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.""Suicide, you mean.""I thought about it a lot.""But not anymore."He sat back against the couch."It's been a few years." Contemplation, like shuffling through a photo album with nothing but grim black-and-whites: crime scenes and accident victims; his young life."Maybe it just didn't seem romantic anymore.You can get jaded about anything." This struck him as amusing."Self-destruction can get kind of old and pretentious if you keep after it long enough.If you don't eventually off yourself, you're just a poseur."Adrienne found herself tracking down an intriguing line of thought that Clay would, naturally, be too blind to see about himself."So you put down the knife one day and decided, No more.""More or less.""Yet you've received several scars since then."Clay raised his head fractionally, wary — somewhat amused but tempered with something grimmer, as well, some spiny little paranoia."So?"Tightroping over the session once again, hoping instinct still served her well — that he was ready to be confronted with the obvious and could deal with it."So is it possible that you put away your knife, but turned the same task over to others … one of whom might be willing to do a more thorough job?"Sun at her back and the soft, soft sound of the cassette.She was never more aware of it than at moments such as this, when words and eye contact and even the air in the room congealed."Death wish, huh?" Clay's grin was shy and menacing by turns, depending on the tilt of his exquisitely contoured head.Biting his lip as he watched her with narrowed eyes, as if one moment hating her for finding him out, congratulating her for it the next."Did it ever occur to you that maybe I decided I liked feeling other people's skin give way under my hands instead of my own?"A lie.No, not exactly, more a rationalization.A defensive barrier thrown up hurriedly, enough to block her but not sturdy enough to fool her.Clay would know that, wouldn't he?"That sounds like something that would come from a predatory outlook.From what I've seen about you, what I know about you, and the incidents that have gotten you into trouble, you don't fit the predator mold."He stared down toward his casts.After three weeks they had gotten dingy, the pristine white given way to a more lived-in look."I guess," he said, and looked at her in surrender, even embarrassment, "I just overreact."Gently, Adrienne nodded.She had been sitting with one knee draped over the other, leaning back, relaxed or trying to at least give that impression, but now she dropped both feet to the floor and slid forward, edge of the seat.Oh, what she could learn from him, given the time and the freedom."Whether they realize it or not, people usually overreact because they're feeling threatened.And not always by anything so obvious as three gang-bangers trying to relieve them of the last of their cash."While she left this with him, Adrienne combed mental files.Trying to call up those incidents in which Clay's impulses got the worst of him.The destruction — merely mindless, or cannily directed? — he could leave in his wake.Shattered glass doors in convenience store coolers; BMW pounded halfway to the scrapyard with a lead pipe; parking lot rammings of the cars of cocky drivers with more insurance than sense.Yes, there had been fights too, but were his incidents of vandalism sudden ventings of rage to keep him from harming others? Or unconsciously chosen symbols of a world he despised?Clay shifted back and forth on the couch — all at once he just couldn't get comfortable there.So he left it, wandered across the room until he could sag against the windowsill and stare out at a world he'd not been part of for nearly three weeks."I thought about trying to become a Buddhist once," he said to the glass, to a world that would never hear him, "because they always seem so peaceful.That was very appealing, I thought it might help." He had begun to rhythmically strike his casts together, clunk clunk clunk, hammer and anvil, harder, louder — how must that feel vibrating through his knitting bones? Then he stopped."But it's so passive, I just … I couldn't."But I did read this story that made so much sense.A story about Buddha.Someone came up to him, trying to figure out what it was about him that made him so wise, so in tune.They asked him, 'Are you a god?' He said, 'No.' Then they tried again, 'How about a saint, are you a saint?' Same thing, 'No.' Finally had to ask, 'Well, what are you, then?' And Buddha said, 'I am awake.'"Adrienne smiled.It was a beautiful little fable and for a moment she thought how much Sarah would love it, its profound simplicity.But Clay had not shared it in delight, and she watched as he knocked his head against the window, eyes shut, breath fogging the glass."You related to something in that story," she said."I woke up one day, or month, or year — who knows how long it took, these things never just come over you full-blown, it takes time.I mean, I know there's something seriously screwed up about me, too, but … I started seeing everything around me for what it was.And I realized it was all I could do to stand it, living in a world where everybody seems satisfied with so little.I'm not talking about material things, I mean their lives.Give them their little ruts and they're happy.Or maybe not, but they settle for it, because they don't know any other way out
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