You Said: “How — I Don’t Ask”

Under the yellow light of the corner store Craig stands with a face that “wasn’t a face” and says: “He knows. About the recording. About the forty seconds. That it was you.” “He didn’t ask. He said: it was her. I said: her.” “YOU IDIOT!” — in a voice she did not know she had. “I said scare him! Show him forty seconds!” “I didn’t ask you to beat him up!” — “You said: ‘How — I don’t ask.’” She shoves him with both hands, “to make anything at all move.” He does not move, and he looks at her “guiltily — the guilty look of a dog that doesn’t understand what it did wrong.”

This is the formula from chapter twenty-three returning to its author. Delegated violence is arranged so that the client receives the result without seeing the process; but the process happens all the same, and one day it comes back in the form of a battered face that speaks in your own words. “That’s not what I told you!” is true: she said “scare him,” “Nothing irreversible.” And at the same time it is untrue: “how — you don’t ask” meant precisely “do whatever it takes, just don’t tell me about it.” Craig here neither excuses himself nor attacks — he reports, and that is the most terrible thing in it for her: the executor turned out to be exact. The responsibility for what the hands you bought do cannot be handed over along with the instructions. Priscilla learns this in the same minute as something else: Jacob knows — and he will not turn to her again.