The Bullet One My name is Caroline Cashion, and I am the unlikely heroine of this story. Given all the violence to come, you were probably expecting someone different. A Lara Croft type. Young and gorgeous, sporting taut biceps and a thigh holster, right? Admit it. Yes, all right, fine, I am pretty enough. I have long, dark hair and liquid, chocolate eyes and hourglass hips. I see the way men stare. But there's no holster strapped to these thighs. For starters, I am thirty-seven years old. Not old, not yet, but old enough to know better. Then there is the matter of how I spend my days. That would be in the library, studying the work of dead white men. I am an academic, a professor on Georgetown University's Faculty of Languages and Linguistics. My specialty is nineteenth-century France: Balzac, Flaubert, Sten-dhal, Zola. The university is generous enough to fly me to Paris every year or so, but most of the time you'll find me in the main campus library, glasses sliding down my nose, buried in old books. Every few hours I'll stir, cross the quad to deliver a lecture, scold a student requesting extra time for an assignment--and then I return to my books. I read with my legs tucked beneath me, in a soft, blue armchair in a sunny corner of my office nook on the fourth floor. Most nights you will also find me there, sipping tea, typing away, grading papers. Are you getting a sense for the rhythm of my days? I lead as stodgy a life as you can imagine. But it was by doing just this, by following this exact routine, that I came to schedule the medical appointment that changed everything. For months, my wrist had hurt. It began as an occasional tingling. That changed to a sharp pain that shot down my fingers. The pain got worse and worse until my fingers turned so clumsy, my grip so weak, that I could barely carry my bags. My doctor diagnosed too much typing. Too much hunching over books. To be precise--I like to be -precise--he diagnosed CTS. Carpal tunnel syndrome. He suggested wearing a wrist splint at night and elevating my keyboard. That helped, but not much. And so it was that I found myself one morning in the waiting room of Washington Radiology Associates. I was scheduled for an MRI, to "rule out arthritis and get to the bottom of what's going on," as my doctor put it. It was the morning of Wednesday, October 9. The morning it all began. Excerpted from The Bullet by Mary Louise Kelly All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
