an end much more literal than the essayist intended. A shared illusion that man had found a one-way road to progress, a prosperity gospel preached by technocrats more zealous than the most fervent inquisitor, a haughty exceptionalism that claimed exemption from the banal responsibilities of the unblessed nations – these, the failures of shared memory, were the soil nourished by the blood of our ancestors, a rich substrate in which the evil necessary for such total destruction could put down healthy, unobstructed roots.

I was not sure what it meant, but it helped to put the words down. The next day, we all sulked around the place and avoided saying much to each other. Daniel was out back, chopping wood, while I sat in the library staring at, but not reading, one of the newspapers. The quiet was broken once again by a yell from behind the house, and I ran to the back door, grabbing the gun on the way. I found Daniel, holding the axe, locked in a standoff with a racoon. 

“Fucking thing bit me!” he said, annoyed, and I could see blood running from his hand down his wrist. I stood for a moment, looking back and forth between him and the racoon. It hissed and made an awkward staggering move towards him. He took a few steps back, toward me, and cried, “Shoot it!”

His anger was more then enough motivation for me. Again, the sound of the .45 shattered the calm of the quiet morning, and 230 grains of .45 ACEP sent the raccoon flying about 20 feet, then rolling into a messy, partially-connected heap. 

Sarah, seeing the blood, got Daniel into the bathroom and began cleaning his hand and getting bandages ready. There was a deep, ugly bite on the flesh between his thumb and palm. I guessed that the raccoon had been hiding unnoticed at one end of the woodpile and had reacted defensively when he got close. It seemed odd that it had stayed around despite his movement and the noise of chopping wood.

“Did you see that thing?” he asked, eyes wide.

“Big fucking racoon, wasn’t it?” I answered, commiserating. 

“No, I mean it didn’t look right,” he said, looking at me like I was dense. At first I didn’t understand, then I mumbled, “You mean, how it was wobbling around?”

“Yeah, and that shit on its mouth. Go look at it.” Not liking where the conversation was going, I took the opportunity to collect my thoughts alone and walked back out to the yard. What was left of the raccoon lay in a jumble in the grass. I couldn’t see the snout, and I was still afraid to get too close to it, so I grabbed the shovel and used the end of the handle to roll it over enough so that its face was showing. Sure enough, there was a foamy, crusty discharge around the mouth. My mind didn’t want to accept this new information, and I stood there trying to decide what to do for a little while. Finally, I decided there was no way to avoid the situation, and I returned to the bathroom, where Sarah was finishing bandaging Daniel’s hand.

“See what I mean?” he asked, and I saw his Adam’s apple wobble in his throat. 

“Yeah, it doesn’t look right, does it,” I agreed glumly.

Daniel walked back toward the living room and out of sight, and I stayed in the bathroom with Sarah while she cleaned up and put the first aid kit back in order.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, having missed the details of our exchange while she was doing the bandaging.