Godard's Handgun

we stopped the car about midway up the hill. she took the high-powered rifle, the mat and the binoculars with the stand from the boot, and we carried these things up the rest of the way. on the top looking over the steep drop of the opposite face we lay the mat down and surveyed the area. a leafy valley, mostly rocky underfoot in the open spaces where the stream showed through. a bare patch near the bend of the stream, walkable from the road that passed by on the slope above. it was more than a kilometre away. it was a narrow pass.

why did we put the meet here? i asked. it has two hiding places, she said. looking more carefully now, i could see them with a little difficulty.

are those our guys in there? i said. no, she said, theirs.

aren't our boys walking into a trap? yes, she said. you don't seem bothered, i said. i'm not.

there was a long pause. we both watched, i through the binoculars, she through the rifle scope.

okay i'll bite, i said, why aren't you worried? she sighed, like you would to a troublesome child: they think we're amateurs. we chose the spot. they agreed. they are going to double cross us. they think we don't know the hiding places.

can you hit them from here with that? i asked. shhh, she snapped.

Mark Griffin, in Dali's Handgun, states that 'the perfect gun is a beautiful chimera', is 'not in the habit of saluting the dead', is 'a door someone opened'. That gun 'writes sad and ardent love letters', and 'crouches to intercept shadows'. I think of his first lines most: the perfect gun is not visible; the perfect gun exists in the savage state.


the german car rolled up even earlier than expected, too early for the meeting time. when the round friendly shape of the french car showed up, conventionally it would have been impossible to escape the trap. but our boys did not stop, instead took out the goods and carried on as if doing business. i watched the shapes up on the hill, crawling towards the hiding places, i watched the green branches of the valley sway in the wind.

the shots that were supposed to come from the hiding places never came of course when everything went sour, though lots of others did down by the stream. the distant firecracker noises made me feel weird. afterwards there were a lot of dead bodies. but in this place, no one cares about dead bodies. we watched through the binoculars and the scope.

we rolled up the mat and got ready to move off. i asked her, could you really have hit anything with that rifle at such a long way off?

no, she said. then why did you bring it? i asked.

i did not bring it to shoot any of them, she said. i brought it in case i needed to shoot you.

Did Godard get it right? Is the world orderly or disorderly? I think he was saying it is like a madness, absurd and seemingly cosmically planned. Maybe the plans we discern, like a heist or a doublecross, only serve to show how absurd and unplanned everything really is in contrast. We try to design our lives and paths and arrange our selves, but when we steal cars on a whim and jump randomly from one adventure to another, that is when we are most in tune with reality.




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