Free Affliction by Russell Banks

and got up the stairs without anyone’s seeming to notice him and walked slowly down the long hallway to his office and let himself into the darkened room.
    Crossing to the window, he sat down in the chair Jill had dragged over from the desk, and he looked out the window at the parking lot below, the few remaining cars there, the one or two stragglers walking down the lane toward the road. He saw a Chevy sedan with raucous exhausts and a load of kids careen past, and he thought about all the damage the kids in town had done in the last few hours—minor damage, most of it, easily repaired, easily forgotten, but more than irritating. Even though they had done nothing to him, had destroyed or vandalized nothing of his, he could not keep himself from taking their acts personally, somehow, and he felt his stomachtighten with resentment. He tried to remember how he had felt when he was a kid doing that kind of damage on Halloween Eve, but he could not remember any of it, at least no more than the fact of it—that he and his friends and his older brothers and later his younger brother, Rolfe, had indeed in an organized way caused a considerable amount of damage around town. Why? he wondered. What were we so pissed at? Why are all these kids so damned mad? It is like the kids want to attack us adults for something that they think we did to them way back or something that we are going to do to them now first chance we get, but they are scared of us, so they wait until Halloween and they do it this way, making it look legitimate and almost legal.
    Below him, LaRiviere’s silver head exited from the door, with his large body following, and behind him came the Merritts and the others. LaRiviere waited until they had passed and then he locked the door, and together the group strolled down the path, their breath coming from their mouths in small white clouds as they walked. Wade heard the car doors open and thunk shut, saw the headlights come on, watched the cold cars one by one leave the lot and drive away.
    Then he was alone in the town hall, sitting in darkness upstairs by his office window. For the first time that day, he felt good, he told himself. All those plans; then the fears and worries and arguments and explanations that follow: it never seemed to change for him. He lit a cigarette and smoked it down and told himself again that he felt good. A few seconds passed, and the back of his bottom jaw began to throb with low-level pain; it was palpable but with very little heat, and it did not bother him much. He knew, though, that as the night wore on, it would get worse and then worse until the toothache would be the only thing he could think of, the only thing that could abide in his mind.

4
    ONE MIGHT LEGITIMATELY ask how, from my considerable distance in place and time from the events I am describing, I can know all that I am claiming to be a part of my brother’s story. How can I know what Wade said to Jill and she to him when they were alone in his office? How can I know what Wade thought about Hettie and Jack out there in the parking lot by the town hall, or who won the costume contest? Who indeed?
    And the answer, of course, is that I do not, in the conventional sense, know many of these things. I am not making them up, however. I am imagining them. Memory, intuition, interrogation and reflection have given me a vision, and it is this vision that I am telling here.
    I grew up in the same family and town as Wade, side by side with him, practically, until I was eighteen years old, so that when I yanked myself away from both, I took huge chunks of them with me. Over the years, family and town have changed very little, and my memories of them, which are vivid, detailed, obsessive—as befits the mind of one who has extricated himself from his past with the difficulty that I have—arereliable and richly associative, exfoliating, detail upon detail, like a crystal compulsively elaborating its own