Noah sat down with clipboard and blank paper and drafted a letter and struggled with how to say it’s time.
When people do it.
When they do it, is this how they feel? How can he justify the unjustifiable?
Notes flashed by and few were the same. Some were in anger,
some were passive aggressive, obviously most in despair with an uncharitable take on reality.
But how can we share reality? It’s so hard to explain what it's like to suffer.
Noah’s head was throbbing. Sharp migraine. Red dots blurred his vision and when he shut his eyes, colors swirled around to the sound of his blood vessels surging with each heart beat.
He needed to explain this to Kurt and help him understand.
How would you choose your ending? But as this was an abrupt note that would be over-analyzed,
he needed to give context and motives and absolve his best friend of responsibility. A warm sense of an ending would be tough in the aftermath, yet with the right framing, they could share another moment. Honestly, there were two choices.
The Lily Option
Check in. Get put under, hooked up to some new AI technology for experiments, organs harvested. How much pain can you endure? What are the side effects of (x)mRNA vaccine? At best, be globally distributed, maybe have your kidneys add another ten years of productivity to a worthy artist, or maybe have your liver fuel a balding war whore, but the anticlimactic reality is plastic bags and incineration. Last contact will be with a sleep-deprived technician wrapped in plastic and wearing a mask, and as they put you under, you won’t get a smile or a final hug.
The Bear Option
Go into the woods and wrestle an apex predator. Most likely eaten, hopefully not alive, but if so then your final screams will be memorable, and you’ll live on as part of the bear and part of the Cascade mountains. Maybe it’ll happen with a quick snap of your spine and red dots will fill you like salmon roe. Or you’ll smell its breath as you wriggle on a pine floor. And because you are recording and streaming to a popular chat room, your video will live on. You will become a meme. You will be shared in countless internet forums. You will remain a spirit in a beautiful forest.
He stared out his window at foothills of Ophelia’s Hood, the infamous bouldering crag of granite with flourishes of quartz. Pine trees rustling like wind-swept sea. He needed another option or Kurt would say — false choice. But what else was there? … maybe a solution would come as he wrote out his options and explained why he was staring into the woods with a sacrifice in his trunk. (Continues...)
- From chapter 32 of Bottle, by Erik Peter
Get a free copy by writing to [email protected]
Maya's slate eyebrows arched as she squinted and titled her head. She looked up his nose.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
She touched the tip of her nose.
“Something there?”
“Noah,” she groaned. “Today?”
He rubbed his nose.
“Not a good look.”
“Nobody noticed.”
“I did,” she turned away.
“Nobody cares.”
“Who am I?”
“Relax.”
“You need help.”
“I’m fine.”
“Out of control.”
Noah wiped his nose.
Maya reached into her purse and handed him a small mirror.
Noah rotated the mirror and smiled.
Maya rolled her eyes.
Noah handed the mirror back.
“Why are they there?”
"Stopped plucking.”
She stepped to him and tilted her head for a better look.
He stepped away.
She repositioned.
“See, nobody looks up my nose,” he gently feathered the edge of his nose with his index fingernail as though tucking his long blond hair behind his ear.
“Didn’t help.”
“I doubt anyone notices.”
“They will. Isn’t he coming soon?”
“This afternoon.”
“Not a good look.”
“Probably wouldn’t care anyway.”
She sighed, “I’m plucking them tonight.”
“No.”
She sighed, “we’ll see. Why do you have to be so weird?”
“If you can notice your breath on your hair.”
“Then?”
“A kind of milestone.”
“To where?”
The elenchus is the Socratic practice of dialogue. Check out Chapter 6 of
The Socratic Method for a good discussion of how to skillfully discover internal tensions.
Being non-judgemental and helping your partner change on their own terms is the way of the elenchus.
Practice the elenchus with this week's suggested materials, or contact
[email protected] for alternatives -- like journal pieces, video clips, or
materials that interest you.
He looked for others. The shoe box was full of letters with
his handwriting. He picked one from the middle of the
stack. It didn’t have “Turkie” as its return address and dated
a few years earlier.
Hello from my little mountain perch looking down over Lake
Missoula. Hopefully, you will come to our weekend retreat at
the end of the month and of course, a shuttle can be
arranged — so basically you don’t have any excuses. Get your
bare butt on the deck and even out those tan lines with the
alpine sun. Stare at the curve as the night turns on. Where are
the stars brighter? Where else can you see the intricacies of
the Cat’s Eye Nebula? If you don’t know what this means,
Google “Hubble Cat’s Eye Galaxy,” you can see it with our
gear.
And, now for the painful news. What happened to K?
Ms. Andressen was our beloved AP English teacher. She’d
spent a decade on Broadway though her only time on stage
was pushing a broom. She found some extra work off off Broadway, and she had a job dressing as a lion and walking
around Times Square to solicit ticket sales. It was an
unbearable job in the humidity of August as the outfit didn’t
ventilate and she lost gallons of sweat each day.
Then one Sunday, 95 degrees, 92% humidity, she took off
her lion’s head and looked up just as a pigeon dropped a load
on her lips. She spat. She gagged. She was dizzy and tasted
vomit in her throat. She took the lion’s head and found shade
in a Chase Bank kiosk. A mime came to her with a bottle of
water and helped revive her with some energy medicine.
They started a relationship and he taught her the trade. She
quit the lion costume and started miming for tips in a box.
Her miming abilities became a teaching tool in our
classroom. I still shudder at her impression of a hen
protesting the abduction of her eggs (ch. 7 Animal Farm)
and retain a tenuous relationship with poultry.
She dressed like a mime with vivid running shoes, usually
orange New Balance, but sometimes green or purple. The
black pants and black t-shirt rarely changed. She put
uncapped makers in her back pocket so they were ready for
yet another parenthetical note on the board, where the
margins became the main story.
