FAQ Continued

Couple hours earlier, before I got on my knees before the altar, I had taken the Colt out.  And by the way, then literally got on my knees in front of the screen and sat up tall on my haunches for a while before they got sore and I went to the recliner.

Anyway.

The Colt had been part of my inheritance from my father.  Mills knew I had it, but I’d never showed it to her.  I kept locked in a strong box so I’d never told her not to touch it because I intended for her never to see it until she was older.  I thought I might like to sell it, but I hadn’t decided for sure yet.  And what I was doing with it out that morning was holding it, looking it over, trying to decide if I needed to hang on to it as a remembrance of him.  He loved to shoot at cans and stuff in his backyard, but I wasn’t into that.  I wasn’t into shooting at all, in fact I was pretty leery of the gun, but he did once encourage me- not long before he died- to make my high school science textbook a target.  I’d hated that class to death.  Dad cajoled me into taking the gun and after much discomfort and apprehension, I fired.  Clipped the corner of the cover, then hit it solid four times out of five.  I shot the hell out of that book.  And then never touched the gun again until I inherited it.  When I got into Party I thought I’d probably be a decent shot, at least when aiming at things I hate.

  Don’t ask me now to make anything rational out of my stupid decision to keep the Colt as I had found it in my dad’s house after he died- meaning fully loaded.  I was thinking that it was smart to have it in case of a home intrusion.  Something which hadn’t actually happened in our neighborhood, not in the three years we’d lived in that house or in the six years before that.  And I figured I had the gun locked safely away, and no one else would have access to it.  But, as you have surely ascertained, I’m capable of bad judgment from time to time.

So, I’m sitting in ICE looking the Colt over, thinking about my dad, and when a text comes in from Kendra, I set the gun on the coffee table.  Kendra’s in the kitchen making us all a lunch.  It’s gonna be pesto fusilli pasta salad made with basil and cherry tomatoes from Kendra’s garden, and yuca fries fried in her own homemade rosemary-infused olive oil.  A really nice meal.  The text says, Gotta bike to the market.  Lunch at one, OK?  While I’m texting her back sounds great, drive safe, I get a call from my best buddy, Travis, who’s looking to become a big Party hero as well.  While I’m talking to him I switch on the game, and while it boots I put the Colt in its box and slap the lid shut, planning to lock it up and put it away as soon as the call is over.  The speaker is turned up on my phone now so I can play with both hands, and we’re both playing while we commiserate as usual about the gnarly bitch- how I think she looks just like my paranoid mental boss Gloria, and how he’d thought she looked even more like his ex who left him, took all his money, and got primary kid custody.  He never had an obsession with her like me, though, and had already killed her a bunch of levels ago but didn’t take any extra glee in wasting her.  He just thought it was funny how the character looked like his ex.  

So, Travis is a bigger hero than me not only in Party, but because he never plays on the weekends his kid is with him.  I had Mills every weekend and every other day of the week, and what did I do for her?  Let the game take me over so much that she could pick up the Colt along with her soda.

If I’d stretched my neck a little farther when I turned to see her cartwheel I’d have seen the box.  It was RIGHT THERE on the coffee table.  And at least some of the time she had the gun in her hand it must have been visible as a reflection.  But I let that other world on my bitchin giant H fricken D screen have all the power while HD reality was taking shape under my nose.

One thing- and I really want this understood- I truly NEVER connected in my mind the real gun to my real boss.  Not even for a second in fantasy.  I was just blowing off steam by trying to kill the character in the game who looked like her.  That Colt, at most, would have been for shooting at cans, or that same old textbook.

Okay.  Anyway.

After Mills asks if I can shoot the can good with my real gun, I go, “That’s what I mean, with my real gun.”  Then with a genuine sorrowful sigh I say, “Just a little more time, Mills, I promise.  I am blowing low-level bodyguards and punks away like crazy today and I’ll get the lady I’m after soon, and I’ll join you guys.”

“You get to be catcher when Mr. Levinson goes.”

