back in calming circles – just the way his mom does when he feels poorly. He doesn’t sing though, like his mother does, because he doesn’t want to get punched in the ribs. She probably wouldn’t, out of gratitude, because he’s the only one who hasn’t tried telling her everything is going to be fine. --When they are older they fight loudly, and often. They fight about how to properly halve a kiwi, how to spell verisimilitude. They fight about his mother, who finds it hard to cope with the fact that Sarika is poor and not-white. They fight over his dizzy spells, his lack of appetite, her flossing habits. They fight in traffic, in tandem, over the phone. He calls her a fraud and she calls him a snob. He calls her self-centered and she calls him something much, much worse. He tells her he loves her and she will look like she’s about to cry, and not in the good way. “I don’t think it’s just me, either,” he says earnestly, entreatingly. “I definitely don’t think it’s just me.” It’s not, but by then she is older, and will feel impelled by this desperate need to make him understand – He interjects, defensively, that this has nothing to do with his god (because he believes in all of it, the same way he believed in toasters and radio waves, the same triangulation as her father, father son holy ghost, he believed it even when he wasn’t – ill). But Sarika knows differently. If you prostrate to any man or deity or prophet and if you really believe in it, if you really think it will do you good, then of course you would be more willing to risk it all. Of course you’d more easily let yourself love another person. He is comfortable with metaphors, she is not. That is what it comes down to, really. “This is not a metaphor,” he replies, quite angry now. “I am a person. I am a person who lives in real life who feels real things. I wish you would stop trying to make it seem so goddamn little.” They do not talk for several weeks, during which Daniel tries to figure out how to sit those papered examination tables and not stick to it when he has to hop off, tries not to feel like a slab of diseased meat, tries to stay positive, tries not to imagine Boyd Jones’ superior fists rusty with his blood, Boyd Jones as a virus he cannot pluck out of his blood, his eyes melting back into his skull and his body curdling along with it like a used candlewick. The body, the body, the body – sometimes it is too much for us, sometimes it fails us even when the mind and the spirit feels as quick as ever. (It’s had to be, after all those years spent with her, running and parrying and eating out of each other’s lunches.) The day the results come back, he slams the door in her face. She throws it open anyway, follows after his retreat through the kitchenette, the living room, his bedroom. When he finally turns to face her, he is halfwild like a cornered animal: all that propensity for kindness, for wonder of the most tender sort, consumed by a terrible desire to be standing in the ruins of something, if only to know he can still do it, if only to know he is alive by contrast. And here she is, looking like she’s just dying for a fight, and him equally dying (in more ways than one) to give it. He screams: Fuck, Sarika – you can be so fucking selfish, you can’t, you’re not allowed to just, waltz back in whenever you feel like it, like the entire goddamn universe owes it to you, because no one in the entire his-
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