Godless Bodies
“If you could do anything today, what would it be?”
Adam's voice is lethargic gravel. His stubble rakes against the rim and soft lobe of my ear. He has just slammed the snooze button and burrowed back under the warm covers, wrapping around me and seeking my hand with his. He presses himself, half-mast, against my lower back.
“What would it be?” he asks again.
His question insinuates we cannot do the things we want since it is a Saturday we both need to work. I cannot stand this view, that we are martyrs to our existence. I imagine him flailing in the middle of a community pool. He has not learned to swim. Soon chlorine, kiddie urine, and used band-aids will rush into his gaping mouth. I will not rescue him until he admits control over his own life.
I squeeze his hand, then fling back the covers, dash for the bathroom, slam the door, and turn on the shower water hot. My face looks slightly swollen, just woken, in the mirror. Steam rises until my reflected features blur, and I step into the shower. My nipples relax in the heat. I wish Adam would follow me into the warm spray but I know he will not.
***
They were friends, Adam and my brother. Tim brought him to our house for Thanksgiving their freshman year of college. I dismissed Adam as a roadblock to re-establishing the connection I lost with Tim when he left home earlier that fall. His last conversation with my parents had been a fight, simmering with all that was still unsaid even after so many horrible things had finally been yelled aloud. I realized, much later, the only reason Tim came home at all that holiday was for me, and he brought Adam as a buffer to prevent any real conversation with our parents. A couple of times at the dinner table I caught Tim looking at me. When I met his eyes he stared into mine with an intensity that scared me. He told me, that way, that he loved me, but also of the darkness that had taken hold.
Within months of that Thanksgiving, he began ditching the crowd he shared with Adam for an edgier, more lethal one that revolved around the profundity of pain and what tonics exist for it. By the end of that school year, he was using regularly; by the end of the next he had dropped out. And by the time I was a sophomore and Adam a senior, Tim was dead. Adam came to the funeral, the only one of Tim’s college friends who did. I noticed him shaking with sobs when everyone else was dabbing at their eyes, murmuring the word “tragic,” and avoiding mentioning the circumstances of my brother’s death. I thought: Adam’s is the only appropriate response happening in this room. We should all be in uncontrolled grief at our failures and their price and wailing at the impossibility of getting Tim back and the equal impossibility of ever forgiving ourselves.
***
I am accused of being indirect. Adam sits in the ratty old easy chair he loves, legs splayed. He is open to argument. A piece of breakfast toast rests on his knee.
Replying is complicated. Do I respond...directly? The accusation bores me but I sense I am not supposed to say this. In order to appear thoughtful and repentant, I distract myself with thoughts of pushing the fabric of his boxers up high toward the crease of his hips and making the hair on his thighs curlier with the humidity of my breath. I could talk with him if I had any idea what to say. I could touch him, were touching permitted during these talks. Which it is not, as I have previously been accused of manipulative, seductive touching at inappropriate times. Which would be an example of a justified accusation. I have in fact done this.
I have to say something.
“You could at least be a little mean to me.”
“What?” Adam shifts his weight in the chair. It squeaks on shot springs, listing slightly to the left.
“I said, you could at least be a little mean to me. You could say something cruel.”
“Something cruel.” He deadpans his attempted joke with a loud crunch of toast and watches to see if I realize I am validating his point.
“Then I could hate you some, and that would make it easier.” I do not know why I continue to verbalize half-formed thoughts just because they occur to me. He studies my cheekbones. He knows I do not mean most of the things I say and do.
“You want to hate me?” He slowly brings the chair back to center, then lets it tilt to the other side. Jams the last of the toast into his mouth and chews thoughtfully. Stares at my head as if it is a kitchen appliance that he wants to take apart to see how it is put together.
Then he looks at the clock, rocks the chair to its front edge, and rises to dress and leave for work.
***
I get headaches. They are a medical mystery. I have consulted twelve doctors and five practitioners of traditional medicine. I have been to the Mayo Clinic. I have tried medication, meditation, herbs, special diets, fasting, exercise, rest, and psychological therapy. Nothing helps. It has been four years. Some nights I just lie in bed wishing to die. Maybe that is not unusual; the world is cruel.
