SchrÖdinger’s Gun
Elissa E. Minor
When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my pistol. —Stephen Hawking
My wife and I drive the dogs to Sand Lake on a rainy Saturday. A four-mile swath of rolling sand dunes, Sand Lake lies between Cape Lookout and Cape Kiwanda on the North Oregon Coast, just twenty minutes from our house. The road curves, wrapping the trees and estuaries on either side into a wet, mossy huddle. The wipers make easy work of the steady rain against the glass, and when we pull off the road, the dogs leap from the car after the ball we’ve thrown into the dunes.
Mixed-conifer forests surround us on three sides. And to the west, always, is the sea. We aim for the eastern stand of Sitka spruce trees, following the dogs over dunes capped with European beach grass and through low valleys where fairy carpets of neon moss and carnivorous sundews cling to the sand underneath them. When the humans have had enough, we open the back of the car and yell, “All aboard!” As I wait for the dogs to hop in, I kick a rock in the sand that turns out to be a spent shotgun shell instead. This is why we only come to Sand Lake when it is raining. When the weather is nice, people flock to the area with ATVs and guns. They make a shooting range out of my mossy fairy carpet. Their four-wheelers replace the thrum of rhythmic waves with the muffled, throaty roar of engines and the pop-pop of their
weapons. For a queer couple living in a rural place, both of those sounds spell danger. So we claim the rainy days as ours.
I hold the spent casing in my hand, surprised by how light it is, give it a toss, and briefly consider putting it in my pocket.
* * *
“I have a gun for you,” my older brother, J., types. We’d been enjoying a rigorous discussion about cannabis strains on Signal seconds before; the abrupt subject change catches me off guard. It’s a far cry from our conversation about the merits of Rainbow Beltz over Gen Z’s perennial favorite, Gorilla Glue. “I thought about it and I got one from Dad many years ago. Anyway, his little handgun is all yours,” he finishes.
I have never owned a gun. I have, in fact, always been openly and fervently anti-gun. I perform my own sort of concealed carry: statistics about gun violence, like John Gramlich’s 2023 report for the Pew Research Center which reveals 47,000 people died from gun violence in the United States that year alone.
But one statistic I conceal deep in my body, tightly curled in the cavity that surrounds my heart. I feel the numbers with each forceful pump of blood in and out: of those 47,000 gun deaths, nearly 60% were suicide.
I don’t want to have a gun in the house.
I don’t trust that I won’t put it against my temple and pull the trigger.
And yet.
“Maybe,” I told him. “Yeah, I’ll think about it.”
* * *
Depression showed up in earnest after my dad died, or maybe it arrived during his long illness and I was too busy with a sick father and young children to notice it. I walked through the next decade of my life as a phantom, too translucent to be real yet rattling chains too heavy to be imaginary. I taught my students, folded the laundry, but I had nothing left. Lifting my head off the pillow was torture. Showering was torture. Listening to the morning birds: also torture.
Then The Committee started meeting in my brain at all hours, without my permission. None of them were even appointed by me. But they had a twenty-four hour agenda and things to say.
You’re a terrible teacher.
Your kids don’t even like you.
They’d turn out better people if you weren’t around.
Hey, Elissa? You know what sounds like a good idea? You should Google how many Xanax it would take to kill a person of your approximate weight.
Put that kitchen knife against your wrist. Feel the cool steel.
Ancient tendrils of that onerous depression only catch me every month or so these days. I’ll be doing something breathtakingly beautiful and get caught off guard when I look up and everything is dripping with sadness. I crest the dunes above Symons Beach at sunset, for example, and suddenly my chest feels like it’s been weighted with heavy artillery. The world becomes a Dali painting: trees melt like clocks, driftwood looks like lonely bleached bones.
My wife takes me home. We go about our quiet domesticity. The Committee doesn’t show up much anymore in these moments, though I keep anxious vigil for it. Instead, just the ocean out the window and a good woman painting landscapes in a chair next to me, as confident as I am that I’ll feel better in time.