I fire off a half-dozen rounds, and shout “Awesome!” as another scumbag flops to the pavement.  I look to Millie- the real Millie, not her dim reflection.  “Awesome for you too, Dad,” she says with somewhat less enthusiasm than me, having perceived my “Awesome!” might not be exclusive to her.  To make up I go, “Wait, did you say your home run went all the way to Stacy’s?  Four whole houses? DOUBLE awesome for you, honey.”  I think I may have managed a few hundred million nanoseconds looking at her before I finished talking in the direction of the altar.

“I hit a couple of singles, too, before the home run.”

My peripheral vision takes in her request for a fist bump, and I sweep my left fist off the controller, but because I don’t look over we don’t quite line up.  Our knuckles just scrape each other perpendicular.  Do I then try to get that right, or better yet feel motivated enough to get my ass up and outside to answer my kid’s humble request for a bit of my time?  I see another partial virtual human form come out of shadow, so no.  I lean into firing off a few rounds and I feel a sharp pinprick-like sensation on my chest.  My chai symbol has become entangled in chest hair!  I twist my neck and torso to free the dumb necklace, which only sends it into a constant tug, right at the top of my breastbone, and it pulls more focus than I’m comfortable with. 

A chai symbol, you’re wondering?  Of all things, right, to get in the way of my devotions?  Kendra wears the one her grandma gave her for her Bat Mitzvah and I just think it’s a wonderful way to express you appreciate life.  It’s a better visual- I think, anyway- than a crumpled dead guy on a cross.  Those nuns from my middle school- if they could see that chai around my neck- would for sure shit some bricks.  Can’t you picture nuns dropping loads of bricks- so funny.  Yup, I’m a totally lapsed Catholic, my occasional “oh, my God” maybe notwithstanding.

Anyway, I keep my gun sight on my target and my hands tight on the holy controller but I can’t help jerking my head back when I’m shot at.  The neck pang and the hair I feel yanked from my chest bring a “Goddammit” out of me.  I look down to see that a gray hair is one of several caught by a link of golden chain close to the chai.  I snicker at how lucky that was, because on my rather hairy chest there are only maybe three gray hairs scattered, which I’ve been thinking about using Kendra’s tweezers to pull.  At thirty-three, I’m no old man.  Good riddance, right?

That whole little episode makes me double down my concentration on finding the boss.

But I do realize I cussed.  “Sorry, Mills, bad word again.  Last time, I promise.”  Then I’m stunned to see my gnarly dragon bitch pop out from behind a wall.  I say to her, “Goodbye, you heartless, soulless thing, you.”  It’s important I should mention that is in fact the nickname I’ve given her: The Thing.  Because she’s just an object without heart or soul, because like Gloria she lacks human qualities that I can respect.  You’ll understand more about why that nickname is important in a minute.  Anyway, I say out loud, “You miserable piece of-”.  I cut myself off, and then finish the sentence with “poop”, and I am so proud of myself for keeping my promise.  “Goodbye to you, honey,” I say in total disgust as I relish the prospect of at last sacrificing this separated at birth twin on my altar with Mills right there, unbeknownst to me holding my Colt, and I’m zeroed in on this virtual bitch, this character, this assemblage of pixels, this nothing but a bunch of ones and zeroes, and all I know is I’m so going to mess you up.  One shot from me and she slithers back out of sight, and I advance and shout, “Oh, honey.  Hon-nee, do you really think you’re hiding?  You are going down.  Right now.” 

Mills then asks me, “Daddy, why does everyone call each other ‘honey’?”, in a somewhat frustrated tone.

“Don’t you think ‘honey’ is a nice thing for people to call each other?” I inquire, annoyance lingering in my voice, but I figure she understands it isn’t for her, just for the necklace snag and the purple-haired boss bitch.

“Well, yeah, but everyone does it,” says Mills, and she sounds more frustrated.  “You call me honey, and you call mom it.  Mom calls you it and she calls me it.  Stacy’s dad calls her it and Grandma does it to everybody.  My teacher calls it all the kids, even when they’re bad.  She sounds kind of like you when you call ‘hon-nee’ that lady you want to kill.”