All of my moments have numbers now. This was the idea of a pain management counselor. When I barely notice my head aching, it's an intensity of One. When it is so bad I can barely even form the thought of wanting death, that is a Ten. When it is a Nine or a Ten or an Eight that has gone on too long, I take an anal suppository that knocks me unconscious for a full day. When I wake up, the ache is usually down to a Two or Three, but I feel like I am wearing someone else's skin. Adam knows not to touch me then. Adam knows where the suppositories are kept.
A handful of days are Ones or even Zeros. They terrify me. I am scared of how it will be when the pain returns. My favorite days are Fours because it hurts, but it could be much worse, and sometimes I feel hope it will get better. Most days are between Threes and Fives. The days that are higher than Five are horrible, but not as horrible as the nights. Those nights are years. Even with Adam in bed next to me, I feel utterly alone.
***
Near lunchtime, I get a text from Adam saying he is going to stay for the night at his brother’s house. I work like a fiend all afternoon, almost unaware of time at all until the sky is completely dark. I concentrate magnificently when I am sad or angry. Only when I am unusually happy does the world seem strange and fuzzy. When I realize how late it is, I call Adam.
“Hey,” he picks up after the first ring. I hate cell phones for their caller ID. I prefer to sneak up on people and to be snuck up upon. Also, talking on the phone makes me feel removed, disjointed, so that I say things with the sense that they do not count, no matter how many times I have learned this is not true.
Adam has been waiting for my call and he knows I know he has been waiting, and I know he knows I know, and neither of us will elude to the knowing or to the waiting.
“You took your toothbrush with you,” I announce to the empty apartment.
“Brian and Lisa went to her parents’ for the weekend. He said I could stay here. It’s nothing dramatic, it’s only a night.”
“Spineless,” I say.
I can hear a sporadic tapping in the background and I envision the pen he is toying with. His fingers are strong and perfect, with bitten-down nails. The veins that start at his knuckles and run up his forearms are long and slim like his handwriting. His hands and the things they do could be my religion.
“It’s funny,” he says, “because I was thinking that taking a step back is the most solid thing I’ve done in a long fucking time.”
Between any two people is an abysmal chasm they usually try to pretend away. Adam is shining a flashlight into the void. The ferocity in his voice freezes me.
“I’ve been willing to hold on,” he continues, “because I love you, I’m content with you, and because until recently I've had the sense that if I started to let go, you’d tighten your grip.”
“I would.” I bite my tongue to keep from repeating this.
“I don’t know. I don't know how much you think of me.”
“I think of you,” I tell him.
“Easy enough to say,” he replies.
“I do,” I try again. “I do think of you. And I love you,” I add, realizing it sounds like an afterthought. But it is more that everything and anything I care about could evaporate at any second and my head could explode from the pain and disappointment.
This is all too reactionary to sound genuine, I realize. I hang up on Adam, turn off my phone, and go to the bedroom to pack a small bag. Then I go out to the car, which starts as if it does not want to but succumbs to duty. One day it too will just die, reluctance overpowering habit in a silent coup, the way my mother's phone calls stopped. As I approach the interstate, a light snow hangs in the air but is not sticking. North, it would get heavier. I pull onto the southbound entrance ramp and accelerate until the car is going slightly faster than my thoughts. The highway is deserted in quiet, white darkness.
***
I am prepared for the day this car does not start. There is money in the bank for another. Plenty of money, by now. I never knew a car could have 200,000 miles on it and still run. Material objects are not the problem. Someone once told me that African bush taxis are the old cars no one in Europe or America will use anymore, that they have a million miles on them. Literally. Maybe more. They break down every day and the men who drive them patch them with a piece of wire, a wad of gum, a cup of muddy water poured over an overheated part. I have never in my life understood anything as thoroughly as those men understand their cars. We think our cars are dead, but they go to Mozambique for an afterlife.
It was maybe a year ago my mother started calling Adam rather than me. Someday, she told him, I will realize that blame and responsibility are not as simple as I seem to think they are, and I will stop pushing people away. Someday, she said, I will realize that everyone is doing the best they can. He relayed her lecture in a neutral voice that evening while we were lying on the couch watching television. He was spooning me, conveniently not having to meet my eyes, clearly hoping the end of the commercial break would cap my rising anger.
