dim light of the room hits his Adam’s apple in such a way as to make it seem enormous. Adam’s apple, thinks Rank. Ha ha. Adam looks as if he’s offering up his throat.
“It’s just because you’re Catholic,” he mutters, eyes still closed.
“What? What’s just because I’m Catholic?”
“The virgin/whore complex. The two Marys. Of course that’s going to resonate all over the place with you.”
“But it’s true, right?” insists Rank. “That’s what he thinks. My old man’s like that too. Virgins or whores, one or the other. Except Kyle thinks they’re all whores. It’s not a virgin/whore complex it’s a . . . whore/whore complex.”
Rank is suddenly pleased with himself. If he can’t right Kyle’s wrong with sheer force, he will do it with the persuasive force of his mind, which seems to be throwing up gems of remarkable lucidity all of a sudden. And he will apply that force to Adam, who for some reason has fallen neatly — in Rank’s perception — into the role of judge to whom Rank must appeal.
“That’s not what he thinks, Rank.”
Rank cannot believe he isn’t getting through to Adam. This argument is gold. The moment he spoke it, the truth of it seemed to sing in the air around his head as if someone had struck a tuning fork.
“It is what he thinks!”
“It’s what you think.”
Rank has poured them each a fresh shot of rye. Now he puts the bottle down and gapes.
“Adam,” he says. “Will you stop lying there with your eyes closed like you’re hoping someone comes along and cuts your throat?”
Adam’s eyes pop open and he raises his head.
“I do not,” says Rank, “have a whore/whore complex.”
“You have the opposite,” says Adam. And has the audacity to lean back and close his eyes again, resuming the exact same posture on the couch, his Adam’s apple towering.
19
08/05/09, 11:21 a.m.
I HAVE NOT THOUGHT about that moment in a very long time. I’ve thought about that night a lot, yes — what happened later. Because that’s the night I told you what I told you as the morning light began to finger its way inside the room, and you put your hand against my head, and after yanking the story from myself like it was a barbed, endless tapeworm I leaned into your palm and, finally, rested. Yes, I’ve been remembering that night off and on ever since I read your book. And I remembered the fight with Kyle the second I locked eyes with him at Winners. But I’d forgotten all about that in-between time, the calming-down period, your enormous Adam’s apple glowing in the shadows, how you told me I had the opposite of a whore/whore complex and next thing I knew I just wanted to open up my throat and down all the alcohol in the world. If I’d thought I could absorb it through my pores, I would have filled up Wade and Kyle’s bathtub and climbed in for a soak.
I didn’t remember it until I started writing about it.
But what’s weird is that I’m sitting here not sure it really happened.
It seems to me it must have. I remember how Kyle’s ears glowed red. I remember the shove, and how he teetered, his face completely blank with disbelief. I’m sure I remember that. But I don’t remember remembering it as I wrote it, if that makes sense. I just wrote it — it spilled out of my head like it had been lodged somewhere in there, way in the back. It didn’t feel like a memory. It just felt like something that was happening in my head as I was typing.
I want to confess that the longer I do this, the stranger it gets. Half the time, I’m not sure I’m even getting the story right anymore — yet the whole idea of this little project, you’ll recall, was to ferret out the truth. To take your bullshit version of me, flush it like the steaming turd of half-truths and oversights it was, and replace it with the glorious, terrible, complex, astonishing truth of Reality. I still feel like that’s what I’m doing sometimes. I still find it all pretty complex and terrible. But recently I’ve been getting lost in it. I forget what I’m about. For example, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I spent about a half-hour trying to figure out the best way to describe your Adam’s apple, how it seemed to glow, enormous in the shadows.