Alive Only Near Him

This is the most honest sentence Jacob produces in the whole chapter — and he says it only with his body. The emptiness that neither victories nor admiration can fill retreats in exactly one situation: when Simon is near. Contact with him is the only thing Jacob genuinely feels.

But the only language of contact he owns is force. So the need for closeness comes out as violence: he returns “again and again” not for Simon’s pain but for his own aliveness. This is not an excuse — it is a diagnosis of the mechanism: cruelty here stands in for everything he was never taught.