There Was Nowhere for Him to Fall

Forty seconds on a cracked screen: a windowless room, bandages on the wrists, a flat voice — “That’s how we play,” “He and I threw a party.” The words that in the hospital room were “a gift he didn’t deserve” are now evidence in the pocket of the man who has just wiped his hands on him. “The most private night of his life now sat on someone else’s screen, like the cola video. He had learned to live with the cola video. With this, he didn’t know how.” And Simon hears what Craig hasn’t said: it isn’t him on the recording. “If this got shown, it wouldn’t be Simon who burned. Simon was already sitting on the floor — there was nowhere for him to fall. The one who would burn was the one sitting in that recording with bandaged wrists, lying for him.”

The threat of outing is a particular kind of violence: it strikes not the one being exposed but the one who has a surname, a team, a father. Beaten, blood running from his eyebrow, Simon’s first move is to count someone else’s losses — “It’s the end of him. Not me. Him.” — and this is not nobility but the old habit of disappearing for another’s sake (see “Taking Him Away — From Him”). Craig knows where to hit: “You leave — nothing happens to him; he goes back to being who he was. It’s easier for everyone that way.” “It’s easier for everyone that way” is the oldest lie told to victims, and it works precisely on those who have already learned to think of themselves as empty space.