The Thing has the nerve to come out again; we both shoot, she pulls back around the corner and I’m grunting at length at having scared her off instead of killing her worthless ass when one of her male scumbags jumps into view and pulls on me, which makes my grunt into a scream.  I press the buttons to make my virtual body duck and his shots whiz past me.  I jump behind my car.

“Whew.  That was close,” I say.  I take a deep breath, and let out a heavy exhale.  Then I very thoughtfully remember my daughter and in an instant am sweet as any sugary substance you can name.  “Mills, can you think of something you’d prefer to be called instead of ‘honey’?”

“High fructose corn syrup,” she says.  My head falls back as I laugh, but my eyes stay straight ahead as they try to blink and shake away the incipient tears.  Then Millie says in the cutest way, “Because I love soda?  And it has high fructose corn syrup in it and I’d be the only person who ever gets called that.”  And I think I’m gonna die, because she says it with SUCH happiness, and pride of ownership.  My eyes get very wet real fast and my body starts to shake with both laughter and and then panic, because I can’t see my virtual surroundings clearly.

Now, which universe did my thought about my Mills, my so special girl- which universe did my idea of her being a Higgs boson spring from?  The one featuring her being amazing and seemingly reckless looking like she’s defying gravity hurtling herself through space and coming out unscathed, and then cute and poignant like with that high fructose corn syrup thing, and my great wife Kendra with whom I created her who might appreciate some help making lunch, and carefree weekend street games with the neighbors?  Or the malicious, truculent, parallel universe which mesmerized me hour upon hour, that held me as virtual hostage, allowing me sporadic awareness of the real living, breathing universe, but kept me from getting off my ass and being fully present in it?  The two just stayed locked in a battle for supremacy.  And oh so profound me with that Higgs boson idea, and my Carl Sagan, and so brimming with passion for my quest on the altar, and of course I know NOW that everything good can come only from the one universe that matters.  NOW I can pay full proper respect to my child.

So.  Mills asks, and I say to her, “Your wish is my command, high fructose corn syrup!  I’ll bet you’re the only second grader in your whole school who knows what that stuff is.  I love you, high fructose corn syrup.”  With my finger on the Party trigger I wipe the wetness from my eyes with one sleeve, then the other, which requires just enough head movement to see my little girl for a couple billion nanoseconds.  She’s right by my left shoulder, looking in my eyes with a shy smile, her arms behind her back as she rotates her whole body like a washing machine agitator, slow and gentle like on the delicate setting.

That makes me feel secure she does get how much I appreciate her, so I go ahead and continue my chase in my oh-so-fricken amazing parallel make-believe world in which skulk The Thing and her one remaining creep who might impede my getting to her.  Seeing Mills’s reflection zeroed in on the action boosts my confidence.  It doesn’t occur to me to doubt if she understands she’s a higher priority, that my big smile merged into the virtual pavement is for her.  I’m convinced she and I are in synch; she wants me to win as much as I know she knows I want her to show me a home run once I get outside.  I shoot and yell “Bam!  Bam bam bam!  Dang it, you blue-haired freak!  Why can’t I get you?”  Me and the freak fire a lot more shots apiece; I take one in the arm and so does she and she bolts.  My health meter drops, and I shout, “No!  I will not let you run me to zero again, you freaking HAG.”

  Mills asks, “Daddy?  How come you’re so angry?”

After a deep breath I tell her, “I’m not angry,” trying hard to sound reassuring as I begin to reload yet again.   “It’s just a game.  It’ll be over soon.”

“You sure?” she says.  “What’s the pointy thing on top of your gun?”

She’s standing well inside the pale reflection of ICE, and although now at the very edge of my peripheral vision, she must be holding the Colt in such a way that I could see it if I’d only pay enough attention.  But, I figure she’s asking about the gun in my game, which because it’s a first-person shooter every detail is visible.

