Just Being There

Jacob arrives and does what he has never done: he doesn’t pull him up, doesn’t shout, doesn’t drag him to the car. He sits down beside him on the dirty asphalt. “Who” — without a question mark. “Not Craig.” And the fury has nowhere to go: “That man couldn’t be hit in a corridor in front of everyone, couldn’t be frightened with the factory, couldn’t be taken apart.” Every tool he ever solved things with fails here — “for the first time his hands were no good to him.” He sits with those useless hands and learns “just being there.” He isn’t “very good at it”: his shoulder is tense, as before a fight. But he sits.

Presence without action is the most underrated skill in helping: a person’s nervous system settles beside another calm nervous system, not because of solutions. “It was the first silence of theirs in which nobody was hitting anybody” — that is what the author singles out, not the kiss. The hand raised “slowly, along a long arc, in Simon’s sight” touches the bruise “along the very border, without crossing it” — the same lesson as in the bedroom, but now without the power “sweeter than the old kind.” Pizza, a movie — “simple things ordinary people do.” For Simon it is the first invitation into ordinariness, and it works more strongly than any “mine.”