I remember a time Tim and I were in the ocean together. It was the family vacation we took to Florida when I was nine and he was eleven. A few months later, he would start a new club baseball league, and everything would change. But that afternoon in the water, we were innocents in a state of euphoria, having ridden the wave swells for so long that the rhythm of their movement became an internalized peace. I do not know how we did it. We must have been sunburned and dehydrated for days afterwards. Or maybe we possessed the invincibility of youth. It is not a feeling I can clearly recall. But I do remember the sun was getting low when I looked back to shore and saw our mother waving her arms for us to come back toward the beach. I looked to Tim. He looked from Mom to me with a soft grin and then laid back into the water, rising and sinking with the waves, not trying to steer, not caring where the shore was or that he was supposed to go there. I watched him, and I thought: He will drift away. I was not scared. I have never seen anyone look as happy as Tim did right then.
I would like to see Mozambique.
***
Well past dawn, I cross the Virginia border into North Carolina with the sense that as long as I do not slow down I can outrun the need for food and sleep. I have rarely felt as alert as I do now. I never see my surroundings so clearly when I am at home. But I am nearly out of gas. It is a testament to my alertness that I notice this. My mind is unusually blank, all my attention is drawn outward. Why have I never come to North Carolina before? Why do I never travel for travel’s sake? Everyone should get to feel like this.
I exit the highway and pull into an Amoco, where the spell is interrupted. I am surrounded by the saturated fat of every fast food chain in existence, plus some I have never heard of before. A wet, rotting stench sits in the air like smog on a windless day. It is so strong as to be incompatible with the consumption of food. But I know I will be hungry eventually. I go inside the gas station minimart in search of snacks.
“Mornin’,” the cashier drawls. Cigarette ash rests in clumps on the plaid shirt stretching across his stalwart belly. I say hello and pluck some crackers off the display shelves. He rings them up so slowly it would be awkward not to have a conversation.
“What’s that smell outside?”
“That’s just the paper mill, ma'am. Stick around long enough, y’all won't even smell it no more.” I look over his shoulder through the window to where my car is waiting beneath a bright, open sky. “Where y’all headed?” he asks.
I do not know. This would be embarrassing to admit.
“What’s to the south?”
“Ninety-five’ll take you clear down to Miami.”
“And to the west?”
“It’s two, three hours to Raleigh, ma’am.”
“East?”
“I reckon nothin’ but a bunch a cotton, tobacco, and pigs till you cross the bridge to Kitty Hawk. That’s the Outer Banks and beyond that, you’ll require a boat.”
***
Adam drives for FedEx. I believe that anyone who has a job that satisfies him is charmed and should simply enjoy that work. But I really only believe that in theory. In practice I expect everyone to suffer the continual process of strict, unrelenting self-evaluation and self-improvement that I do.
When he graduated from college, Adam was planning to go to medical school. He took the driving route to buy himself time to study for the MCAT while earning some money. I think it was two or three years later that I noticed the fat MCAT prep book had disappeared from his bookshelf. I tried to talk to him about it just once. He was not evasive. But a steely quality in his voice made me understand there was no conversation to be had. He likes that the physical labor of the supply route keeps him in shape. He likes that his evenings are his and that we have time for frequent and elaborate sex. On days off he day-trades stocks on-line and reads like a fiend. He always has something interesting to talk about. He likes to point out that our friends from college with “real jobs” are growing potbellies and saddlebags, bringing work home from the office, and complaining that the passion has drained from their premature marriages.
I am a freelance copy-editor. I work from home and can flex around my headaches. An outside observer might think that Adam and I are similarly settled into similarly adequate work. An outside observer would be wrong. My situation is temporary. I do not yet understand the world or how I want to fit into it. I am trying to figure it out. The problem is not that Adam drives a delivery route but that it satisfies his ambitions. The last shrink I saw said that sounded more like my problem than his. I asked her: Isn’t the point of a relationship to share problems? Then each of us rolled our eyes at the other.
***
Late morning, I step into a tiny roadside pet store carrying a turtle I nearly ran over in my speeding through hypnotically repetitive patches of forest, field, and rundown North Carolinian towns.
I do not like pets. They try my patience. Dogs are needy, cats are ungrateful, and a bird in a cage is a slap in the face of nature. I do not even know why I swerved to avoid crushing this mute shell, much less why I stopped to pick it up.
“Don’t be scared, darlin’, I don’t bite. Them snakes do, but we keep ‘em in the cage.” A dark, wiry woman stands behind a peeling plastic counter with a cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth, a bright parrot perched on her shoulder, and a nametag: Peggy.
