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“What?” Jack says. “You’ve been unfocused the whole day.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Don’t waste time.”
Jack hates nonanswers; Evan should have known better.
“My lower back’s stiff,” he says. “That’s all.”
Jack gestures with the tumbler, whiskey threatening to swish over the side. “Get up and stretch. Dangling pose, yin style.”
Evan obeys, folding over his legs so his chest rests against his thighs and his butt sticks up in the air. He pictures his head as a bowling ball pulling on his spinal column, opening up new spaces.
“Set aside the pain,” Jack says. “Let itbe. But don’t let it run you.”
Evan’s legs are shaking, but he holds the pose, lets his head grow heavier so his spine elongates, his crown moving millimeter by millimeter closer to the floor.
After a few minutes, Jack snaps his fingers. “Roll up now—”
Evan’s voice, muffled against his jeans, joins Jack’s: “—one vertebra at a time.”
Evan comes vertical and then sits once more.
Jack studies him a moment and then snaps the book shut, releasing a puff of dust. He sets it on the ledge of the armrest: reading time over.
Evan feels it then, that flicker of human connection when Jack opens himself up a crack and lets him in.
Jack waves a hand at the wall of books. “Battle-testing,” he says. “That’s what we’re doing here. For what’s coming.”
Evan tries to eradicate the fear from his voice. “Whatiscoming?”
“You’re gonna get beaten and battered and you’re gonna look evil in the face. When you do, it won’t always look like evil. Sometimes it looks like …” Jack tugs at his mouth, callused fingers rasping over his stubble. “Power. Someone understanding the infinity of human options more than you and using that to hurt others. It’ll beterrifying. It’ll mess you up worse than drownproofing or choke holds or enhanced interrogation. Because it’ll get inside you, down deep in the marrow. But you can’t let it stop you.”
Evan’s grown to trust Jack enough to risk showing weakness in front of him. “What if it does?”
Jack gives the question some thought, weighing the heft of it. That’s what Evan respects in him most; he doesn’t serve up ready-made answers like most adults. Finally he says, “When you get stuck, remember that you can deal with physical issues intellectually and intellectual issues emotionally. You can work out emotional issues psychologically and psychological issues spiritually. Those are the spokes of the wheel—one breaks, you can use another to fix it.”
“I don’t get it. How am I supposed to solve one kind of problem another way?”
“How’s your back?”
Evan shifts from side to side. It feels surprisingly loose. “Better.”
“How’s your brain? Such as it is?”
Evan cracks a smile. “Better.”
“There you go.”
“Oh,” Evan says. And then, “Oh.”
Jack takes a weary pause, shadow catching in the texture beneath his eyes. “The emotional spoke will be toughest, because you’ve had a lotta rough road behind you and I’ve gotta put a lot more rough road ahead of you. That’s just how it has to be.”
Evan nods. “Okay.”
“We’re making you into anactualRenaissance man. Not one of your anti-intellectual street thugs or some dandy Ivy Leaguer. We want all the knowledge with none of the pretention.Mens corpus animus.”
The whole thing feels suddenly, crushingly overwhelming. Evan takes a breath. “How the hell am I supposed to do all that? I’m just some throwaway foster kid from East Baltimore.”
