When I was shot, I was not surprised. I’d been waiting so long to be shot. Several childhood nights I dreamt of being assassinated by the entire cast of a popular sitcom, or spent afternoons wondering which neighborhood boy could soon shoot me, and I was regularly visited by visions of the mayor or a news anchor or a row of arm-linked Rockettes pursuing me with bullets, and several times I had nightmares that both my mother and my father, each of them, one after the other, shot me in the head. I have never touched a gun—I’m simply not that sort of person—so it has long been my American fate to meet the other end of a trigger. The right to bear arms carries the obligation to bear their burden.

Just before feeling no surprise in being shot, I was, however, briefly perplexed that this long-anticipated event had happened in a particularly dispiriting hotel conference room. The folding chairs and grim lighting simply set the wrong stage—it was somehow too ordinary of a location and yet not quite ordinary enough, not ordinary in the right way. The contrast of the image was set too low. The air felt pixelated. But then, holding my gut wound, I was overcome by how the blood pooling in my hands was as luxuriously temperate as the water of a perfectly calibrated bathroom faucet in a fine-dining establishment, and it was in that moment I fell to my knees, in awe or pain, as the room filled with screams and gun smoke and the smell of burnt flesh.

Hunched over the decorative carpet—a golden floral pattern interspersed with royal green fleurs-de-lis—I struggled to recall the history of the fleurs-de-lis, but all I could remember was the symbol meant one thing in one century, then meant its opposite in the next century, and now it carried both meanings or perhaps any meaning anyone wanted for it, or perhaps it had no meaning at all. True, European history was not exactly my field, but how horrible it was to see how poorly my own brain had held on to history. Hadn’t open necks sent blood rolling between Parisian cobblestones? The least I could do—yes, the very least anyone could do—was to remember.

The chintzy chandelier above me was being dismantled by gunfire, and fake plastic crystal rained on my back as I tried to mentally reassemble key dates of the French Revolution. Yet who can be counted upon to recall anything specific when bathing one’s hands in such luxuriously temperate fluid, the likes of which you’ll find only in the very best fine-dining establishments? We had assembled in that hotel conference room for the annual Conference on the State of Modern Thought, a four-day invitation-only symposium organized and attended by a cadre of multidisciplinary academics, and each night we dined at the finest restaurants in that year’s host city, and at the end of each decadent meal we put down our endowment-backed credit cards with a wanton satisfaction we each tried to wear casually.

More specifically, we had assembled in that hotel conference room for a much-anticipated session led by Harold Mennakin, an extremely charismatic but not entirely substantive philosopher of philosophy who was giving a lecture about how every theoretically monumental philosophical idea descended, paradoxically, from the minuscule subjective reality of one person’s meaningless life. The title of the talk was “No Great Man,” and I had gathered from the pamphlet’s description and from a cursory understanding of Mennakin’s work that he was making an ethical argument for a philosophical methodology that is self­negating and pluralistic, which interested me in theory but less, I realized, in actuality. Mennakin was in the midst of a clumsy metaphor about intellectual solipsism that involved a pressure cooker and dried beans when our assailant threw open the double doors, hoisted his guns without grace and began shooting.

To be honest, Mennakin had lost me with the bean metaphor—I hear he’s a staunch vegan and perhaps his ethical diet has come at the expense of his sense of aesthetics—and though I do agree with him that it’s a tragedy we so often fail to see around the corner of ourselves, I was much relieved by the sudden interruption, a relief that lasted at least until I fell to the floor, where my wound issued its seductive warmth into my hands.

Moments later, the shooter paused to deliver some remarks at the vacated podium. The shooter believed us all to be perverts and delinquents who had scammed our way into positions of academic authority, and he accused us of trying to convert the American collegiate masses to our dark and tweedy ways. “All of you should be institutionalized, removed from the mating pool, or worse,” he told us, and though I did not agree with him, I had to admit that his delivery was surprisingly compelling. The shooter called us atheists, snobs, intellectuals—to which none of us would levy any objections—“and one of you,” he said, “wrote a disgusting story about a dog trying to have sex with a human elbow.” And it was appalling and it had to stop and someone had to be the one to stop it. “What the fuck is wrong with you people? Who needs this stuff? Why do you want anyone to think about these things?” Then he resumed fire.

