Not Out of Pride. Out of Arithmetic

With blood in his eye and ribs that “wouldn’t let him” breathe, Simon counts the passing cars, “because counting was easier than thinking,” runs his tongue over his teeth — “All there. That mattered, he didn’t know why” — and comes back to one of Craig’s words: “mailman.” “Somebody gave it to you. So somebody has it… I leave. And they still have it.” “You’re promising nobody will see it. You can’t promise that. It’s not yours.” And Craig does not answer right away — “The pause was short, one breath, but it was there.” “I’m not bargaining. I’m asking who’s making the promise.”

Under blows a person usually loses the ability to think; Simon holds on to it with what we saw in the previous chapter — a silence that cannot be taken away — and takes the next step: he turns the silence into a question. This is not bravado and not bargaining. It is exact calculation: “he couldn’t hand the one decision that was still his to a man who didn’t even know what he was promising. Not out of pride. Out of arithmetic.” Recall “A Straight Line Across the Courtyard” and “Fear Is Caring About Tomorrow”: there, fearlessness was a symptom of the absence of a future. Here, for the first time, it is the reverse — Simon refuses to leave because he is counting the consequences, that is, because he has a tomorrow. Craig hears in this “You think you’re smart.” It is something else: a person who is being beaten behaves, for the first time, like a party to a negotiation and not like an object.