“It’s the sight, high fructose corn syrup.  It’s a big one and it helps me line up the gun better.”

“Do bad people have the big ones, too?”

“Sure, but I’m faster and accurater.”

“How many times can you shoot before you run out of bullets?”

“Fifteen.”

“Really?  It doesn’t look like there’s room for that many.”

The Colt is a six-shooter pistol.

Me and the freak continue to exchange fire, me still behind my car and she her wall.

“Yup, there’s room.  I can shoot all fifteen in less than four seconds.” 

“What if you want to shoot only one?”

“You pull the trigger and then let right go.  It’s a bit tricky though.  Here, like this.”  I demonstrate by taking down an unfortunate passerby with a little kid.  “Takes a bit of practice,” I say with utmost pride.

“Daddy, why did you shoot that lady?  She’s a mother.”

“Not a real mother.  It’s just a game.”

“She wasn’t doing anything.”

As unreal as the mother seemed to me, Mills didn’t see her that way.  She saw me shooting a person.

   “Is your game gun a machine gun?”

  So now that’s Millie’s first request for information about the virtual gun.  But do I detect the difference?

   “No, those are much bigger.  This is called an automatic handgun.  But the lady with the blue hair, well, it will be worth a lot more to take her down with just one shot.”

The Thing nails me with a graze to the shoulder.

“Oh, Daddy, she got you.  What happens if she shoots you again?  Would you go down, and be dead?”

“Oh, Daddy’s not about to die, not now.  Don’t worry, honey.  I mean high fructose corn syrup.”

“Thanks, Daddy.  How many people do you have to kill to win?”

  “You don’t win, Mills.  The story just keeps going on forever.  But I’m gonna stop once I get Gloria.  Look, there she goes!  Look at her trying to hide better.  The software is probably telling her how good I am.”  Then I realize I’ve just said the lady’s name, and I think Oops.  What if Mills mentions this to Kendra?

“If nobody can win, why do people play?”

“Just because it’s fun, Mills.  Doesn’t matter if you win, it’s how you play the game.  That’s what we tell you about your gymnastic tournaments, right?  And it’s true about the mushball game, too.  It’s just about having fun and doing your best.”

I feel her forearm settle again on my left shoulder, and she asks, “Does everyone’s gun have a safety on it?”

“How do you know what a safety is?”

“At school we learned about it on the field trip to the police station.”

My phone on the side table to my right lights up and plays a cartoonish boiiiiiing sound for an incoming text.  I ask Mills to read it to me.  Her reflection stays looking up at me, and when I turn to the real her she’s all innocence and inquisitiveness merged into one intense focus, waiting for the answer about the safety.  The New Frontier has a long, shiny silver barrel so it’s probably not hard to see in her far hand if I’d JUST USE MY EYES.  Any kind of real father would see it but I- dumb, pathetic man- snap my attention from the reflection of her face in my game to my game.

“What about the safety, Daddy?  Do you have one?”

“It’s a little lever right on the trigger.  You have to press it before the trigger will move.”

“What about your real gun, Daddy?  Does it have a safety, too?”

“Sure does.  All guns do.”

  “That’s good, Daddy,” she says.  Then, only then, after she feels assured the Colt has one, after she prioritizes my personal safety over the text, Mills goes over toward my phone.  I don’t see her bend down behind my chair.  I do notice she’s a thoughtful kid for not crossing between me and the screen.  That makes me figure me and Kendra are doing something right, so gold star for us.  I compliment my adorable daughter on all her intelligent questions.  Platinum star for me then, for sure, right?  She plops half her butt and folds one leg next to me on the extra-wide, and she says “It’s from Mommy.  ‘Did you put that thing away yet?’”

About an hour after breakfast, Kendra’d come to ICE to plead with me to go be with my daughter outside.  She really laid into me after seeing the Colt on the coffee table.  I shouted back at her over the massive gun sounds and music not to worry.  I promised I’d put it right away and lock it up.

