None of the other houses were near the beach,...
None of the other houses were near the
beach, and when I faced south, I could only see a
single roof: what looked like an acre of orange
tile mostly buried in palmsIt was the hacienda I
had noticed the day beforeI could block that out
with the palm of my hand and feel like Robinson
Crusoe
I walked that way, partly because as a southpaw,
turning left had come naturally to me my whole
lifeMostly because that was the direction I
could see inAnd I didn't go far, no Great Beach
Walk that day, I wanted to make sure I could get
back to my crutch, but that was still the firstI
remember turning around and marveling at my own
footprints in the sandIn the morning light each
left one was as firm and bold as something
produced by a stamping-pressMost of the right
ones were blurry, because I had a tendency to drag
that foot, but setting out, even those had been
clearI counted my steps backThe total was
thirty-eightBy then white chanel j12 watch my hip was throbbingI was
99
more than ready to go in, grab a yogurt cup from
the fridge, and see if the cable TV worked as well
as Jack Cantori claimed
iii
And that became my morning routine: orange juice,
walk, yogurt, current eventsI became quite
chummy with Robin Meade, the young woman who
anchors Headline News from six to ten AMBoring
routine, right? But the surface events of a
country laboring under a dictatorship can appear
boring, too - dictators like boring, dictators
love boring - even as great changes are
approaching beneath the surface
A hurt body and mind aren't just like a
dictatorship; they are a dictatorshipThere is no
tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as
confusionThat my mind had been as badly hurt as
my body was a thing I only came to realize once I
was alone and all other voices dropped awayThe
fact that I had tried to choke my wife of twentyfive
years for doing no more than wholesale tiffany trying to wipe
100
the sweat off my forehead after I told her to
leave the room was the very least of itThe fact
that we hadn't made love a single time in the
months between the accident and the separation,
didn't even try, wasn't at the heart of it, either,
although I thought it was suggestive of the larger
problemEven the sudden and distressing bursts of
anger weren't at the heart of the matter
That heart was a kind of pulling-awayI don't
know how else to describe itMy wife had come to
seem like someoneMost of the people in
my life also felt other, and the dismaying thing
was that I didn't much careIn the beginning I
had tried to tell myself that the otherness I felt
when I thought about my wife and my life was
probably natural enough in a man who sometimes
couldn't even remember the name of that thing you
pulled up to close your pants - the zoomer, the
zimmer, the zippity-doo-dahI told myself it
would pass, roxanne mulberry bag and when it didn't and Pam told me she
wanted a divorce, what followed my anger was
reliefBecause now that other feeling was okay to
have, at least toward herNow she really was
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otherShe'd taken off the Freemantle uniform and
quit the team
During my first weeks on Duma, that sense of
otherness allowed me to prevaricate easily and
fluentlyI answered letters and e-mails from
people like Tom Riley, Kathi Green, and William
Bozeman III - the immortal Bozie - with short
jottings (I'm fine, the weather's fine, the bones
are mending) that bore little resemblance to my
actual lifeAnd when their communications first
slowed and then stopped, I wasn't sorry
Only Ilse still seemed to be on my teamOnly Ilse
refused to turn in her uniformI never got that
other feeling about herIlse was still on my side
of the glass window, always reaching outIf I
didn't e-mail her every day, she calledIf I
didn't call her once every third 925 tiffany's necklace day, she called
meAnd to her I didn't lie about my plans to fish
in the Gulf or check out the EvergladesTo Ilse I
told the truth, or as much of it as I could
without sounding crazy
I told her, for instance, about my morning walks
along the beach, and that I was walking a little
farther each day, but not about the Numbers Game,
102
because it sounded too sillyor maybe
obsessive-compulsive is the term I actually want
Just thirty-eight steps from Big Pink on that
first morningOn my second one I helped myself to
another huge glass of orange juice and then walked
south along the beach againThis time I walked
forty-five steps, which was a long distance for me
to totter crutchless in those daysI managed by
telling myself it was really only nineThat
sleight-of-mind is the basis of the Numbers Game
You walk one step, then two steps, then three,
then four, rolling your mental odometer back to
zero each time until you reach quilted white bag