Peggy presides over two skinny aisles of aquariums, cages, and pet toys and food. A vague, rank, animal smell is tempered by the haze of smoke hanging over Peggy's head. Three or four flies buzz in circles around the register and the parrot stares at me. Peggy nods at my turtle.
“You pick him up on the road?”
“I don’t know what to do with him.”
“Turtles like tomatoes.” Her tobacco-roughened vocal cords rip like thick fabric. She stubs out her cigarette and lights a new one. As she resumes smoking, the parrot walks confidently across her brittle back and resettles on her other shoulder, then leans in to the exposed side of her neck. When the tip of his beak is an inch from her cured skin, he stops. A black basalt tongue appears, extending slowly until it is licking her neck.
“Oh, lord,” Peggy comments, and at first I think she is reacting to her bird, which suddenly retracts its tongue and straightens up to resume staring dispassionately at me. Then I notice my arm feels incredibly warm. And wet. I hold the turtle away from my body while Peggy eyes the puddle of urine on the floor in front of me.
“Sorry,” I say dumbly.
“It happens. Listen, darlin’, turtles are a dime a dozen in this county. You don’t want it, just set it behind the store and it’ll wander on back into the woods.”
If I have a soft spot for turtles, it is only because they are hard all over. The shell is not a bad concept.
***
As a kid, I loved going to baseball games with my dad. I had only a mild interest in the technicalities of baseball but loved the atmosphere. The base coaches adjusting their crotches, the batters warming up, the kids in the stands with their own mitts, the announcer's echoing boom. My dad always brought binoculars and a newspaper and bought his dinner from the vendors. He never had much to say, but just sitting there next to him, noticing how much my legs resembled his, minus the hair, I felt connected. Special.
A couple years ago, he invited me to a game for the first time in a long time. At Adam’s urging and against my own better judgment, I went. The tickets were at the far end of the third base line, and the kid next to me was wearing team paraphernalia and a glove, clearly hoping to catch foul balls. He stared at each batter with a dedication and determination I have never felt about anything. Each time someone else in our section caught a foul, his eyes flickered and he reset his jaw and I could feel my chest tightening. He sat there, alert and faithful, to the end. As his family gathered up their things after the game, he stared at the ground, punching his empty glove, uninterested in the pity balls that the bat boys were throwing to the kids who lingered by the dugout. Distractedly, his mom ruffled his hair and patted him on the back and asked if he was ready to go. I could not tell if she was ignoring or just not seeing the broken look on her son's face.
As my dad steered us away from the stadium toward home, I started crying for that kid, for his pain and disappointment, and for his mother’s obliviousness. When my dad noticed and asked what was wrong, I began sobbing so hard I could not speak. By the time he pulled up to my apartment, I was doubled over in the seat, my head screaming at an eight, and still I cried. My dad texted Adam, who came out to get me. I imagined the look that would be passing between them as Adam opened the passenger door and reached in to guide me out of the car: the question mark in his eyes, and my dad’s baffled, helpless shrug in response. Perfect, I thought, as I struggled to stave off hyperventilation. Pass this problem off to someone else. Do not show up for me any more than you did for my brother.
***
I probably learned about the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk in grade school, but the name sparks nothing in me as I first drive into town. The turtle sits on the passenger-side floor with no comment. Along the Atlantic shore, wood frame houses stand sentry, gingerly, on stilts. They look impossibly light, able to tiptoe away from the slowly eroding coastline. Mountainous sand dunes rise along the inlet as I continue south, following signs to the flight museum. The parking lot is full of RVs and the museum crawling with aging couples in shorts, purple veins climbing their white legs like ivy.
On a whim, I pick up the turtle before walking out to the field that was the Wrights' first airstrip. I stop at the lift-off marker with my road buddy balanced on my palm. Together, we assess the barren, unassuming runway. It is silent but for a light breeze and the distant hum of a group of retirees that look to be headed this way. Our solitude is finite. I set the turtle on the path next to me.
“Race you,” I challenge, and start walking. I am not even trying hard but I leave my competitor in the dust. Possibly the shell is a hindrance.
Two minutes later I am standing at the touchdown marker. It is that simple. One short strip of land and the whole planet is dwarfed; people can leave the ground and return safely. Flying may not make the world look as small as death can, but it helps. This is the sort of perspective I need. North Carolina was a good choice. I still do not know what I am doing here but I am glad I came.