Now I’m sure her text refers to the boss from hell.  THAT “Thing”, who me putting away I’m certain is imminent, and then I will quit, and everyone will be proud of me for doing so.  I go, “High Fructose,” to Mills as I’m making a rapid reload of my virtual, “write back to Mommy for me and tell her not yet, but I’m about to, right now.” 

So- Mills, her little thumbs go to work.  Kendra, I later learned, was staring at her phone while she stirred the pesto dressing into the pasta, waiting for assurance I’d put the Colt away.  There was music blaring in her ears too, through the tiny buds snaking up from her phone.

  When Mills is done, she holds the phone up right in front of me.  It says ‘I’m doing it right now then I’ll go play with Mills.

“Good job.  Thanks, HFCS.  Is it okay if I use the abbreviation?”

In a vapid Valley Girl voice, she goes, “OMG, Daddy.  You like told me IYHO you don’t think we should, like, talk to each other like we’re texting.”

I feel like cracking up again.  My beautiful, smart kid.  “Bullseye, high fructose corn syrup.  In my humble opinion we definitely shouldn’t start letting that happen.”  I lower my head to connect with the top of hers, keeping my eyes on screen, remaining ready to pounce.  Yes, I fail to grasp there is an analogy between textspeak coming into everyday English and how Party and my booming home theater have overtaken me.

Mills thanks me and hops up, puts the phone exactly where it had been, and proceeds back around my chair.  This time I see her reflection disappear downward behind me, and I figure she’s starting a walkover or something.  But no part of her reappears.

“Whatcha doing back there, high fructose corn syrup?” 

She pops back up and sticks her head over the top of my chair back and says, “I was just picking the gun back up and looking at it.  I don’t see the safety.  Will you show it to me?”

I fire off a shot to nail one short, skinny, pasty, horn-rimmed geek who thought he could protect Miss Flabby Tits with nothing but a snub-nosed pistol.  The Thing herself then pops back into view and an explosion of panic hits my throat and chest.

I believe that no more than two seconds had passed since Mills’s response.  But- two billion nanoseconds added onto the time she’d already spent with gun in hand and me oblivious is a virtual lifetime.

I toss the holy controller and swivel the recliner.  I pass ten o’clock and I see the open strong box on the coffee table, then continue right on around to Mills with her little hand clasping the Colt, two fingers on the trigger.

“Mills, oh my God,” I shout as I stand up.  “Hand that to me, gently.  When did you pick it up?”

She looks into my eyes and extends the gun toward me.  “It’s okay, Daddy,” she says very innocently.  “I didn’t push the safety.”

I panic and grasp the Colt by the barrel.

“The safety’s different on this one,” I tell her, and with my free hand move to check the safety, which is a little switch at the back you flick to prevent firing.   The gun fires.  I’m blown hard against the chair back.  My neck feels as if it’s burst into flames; I can actually feel air inside my neck.  There’s immense heat and pain, but in a couple seconds I feel no more pain, no more air.  I feel just shock, and terror, and my head against the chair back.  I can’t move my body, or sense anything from it.  I can’t feel the blood spilling over my shirt and pants, but I can sure see it.

Mills is staring at me, hands over ears and her mouth gaping open but no sound coming out of it.  I try to speak but can’t.  My eyes are moving the way they do when you’re in a panic and they just move all around while you can’t get yourself together.  I force them to stop and lock eyes with Mills for a couple seconds, then I start moving my eyes over and over again from her to all the way left, harder each time, to indicate the direction toward Mommy in the house.  Mills goes for my phone, which is now to my left also.  I try to tilt my head and use my voice to direct her to the real live Mommy, but my brain’s commands aren’t getting through.  Mills extends the phone to me and after a lengthy scream says, and she’s crying, “Here, Daddy.”  She tries to put the phone in my right hand, and I try to take it but- nothing.  She emits a horrific scream.  “Daddy, all your blood is coming out.  You won’t die, will you?  You said you wouldn’t.”  She starts to thumb the phone very slowly with trembling hands, and I’m thinking Why isn’t she going inside to get Mommy, or dialing 911?  She knows about 911.