We were all professors, of course, but we were also philosophers and theorists and essayists and economists, of a sort, and though none of us would openly call ourselves artists, a scarce few of us painted or made films and there were a handful who had once or still did publish poetry or fiction in journals that ranged from vaguely available to wholeheartedly obscure. In fact, I had been the one, several months prior to the conference, who had published a poem that included the image of a dog trying to insert his penis into a slit between the speaker’s forearm and biceps, a moment that causes the speaker, a man, to empathize with all of womankind. The poem had, to that minor literary journal’s surprise, become the focal point of three days’ worth of internet debate, and in the many critical takedowns and defenses of the poem, the word problematic had been deployed as if it were a pocketknife fit for any use. As a result, I’d been invited to this year’s Conference on the State of Modern Thought to give a lecture on the problematic nature of the contemporary use of the word problematic.

Lisa Kindalee, however, one of the staunchest critics of that poem’s very existence (not to mention its publication), had also been invited to this year’s conference to give a competing lecture on the revolutionary nature of the use of the word problematic over the past decade of public discourse. To make matters worse, our lectures had been scheduled to happen concurrently, forcing any potential attendee to choose a side before even hearing the arguments in a debate that was not necessarily as diametrically opposed as the session titles made it seem.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with conflict and competition of any sort, a skittish disposition that was partly what led me into academia in the first place. I’ve always had an aversion to games and sports, despite possessing a somewhat hefty physique. At a young age I longed to be a history professor, because history made me cry in a way that felt historical, as if I were crying tears that belonged to the dead, as if that sorrow won me an esteemed place in the world, and even as a child I disliked that platitude about history repeating itself, not because it wasn’t true—it was and still is, in a way—but because that phrase had been repeated so often that it had become itself, and by becoming itself it had become invisible, a repetition of a copy of a thought, a vacant cheer from the sidelines of a history one is excused from ever knowing because one is actively living through its equally unimportant sequel, as if all years merely slipped from a machine that made years.

But there I was on the floor of a hotel conference room, a Xerox of an American history, bleeding into the fleurs-de-lis. Another plastic jewel fell from the battered chandelier and landed on my shoulder as gently as a tapping finger—excuse me, sir.

The shooter, I’m told, made no rush on his way through the lobby and was tackled, without resisting, by a frenzied security guard, and only then was it revealed that all his guns had been made of 3-D-printed plastic and all the bullets were a sort of rubber semi-explosive filled with an indeterminate molten substance. All our wounds were superficial and every last one of us survived, which means this story can be read without sacrificing a moment of anyone’s sincere pleasure in the languid unwinding of late capitalism.

Still—we were all sent to the hospital as a precaution. There was a concern that we may have been exposed to a chemical weapon or merely traumatized or perhaps our superficial wounds were more complex than they first seemed, prone to infection, prone to litigation. As I raised myself from the hotel carpet I realized the pleasant warmth I’d felt in my hands had not been my own beautiful blood but some strange syrupy substance, faintly neon red, perfumed with gunpowder and death. How, I wondered, had this substance been able to maintain such a consistently pleasing temperature, that expertly calibrated blend of hot and cold?

Prior to the shooting, everyone had spent their free time between lectures trying to curry each other’s favor for hypothetical favors that might later be needed or given, and a minority among the group took this exercise into the realm of extramarital affairs—though most of those affairs seem to have been experienced only in the abstract and only a very small number were ever concretized—but for the most part the conference is just a way for a group of people to use their obscure interests as a path toward people who might pay them some attention. That’s all it ever really is.

After the shooting, however, the entire conference was moved, first unofficially, then officially, to the hospital. A psychologist-philosopher began giving a speech in the waiting room about how the shooting had pulled back a curtain on each of our truest identities; seen that way, it was a kind of gift. When the shots began, some of us had panicked and fled the room, stepping over bodies and pushing past each other, while others had remained supine in our chairs, our latent suicidal tendencies laid bare. Some had thrown themselves over the bodies of those with whom they’d been engaged or merely trying to begin affairs, preferring to usher our spouses into widowhood rather than become a person who has seen their lover, whether imagined or actual, die.

I was assigned a hospital room with many other semi-injured. A nursing student punctured me with an injection needle in several places on both my arms before she finally administered some kind of medication that made me weep and tremble. “Don’t worry,” she kept saying, as other nurses and academics paced in and out of this room’s many doors. “Don’t worry.” A woman walked the length of the room, from one door to another, with her cell phone ringing some melodic tune several times before the nursing student finally finished her task, my arms a smear of rubbing alcohol and blood and half-stuck bandages.

