“My Place” and “Chosen”

“Pack your things… You’re coming to my place. Tonight… I’m not leaving you here anymore. Not for a single night” — “Not a question.” Simon remembers the car: there, the “no” about the apartment and the doorman was heard. “This was different… This was ‘my place,’ said into his hair, with skinned hands, by a man who had just stood with his arm raised and stopped at the sound of Simon’s voice.” That cold thing, his own — “who decides where I live” — should have risen. “It didn’t rise. Or it rose — and didn’t get there. He was shaking, and he was being held, and the words ‘my place’ lay so close in all of this to the word ‘chosen’ that he couldn’t pull them apart.” “He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say anything. He held on to the shirt.”

Here the codex is obliged to be precise: a person who has just been beaten, who has lived through an attack and who is being held cannot make decisions about where he is going to live — and the book knows this, which is why Simon does not say “yes.” The decision is made for him, from the best of motives and in the right direction (staying in this house tonight really is impossible) — and still it is once again Jacob’s decision, spoken as an order. The difference from the car is not in the words but in the state: in the car Simon had something “cold, his own”; here it “didn’t get there.” This is what is called vulnerability after trauma: the boundaries a person knows how to hold when calm are temporarily unavailable, and the other person’s decency is measured by whether he takes advantage of that. What Simon takes with him says more than any “yes”: the notebook, the backpack — and a gray T-shirt, “not his.” “Which one?” — “Yours.”