Maybe he unscrewed the bulb from his apartment ceiling so that passersby would not believe a giant firefly was pulsing its electric abdomen in 13 B. Maybe, as he stood two inches from the wall, in darkness, fogging the old plaster with his breath, he visualized the future as a mansion standing on the shore that he was rowing to with his tongue's exhausted oar. Sometimes we are asked to get good at something we have no talent for, or we excel at something we will never have the opportunity to prove. Often we ask ourselves to make absolute sense out of what just happens, and in this way, what we are practicing is suffering, which everybody practices, but strangely few of us grow graceful in. The climaxes of suffering are complex, costly, beautiful, but secret. Bruce never played the light switch again.
Mothers add more blankets to the bed.
Yellow lights in windows of the junior high mean that night school is back in session, tired grown-ups sitting at the plastic desks, learning to bisect the hypotenuse, how to say spreadsheet in Japanese. But the congressmen can't pull the trigger on his own tongue to fire out the word without tripping over it-fumbling, stumbling into the ditch between home and sexual. You might say his defense industry is troubled, as if he had a subterranean suspicion that to say it might mean, just a little, to become it- which might be right, since language uses us the way that birds use sky, the way that seeds and viruses braid themselves into a mammal's fur and hitchhike toward the future. Tonight, all over Washington, senators in mirrors will practice until they are as fluent saying homosexual as they already are at saying Mr. President, and first-strike option. Sometimes we think the truth is the worst thing that could happen but the truth is not the worst thing that could happen.