The Abstraction Had No Peeling Paint

The farther from campus, the lower the houses and the blanker the fences; Jacob looks at the neighborhood “the way you look at a country you only knew existed from the news.” Then — a peeling facade, trash cans by the porch, grass through the cracks in the path. “For all those years the address had been an abstraction to him: the place Simon disappeared to after class. The abstraction hadn’t had peeling paint.” And there are no words — “not expensive ones, not simple ones, none at all.”

Violence is easiest to commit against someone who has no home, no family, no mornings and evenings — against a function, “the freak with the notebooks.” To see another person’s life whole is to lose the ability not to notice that you were beating a living human being. Add to this the language of money: Jacob can only apologize with a check — “his father settled things with a check, his mother with silence; in their house apologies didn’t exist as a genre.” Simon takes that language away from him (the “Don’t” about the bike), and for the first time Jacob stands before another person’s pain without a single tool. This is where the real conversation begins — fingers on a sleeve, “not by the wrist — by the fabric,” and a car that stays at the door “one second, another, a third.”