“I texted Mommy to come right home,” says Mills.  The full story I got later was Mills thought she hadn’t yet come home from the corner market.  She’d seen Ken leave on her bike and they’d exchanged waves, but when she came back, Kendra had approached our house when Mills was at bat, and waved again, and even though Mills was facing her she didn’t see her.  Like father, like daughter: a fierce, focused competitor.  But unlike me, at least she was outside interacting with real people in the real world.

“Now I’m getting 911.”  She thumbs a brief message, which I have since learned was HELP.  I will my neck to move my head hard left to right, but it fails to respond.  CALL I’m screaming in my head.  YOU HAVE TO TALK TO THEM.  WHY AREN’T YOU GOING IN TO GET MOM?

“Daddy, does 911 know where we are when they get this text?”

I move my eyes hard back and forth, frantic, from one edge to the other.

“Does that mean ‘no’?” she says through her sobs.

I alternate my eyeballs hard up and down.

She dials, and is able to tell that her daddy is hurt and bleeding very badly, and to give our address.  We’re only a mile from the nearest hospital, so in a few minutes the EMTs show.  Kendra had gone to the can with her earbuds still at high volume, so she heard nothing.  Funny enough, neither had anyone else heard the Colt; none of the immediate neighbors happened to be at home, and when Levinson came to see me after I got out of ICU he said everyone in the mushball game also just thought it was part of the game sounds wafting at them through the door Mills had flung open.  I mean, I had the volume up farther than ever.  A real gunshot?  Perish the thought.  And they did.

Guess I wasn’t the only one detached from what’s going on right around them, right?  Not that Levinson speeding over would have helped any.  Not like me being 100% in the room and able to save Mills from shooting me.

Kendra didn’t hear the siren either.  Or Mills’s screams.  Kendra didn’t know anything had happened until everyone playing ball rushed over when the ambulance pulled up.  Millie’s friend Stacy’s dad was catcher and had seen Kendra come home on her bike, so when the EMT’s came he went inside the house to find her.

So.  Here I sit, nice and straight up in my wheelchair just like always now.  Isn’t it great that when I need to go somewhere, I get to be chauffeured in it?  Pretty soon, though, I could be eligible for a state-of-the-art chair with mouth-activated controller and I-Pod dock.  I’d thought my kick-ass home theater was the most awesome piece of tech ever, but that chair would make me, very beyond any shadow of doubt, the guy on my block with the coolest hardware, would it not?  With four hours of rolling on a charged battery I’ll really get around.  “Look at me, everyone”.

The bullet that went through me I have at the bottom of a lanyard around my neck.  Because of my cortical blindness, I had to be told it reaches to my sternum, right over my heart.  I like to have my fingers placed through the space between two shirt buttons and onto the bullet.  I imagine the raised areas of black plastic which melted and stuck to the bullet as it lay embedded in the giant screen’s case.  I imagine I’m fondling it like a penitent Catholic would rosary beads, as I try to form a flawless mental image of my High Fructose Corn Syrup.  That’s all I get right now, an image that my brain has been programmed to produce, at least until my neurologist figures out my cortical blindness.  She says it’s not that uncommon a delayed side effect of a spinal injury like mine.  It’s weird that the blindness happens; it’s no obvious relation to the spinal injury.  But my neurologist assures me that in many such cases full vision comes back, and she is very hopeful that part of me will be restored.  And then I’ll get my awesome new mouth-controlled wheelchair.

Of course, for the paralysis- there is no hope.  Too much spinal cord damage.  So up tall I sit, and spend most of my time bemoaning how I allowed a piece of virtual unreality to have a greater claim on my attention than my beautiful girl.  How I allowed myself to be diverted from taking proper care of my sweet little baby.  My cortical blindness might be poetic justice.  Gloria getting the last laugh?

Maybe it’s divine retribution.