By then the hospital room had filled with conference-goers and someone had installed himself atop a chair in the corner of the room and begun an impromptu lecture on how no belief is meaningful until it is translated into action. I recognized this as a repurposed version of a talk he was already scheduled to give, about how the two primary problems of the internet were that it created the illusion that digital speech was equivalent to action and that it upheld the illusion that any statement can ever be completely sincere or altruistic—proclamations never occur in a vacuum. The updated form of this lecture posited that, at the very least, the shooter’s sincere objection to our works and worldviews—despite being unfounded and logically inconsistent—had led him to action, and when the shooter enacted his beliefs by “shooting” us, he had revealed a dark truth about our beloved Conference on the State of Modern Thought, which is that most of those who participate in it have blindly accepted this lie of the paralysis of the Individual in the Information Age.

As I listened to this lecture I had to turn sideways and fetal on the hospital cot, as it was simply not large enough for me as I am a very large man. I clutched my bruised belly and cried my historical tears, trembling as I was held hostage to whatever drug was flowing in my bloodstream, calling all the shots within my body. It was then the president of the Conference on the State of Modern Thought knelt beside me to say that my lecture had to be canceled as it had been rendered obsolete by recent events, but when I asked him if Lisa Kindalee’s lecture had also been canceled, he just said the story was still unfolding, that new lines of thinking were already being drawn, that I would soon have the opportunity to reapply for next year’s conference and he would personally ensure that my application was given full consideration by the committee, and with that the president was gone.

Then a young woman I’d never seen before sat beside me and she looked down at me with a gaze somewhere between somber and sexual. “Are you the one who wrote the poem about the dog trying to fuck the crook of someone’s elbow?” I nodded. “I scanned it,” she said, and—foolish me—I thought that meant she wanted to discuss my complicated system of mirrored trochees and iambs, a poetic feat that no one ever mentioned in the poem’s ensuing controversy, but she hadn’t meant that at all. She inserted three fingers into the crook of my elbow, right at the spot where the injection had finally taken, and I wanted to tell her that even though the poem contained the image of a dog trying to fuck the crook of someone’s elbow, that didn’t mean the poem was about a dog trying to fuck the crook of someone’s elbow. That was the thing about art, wasn’t it? That the apparent subject concealed the true object? I wasn’t sure of anything anymore, I thought, or maybe that’s just what the medication wanted me to think. Was I speaking? Was the room spinning? How much of the thing I called my life had been imaginary? The girl skipped away from the cot’s edge, and I recalled, for some unknown reason, how utterly modern it was that the neighborhood boys of my childhood were so intent on playing a game called War all summer, though none of them, to my knowledge, ever joined an actual army.

Then, moved by a mysterious neurochemical or moved by some holy spirit of the academic, I stood on my cot and launched into a sermon about a revelation I’d just had: Poetry—sweet Jesus, poetry!—was still alive in America! Had the shooter not been stirred by a poetic creation of carefully calibrated trochees and iambs into action? Had the shooter not been changed by a mere and mighty poem and translated this personal transformation into a physical gesture, a performance, an elaborate gesture meant to elaborate on his thoughts on that poem? It was true (wasn’t it true?) that poetry still held real power! Yes, no matter how battered and ignored poetry had become in this era, it still held the power to change the course of history!

I’d become so dizzy over poetry and history that I had to slide back down into a fetal position on the cot, and in my half-sleep I thought I heard someone saying that the shooting had in fact been a work of performance art, and someone else said that the shooter was no less of a monster for being an artist, and someone else argued that true art should have the freedom to do harm, and someone else suggested a New American restaurant with an extensive cocktail list, and someone else argued that just because you call yourself an artist doesn’t mean you aren’t also a sociopath.

But who are we to diagnose anyone? That’s not our field, not really. In our hearts, I think, we just want to be good people who are kind to other good people. We get flu shots for the sake of public health. We read the manuals on workplace harassments and racisms and sexisms very carefully, with somber, serious gazes. And before we leave any washroom, we wash our hands for a full 20 seconds with plenty of soap and attention to the nail beds and cuticles, and we relish the way the water feels as thick and warm as the blood of any human, of any living human at all.