Free An Honest Ghost by Rick Whitaker

thought antisocial, he was not aloof because he was indifferent or antipathetic, but because he was so profoundly affected by others that he could not easily locate the boundaries between their expectations and his own.
    “You don’t know him,” David exclaimed. He had his grand manner on. “I wish we could sometimes hear some positive praise of our little boy.” This, he insisted, would be solace. “Poor boy! he’s got to live,” David asserted with the humility of an employer who feels that he himself is to blame. “You won’t believe what he’s got me doing.”
    At the risk of unwarranted ghoulishness, I cannot suppress a final irony. David drank slowly but steadily whenever possible. He was a man doomed to suffer. It had brought out the worst in him, and no one saw this more clearly than Eleanor. The Romantic is nearly always a rebel. Etc., etc., etc. I suppose it is easy to understand how this topic can become such a volatile one. The sex with him was pure sorcery as always, but there was a new element in it of savagery and despair, and more than once I got a sharp disturbing whiff of awful finality in his actions. Desire was his crime, he saw.
    Seeing Dick Cheney looming up on the television screen with that weird lust in his eyes and bits of brain matter in the cracks of his teeth might accidentally be diagnosed as dementia. Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another. Television is a mystery. The vivid rhetoric of terror was a first step in the slow process toward American Democracy. “Don’t lose your temper,” said Joe. “He should have come out of the closet years ago like everybody else, and then he wouldn’t have to do all that compensating.” You took the words out of my mouth. I’m getting so I can’t bear the sight of newspapers. Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. History makes me numb.
    I thought: “My son will be hurt.” I am all emptiness and futility. There is no such thing as inner peace.
    Must be the war news.
    It’s right before Christmas, and I’m feeling very anxious.
    “Dad,” he says. “Don’t worry.”
    “O.K., O.K.” I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you.
    My dear child, your father will need you.

29.
    David introduced me to a man named Roy Hardeman. He was not good-looking, but his policeman’s uniform, and the idea that he was a policeman, excited me. It was a new, glamorous world. In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting. Or was I wrong about that?
    I stared at him, holding my breath. He was tall and strongly built, his face rather pale. He had a huge hairless head. In his left ear he wore a gold earring: a snake swallowing its tail. He’s a former pro boxer, and once had a fight in Mississippi where he kicked his opponent in the scrotum when he couldn’t conquer him with his fists, then wept tears of frustration.
    For all I know he may be a prince in disguise; he rather looks like one, by the way—like a prince who has abdicated in a fit of fastidiousness and has been in a state of disgust ever since. Perhaps the man was the less handsome for the deep lines in his face, the irritable tension of his brow, which gave him the look of a man who fights with life. He also struck me as a rather cruel man, although it would have been difficult for me to say why. The handshake of some people makes you think of accident and sudden death. There are some people who invariably make a favorable first impression.
    A single insight at the start is worth more than ever so many somewhere in the middle.
    As a child, he had been raised by his grandparents, and been allowed to run wild. And so on. He was one of those young men whose age is difficult to determine. His bald head sits solemnly on the brown plinth of his neck. He stared at me with such interest that I could only feel flattered.
    The signs of some incurable gastric disorder were