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Eugene Randall held the gun in front of his mouth and fired. The bullet smashed his upper front teeth, left his head through the back of his jaw, pierced an ear lobe and broke a window that overlooked much of the midtown area. A chambermaid on the floor said to herself “What kind of noise is that — that sounds like a bullet. And a window being broke. But maybe it wasn’t either.” The bullet landed a block away on a brownstone roof, where a boy was watching mama-and-papa pigeons sitting in the sun. Mr. Randall fell over the end table, sending to the floor a lamp, pack of cigarillos and an ashtray that had been resting on the three notes he’d written regarding his suicide. The wind came in through the broken window, picked the letters off the floor and distributed them around the room. The chambermaid leaned on her cleaning cart and said “Yes sir, that was a shot all right. Someone’s practicing on the windows or furniture or maybe gone and killed himself or someone he didn’t like. It happened last month on the twenty-first. And a year before that on the eighth. All kinds of suicides and nuts end up in this hotel, and these drunken conventioneers and lonely Japanese businessmen the worst.” She lifted a phone receiver. One letter landed on the couch. Another under the coffee table. The third floated out the window and higher than Mr. Randall’s room on the fourteenth floor. The boy looked at the bullet that had rolled to within a foot of him. He thought it was a stone, picked it up, dropped it because it felt so rough, almost prickly, stared at it and said “Holy G, that’s a bullet. Someone tried to shoot me with a bullet,” and opened the roof door and ran downstairs. The pigeons flapped when the door slammed behind the boy, settled in the same positions they were in before.

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