The Wrong Question More Than Once, and Here the Thing with Feathers Isn't Hope

Abstract

The Wrong Question More Than Once, and Here the Thing with Feathers Isn't Hope Matt Donovan (bio) The Wrong Question More Than Once For most of the shift, it was more about not lookingbored or wanting to seem invisible behind the ER deskwhile nothing much happened at all. A Cubs bannertwitched in the air vent. A nurse wearing a "Welcometo the Madhouse" T-shirt described a stick-figure meme.Someone wanted to know why a drunken John Doehad pissed in the supply closet & a man half-hiddenbehind a triage curtain never stopped staring me down.Off-rhythm pings from somewhere chased a pulsingbeep that made it seem as if something had gone wrong.I asked & then later asked again: nothing was ever wrong.And because the shift would be ending soon, I askedthe question I was there to ask after reading abouta surgeon who'd claimed our gun problems could besolved if only we'd release the autopsy photosfrom Sandy Hook. That's the only hope, she insisted,for this to be reversed. No doubt even if I'd founda better shape to my words, the doctor chaperoningmy visit would have given me the same look that saidas an act of mercy to everyone within earshot, pleaseshut the fuck up. The idea seemed stolen fromScared Straight, he said, the 1970s documentary in whichprison lifers rage at juvenile delinquents as a meansof mending lives. Shoes squeaked. Phones rang.More off-rhythm pings. Besides, why would seeingbodies with gunshot trauma make any differenceto Second Amendment fans? They'd say "Yeah,that's what guns do." The next day in the basementof Saint Sabina church, talking to the womanfrom Purpose Over Pain, what easier way to proclaimwhat little I knew than to ask the same questioneven after she told me—calmly, quietly—how her son [End Page 199] was shot unloading a drum kit outside a church?We have mass shootings all the time in Chicago& they do nothing. It's a problem when it's white lives.When a six-year-old gets shot on the South Side,it's just crime as usual. And after she walked meupstairs through the pews, past the sculptureof an ash-gray figure gripping a pistol with one handwhile piercing the chest of a young girl with another,leading me through the locked front doors & outto the display case lining the sidewalk—was I thinkingeven then about how photos of the dead mightenact change? This is our memorial wall, she told me,matter of fact. I knew everyone here. She watched mefor a moment scanning the faces stapled in place—school photos, caps & gowns, plenty of thumbs-ups& basketballs, children a few months old—beforepointing at a teenager grinning in a white tuxedoin front of a drawing of a skyline & fountain.There's my Terrell right there. [End Page 200] Here the Thing with Feathers Isn't Hope but a 400-pound pistol in the bedof a pickup, welded together fromscrapyard metal & stamped with namesof kids shot & killed near the artist's home.Except for all the feathers, dyedcotton-candy blue & affixed acrossits cylinder & grip, wrapping the lengthof the barrel with a flourish like a boaentwining a neck, it might seem likeany other oversized gun. ConversationPiece, he called it, although the featherscame later, only after he'd begun drivingsouth with a plan to haul the sculpturefrom Chicago to Atlanta, then backthrough Charleston & Sandy Hook.But when he stopped for gas the first time,he knew his art had failed when a mansprinted across the parking lot to sayGoddamn, that's one badass gun.Something needed to change. Maybethe feathers could turn the pistol intoa thing you approached with a questioninstead of praise. And if the plumesnow covered some of the names, buryingthe elegies hammered into metal,what choice did he have but to continuedriving through town after town, listeningto the...