It Would Begin Now
“He would take Simon's silence from him as he always had — because that was why people came to witnesses.” Jacob sits down on the edge of the bed, and Simon already knows how it continues: now Jacob will explain what to say, make him memorize the version, take his silence “as he always had.” He braces in advance — for the fist in his hair, the fingers around his throat, the flick against his forehead. This is not fantasy but a forecast built on three years of data. A traumatized psyche lives not in the present but in the most probable past.
Such forecasts save energy and protect against surprise, but they have a price: they cannot notice that the script has changed. Jacob says nothing — for a long time — and that silence frightens Simon more than words would, because nothing in the script provides for it. When reality fails to match expectation, the body does not rejoice — it panics, and the monitor is “broadcasting his condition to the entire room.” The first thing both of them will have to learn is to bear the unplanned.
