Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles Read Online Free PDF Page B

year. He will keep showing me forever,
porque
he will never leave me, never go out on his own.
    I looked more closely at the boy. He seemed vacant, like a golem, bound to perpetual pointless motion by impulses he could neither understand nor resist. I was reluctant to say it, but I told Roberto that his son looked anything but happy. Shuffling around, waving that quarter-moon of Styrofoam in his own face.
    Pero
that is how you know he is happy, Roberto told me. He walks on the grass. He rocks back and forth. He plays with his plastic. He is not like you and me. He does no need to talk and have all kinds of things and never be alone. This is all he need.
    Roberto nodded toward his son again, who had turned around at the border of the chain-link fence and now shuffled toward the house, his back to us. It’s when he sit still, Roberto said, that you know something is wrong. But this is not often.
    So, Roberto said, looking back at me. Now you see, yes?
    I didn’t. Not really. The things he said made a distant kind of sense, but whatever revelation he hoped they would inspire wasn’t happening. Which, looking back, had a lot more to do with me than with Roberto’s son and his circumstances.

L ater, when my self-involvement grew somewhat less acute, I realized that not only did what Roberto said make sense, but I actually recognized his son’s brand of happiness from my own experience.
    Because after the first time Emma dismantled me, I’d become something of an autistic myself. The words I wrote were my fenced-in yard, and the company of mostly anonymous women my Styrofoam crescent. I passed season upon season caring for nothing else. I was empty but content. I took pride and pleasure in good work: the finely hewn sentence, the sleepy smile of a well-fucked woman. I loved these things but I did not need them. I drank when I was thirsty and wrote when I was moved to and slept with whomever I wanted. I spent no time at all thinking about these things when I was not actually engaged in them, and thought of nothing else when I was engaged. When I wrote it was with a fever, and when I fucked my sole hope and aim was to make whomever I found myself with happy, if only for a few hours. And when we were done and I invited these women to leave me be, I slept the placid dreamless sleep of the long-dead, every night for almost two decades.
    The only ripples in this calm came on the rare occasion when I saw Emma. Those early years she still lived in town, with the boyfriend who’d displaced me, and I would run into her at bars, or else see her at the restaurant where she waited on tables through college, and each time I would smile and introduce a new woman to her and talk literally about the weather and keep my hands wrapped tight around my drink glass so Emma could never see how they trembled.
    Later, after she moved away, it became easier. She only appeared during the holidays, and if I wanted to pretend for long stretches that she didn’t exist, all I needed to do was stay away from the bars at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

H igh school sweethearts, Emma and I. My senior year, her junior. I loved her so much, I even loved her cat. Alarming physical chemistry. The sort of ravenous coupling that only teenagers are capable of. It didn’t matter what positions our bodies contorted themselves into; we found a way to execute. And also of course the consumptive non-sexual preoccupation with one another that, again, only teenagers. So imagine my surprise and dismay when, nearly twenty years later, after she and her husband split up and before she sent me away to the island, as I rested my chin on her bare sternum between her small breasts, she smiled at me and asked in an uncharacteristic moment of open wonder, How long has it been? and I realized suddenly that at thirty-six my body couldn’t hope to keep up with either my heart or my brain when it came to this woman, always this woman, only this woman,