I listen and cannot hear the water from here. I turn and retrace my steps, expecting to find the turtle back where I started, but when I get there it is gone. A plump, comforting grandma with permed gray hair watches me turn several circles at the starting line, scanning the ground in every direction.
“I know how you feel,” she assures me.
“You do?”
“Sure, places like this are always disappointing. Our imaginations make much more of them than they are. They’re just places, like anywhere else.”
“Yeah,” I murmur, then smile at her and walk back to my car alone, imagining my turtle has learned to fly and lifted off in search of a new place to be.
***
In the years following Tim’s death, my parents dutifully called me each week but never spoke of him. Adam, in contrast, had sought me out after the funeral, given me his number, and urged me to let him know if I needed anything back at school. On the evenings I texted him, he would suggest some bar or another around campus where we slid into opposite sides of a booth. He would always be the first to talk, and he always brought up Tim, somehow knowing that is what I needed. Early on, I said little, and it was not uncommon for us to just sit together in comfortable silence. Eventually he shared the pivotal truth: he and Tim had met at a support group for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Together, we wove what little we each knew of Tim’s experience into the narrative I carry with me still. My brother had suffered two years of molestation by a baseball coach, a secret he did not know how to tell, and a shame and confusion that led to underage drinking, that led to several arrests. Instead of asking questions and finding a therapist, my parents imposed authoritarian discipline. Tim called their bluff, doubling down on an increasing array of substances. And so it went, the mutual hurt, fear, and resentment compounding until the end.
Until Adam told me about the support group, I did not know that Tim had ever reached out for help. Weeping at the funeral, Adam was grieving for not having found a way to save him and for being the one who had the support, resilience, and luck to push through his own story and keep on living. Was I, to Adam, simply an opportunity to save someone else who was not already too far gone? His affable acceptance was a path I followed into his life and eventually his bed, I realize. When did I make it the focal point for my fury? And why?
***
The sun is getting low by the time I drive back toward Kitty Hawk and stop at the dunes. I struggle up the seaward side of one of the soft mountains and sit to rest, warm in sliding grains. All I can see is orange sand and blue sky. In the bright undulating distance, children are shrieking and laughing and flinging themselves down the slopes like tiny black ants on burnt ochre from an oil paint tube. The dunes have no beginning and no end and everything seems irrelevant. I take a deep breath of thick salt air. Then I exhale and lay back against the soft slope, gravity pulling me deeper into the sand. I wonder if they all would forgive me. We could lie here together and the sand would shift and it could be like starting over.
***
I wake with a start, disoriented, and realize my head is pounding. It is a Five on the rise. For a moment I lie totally still to get a fix on where I am. Dunes. The sand is still warm beneath me, though the air is cool on my arms and legs. The sun hovers just above the horizon. I must not have slept for more than ten minutes, but I sit up feeling I have woken to a different day. There is an exodus underway from the beach toward the parking lot. I watch the sun finish setting before succumbing to a sense of urgency that drives me down my dune in a lope. Going slowly is an effort. I devolve into uncontrolled running. My feet plow deeply into the sand in sliding steps and I helicopter my arms to keep my balance. My headache intensifies to a Six. I reach the bottom and switch to a quiet walk, the throbbing subsiding as my heart calms.
In the parking lot, parents are emptying the sand out of their ruddy-cheeked children’s clothing. One man holds a three-year-old upside down by his ankles, shaking him in rhythm with his manic giggles, bits of dunes cascading from his pockets. The scene is so idyllic, I cannot believe it at first when I get into my car, turn the key in the ignition, and nothing happens. I try once more, before my mind catches up to the moment. This is it. I have been anticipating the death of this car for a couple of years. Dozens of times, I have imagined what I will do when it happens. But I did not imagine being so far from home. Will I have to leave this old friend here and drive a rental home? My mind races to the fifth, tenth, and twentieth steps ahead of me. I try to slow down to take the first step first. The number for AAA is in my wallet. I turn on my cellphone to make the call and realize it has been off since I hung up on Adam last night. But no messages from him appear. Was I expecting to be chased? Why would I want him to chase me? Why would I try to make him do that? From this new place, from a distance, I can see my patterns as the problem that they have become.