And I always do.
* *
My little brother, Quinn, first introduced me to the famous thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s Cat when he was about fourteen. (He’s a theoretical physicist now, and if I went to parties, the trick I’d pull from my hat would probably be to tell everyone that his desk is in the same department as Neil deGrasse Tyson’s.)
So the cat.
Austrian-Irish theoretical physicist Edwin Schrödinger posited the theory of superposition (which, in simple form—the only form of physics I understand—is that small particles can be in two states at once until they are observed).
Imagine a cat, Schrödinger said. I picture an orange tabby.
Imagine the cat is in a box, Schrödinger said. Sure, okay. The cat is now in her fancy carrier. Oh, my bad, Schrödie says. The box can’t have any holes.
My imaginary tabby walks into a cardboard box. I close the lid.
Schrödie: Hang on. Don’t close the lid. One more thing. This dude is testing my patience.
Put a cobra in there.
So the theory is this: if the cat is sealed in a box with something that can kill it on the spot, then until the moment the box is opened and the cat is observed, the cat is actually both alive and dead. At the same time.
When Quinn’s wife was pregnant with their first child, they named the fetus Schrödie. Until that baby was born, it was both girl and boy. Both human and fish.
We hear from a friend that a lesbian couple was pulled out of a bar in Tillamook and beaten while cops looked the other way. We didn’t even know there were other queer-and-out women within our sparsely populated thirty-mile radius.
Living in rural America during the era of Trump means I am tempted by the lure of my father’s gun. My wife encourages me to think of the gun as another tool, something to have on hand only if we need it. Like if The Big One hits and we need to hunt our own meat. (What she doesn’t say, but it hangs in the air, a viscous truth between us: like if a group of drunk rednecks shows up at our door, looking to play a game of Smear the Queer.)
As a Portlander, whenever I heard the phrase “rural America” I pictured tiny parishes in Louisiana, poverty-stricken towns in West Virginia coal country, or the open ranges that stretched for miles through the sagebrush of Wyoming and Montana. But of course, rural America is just a place that is country in both senses of the word.
Schrödinger’s America: inside these borders, rural America is both a safe place and a terrifying one.
Someone should tell Schrödie that even outside of a box, two things can be true at the same time.
* * *
It’s an open secret that as I was his only daughter, Dad mostly favored me, and that my easier lot in life came from not being his son. But this also meant that he didn’t push me to achieve much of anything beyond marrying a good Mormon boy. He took pride in my accomplishments and degrees, but I suspect he would have taken pride in most anything I did. I got the kindness and my brothers got the guns.
SCHR Ö DINGER’S GUN
It is not lost on me that J., the one who caught the brunt of Dad’s ire, sees it is an injustice that he gave the boys a gun and not me. The true injustice is that while my dad told me how special I was almost daily, he mostly just rode J. about all the ways he wasn’t living up to expectations.
I ask for details about the handgun. J. remembers Dad telling him he bought it in the sixties from a private party, when he was a college student in Hawaii. I ask if I would need a license for the gun, or if I would need to get it registered somewhere.
“Nope,” he types. I can almost hear the sarcasm. “Just another inherited gun in America, untraceable to our family.”
Schrödinger’s Gun: at this moment, inside this hypothetical box where I have not decided, I both hold a gun and do not hold a gun. * * *
My father was murdered by a brain tumor. If that sentence sounds overly dramatic or violent, then I’ve captured the tenor of those years. Because he wasn’t killed by just any brain tumor; it was one of the most terrifying of all brain tumors, a mixed astrocytoma-oligodendroglioma smack dab in the middle of his frontal lobe.
The frontal lobe is the county seat of who we are as people: our personalities, our executive functioning, our grasp of reality, our inhibitions. Early in his illness, I walked in the room to find him begging my five-year-old child to give him his daily dose of insulin. Chloe cried while Dad held the syringe in the air, begging her to plunge it into his stomach.