Read more ...
Steel-toed boots echoed on the tiles. He knew the sound from years of working in construction. Most of the guys wore plated boots. They worked with heavy beams on the Canadian border. It was often below zero in the Cascade mountains where they constructed second or third homes for people who rarely came and thought they were too good and never tired of silly demands, like ripping up eighty thousand in tile work just to reposition a Laufen bidet.
They slowed to a stop. In the murky reflection of a scratched steel panel, a figure emerged. His boots came to rest on the lacquered tile next to him, though empty silver urinals lined the walls. There must have been fifty places for him to stand, yet his black leather boots nearly touched his flip-flops. Sound of him slowly unzipping. A side glance revealed a holstered .45.
“A little nippy this morning.”
Noah didn’t respond.
“Nice thing here.”
His cheeks clenched, stream sputtered. He closed his eyes and tried to unclench. He slowed to a dribble then Nothing.
“Little forward, I guess,” he chuckled, “Ben.”
Noah half turned to get a better look at his combat gear. He didn’t see a patch or familiar insignia. The gear was dark navy with black highlights. It had the aura of Hugo Boss.
“What happened to your wrists? Looks like you were cuffed?”
Noah ignored him.
“Too forward?”
Read more ….
What happened?
Context is important.
It started after my freshman year. I went home to visit my father one weekend, but when I pulled into the driveway, his white Ford F-150 was gone, and a black Mercedes with tinted windows was parked. As you know, that’s not a common look out there, particularly shiny with little dust.
I opened the front door and yelled: "Dad?
"
“Noah?” I heard a woman’s voice with an odd accent. Actually, it wasn’t odd, but it wasn’t expected. Dad had lots of guys on his crews that came from different regions of the globe. When he realized that there were thousands of men with advanced degrees in electrical engineering and architecture, etc., that didn’t have the language capabilities or proper work visas for top-shelf companies, then he started hiring under the table.
She stood at the top of the stairs. She had long legs and dark black hair. She said: “Noah, Noah. Please forgive. I’m Natasha. Your father hunt with my husband Boris. They hunt moose. Do you know Boris? He electrician with short body and bad manner,” she walked down and smiled as she stood across from me as I unlaced my boots. She wore a white t-shirt. Her nipples were eye level. She arched her back. I remembered my manners and focused on her dark pupils. She smirked. Her fat lips were dark ruby and moist, as though she’d just put on lipstick. She shook her head and apologized and asked if I was hungry. I was. She’d just made borscht.
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Noah grew up near a make-shift Protestant church, once a post office, that was
remodeled with linoleum flooring and vinyl siding. The church never resonated with him.
He had few thoughts about church, other than a passing desire to be admonished in a booth
and given beads or chants or some ritualistic way of riding the churning in his gut.
Yet, this would mean nothing to Maya. He needed to say sorry in a way that made a difference. He needed a scientific theory of how people actually behaved.
He needed to read what experts said. There must be a healthy body of research devoted to forgiveness
and related topics of empathy, anger, resentment, PTSD, personality disorder, trauma, and so on.
He searched for variations on “academic forgiveness” and “anatomy of empathy” and soon found a cache
of pdf articles from an AlAnon message board:
He obsessively read for a week.
He grew a tired from trying to make sense of the tables of data, the diagrams of brain regions, and references to past studies. It truly felt like a circling ivory tower of concurrence. Several studies basically concluded that forgiveness was a complex process that combined several brain regions, and factors that contributed toward forgiveness included moral judgement, cognitive control, social evaluation, and perspective taking.
No shit, he muttered.
The charts and graphs weren’t that helpful. He didn’t see how to apply them. He massaged his temples and tried to recall what regions were being stimulated, but he couldn’t remember the names. He skimmed through the articles again and repeated the names of the brain regions, but after he looked away he forgot.
His main take-away was that forgiveness happens in the brain and comes from morals and perspective taking,
whatever that meant beyond the garden-variety books he’d found in the self-help section. Was the field of psychology
so underdeveloped? Did they have trouble duplicating results?
Perspective taking. That was a common conclusion. It seemed like something his mom would say in her folksy Canadian accent.
She often told him to take a step back and consider what else might be going on. This insight seemed worthy of a faculty position
if she could definitively pair it with neurons that could be targeted with medication.
Maybe he should go back to school. The life of a researcher, sharing results, meeting for conferences,
long dinners at Denny’s milking free refills of coffee, affairs with lonely post-docs.
His head ached. He pressed the button on his Princess. It seemed like static. He stared at the wall.
A thought emerged of whipping. It was as old as time. Flogging,
lashing … from the Old Testament to contemporary S&M clubs, punishing the flesh has a role.
Traditions continue for reasons, he didn’t need to know why, it just was so.
What was so complicated? Consider the sin, apply the pain. Suffer. Repeat.
Soon the bad feelings would be washed away. Grind the pole. Let it go.
He thought of the pole in his old garage. It hurt. He made a list of alternatives:
whip with electric cord
whip with … chain
whip with
lighter on skin? cable news?
door jam
He stood by the door jam. It was old and crusty and had layers of chipped paint. He counted six maybe seven different shades of cream and green, probably going back to lead paint. At its base was quality wood from a century ago which could’ve been preserved with light sanding and oils, but instead was crusty, bumpy and with sharp edges. He turned his back to it and worked a scab. He rotated back and forth. Blood trickled down his back. He pulled away and closed his eyes. His stomach relaxed. His headache eased. He turned his back to the rough edges on the door jam and started grinding. Shots of pain. Little dots flared and swirled and weakened his knees.
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