the sound of a gun being fired

But the silence was difficult. It hung over the land and drifted across the long plains. It was out there with the soft black insects beyond the last line of buildings, beyond the prefabs and the Quonset hut and the ROTC barracks. Day after day my eyes scanned in all directions a stunned earth, unchangingly dull, a land silenced by its own beginnings in the roaring heat, born dead, flat stones burying the memory. I felt threatened by the silence. In my room at home, during my retreats from destructive episodes of one land or another, I had never even noticed the quiet. Perhaps silence is dispersed by familiar things; their antiquity is heard. All I had feared then was that my mother, bringing my lunch upstairs, would forget to comment on the weather. (These reports were indispensable to my progress.) But now, in the vast burning west, the silences were menacing. I decided not to eat meat for a few weeks. One day in early September we started playing a game called Bang You're Dead. It's an extremely simpleminded game. Almost every child has played it in one form or another. Your hand assumes the shape of a gun and you fire at anyone who passes. You try to reproduce, in your own way, the sound of a gun being fired. Or you simply shout these words: Bang, you're dead. The other person clutches a vital area of his body and then falls, simulating death. (Never mere injury; always death.) Nobody knew who had started the game or exactly when it had started. You had to fall if you were shot. The game depended on this. It went on for six or seven days. At first, naturally enough, I thought it was all very silly, even for a bunch of bored and lonely athletes. Then I began to change my mind. Suddenly, beneath its bluntness, the game seemed compellingly intricate. It possessed gradations, dark joys, a resonance echoing from the most perplexing of dreams. I began to kill selectively. When killed, I fell to the floor or earth with great deliberation, with sincerity. I varied my falls, searching for the rhythm of something imperishable, a classic death. We did not abuse the powers inherent in the game. The only massacre took place during the game's first or second day when things were still shapeless, the potential unrealized.