Joshua Cohen, "Aim"

Continuing our in-house journal, here's a new short fiction by Joshua Cohen, author of A Heaven of Others.

Aim

He was six or seven and this was fun, it was fun being in the woods, doing everything in the woods with dads and his dad and the other boys their sons, hunting or pretending to hunt or fish, making fire with three matches (collecting tinder, branches), pitching tents and breaking it all down again, the campfire stories, the gear.
When you had to piss you'd go deep into the woods away from camp, always bring another boy with you; it was good and not shaming if the other boy had to piss, too, or only said he did.
Then, if he had to piss, you'd stand about five six feet apart and face each other and, careful not to piss on each other (though that sometimes happened), piss at each other, trying as hard as you could not to cross the streams but to merge them into one stream where they would deflect each other down to the ground. But this skill could only be sustained for a moment or two, at a uniformity of flow.

Later (years) aim was tested from the train platform, the El. Waiting was boring so you'd talk sex while smoking cigarettes with other friends from college. When the tobacco taste hurt your mouth and the cigarette was almost done you'd spit over the railing to the street (careful not to hit a passerby), then drop your lit cigarette butt trying to land it and so snuff it directly in the spit puddle (again, careful not to hit a passerby). You tried for three years including summers, you dropped out; you only hit it once.

For your grandfather it had been taking the gun they'd given them, loading it with bullet then shooting that into a German, and with your father it was similar in Asia: you pulled the trigger and suddenly, motion stopped, behind that shed door outside Aachen or a stand of bamboo … Sometimes you saw your victim, before or after you killed him, other times not. Still, there was no doubt he was there: He, in turn, could kill you. He took aim and you, too, were a target.
Not him. He sat at a desk embedded with a screen. When a light blipped on the screen he pressed a button, a bullet was launched remotely, then the light disappeared, eventually, ten nine eight, the light was destroyed. There was no danger to this work. There was no aim, and his finger could not miss that little white circle that was the same size and shape and color as his mother's nipple. What was necessary was only that he "Pay Attention." Every three hours he was relieved from duty to eat dinner, or take a piss — which he did, pissing, alone and with his eyes closed the entire time.