American Purgatorio by John Haskell Page B

of him, growing inside of him, as if, if it were possible, he was pregnant. The man saw where I was looking and before I could speak he said to me, “I can’t get rid of it.” He looked down at the thing he had down there and patted it.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said.
    â€œWhy?” the man said.
    â€œIt’s pretty big,” I said.
    â€œI know,” the man said, and rested his hand on top of it.
    â€œIs it painful?” I said.
    â€œFeel,” he said, smiling. “Feel it.” And he swiveled on his stool. He wanted me to feel his stomach.
    â€œI can see,” I said. “That looks pretty good.”
    I saw no need to touch his stomach, but he wanted me to feel it. He reached out, grabbed my hand, and held it, in his. He was holding my hand and I didn’t know quite what would be the appropriate thing to say, so I started explaining to the man about the neurological foundation of pain. I told him it was all in the mind. I explained that when you touch something, you have sensations, but those sensations aren’t pain unless you think they are. “Thinking makes it so,” I said, and I told the man he could have control. I told him that his body was a vehicle.
    The man nodded, then guided my hand between the buttons of his shirt. He placed my hand against his taut, damp belly. It was moving with his breathing, up and down, and he pressed it there, or I pressed it there, against his belly, for what seemed like a long time.
    And then I pulled my hand away. I slid my bowl of half-finished soup in front of him. I stood up and looked at the man, thinking the man would be looking at me, but he wasn’t. He was drinking his tea. A song about sexual healing was playing on a radio. I wanted to say something to him, and finally, when he did look up, I said something like “Good luck” or “See you later.” And then I walked out. I walked about a block down the street and I realized I was still feeling it. It was still there. I could still feel this person’s belly on my hand.

III
    ( Invidia )

1.
    Just as a person who buys a new pair of shoes notices other people’s shoes, so I was noticing cars. The rest of the day I spent driving around Lexington, around the public housing projects, the vacant lots, the liquor stores, and the “revitalized” downtown, watching cars and the people getting in and out of cars. The people were living their lives, or seemed to be, doing what they could do, given the circumstances they had.
    My own circumstances were starting to feel used up. My intuition, which I’d been using to find Anne, or thought I’d been using, was gone. And even if I’d had a full supply, all the intuition in the world wouldn’t find her if she didn’t want to be found. She was the one who’d left me, and if, in fact, she didn’t want me to find her, even if she was still here somewhere (which she probably wasn’t), there was nothing I could do.
    I realized I was going about this whole thing all wrong. I’d been trying to find this thing, and since the best way to find something is to stop looking so hard, I decided to stop looking for Anne. Let’s be realistic, I thought, and I turned my attention to the most realistic thing I had, or the most salient realistic thing I had: my teeth. They were covered in a film of day-old plaque from not brushing. So after about an hour of driving I turned onto a road called Circle Road or Loop Road, driving past the motels and strip malls lining the road, looking for a drugstore. It was my habit now to scan the streets and parking lots, so I also did that, looking for something that by this time had become a little hazy in my mind. It wasn’t hard to find a mall, a so-called megamall, filled with music and escalators and a big-brand drugstore. I walked into the upbeat music of the drugstore, bought some toothpaste, and when I walked back out into the parking