The AAA operator asks my location and promises a representative will meet me within an hour. I sit on the hood as the parking lot empties. It is nearly dark and my car stands alone when a tow truck with a decal reading “Aycock’s Garage” rumbles toward me and squeals to a halt. A top-heavy woman with the longest red fingernails I have ever seen slides from the edge of the passenger seat to the ground with practiced caution.
“Evenin’, sweetie, sorry we’re so late! I’m Sheryl Aycock,” she says. A sturdy man in overalls lumbers out of the driver’s seat and nods to me without making eye contact. “That’s my husband, Ernie, but he don’t talk much, so I handle the people side of the business. I’m a people person, as they say.” She raises an eyebrow and hands me the paperwork I need to sign.
“My car is really old. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong.”
“Nothing necessarily wrong with an old car. Let’s hope you just need a jump, and we can send you on your way,” she pats my arm reassuringly. I cannot stop staring at the nails.
Ernie pops open the hood of my car and bends over its insides with jumper cables. When he mumbles for her to try the ignition, she slips into the driver’s seat. She turns the key and my engine seems to clear its throat before settling into its reluctant rumble.
“Well, there you go!” Sheryl whoops triumphantly. “Just make sure to drive a good long ways before you make a stop, give the battery a chance to recharge. And don’t turn off your car anywhere there ain’t someone around to give you another jump if need be.”
“It’s Sunday,” I realize, aloud. Sheryl’s eyes flash over my face, confused. “Sorry you had to come out here on a Sunday night. I could have asked someone else in the parking lot for a jumpstart earlier. I really thought something more serious was wrong.” I feel a momentary shame, as if I am a bad host because they did not have cause to stay longer at the scene of my breakdown.
“Oh, honey!” She chuckles and then her voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. “Well, me and Ernie are not religious people. It’s nearly a jailable offense to say so in these parts, but we decided, if there is a God, He’d want someone to take care of the people whose cars won’t start on Sundays. It’s either Him or just plain luck that throws all this business our way, so we figure we’re doing something right!” She leans back and gives me an appraising look. “I don’t mean to offend, of course,” she adds perfunctorily.
“I’m not offended. Makes sense to me,” I shrug.
My phone vibrates and lights up with a text from Adam: I am home and you’re not here. Then, fifteen seconds later: WTF? Why is your phone in North Carolina????
“Someone’s worryin’ about you,” Sheryl observes as she pulls herself out of my car.
“More than I deserve,” I admit to her, and to myself. Ernie is already putting away the jumper cables, but Sheryl watches me intently. I have the feeling she can see straight into me. What, I wonder, does she see?
“I doubt that’s true, darlin’,” she finally responds. “But if that’s your feeling, now you can scurry back home and mend what needs mending.”
***
I see my arrival home clearly. I will not want to talk but Adam will insist and I will be secretly glad for his focus. He will settle into the easy chair and brace his feet against its lean. I will brace myself for the accusations. Waiting will make me nervous. My headache will swell from a Three to a Four. Words will fly from my mouth unexamined.
“I don't need you,” I will tell him.
“Oh, I know that,” he will reply.
I will fall silent in a moment of atypical wisdom.
“I can tell you why you are unhappy,” he will say steadily. “If you want.” This will not be teasing. He will be offering sincerely. He will want me to realize that it is valuable information, not to be dropped into the abyss. I will sit up straighter.
“I want,” I will say. I will lean forward so that I could reach out and put my hands on his knees, were touching allowed, which of course it is not. Adam will suddenly lean forward as well, throwing his weight so that the springs are overpowered and the front bottom of the tattered chair will rest directly on the carpet. He will rest his elbows on his knees, close enough to be able to hold his hands on either side of my neck, interlacing his fingers in my tangled hair. He will do this.
“Tell me,” I will whisper, not intending to whisper.
“You are the sort of person who doubts only what is most important to you. It's because you love me that you doubt me. You have no faith, so it’s dangerous to care. But that has no bearing on my actual loyalty and dependability. For example.”
He will free his fingers and sit back in his chair, not expecting an immediate response or planning to value it if I give one. He knows my immediate responses are generally not valid in the long term. So I will wait for a moment. Then I will move to sit at his feet and rest my cheek against the hard knob of his left knee.
“You have quite a high opinion of yourself,” I will say into the space between his thighs. He will palm my skull in his wide hand and gently press his fingertips into my scalp. His chair will list, creaking, to my side.
And finally, I decide, I will use what weight I have to hold him there.