Near the end, when his mobility was limited and his memory mostly gone, my mom learned the hard way that Dad still knew the location of the gun safe and its code. We don’t know how long
he slept with a loaded weapon under his pillow, convinced he would need to defend himself from an intruder. We don’t know how many times the kids came and went from that room without being confused for prowlers. We don’t know how many times my mom opened the bedroom door in the night, how many moments she avoided startling him before he finally pulled it out in front of her and aimed.
I don’t want the gun.
* * *
Katie’s dad has wanted, for some time, to give us a shotgun. A gun much more realistic for our needs, a gun that is an actual tool more than a novelty. Fully agreeing with my hesitations, Katie proposes we keep the guns in a safe that only two people know the code to: she and our trusted friend Micah.
(The plural guns is not lost on me. Guns, it appears, are like bunnies, tribbles, or wildfire.)
But it isn’t just me I’m worried about. I hesitantly remind her she’s just two years out from a nasty bout with Long COVID where she, too, spent dark nights listening to The Committee meet in her own head.
Katie nods thoughtfully when I mention it, her eyes darkening at the memory. She squeezes my hand. “Maybe we put the guns in one safe, and the ammo in another, and each of us only has the combination to one of them?”
“And we reveal the combos to each other—”
“—only in case of emergency,” Katie finishes my sentence.
Schrödinger’s Gun Safes: if we don’t have access to them, will it be like owning guns and not owning guns at the same time?
* * *
My childhood best friend, Dani, was the middle of a ninesibling sandwich, making theirs the largest family at church. They made up almost an entire golden-haired pew every Sunday, all by themselves.
I loved being at Dani’s house, because the chaos and constant motion was so different from my own. The baby of the siblings, Lara, was particularly fun to be around: when she was about four, desperate for a pet, she pretended to be a dog herself. She could spend what felt like hours on end walking on all fours, barking instead of speaking, and generally being underfoot in a terrifically dog-like way. I watched Dani’s mom feed Lara under the table while the rest of the family ate, petting her white hair while asking the older kids about their schoolwork or scripture study.
When I moved back to Portland with my two small kids and a brand new puppy, Lara was in high school. Her mom asked me if Lara could come spend time with the puppy; apparently her love of dogs had persisted, and she’d been having a terrible go of it at school. I loved having this older Lara in my house, and teased her about the dog she used to pretend to be. The Committee was already meeting in her head at that point, though I didn’t know it yet.
Six years later, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Lara purchased a handgun. Held it to her head. Pulled the trigger. She was twentyone years old.
A handful of years later, Dani’s youngest surviving sibling, Tom, shot himself in the bedroom of the home he shared with his partner in Corvallis, Oregon.
When we speak, Dani tells me how frustrated she is by her inability to convince her six remaining siblings to remove the firearms from their homes.
I don’t want the gun.
After a luxurious Thanksgiving meal, Katie and I decide to take our guest to the state scenic lookout, where a twisty landslideturned-trail lets us access the beach below. The trail is only wide enough for one person—or their leashed dog—to descend at a time. Our guest goes first, and then Katie, holding firm to Cora’s leash. From the rear of the caravan, I watch as an off-leash rottweiler rushes Cora at the base of the trail; in a matter of milliseconds, she is on the ground, whimpering and terrified.
Katie puts herself between Cora and the snarling dog, still hanging tight to Cora’s leash. “Back,” she yells, using her boot to break the other dog from Cora. That’s when the dog’s owner saunters up. He reads more local than tourist, in Carhartt pants and a camouflage hunting jacket.
“Don’t touch my fucking dog.” His voice drips with disdain. He spits on the sand, and I can smell the liquor on his breath even through the salty spray off the ocean.
“I haven’t touched your dog, sir, I am just trying to keep my dog safe,” Katie replies.
He puffs his chest out. If I wasn’t so nervous, it would almost be comical. “How do I know it wasn’t your dog that attacked my dog?”
