The Fourth State of Matter

Beard delays the introduction of the central action and climax of the devastating mass shooting until later in the essay but uses foreshadowing to hint at the impending violence.

After the establishment of the collie’s disruptive ailment and the squirrels’ chaotic presence in the house, Beard writes, “I can take almost anything at this point” (Paragraph 7). This sentiment of being able to “take almost anything” takes on a different meaning as Beard is saddled with processing the reality of the violent deaths of her colleagues.

While settling in to sleep in the living room with the ailing collie on her downstairs sofa, Beard writes, “We are in this together, the dying game” (Paragraph 11). This idea of “the dying game” again takes on a whole new weight once her colleagues fall victim to Gang Lu’s senseless violence.

Missed conversations with her husband are always fraught, given the frantic voicemail messages Beard often receives. At the end of a sequence of voicemails, Beard describes her anxiety quelling: “My leaping heart settles back into its hole in my chest” (Paragraph 22). The hole in the chest eerily foreshadows the gunshots so many of her colleagues endured at the hands of Gang Lu.

At one point, Beard’s friend Caroline threatens, “You call him back and I’m forced to kill you […] that is evil shit” (Paragraph 54). The sentiment of being “forced to kill” and Caroline’s deeming the husband’s behavior “evil shit” together foreshadow Gang Lu’s action and the nature of his action as evil.

Beard gets increasingly clear with her foreshadowing as she catapults forward in time toward the aftermath of the shooting, taking “a friend of Bob’s” to the scene of the crime, where she is overwhelmed by “his blackboard covered with scribbles and arrows and equations” (Paragraph 76). Beard confirms the reality of the situation as the friend sobs and “[lays] her hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly and blurred” (Paragraph 76). The “ghostly” numbers foreshadow the colleagues’ impending deaths, as they will no longer draw on these chalkboards and will themselves become ghosts for Beard.

In her increasing directness, Beard recounts a shift in Gang Lu’s behavior: He “no longer spends his evenings in the computer lab down the hall, running simulations and thinking about magnetic forces and invisible particles” (Paragraph 80). This behavior shift introduces the murder weapon to the essay: Lu “now spends [his evenings] at the firing range, learning to hit a moving target with the gun he purchased last spring” (Paragraph 80). The ultimately eerie moment lands as Lu “pictures himself holding the gun with both hands, arms straight out and steady; Clint Eastwood, only smarter” (Paragraph 80). While this gun and position live in Lu’s mind at this point in the essay, it turns to reality later in the essay as he carries out his planned attack.

Continuing with the image of the chalkboard, the drawings that throughout most of the essay are a point of levity takes a dark turn on the Friday of the shooting as Beard “draw[s] a picture of [the collie] on the blackboard using brown chalk” and “make[s] ‘X’s where her eyes should be” (Paragraph 84). The crudely drawn indicator of the collie’s death on the blackboard coinciding with the date of the shooting is ominous and foreshadows the deaths of her colleagues, even though before departing Beard erases the “X”s.

Beard uses imagery, descriptive and/or figurative language, to build her emotional world for the reader. Images of her ailing dog and the sky permeate the essay, but, perhaps more saliently, Beard also uses imagery to give the reader access to her emotions throughout the essay. Beard does this when she illustrates the anxiety she feels fielding phone calls from her husband: “My leaping heart settles back into its hole in my chest” (Paragraph 22); or when she describes a sense of hope at Christopher Goertz’s reaction to her husband leaving her: “a small bubble of self-esteem percolated up from my depths” (Paragraph 28); or as she describes Caroline’s reaction to one of her husband’s voicemails: “Caroline stares at the machine as if it’s a copperhead” (Paragraph 49). This visceral language invites the reader to feel a heightened connection to Beard’s character and experiences. Perhaps most poignantly, Beard uses imagery to describe how her grief has changed her view of the night sky: “The sky is full of dead men, drifting in the blackness like helium balloons. My mother floats past in a hospital gown, trailing tubes” (Paragraph 126). The sky, once merely the sky and a symbol of her workplace and colleagues, is now a kind of cemetery of ghosts for Beard, a vastness that holds her immense grief and loss.