I yank Chester off his pedestal and give him a punitive squeeze. At first I feel massive and powerful, like a Polyphemus in those old stop-action films grabbing Claymation mariners and biting their heads off. The exultation and the analogy are short-lived, however, for when I grip Chester he does not beg for mercy nor crumble into plastic dust, and when I insert his head into my mouth and clench down nothing gets severed, although my teeth do crack in a painful way.
Plan B is a dressing-down. You think you’re so cool, I tell him. You think you’re so cool because you’ve actually done something. But you’re just a piece of plastic. And you’re still an asshole. An English jerk. A bumlover.
Chester is unruffled by the pronouncement.
I give consumption another shot. I shove him as deep into my mouth as I can. His grape-sized head tickles my epiglottis and his legs protrude from my lips and I shake him violently like a dog with a rag in its jaws. This doesn’t produce a noticeable response in Chester but it does in me. The combination of Nix-laced toxins scouring my bloodstream and the way I am jiggling my braincase like a can of paint in a shaker generates a sudden irresistible urge to regurgitate, which I do, like a drunken cadet, in the sink.51
As this marks the inaugural puke of my whole life, I try not to reproach myself for my imperfect aim but I cannot help feeling generally negative about the whole enterprise. I am debating the merits of my InSinkErator vis-à-vis Chester’s head when I see something startling: the old sport is anatomically correctish. He has a meaningful bulge in his zipper zone that is, honest to God, precisely the size and shape of a Raisinet.
That sobers me up.
And it makes me realize Herk’s right. I don’t do anything. I just prevent. That’s what a pulse does: makes sure nothing happens. I’m a Sit Alone In a Dark Room guy. A Night In with a Book guy. I’m the guy who works up to the proposal and then shies away. “Do you know what that sound is?” I say from under the hood of the Reliant on the side of Lafayette. Then Charlie says, “What is it?” and I go, “Nothing.”
In short, a chicken.
Static cling.
A trouser void.
I can talk all the Joseph Campbell I like, but the final fact is: Raisinets.
While squirming with the discomfort of self-examination I catch sight of my reflection in the metal of the refrigerator. It hardly counts as a reflection—most people wouldn’t even register it as a blur—but I can see everything in excruciating detail. What I crave right now is some peppy outrage. A defiant, dauntless, possibly violent, You Looking at Me? moment. But instead of a raving De Niro staring back at me in the metal I see only a bobblehead of fear and cowardice and inertia.
Then I start feeling another, non-Nix tingling. It starts in my gut and spreads up my spine like a constrictor vine. It has heat. It has thrust and purpose. It is, I realize, anger. Motile anger. Resolute anger. Get-up-off-your-ass anger. Revolutionary anger. It’s not an exaggeration to say it is tumescent anger.