@@@@@I counted my steps backThe total 660
@@@@@I counted my steps backThe total was
thirty-eightBy then my hip was throbbingI was
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more than ready to go in, grab a yogurt cup from
the fridge, and see if the cable TV worked as well
as Jack Cantori claimed
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And that became my morning routine: orange juice,
walk, yogurt, current eventsI became quite
chummy with Robin Meade, the young woman who
anchors Headline News from six to ten AMBoring
routine, right? But the surface events of a
country laboring under a dictatorship can appear
boring, too - dictators like boring, dictators
love boring - even as great changes are
approaching beneath the surface
A hurt body and mind aren't just like a
dictatorship; they are a dictatorshipThere is no
tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as
confusionThat my mind had been as badly hurt as
my body was a thing I only came to realize once I
was alone and all other voices dropped awayThe
fact that I had tried to choke my wife of twentyfive
years for doing no more than trying to wipe
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the sweat off my forehead after I told her to
leave the room was the very least of itThe fact
that we hadn't made love a single time in the
months between the accident and the separation,
didn't even try, wasn't at the heart of it, either,
although I thought it was suggestive of the larger
problemEven the sudden and distressing bursts of
anger weren't at the heart of the matter
That heart was a kind of pulling-awayI don't
know how else to describe itMy wife had come to
seem like someoneMost of the people in
my life also felt other, and the dismaying thing
was that I didn't much careIn the beginning I
had tried to tell myself that the otherness I felt
when I thought about my wife and my life was
probably natural enough in a man who sometimes
couldn't even remember the name of that thing you
pulled up to close your pants - the zoomer, the
zimmer, the zippity-doo-dahI told myself it
would pass, and when it didn't and Pam told me she
wanted a divorce, what followed my anger was
reliefBecause now that other feeling was okay to
have, at least toward herNow she really was
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otherShe'd taken off the Freemantle uniform and
quit the team
During my first weeks on Duma, that sense of
otherness allowed me to prevaricate easily and
fluentlyI answered letters and e-mails from
people like Tom Riley, Kathi Green, and William
Bozeman III - the immortal Bozie - with short
jottings (I'm fine, the weather's fine, the bones
are mending) that bore little resemblance to my
actual lifeAnd when their communications first
slowed and then stopped, I wasn't s
