Chapter 9

Smitty’s wedding finally rolled around, and Maria and I flew out to Alabama for the occasion. Smitty’s paradise is like the ghost of a picture that lags a few seconds behind the programming on a dying television with poor reception, and to visit it is in many ways to visit the past. There is a strange and ever-present courtesy, a sincere and overgrown concept of “please,“ and “thank you” that avoids the hollow echo that courtesy makes in the rest of the country, but rather is gilding upon a lily of genuine kindness. Inflation appears to have trod with a gentler step in the South as well.
Southern women are points of physical perfection, but their countenance is often the mere carapace that advertises a biography that has been written endlessly by human beings, the same story spoken by innumerable mouths with no revision, a game of telephone gone strangely awry. The majority of them appear to be just waiting to get married and start having children.
You can see in the hope that backlights their eyes the slow spiral into a stout and dreary existence, with greasy cooking and offspring underfoot, the prospect of a tepid life with close boundaries and little ambition.
You have to look closely to see their strings, but they are the mouthpiece of this ambition, marionettes that do not move by their own volition, but rather take rote steps along a road with deeply-worn ruts. A simpler life perhaps, but I suspect that it is simpler than life itself, that they have taken life and made it a monochrome, and by shunning the embroidery of patchwork demographics and abstract thought in favor of little hamlets and common sense they have abandoned whatever forward motion we might gain in favor of stasis and domesticity.
And there is an almost benign racism that lurks everywhere, a bashful sentiment that only reveals itself through palsied lips that mutter, “Nigger,” and an implied distaste that seems not to need utterance.
It is very strange, how the same people can be the warmest and most hospitable sort, who will welcome you with open arms as if you are their prodigal son returned to them, who will take a stranger and share their roof and their meals and their hearts with him, but who will also dislike someone because of the color of their skin. I have always felt that racism is lazy a sort of malice: any given person gives you innumerable reasons to dislike them for their actions. To dislike that person because of their race is to fail to make a sincere effort to acknowledge the particular form of humanity that they have chosen to represent, to judge them on accident rather than volition.
We were greeted by humidity and the happy couple, a stifling combination. The humidity hung with the glowering malevolence of omnipresence, like the promise of a judging God, and it opened gasping pores in our skin that coughed forth sweat and then puckered instantly shut to defend against the saccharine barrage of cloying devotion humming shrilly around Smitty and Angie, like moths around a sputtering floodlight. Their devotion was such that it begged for a new word to be minted, cloaked in the purple pallium of polysyllables and carrying all the authority of obscurity and arcane etymological roots, a word that described nausea and all of its flavors, a word that contained within it the sensation of acid bits of chewed and scarcely digested hot dog in the nasal cavity, and also the half-formed membrane of discomfort that appears after the piece of candy that was one too many in your youth, the harbinger of misery.
Their skin seemed to be visibly crawling, as their hands played hind-and-seek with each other’s body, trying to find new frontiers of sensuality, perhaps, and their lust seemed a tempest to rattle steel doors.
I had to look away. It was horrible.
Smitty seemed to have been granted the gift of tongues, for the sounds that came out of his mouth were not words, but rather high, keening phonemes of nonsense that crowded that air with obscene molecules of infatuation, a miasma of idiocy and disgrace. I wondered momentarily if they were not a matched pair of some lower form of humanity, a perfectly camouflaged missing link that happened to find each other while they were both in heat, and when the moment passed, they would part ways again, Angie to rear her brood in some cave festooned with primitive cave paintings like the foreshadowing of cubism, Smitty to roam the boundaries of his territory, beating his chest and howling to drive off intruders.
They clung together like carbon monoxide to hemoglobin.
Although they were there to greet us and give us a ride, it seemed that any interruption of the rapture that they inspired in each other would be a terrible imposition, an affront on the magnitude of the invasion of Poland. I was hesitant to speak, and Angie relieved me of the burden.
“There he is!” and it seemed that all of the effusiveness of her emotions was directed momentarily at me. “Thank you so much for introducing me to Jonathan, Sidney. I really can’t thank you enough. He’s the light of my life.” She drew the word “so” out in a barely recognizable elongation, as if through the duration of the utterance she could convey the magnitude of the sentiment.
“It was nothing, really. I’m glad that ya’ll are happy together.”
How could such a transformation occur in my friend Smitty? There is a certain assumption that we make after knowing someone for a while, that we more or less have a handle on the nature of that person, and that however they may rearrange their countenance, however they might choose to face the world, their actions will still be intelligible and consistent with the nature that we had come to love. Smitty had shattered this illusion with a swift blow, and the power that time and space have to create change was very tangible.
I looked at Maria, and though her face was an amiable mask, the thing looked brittle, and her eyes were aghast by what she saw.
“Yeah, thanks,” said Smitty, who had not, as far as I can remember, thanked me for anything in the tenure of our friendship. Worried that I might display my horror, I kept my answers terse, and we drove to the hotel.
“What the fuck happened?” I asked Maria, when we were alone together.
“Don’t ask me. He’s your friend. I hope they aren’t like that the whole time.”
“Fuck.”

I was at the bachelor party. Bachelor parties are strange things that have always filled my nostrils with the reek of duplicity, because it makes very little sense to spend the night before marriage staggering drunk and wallowing in the presence of women who you do not love, with whom you cannot have sex, and who are nothing more drunken temptation to which you are begging to succumb.
