Guns Are Just Too Fast
By: Melissa Toldy
Tags: Life, Culture, Violence, Family, Guns

Guns Are Just Too Fast

illustration by author

Who would we be without our memories? We wouldn’t celebrate milestones. Without our memories, we would lose a sense of repetition, and without repetition, we would never learn anything. We would be lost.

It’s weird how memory works. If I recall the year I met my mugger, I first remember I was living in Williamsburg, and I was dating my current partner, and my brother Nick was already dead. Those engrams might seem disconnected, but they track like this: seasons, relationships, cities. So that means I got mugged in 2011. Fall, a dead brother, a new boyfriend, Brooklyn.

This kind of circuitous thinking can’t happen when you have a gun pointed at you. You can’t find context or meaning. You can’t make sense of where you are, in relation to where everything else is. You only know two things: There’s a gun, and it’s not your gun.

Nick died in the early days of 2011. By April, I asked my then-colleague to go on a date with me. Daylight Saving ended, and just before Thanksgiving, I got mugged on the Williamsburg Bridge, along with my then-roommate and best friend. These reference points don’t tell me why I was mugged, but the people and the places give my memories a personal context.

I went to a gun range, some time between 2013 and 2015. It wasn’t my idea; it was my partner’s idea. I lived in Texas, land of perpetual summer, during those years, and my partner visited me, and he wanted to shoot a gun. My partner, my sister, and my sister’s then-boyfriend, took turns shooting. They encouraged me to take a turn. I was able to reach for the gun, and I was able to hold it, briefly. But I couldn’t pull the trigger. I felt sick. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

I thought about my mugger — for years — after I got mugged. The hooded man who materialized out of nowhere. I thought about where he went with our wallets and phones. I pictured him in darkness, skulking down alleyways, meeting nefarious allies in dim, stark rooms. I protected myself — by giving my mugger an unhappy life. He didn’t live in the daylight. In my mind, he was a depraved and desperate man. In my mind, my mugger wasn’t very different from my brother Nick.

In the early days of 2011, a hotel manager discovered my brother’s dead body. Nick was living in Copenhagen, living a life of crime. Criminality runs in my family, perhaps encouraged by society’s views of who-deserves-what. My great-grandmother was a prostitute, in Hungary. During the communist regime, many members of my extended family were penalized for “crimes” too. Dad made money on the black market, and he brought his loose morals to America, where he collected and squandered a small fortune, selling Chinese counterfeit goods. We are a resourceful clan, but we don’t follow the rules.

Nick tried to rob a bank, some time before 2011. As reported in the Danish news article detailing his arrest, Nick used a toy gun. They also printed something peculiar about his socks. Like, he wasn’t wearing socks, or his socks were soaking wet. I lived in Denmark as a kid, and I remember the misty weather, the crisp air. When I picture my brother failing to rob a bank, I never picture him inside the bank, holding up a gun. I always picture him outside the bank, on the sidewalk, sitting there with peculiar socks. He looks lonely, and he looks cold.

The NYPD officers who picked up my friend and me, they also mentioned a toy gun. They rode their patrol car onto the Williamsburg Bridge, and they took us away from Manhattan, back into Brooklyn. The officers told us to look out the windows while they drove through “known areas” where offenders lurked. The officers told us that our mugger, possibly, robbed us with a toy gun. I suppose it’s possible. I’m not a gun expert. Fake guns exist for a reason. But even if the gun wasn’t a real gun, it didn’t matter to me. Even if they caught my mugger, and they showed me his toy gun, I wouldn’t feel any comfort. You can’t undo a traumatic experience. You can’t dispel the shock with logic or subsequent information. Your body remembers what happened, as it happened.

My brother died from a gunshot wound to his head. That’s not a memory I can re-write, per se. The trouble is, my family disagrees on who pulled the trigger. The Danish police called it a suicide. But we also know: Nick knew dangerous people. There was cash and cocaine in his hotel room. Part of me hopes my brother took his own life. That way, he made the choice. But really, why did he have to die like that? In his case, a toy gun would have made all the difference.

Getting mugged helped me understand something vital about guns. Like many human inventions, guns do too much, too quickly. Instead of having a conversation, a man pointed a gun at me, and he took my possessions and ran away. There was no room for thinking or negotiating. Guns cancel time. They make life stop, or at least, stand still.

I’m afraid to shoot a gun because I don’t want life to end. To point a gun is to say, “I’m out of options. This is my last resort.” I hope I never find myself in that position. Where I can’t figure out how to get what I want, by any other means. My mugger didn’t score big when he robbed my friend and me. Maybe pointing a gun seemed easy for him. Easier than finding a job. That was the biggest hurdle for my brother Nick. He wasn’t an American citizen, and it was too easy to sell drugs. By the time he was deported and living in Denmark, Nick was already lost.

The language of guns is cruel and mute: Shut up! says the gun.

Gun advocates know the difference between pistols and rifles. They know the names of the guns, their shapes and sizes. They say this gun is for this purpose and this gun is for another purpose. But all guns look the same to me. They’re silencers. Tools for stopping life.

The problem with guns is that they work against time, against context. You can insert them, but they come on like punctuation marks. They don’t link or connect us. Guns set us apart. Guns make holes. Guns erase us.