I asked for another shot. He poured it, and the man on the floor receded, maybe said something more or maybe he didn’t. But I still didn’t care, and maybe the three men in the corner playing a clumsy game of cutthroat pool snickered at him or maybe they didn’t. Main thing was, they didn’t come near me the whole rest of the night.

In the car later, under a contaminated gray-green sky, my back ached, but my shoulders were worse: that brittle shooting stab that, like random veins of lightning, wandered places unexpected and new each time. Sitting was worse than standing for my leg, something wrong with the nerves, like someone had run an iron rod through it, but leg pain I was more familiar with by then.

You never know every part of yourself because you never encounter yourself in all situations. But I’d come closer. I was a wounded beast. A creature that hurt all over. The pain cascaded, reached crescendo, lowered to a murderous hum and shudder, but never left. I could not contain it and had to live within it. I saw through it, worked through it, because I had to, because I thought I still had a purpose.

Maybe I could blame the pain for how I was a different person since the warehouse, since the balcony. Maybe not. But I wanted to kill someone. Anyone who came across my path and looked at me the wrong way.

Back in the old days, they claimed salamanders were born in fire, born to fire. That if you touched one, you, too, would be consumed by flames. But unlike the salamander, you wouldn’t survive the encounter. That a poison lived in the conflagration.

I was so much on fire all the time, I should’ve died.

[69]

Even in pain, even in a kind of limbo, I knew what felt right. I knew I felt right. More myself, even if I couldn’t define “my self.” Why should I be more comfortable in grubby diners or bars in the middle of nowhere? Did it seem more authentic than my life before?

No, it was more that all the things I thought I’d enjoyed … I hadn’t. Not really. Stripped down, I saw I’d enjoyed almost nothing and, in the end, needed so much less than I’d had. How the idea of “husband” faded, even if the idea of “daughter” didn’t. How I couldn’t tell if that was due to different kinds of guilt or just a frank admission. I wasn’t a dandelion. He wasn’t a bear. We just called each other those things in hopes the sentiment was true.