raw and bleeding, my knuckles popped open, but I could feel good about my defeat, because I suffered for it, just as I suffered when I wrote the book, with him hovering and judging over my shoulder, before he left. The guitar sits in the corner and my son tips it over with a musical thunk. Those vibrating strings remind me that all stringed instruments are the innards of animals, the true guts, I am strangling your guts. And for the first time since childhood, I say the words Fuck me, and it is such a needless, pleasurable release. Fuck me.
You are a prisoner of war, and you are given a choice: You must bury the person next to you. Bury him alive, in the sand, up to his neck, and leave him for the winged predators and insects and high tides. Do it, or it will be done to you. What if the person is your next-door neighbor, the one you could never tolerate, the one who
 | | would spit on the ground when he walked, not caring about the barefoot children playing nearby? Kill him, and you are safe. No one would notice. His family is probably already dead. When this is all over, everyone who knows him would likely be dead. It would be a secret, between you and your captors. And you have been bestowed with good fortune, to receive this order. You could have been the victim instead of the perpetrator. But mathematically speaking, it could just as easily have been reversed. So it really means only what you want it to mean, and the soldier in his burnished mustache is staring at you, eyes bulging like egg whites, ready to bark at you to do it now, and you think of how you could be here, of all the fates that could have befallen you, of all the places to have been born and lived and taken, of all the millions of probabilities that led you to this point. But this is sophistry -- you are here, you are experiencing
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