When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,63
robes, like wizards.
“I just want you to know how much I enjoyed that.” So did I place a pox upon him? Did I spit in his face, or even turn my back?
Of course not. With everyone watching, I looked up, and said, “Oh. Thank you.” And because he had held out his hand I took it, just as I had taken Jackie’s after his release from prison.
I said to Hugh after the graduation, “But I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. Sure, I said, ‘Oh’ and ‘Thank you,’ but anyone who knows me would know that I was faking it, that I didn’t really mean the ‘thank you’ part.”
“Well,” Hugh said, “I guess you showed him.”
Had the politician been my neighbor, I might have moved. That’s how disgusted I would have felt, but Jackie, because of the metal plate in his head, because you could put a magnet to his temple and it would stay there, aroused pity rather than anger, or at least he did in me. I didn’t go out of my way to pass his hut, but neither did I go out of my way to avoid passing it. If he was in the yard, he’d say hello and I would say hello back, or “Yes, it certainly is warm,” or whatever answer seemed called for. And in this way — a word here, a wave there — little by little the summer advanced, and Jackie came to see the two of us as friends. One afternoon he invited me inside his front gate to show me the tomatoes he’d planted.
“Well,” and I looked to see if any of our neighbors were watching. No one was, so I opened the latch, saying, “OK, sure.”
During the years that he had been away, Jackie’s hair had gone from brown to gray. His eyes were flat and more heavily shadowed, and what had once been a pronounced limp had grown more subtle. It seemed that while in prison he had had a hip replaced, and the way he walked now was miles better than it had been before the operation. “Hey,” he said, and he gestured behind him in the direction of his open front door. “Do you . . . want to come in and look at my X-rays?”
As I later said to Hugh, “Do you tell a person, ‘No. I don’t want to see pictures of your insides’? Of course not. How can you?”
The hut was a lot cozier than I’d imagined it. In the kitchen were the same sorts of things you’d find in the homes of any of our neighbors: a postal calendar picturing a kitten, a hanging copper saucepan turned into a clock, souvenir salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of castles and peasants and wooden shoes. The room was tight and clean and smelled of watermelon-scented dish detergent. From the kitchen, I could see the bedroom, and rows of medications neatly arranged on the dresser. Little radio. Little TV. Little easy chair. It was like a troll’s house.
Jackie’s X-rays were as large as bath mats, and he washed and dried his hands before removing them from their separate envelopes and presenting them to me. When handed a photograph of someone’s wife or children, I know how to form the appropriate compliment. “How pretty!” I can say. Or “How like you.” “What nice eyes.” “What a pleasant smile.” Hip replacement presented more of a challenge, and I alternated between “I like the pin” and, simply, “Ouch.” On or about the fifth X-ray, I looked through a clear patch of plastic, past the front yard, and into the hills on the opposite side of the road, where another of our neighbors grazes his sheep. The flock had been shorn earlier that day, and those in view seemed oddly aware of how dumpy and vulnerable they looked.
“I have to go,” I said, and in the way of good neighbors the world over, Jackie said, “Stay, why don’t you? I was just going to make some coffee.”
A few weeks after that, he invited me in to look at his government-issued ID card.
“Oh, I don’t want to put you out.”
“Not at all,” he said, and two minutes later I found myself back at his kitchen table. The ID was in a bright plastic folder, the sort of thing that a young girl might carry. On the cover was a cartoon pony having his mane braided by a troop of friendly ladybugs.
I think I said, “All right, then.” Jackie opened the