Return to the city necessitated a proper job. Packing up at Citadel in ’41, he already suspected that a job meant being chipped. It was routine; everyone said so. Like applying for a Social Security number. A bureaucratic matter, a relatively painless, pro forma protocol of the modern day. Thus Willing had not considered the inevitability of the procedure with sufficient seriousness. He had been lulled by what was regular, by what was expected and customary. No doubt all ages have their usual things, about which no one at the time thinks twice. Their leeches and bloodletting, their homosexual “cures,” their children’s workhouses and debtors’ prisons. When drowning in the is-ness of the widely accepted present, it must be hard to tell the difference—between traditions like burying your dead and having dinner at 8 p.m. and other, just as mesmerizingly normative conventions that later will leap out to posterity as offenses against the whole human race. Maybe he was letting himself off the hook. He’d had misgivings, after all. Yet it is always challenging to choose otherwise when you are informed in no uncertain terms that there is no choice to make.
When Willing was small, people made a great brouhaha over pedophilia, and sexual abuse of any kind. His mother had taken him aside with a formality that wasn’t like her when he was four or five. She knelt with a maudlin solicitation that made his skin crawl. Her voice dropped into a timbre both stern and over-tender. He should never allow adults to touch him in his “private places.” That expression was not like her, either. She had always been a straight shooter. If she wanted to refer to his dick or his asshole, she called them precisely that. Which is how he recognized that her mind had been contaminated by a communicable virus. The “private places” lecture was repulsive. It made him feel dirty. It made him recoil from his mother in an instinctive dislike that was singular.
In those days, playing outside was forbidden. Employees at daycare centers were required to get criminal-record checks. All scoutmasters were suspect. No one ever seemed to care if you were a murderer. Murderers were let out of prison and blended right back into the neighborhood. They could live wherever they wanted. Sex criminals were marked for life—shuttled from hostels to underpasses, and required to report their whereabouts, which were posted on the web—the better for local parents to start picketing campaigns to have the filth evicted. The no-go radius around schools and playgrounds widened every year. It was worse to be a rapist than a killer. By inference, rather than be raped, you were better off dead.
Willing did not want to return to the preoccupation with “private places.” It didn’t bother him that sex had grown incidental. He and Fifa enjoyed it, but he didn’t see what all the fuss was once about, and most of the time they were too tired. Dispensing with the business in private was more efficient.
Yet long after the larger social conversation had moved on, hovering over new fixations like a cloud shadowing other parts of town, he finally appreciated what they’d been talking about when he was a boy. It wasn’t, probably, as bad as being murdered—though he’d never been murdered so he couldn’t say. But it was horrific all the same. It was like being murdered and living through it. And you could remember not only the violence but the dying part. You have survived your own death but you have still died, whereas usually survival means not dying after all. He was certain this was what had occasioned the hushed tones, the kneeling, the deep warning strangeness from his mother in his childhood. She had kept him safe, for years thereafter, but she was gone now and couldn’t protect him, so that when he was twenty-five it happened and all those teachers and counselors and moderators of school assemblies—it turned out they hadn’t been exaggerating after alclass="underline" Willing was raped.
That was the only word he had for it, a word he did not, therefore, use to anyone else, not even to Fifa. The very word, as it applied to the experience, in addition to recollection of the experience itself, was stored in a “private place.” The stasis with which he was now afflicted six years later, that pessimism about whether there was even anywhere to go were he to suddenly discover an ambition to get there, this heavy unmoving sameness—he couldn’t help but wonder whether it was all related to having been raped. He wasn’t sure what he’d been like before. Clinically, as reliable biographical information, he could recall a deep sense of belonging at Citadel. The big round-table dinners. The loamy exhaustion after milking cows and slopping hogs. A gathering fondness for a group of people several of whom were very different from him—which made the emotion more of an achievement. A fondness for each person yet also for whatever the combination of them made together, which was more than the sum of parts. Yet since this numbness had descended, he could summon only the fact of the warmth; he could not inhabit the warmth itself.
He tried not to rehearse it (though the memory would intrude, when he was unguarded, falling asleep or not yet woken). He was still more disciplined about not discussing it. Virtually everyone else had been through the same thing. Thus, or so went the reasoning, there was nothing to say. This most minor of medical indignities was less of an ordeal than getting your teeth cleaned. Any expression of his distress would be interpreted as Willing Mandible being a big baby. Indeed, even newborns were now subject to the same procedure within their first hour in the world. Granted, some parents had expressed concern that infants might find the operation painful, traumatizing, a rude introduction. But physicians had reassured the public. The local anesthetic was skillfully targeted. The foreign object was the size of a pinhead. A mere poke would be more painful, a squeeze, even. Parents were far better off anguishing over male circumcision, now roundly discouraged. Willing envied the newborns. The real trauma had little to do with physical torment. A baby’s clean slate would preclude any horror over what the “foreign object” was for.
Since he was eight years old, Willing had understood that most systems worked badly. It was a surprise to discover in his young adulthood that they could also work too well.
He had recently moved back to East Fifty-Fifth Street. Of a lesser order, the return also entailed a violation. The house had been occupied by strangers for nine years. Their alien residue was everywhere—dirty shirts, empty liquor bottles, syringes. More upsetting was the familiar—cups his mother had lovingly washed in gray water salvaged in the plastic tub year after year, now chipped, missing handles. Nary a plate or a bowl he’d grown up with wasn’t broken or cracked. Comically, remnants of Avery’s raids on Walgreens, Staples, and Home Depot remained. He continued to come across the odd packet of L-braces, a half-used bottle of Gorilla Glue, a scatter of multicolored paperclips in the basement. From the ripped-open packaging, he construed that someone had actually availed themselves of the toenail fungus kits. The closets had been rummaged. The few leftover shreds of his mother’s wardrobe were speckled with mildew. Her beloved Bed Bath & Beyond laundry hamper, emblem of Esteban’s devotion, had been moved to the kitchen for use as a garbage pail, and smelled. The cleaning job alone was arduous, and underneath the scum and the dust lurked deeper structural issues. A pervasive dampness was ominous. Oh, Florence Darkly—you and your obsession with shabby waterproofing.
From the start, he knew the variety of employment widely available: home health aide placements, health insurance and billing, design and maintenance of healthcare websites, answering healthcare help lines, medical device manufacture, service of medical devices, medical transport, medical research, pharmaceutical manufacture, pharmaceutical research, pharmaceutical advertising, hospital laundry, hospital catering, hospital administration, hospital construction, and work in assisted-living establishments that served every level of decrepitude from mildly impaired to moribund. Like so many his age, he was a high school dropout. That ruled out neurosurgery.