Give Me Your Hand

When I was a kid, I checked out Call of the Wild from the library and inside, on one of the chapter pages, someone had drawn, with sharply pointed pencil, the most meticulously detailed sketch of a swollen penis and an enveloping vagina. It vaguely terrified me and the worlds beneath it (Just one squeeze and...) even more so and for a few years, until I crossed the great divide myself, I couldn`t shake the idea of sex as being this contorted, ugly thing, a gaudy cartoon.
The big surprise came later when I learned the scariest part about sex wasn`t the swell and heave of body parts, its comic grotesquerie, but the shattering intimacy of all of it.
How it made you feel, in your shuttered-up heart.

Then Diane said the funniest thing.
"Except sometimes I see you walking your dogs," she said. "You`ve got your earbuds in and the dogs all tangled in your legs, and the way you`re walking, like... like there`s nothing in the world to worry about it. And I think, That`s what I want."
"But that can be you," I said. I was thinking of our bull mastiff, Grimm, and Fudge, our German shepherd, and Old Sam, the dog they were meant to replace. When my dad ran over Sam with his Mustang, I cried for three days. I thought I`d never stop crying, my face swollen and pink like an Easter Peep. "Anybody can do that," I told her.
It felt like she was seeing something in me that she wanted to, something I had that she didn`t. But it wasn`t really a thing I had, or a think I was. It was just part of being in the world, of living. You cared about things. People, animals. That was what you did.
"I`m going to try," she said. "I`m going to try to do that."

It`s like those moments when you catch yourself in a store window or a pair of smeary elevator doors without knowing it`s you. Or you see a picture of yourself you don`t recognize, an angle you`d never catch in life.
You know something`s wrong, but you can`t name it, place it. When I was a kid, my mom told me that Mr. Mott, the retired cop that lived down the street, died after slipping in the shower. A year later, I served Mr. Mott at the Golden fry. It turned out it was Mr. Mertz, the retired insurance agent, who`d died. But I stood there and handed Mr. Mott his chicken on a stick and it felt like I was talking to a dead man, or else a man who could never die.
When she turns, it`s like that. It`s like seeing a ghost, or worse.

At the lab, I feel better. I always do.
I label bottles. Clean my pH meter. The simplest of tasks, just to get my brain firing, to give me peace. I move as much as I can before drifting to the cell-culture room, where I will soon be hunkered down for hours at the fume hood, my back curled to a clamshell.
There is something beautiful in it. Like when I was little, when my parents were still raising our roof semiregularly, and I`d sit in my room and alphabetize all my books or align my pencils by length in their case. The Beanie Babies my mom always bought me from Rite Aid, their soft necks arched. The pair of bunnies, all ears at the same height, pink nubbins pointing straight.
If everything is ordered, maybe something momentous will happen. Like the relationship, however mysterious to others, between the molecular formula you`d write on the pace — C17H19ClF3NO, abstract, so much hieroglyphics — and the wild thing happening in front of your eyes, between your hands.
Nothing else could promise both things, could it? To be so ordered and so out of control.

You always wonder, when someone is trying so hard, what it`s really about. Whenever my dad started calling more or took me out for a surprise dinner at Benihana or sent me leopard-pom booties for Christmas as if I were twleve (or a stripper), it was always because he`d lost his job because his boss was jealous of him or he`d gotten married again to a woman he`d met at the OTB and, anyway, there would be no more monthly support checks forthcoming, and Maybe you could even talk to your mom about floating me a nickel? How 'bout a hundo?
Maybe, for Diane, working really hard was a way of crouching low in her grief, of staying under the radar. Of hiding.

One beer later, I`m on my hands and knees, digging through my closet to find the old milk crates and sunken file boxes from home.
I don`t have anything of hers. Nothing to document our friendship, if that`s what it was. There are a few senior-year mementos — a tasseled leather bookmark Ms. Castro gave me that sits forever in my copy of The Origin of Species, a beanbag bunny in a State U. sweatshirt, a graduation gift from the Ashleys — but none are from Diane. I didn`t ask her to sign my yearbook, which I find in the very back of a crate, wedged between my childhood teddybear, flat as a gingerbread man, and my diploma. We were no longer friends by graduatio.
The only piece of Diane I have — the one I`ve kept through countless cinder-block dorm rooms, sweaty, crusty-carpeted college co-ops, through university apartments with broke-back sectionals and the smell, always, of industrial glue — is the piece I`ll always have.
By which I mean the neural snag she left in my head, the mad drone of her toneless seventeen-year-old voice that long-ago night, the burned-into-my-brain image of her cross-legged on my twin-bed-in-a-bag comforter, purple paisley, as she told me her secret. And showed me what darkness was, and is, and how it works, and how it never goes away or ends.
Because the bad things you do become part of you, literally. This is no metaphor. They become part of you on a cellural level, in the blood.