As she walks away with Cora, Katie says calmly over her shoulder, “Because only one of them was on-leash, cowering on her belly.”
I’m passing the man with our little dog in my arms as he yells at my wife’s retreating back. “You know what I’d like to see?” he sneers. “You. Cowering on your belly. Hog-tied and scared and taking it like the bitch that you are.”
I freeze. My hand on the pocket knife clipped to my pants. I feel the anger start as a heat in my belly, then rise through my
chest and throat. I weigh one-hundred pounds and I have a brief moment where I consider defending my wife’s honor with a twoinch blade. But I don’t, of course. I avert my eyes and scurry past the man.
Rape is the only crime that happens significantly more per capita in Tillamook County than the national average. And gay women make a particularly good target for the type of man I’m certain he is.
We walk on the beach twice as long as we had planned to make certain the man and his dog have left. That way we can climb back up the trail without getting cornered.
Cowering on your belly. For years, I will fight the awful intrusive image this man has burned into my head. Hog-tied. My feeling of powerlessness echoes far into the past, far into the future. Like the bitch you are.
I cannot protect my wife.
I want the gun. * * *
The truth is, it was easy for me to be anti-gun my whole life because I’d felt so safe and protected. Who needs a gun when you have your own private 6’2”, 200 pound bodyguard? But when that bodyguard got sick and lost so many aspects of himself, it became my job to protect him. And after he was gone, it became my job to protect myself, my wife, and my kids.
Schrödinger’s Father: if we had only looked away before he became an unrecognizable version of himself, if we hadn’t gathered around his bedside to observe him as he died—if we’d never opened that metaphorical box at all—would he still be alive today in addition to being dead? SCHR
Schrödinger’s Gun, revised: at this moment, inside this hypothetical box where I have not decided, I both want a gun and do not want a gun. * * *
Do I really think I can write an essay about anti-gay hate crimes in rural America and not mention Matthew Shepard? Because he’s in the background, whether I choose to illuminate him or not. For me it always comes back to that barbed-wire fence, meant to keep livestock in but instead holding Shepard aloft for eighteen hours. The cyclist who eventually rode by and spotted him at first mistook him for a scarecrow.
He was twenty-one when he died. I, too, was twenty-one when he died.
Just after I had my third child, a gay couple from Seattle camped with friends here on the North Oregon coast. They came-to at three in the morning, lying on the beach, bloody and disoriented. The last thing they remember before losing consciousness were the slurs their attackers hurled at them.
Do I need to learn how to live with guns because I live in this America, the one I didn’t hope or plan for but the one I want desperately to survive?
I. Want. The. Gun.
* *
One of the more cliched prompts on the dating app where I met Katie almost half a decade ago: Are you a forest person or a beach person?
Both. Both. Both.
Sand Lake is one of those rare spots where I don’t have to choose between mountain and sea. I can hug a Sitka spruce with my ankles knee-deep in sand and watch the ocean undulate over the ridge.
The enchantment of the North Coast is in its seeming ability to defy physics. Look closely at those tall basalt cliffs to find the perfectly preserved remnants of ghost trees from 40,000 years ago. Look at that nurse log: a spruce stump with battle wounds, empty wedges cut by chainsaws. It’s twice the size of my car and double my height, and deep enough into the unmapped forest that I couldn’t even begin to direct you there. Look at the way four smaller trees have grown out of the once-giant one felled by loggers. Red huckleberries and deer ferns, too, grow from the punk wood on top of the stump.
Here, at the edge of the continent, it feels as if everything in the world is both mine and not mine. That anything I desire is both possible and not possible. That in this place, I don’t need to box things in with cobras to let them exist at the same time.
I want my father’s gun, and I don’t want my father’s gun.
But the ghost trees come out at night. And the forest breathes as the ocean does: it inhales safety and exhales danger.
It’s folly to think I don’t need to make a choice.