As If Simon Had Slipped Up

Throat bare, jacket somewhere in the back, the lights on red. “Craig. At his place. Now” — three words going around in a circle, “and nothing fit between them.” And inside that circle, for the first time, responsibility is laid out correctly: “He hadn’t picked up the first call” — he had sat there counting off dessert and keeping his father’s rule. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll deal with it” — and off he went to get fitted for a tux. “Said ‘stay away from him,’ as if Simon were the one who needed to keep his distance. As if Simon were the one who’d let something slip.” He knew Craig — “knew how Craig stood over someone on the floor, because he had stood right next to him and laughed.”

This is the first moment in the book when Jacob does not look for someone to blame outside himself: not Simon, who “behaved wrong,” not Craig, who “overdid it,” but he himself — he kept quiet about the name, decided not to decide, obeyed the voice at the table. But look where this knowledge goes: not into words, but into the gas pedal and into “Don’t” — don’t call the police — “I’ll get there faster.” Guilt that a person does not know how to hold is immediately converted into action — any action, so long as he does not have to sit with it. Twenty minutes later it will turn into a fist. Guilt read correctly is not yet responsibility; responsibility begins where it can be borne without striking.