on a rusty axle

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:

• Forgivingness, vengeful rumination, and affective traits. Journal of Personality.
• Brain functional connectome-based prediction of individual decision impulsivity. Cortex.
• The entropic brain - revisited. Neuropharmacology.
• Investigating the functional anatomy of empathy and forgiveness. NeuroReport.
• Quantifiable change in functional brain response to empathic and forgivability judgments with resolution of posttraumatic stress disorder. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.
• Parsing the components of forgiveness: psychological and neural mechanisms. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.
• Temporal pole activity during understanding other persons’ mental states correlates with neuroticism trait. Brain Research.
• The neural basis of moral cognition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

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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sleet melts

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.

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see your sun

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?”