Mills likes to climb into my lap and snuggle with her arms around me.  I can feel her only when she strokes my hair or touches my cheek or kisses it.  Kendra still gives me just butterfly kisses and hesitant hugs.  I can only see my daughter and my wife as images stored inside my brain, one specimen of what humanity insists is the most sophisticated piece of engineering in the universe.  But the reality is what I “see” now are just virtual images of my wife and daughter, and they aren’t as sharp, as detailed, as real, as perfect as what would come through my pupils and onto my retinas and through my optic nerves into the cortex which would allow me to see, really see and be with Mills and Kendra.  When I picture them, I struggle to bring them into perfect likeness and focus, but the software isn’t sophisticated enough.  There are no patches or upgrades that any doctor can apply.  My only hope is if there is a God in heaven he might one day soon be feeling benevolent enough to make me able to see my family in all their perfection again.

At least He’s always known that virtual images are no substitute for the real things.

Mills asks me all the time if I forgive her for hurting me.  Thank God my larynx has come back to working pretty well and I can tell her she did nothing wrong, so there is no need to forgive.  I tell her that it was all my fault and that I hope she can forgive me for not taking proper care of the gun so that she could end up holding it when it went off.  She cries when I say that.  She’s asked me to stop calling her high fructose corn syrup because she doesn’t think she deserves to be treated special.  I assure her she always will be to me the most special person on the planet.  How do I make her secure in the knowledge that she is in fact my Higgs boson, when I failed to be one for her when she most needed me?

The gun of course didn’t just go off.  Guns only do that in movies and TV shows.  It had to be that I grabbed it and scared Mills so bad she panicked and clenched up enough to fire the gun.  What I can’t figure is how the safety was off- if I neglected that before she picked up the gun, or if she moved it.  But the blame is on me because it’s my gun and I knew everything about it and she knew nothing.

If I end up not ever being able to see her or hug her, or to have the full enjoyment of my wife cuddling against me, or to feel the bullet or anything else- those things I accept.  How do I make it up to my family for giving my daughter the experience of shooting and paralyzing her father?  And under the lamest of circumstances- a virtual unreality taking priority?  How do I help my little girl stop believing she’s the bad guy?

If Mills was now a blind quadriplegic instead of me, I don’t think I could even consider going on living.  What if the gun had killed her?  

Anyway, before my vision went, Kendra sounded kind of flat when she said she forgives me, so does she really?  Is she telling the truth when she says she feels it’s partially her fault because she should have verified I put the gun away?  She doesn’t sound like she feels it, and doesn’t ask me to forgive her, so is she just being nice because that’s what she thinks is expected of her?  For better or for worse- and it can’t get worse than this- will Kendra stay with me?  Do I even deserve her at all now?

All moms and dads have some universal hopes.  They want to see their kids safely through to adulthood, and to see them skip the mistakes they themselves made.  Can I be enough of a father now to help Mills avoid ever being so distracted- by anything like a game, or texting, or a hilarious video, or any other temptation virtual or real- to the point that she is negligent to herself or anyone else in her life?  Will I live to see my kid’s wedding?  Will I at least live to attend it, and be pushed down the aisle in my wheelchair to give her away?

One day she will come to know that guns don’t just go off, and although I believe she will forgive me for that little white lie, will she get over Daddy the perp making her the trigger man?  For now, she still believes that her daddy helps to make her life complete, but now can that belief last?  Will she even want me to be with her on the way down the aisle? 

What exactly happened to blur my distinction between virtual and real?  Can I instill in Mills the trust that I in fact do now have some credibility when I try to talk to her about the difference?  Maybe now, but when she’s older and truly gets why this happened to me, she might come to not even care to hear what counseling I have to offer, right?

Oh, my God, what if I’ve set her on the path to doing drugs?

Even if as time passes she comes to accept that I scared her into pulling the trigger- isn’t there still my hypocrisy about not having been angry, and about how winning isn’t the most important thing, and about coming outside very soon- all the while the gun was a threat to us both?

How could anybody ever let anything distract them so?

How might this scenario play out?

Where in the hell can be found a good patch or upgrade?