Power Comes as a Surprise

Like a bad scene from amateur short stories, we sat in the dark, except for the static of the TV. The VCR had shut itself off long before, stopping the A/V feed. The stereo was on, playing a compilation of the songs that had spoken to him over the years. After two six-packs, he was hydrated enough to let his eyes water at the memory behind a few of the tracks.

I sat in the corner of the couch, under a thin, old, yellow blanket. I hugged a ribbed, dusky green pillow absently, and watched the man next to me disintegrate.

He'd told me once, or maybe a few times, how to hit a man in a fight. "You duck, move to his opposite side--that's to your left if he's a Southpaw, so he has to move across his body. He'll have lost most of the power by the time he reaches you. And then I get 'em about here--" He stops his formed fist about five inches from me. "And I push through." He stands up out of his fighting posture. "The look of, just, surprise, and 'Oh my God I've fucked with the wrong dude this time' is, just, hilarious. It's great. 'Cause they seen this little guy and think they can fuck with me, but then I hit 'em just once, and they start thinking."

At one point he's tallied his fights at about six hundred. He's proud he still has all his own teeth. He's proud he's still standing. He's outlived many of his neighborhood buddies, and even more of his neighborhood's bullies. It seems to me that every time he tells me about a fight, his power comes as a surprise.

Halfway through the CD, I decide to go to bed. There are two more beers in the refrigerator, and he will inevitably finish them both off before he thinks about sleeping.

I want to say to him, "You could have been so much more, and you could have gone to war, like you'd always wanted. But you chose the streets instead of the Service, you chose gangs instead of becoming a real soldier." Nine of the sixteen songs are about going to war, surviving war, the glories of war. Pamphlets for the Marines and the French Foreign Legion are scattered around the studio apartment, thumbed through and set back down countless times.

I choose to say nothing at all, though. I start to get up and his eyes focus on me clearly for a moment. He reaches for my hand and I put it in his. Pulling me back down next to him, then on his lap, I let myself be arranged, my hair clumsily pushed away from my face. I tell him I need to sleep, that I'm tired, and he lets his head fall back on the sofa, on the faded floral print of the cover. Passing cars make patterns on the ceiling, between the brown water stains of the last two years. When I hear his breathing even out I take the beer bottle and put it on the end table. The growing raspiness of his snoring is my cue. I get up and pull his arm over my shoulder. His head lolls down as I walk him the few steps to the twin mattress. Under the two old blankets, he curls against the wall, and drifts deeper into sleep with the last song, a medley of bagpipes.

The high whine of the stereo, having run out of music, rings in my ears behind the rhythmic roar of his sleep. I am still awake. In the dark, I get up, I pack, and I put my bag by the door. When I wake up in the morning wrapped in two thin blankets and a thick, muscled arm, my power comes as a surprise.