Strange how the demons do their work. With that fragile life sleeping against me, and two more dark-haired creatures close beside, and riding a run of good luck like I’d never known, my mind traveled along the ridges of its flying-fear, bumped and tilted, flipped upside down, and crashed into Brian. It occurred to me for the first time that he might have done some great heroic thing in the last minutes of his life, to make up for the not-so-great things he’d done before that. Alright, a voice in me said, let it go now. Let it be true. Let it go.
The atolls coasted along in their dreamy, improbable stillness. Beside me I thought I heard a cough. I turned-too quickly-and her dark eyes held an expression that no one could paint. Don’t worry, they said. Just an ordinary breath, a good ordinary puff of life, part mine and part yours and part someone else’s. Be happy while we can.
Book One
1
MY YEAR OF MOURNING was over, and I decided to mark the anniversary by treating myself to a doughnut.
By my own choice, I had not had sex with anyone during those twelve months. I’m not sure why I did that. Maybe it was out of respect for the woman I had lost, though she wouldn’t have wanted anything like that from me. My older brother is a monk, so maybe I was trying to prove I could keep up with him in the abstinence department. Or maybe I was just afraid I would meet someone I liked and sleep with her, then start to think about her all the time, then start to want to have children with her, and then she would be torn away from me and spirited off to some better world-if there is a better world-and that is not the kind of thing you want to go through twice in one year.
So on that wet September night my year of abstinence was finished, and I went out looking for a doughnut as a sort of offbeat celebration. That’s all, really. A doughnut says: Listen, for your eighty-five cents I’m going to give you a quick burst of feel-good. No soul connection. No quiet walks. No long foreplay sessions in a warm one-bedroom. No extinction of aloneness. No jealousy. No fights. No troubles. No risk.