Bullet In the Brain by Tobias Wolff
Anders couldn't get to the bank until just before it closed, soof course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two womenwhose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. Hewas never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders - a book criticknown for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatchedalmost everything he reviewed.
With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the tellersstuck a \"POSITION CLOSED\" sign in her window and walked to the backof the bank, where she leaned against a desk and began to pass thetime with a man shuffling papers. The women in front of Andersbroke off their conversation and watched the teller with hatred.\"Oh, that's nice,\" one of them said. She turned to Anders andadded, confident of his accord, \"One of those little human touchesthat keep us coming back for more.\"
Anders had conceived his own towering hatred of the teller, buthe immediately turned it on the presumptuous crybaby in front ofhim. \"Damned unfair,\" he said. \"Tragic, really. If they're notchopping off the wrong leg, or bombing your ancestral village,they're closing their positions.\"
She stood her ground. \"I didn't say it was tragic,\" she said. \"Ijust think it's a pretty lousy way to treat your customers.\"
\"Unforgivable,\" Anders said. \"Heaven will take note.\"
She sucked in her cheeks but stared past him and said nothing.Anders saw that the other woman, her friend, was looking in thesame direction. And then the tellers stopped what they were doing,and the customers slowly turned, and silence came over the bank.Two men wearing black ski masks and blue business suits werestanding to the side of the door. One of them had a pistol pressedagainst the guard's neck. The guard's eyes were closed, and hislips were moving. The other man had a sawed-off shotgun. \"Keep yourbig mouth shut!\" the man with the pistol said, though no one hadspoken a word. \"One of you tellers hits the alarm, you're all deadmeat. Got it?\"
The tellers nodded.
\"Oh, bravo, \" Anders said. \"Dead meat.\" He turned to the womanin front of him. \"Great script, eh? The stern, brass-knuckledpoetry of the dangerous classes.\"
She looked at him with drowning eyes.
The man with the shotgun pushed the guard to his knees. Hehanded up the shotgun to his partner and yanked the guard's wristsup behind his back and locked them together with a pair ofhandcuffs. He toppled him onto the floor with a kick between theshoulder blades. Then he took his shotgun back and went over to thesecurity gate at the end of the counter. He was short and heavy andmoved with peculiar slowness, even torpor. \"Buzz him in,\" hispartner said. The man with the shotgun opened the gate andsauntered along the line of tellers, handing each of them a Heftybag. When he came to the empty position he looked over at the manwith the pistol, who said, \"Whose slot is that?\"
Anders watched the teller. She put her hand to her throat andturned to the man she'd been talking to. He nodded. \"Mine,\" shesaid.
\"Then get your ugly butt in gear and fill that bag.\"
\"There you go,\" Anders said to the woman in front of him.\"Justice is done.\"
\"Hey! Bright boy! Did I tell you talk?\"
\"No,\" Anders said.
\"Then shut your trap.\"
\"Did you hear that?\" Anders said. \"'Bright boy.' Right out of'The Killers'.\"
\"Please be quiet,\" the woman said.
\"Hey, you deaf or what?\" The man with the pistol walked over toAnders. He poked the weapon into Anders' gut. \"You think I'mplaying games?'
\"No,\" Anders said, but the barrel tickled like a stiff fingerand he had to fight back the titters. He did this by making himselfstare into the man's eyes, which were clearly visible behind theholes in the mask: pale blue, and rawly red-rimmed. The man's lefteyelid kept twitching. He breathed out a piercing, ammoniac smellthat shocked Anders more than anything that had happened, and hewas beginning to develop a sense of unease when the man prodded himagain with the pistol.
\"You like me, bright boy?\" he said. \"You want to suck mydick?\"
\"No,\" Anders said.
\"Then stop looking at me.\"
Anders fixed his gaze on the man's shiny wing-top shoes.
\"Not down there. Up there.\" He stuck the pistol under Anders'chin and pushed it upward until Anders was looking at theceiling.
Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank, apompous old building with marble floors and counters and pillars,and gilt scrollwork over the tellers' cages. The domed ceiling hadbeen decorated with mythological figures whose fleshy, toga-drapedugliness Anders had taken in at a glance many years earlier andafterward declined to notice. Now he had no choice but toscrutinize the painter's work. It was even worse than heremembered, and all of it executed with the utmost gravity. Theartist had a few tricks up his sleeve and used them again and again- a certain rosy blush on the underside of the clouds, a coybackward glance on the faces of the cupids and fauns. The ceilingwas crowded with various dramas, but the one that caught Anders'eye was Zeus and Europa - portrayed, in this rendition, as a bullogling a cow from behind a haystack. To make the cow sexy, thepainter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopyeyelashes through which she gazed back at the bull with sultrywelcome. The bull wore a smirk and his eyebrows were arched. Ifthere'd been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said,\"Hubba hubba.\"
\"What's so funny, bright boy?\"
\"Nothing.\"
\"You think I'm comical? You think I'm some kind of clown?\"
\"No.\"
\"You think you can mess with me?\"
\"No.\"
\"mess with me again, you're history. Capiche?\"
Anders burst our laughing. He covered his mouth with both handsand said, \"I'm sorry, I'm sorry,\" then snorted helplessly throughhis fingers and said, \" Capiche - oh, God,capiche,\" and at that the man with the pistol raised thepistol and shot Anders right in the head.
The bullet smashed Anders' skull and ploughed through his brainand exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into thecerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basalganglia, and down into the thalamus. But before all this occurred,the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off acrackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmissions. Becauseof their peculiar origin these traced a peculiar patter, flukishlycalling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and longsince lost to memory. After striking the cranium the bullet wasmoving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacialpace compared to the synaptic lighting that flashed around it. Oncein the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of braintime, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scenethat, in a phrase he would have abhorred, \"passed before hiseyes.\"
It is worth noting what Ambers did not remember, given what hedid remember. He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or whathe had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him -her unembarrassed carnality, and especially the cordial way she hadwith his unit, which she called Mr. Mole, as in, \"Uh-oh, looks likeMr. Mole wants to play,\" and \"Let's hide Mr. Mole!\" Anders did notremember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted himwith her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor ofeconomics at Dartmouth. He did not remember standing just outsidehis daughter's door as she lectured her bear about his naughtinessand described the truly appalling punishments Paws would receiveunless he changed his ways. He did not remember a single line ofthe hundreds of poems he had committed to memory in his youth sothat he could give himself the shivers at will - not \"Silent, upona peak in Darien,\" or \"My God, I heard this day,\" or \"All my prettyones? Did you say all? 0 hell-kite! All?\" None of these did heremember; not one. Anders did not remember his dying mother sayingof his father, \"I should have stabbed him in his sleep.\"
He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class howAthenian prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could reciteAeschylus, and then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in theGreek. Anders did not remember how his eyes had burned at thosesounds. He did not remember the surprise of seeing a collegeclassmate's name on the jacket of a novel not long after theygraduated, or the respect he had felt after reading the book. Hedid not remember the pleasure of giving respect.
Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death fromthe building opposite his own just days after his daughter wasborn. He did not remember shouting, \"Lord have mercy!\" He did notremember deliberately crashing his father's car in to a tree, ofhaving his ribs kicked in by three policemcn at an anti-war rally,or waking himself up with laughter. He did not remember when hebegan to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom anddread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He didnot remember when everything began to remind him of somethingelse.
This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellowgrass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as theboys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on asthe others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They havebeen worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious toAnders: an oppresssion, like the heat.
Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his fromMississippi. Anders has never met Coyle's cousin before and willnever see him again. He says hi with the rest but takes no furthernotice of him until they've chosen sides and someone asks thecousin what position he wants to play. \"Shortstop,\" the boy says.\"Short's the best position they is.\" Anders turns and looks at him.He wants to hear Coyle's cousin repeat what he's just said, but heknows better than to ask. The others will think he's being a jerk,ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn't it, not at all -it's that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final twowords, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes thefield in a trance, repeating them to himself.
The bullet is already in the brain; it won't be outrun forever,or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave thetroubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hopeand talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can't behelped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for theshadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to barkat the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack hissweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, theyis.
Part B: Character
From the story \"Bullet in the Brain\" by Tobias Wolff inthe link below, Answer the questions:
1. Who is the protagonist in \"Bullet in theBrain\"?
2. Who or what is the main antagonist in the story\"Bullet in the Brain\"?
3. List the three most important characters in the story\"Bullet in the Brain\" and explain whether each is static or dynamicand round or flat.
