Six

Dr. Carl Pastor

While I didn’t meet Billy until he was fifteen, I studied those early cases. I talked, for instance, to the doctors who treated Bridget Hathway, the day care worker. There was nothing there to explain it--is nothing there to explain it. Even if they’d used the most up-to-date technologies in today’s best–equipped emergency room. That bullet simply had no business being where it was, had no business entering this woman’s neck and exiting her mouth six hours later with such a minimal amount of damage. There simply is no explanation

What’s really challenging about all this, what’s really difficult for people to get their heads around . . . It’s not the image of a three-year-old with a gun; it’s the realization that medicine is not an exact science, that even science itself is not an exact science—-at least not in the way most people think about it.

There exists this illusion of infallibility around any practice termed a scientific. The truth, however, is much more complex. Much more beautiful really. That truth is what Billy threw in our faces. That’s what he always meant to me. Beneath it all.

How do you shoot a woman in the neck and somehow get the bullet into her larynx without any internal damage. It’s impossible, right? But that’s the thing, The phenomenon of Billy—-or Billy Shooter, as his father always insisted on calling him-—it’s not about doing the impossible, it’s about expanding our understanding of the possible. Our appreciation for the possible. People think it’s admirable to believe in the power of magic—-a sign of some kind of depth, but Billy always showed us that true depth comes instead from understanding the true power of reality.

It’s not that he showed us anything we hadn’t seen or heard of before; it’s that he perfected it, brought it right to the surface, and reminded us of it over and over again, each shot screaming out, “You do not know everything! You will not understand this world!”

I have seen steel rods from construction sites enter straight through the victim’s eye socket and exit through the foramen magnum—-that small open space at the back of your skull—-without damaging any vital areas of the brain. I have seen patients pronounced dead regain conspicuousness on the table minutes later, seemingly coming back to life only after all efforts toward medical intervention ceased. And every emergency room intern has heard stories of “magic” bullets lost in bodies, lodging themselves in a victim’s stomach without puncturing the stomach wall, or exiting the body cleanly with an exit wound inexplicably smaller than the entry wound. But with Billy—-or Billy Shooter, I should say—-the phenomenon of the medical miracle became an art form.

He had the artist’s enigmatic aura too, but it was more of a shadow really. A sadness forever cast across his features, a distance, a barrier between him and those around him. He possessed that remoteness you see in autistic children. And that’s really how I always saw him--as a kind of beautiful savant. Only for Billy, the overdeveloped talent wasn’t math; it wasn’t language; it was gun violence.

Taciturn to the point of muteness, he spoke most clearly in a language of wounds written across the bodies of those he shot. The sublimely gentle tear of the epidermis, The subtle expansion into the reticular region disturbing only a handful of sweat ducts and blood vessels, the careful path through though muscle fiber leaving behind sometimes not even so much as a trace of mitochondria. I examined so many, and each was more exquisite than the next. Billy simply elevated gun shot wounds into poetry, the human anatomy his dictionary. These were wounds that would make a surgeon weep, the touch of each bullet defter than any scalpel, more tender than even a lover’s touch. What he left behind were not so much scars as they were love letters to a world that could never understand him.

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