The party was held in a strip club near the airport, the sort of place that makes limited use of black lights because of the embarrassing revelations they might cause about the sanctity of every single surface in the place. It smelled of fried food and bourbon, and it was decorated sanguinely, like the inside of an organ, with red carpet possessing a texture like beer-batter and breading from spilt drinks, unrequited lusts, dust and cigarette ash. The light was a dull red hue, like throbbing temples and the hydraulic pressure of stress coursing through veins, and it filtered slovenly through smoky air so that there was an impression that the strip club had been struck by some unnoticed calamity.
Smitty and I sat together at a table near the bar, and the majority of his friends huddled around the stage like throngs around a politician. They were stout, sweating men with porcine faces and simian shoulders, the sort of human beings who call to mind the strange monstrous collages of mythology and apocryphal literature. They clutched dingy dollar bills depicting the grim faces of monumental men as if the pallor of their knuckles represented the full measure of their lust, and the clamor of their conflicting mutters formed a sort of silence, a white noise to which the strippers were deaf.
Near our table there also stood a tight knot of slender men with long hair and dark clothing, with nervous movements and faces that constantly turned over their shoulders. Their eyes whirled wildly in their sockets as if hoping that a thorough examination of the situation would reveal that it was all a horrible mistake, that they actually stood in a refined bar drinking the nectar of refinement and sophistication.
Smitty’s friends were a dichotomous lot.
“So, Smitty,” I said to the side of his face, which he had directed at the stage. I paused to sip my whiskey. “How’s the prospect of married life looking to you?”
“Good. It looks really good,” he said, without averting his gaze. The words beat a crisp staccato in the air, as if it had taken a tremendous pressure to force them past an unnamed impediment. “It’s actually kind of surprising: I didn’t necessarily figure myself for the marrying type, at least not so soon.”
“Yeah, I was a little surprised by it myself. I didn’t even know you had started dating, and then you called and said you were getting married.”
“Yeah, it was weird. One morning, I just woke up, and I knew that I couldn’t live without her, absolutely knew, like God himself tapped me on the forehead and said, ‘Get married, dumbass.’ So I talked to her, and she felt the same way, so we decided to get married. It was really abrupt, now that I think about it.” His eyes still hadn’t left the stage, and I followed his gaze in case some miracle was occurring.
This proved not to be the case. He was simply watching the strippers. The strippers were the sort of people who seem to be less human beings and more the explication of some concept, an elaborate construction, a deliberate artifice. They undulated curves that were lush like a suburban lawn, pumped full of chemicals and bearing artificial breasts. And yet, there was a careworn air of sadness that hung over them, blemishes and track marks not quite hidden by the poor lighting, a little wear around the eyes, a gaze that reflected the lusts of an infinity of rapt spectators, but dared not to reveal anything about the spectacle.
Some might be inclined to call them succubi, and indeed, it seemed possible that a night spent with them would steal your soul, but they did not seem inclined to misrepresent themselves. Rather, they carried about them the sort of honesty that is the most insidious of lies, playing their role perfectly but making no claims greater than their modest role as an entertainment for an evening’s lust, letting the spectator project upon them all of the lies hanging pregnant on his lips as a rationalized buffer against perdition.
This plural Mephistopheles would tell its true nature, if only the spectator were wise enough to listen, and yet it seemed that far too many were prepared to die carrying the name Mephistopheles on their last susurration. Smitty was enthralled.
“Strippers are pretty fucking captivating,” I said. His shoulders inched upwards a sudden and precise inch, and whatever held his eyes to the stage seemed to snap, leaving him only withs terrible whiplash.
“Yeah. Is it a bad thing, you think, that the closer I get to the wedding the more I notice every other woman in the world?”
“Only if you start getting all hot and bothered when you see your grandmother.” He sputtered into his drink, wracked with laughter.
“Fuck. I just got the worst image of my grandma naked. You’re an asshole.”
“Whatever, man. You’re the one thinking sexy thoughts about septuagenarian relatives. Pervert.”
“But seriously, do you think it’s a bad thing? Every time I see a woman, I think to myself, ‘That’s a woman that I’ll never have the chance to fuck.’”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t really know what to think. I mean, it seems like it’s a pretty common occurrence, I mean, Jesus, you’ve listened to my dad talk, and I know that yours isn’t much better, but that doesn’t really seem like the healthiest way to start a marriage. I mean, I do love her, I don’t want to hurt her, and I really do want to get married, but it just worries me.”
“I think that the fact that you’re worried about it is probably a good sign. Fuck, did you just listen to the things that you said? You love her, you don’t want to hurt her…there you go, you know what you need to do. Show some fucking discipline and you’ll be all right. It just sounds like cold feet to me.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, I think. Jesus, you always were a big pussy. Besides, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? You end up getting divorced? Like that doesn’t happen to half the people that get married. At least you’ll have a better story about your first wife then, ‘She was my high-school sweetheart, and we got married the day before I went to boot camp, and then when I was deployed, she spent all my money and fucked like five Jodies.’ At least you fucking thought it through, and at least you fucking tried.”
“Man, I fucking forgot about West. Jesus, was that guy a fucking rock. It’s no wonder his wife cheated on him; she didn’t want retarded children.”
“Yeah, you know he asked me what the word ‘celibate’ meant one time?”
“Did he really? That’s fucking priceless. Jesus, can you imagine if he tried to spell it?”
“Yeah…I always kind of wondered how he graduated high school. Do you know where he was from, so I don’t ever raise my children there?”
“I’m pretty sure he was from Oregon. I remember him telling me once that they cancelled a bunch of school days because there wasn’t enough money in the budget to pay the teachers, and I’m pretty sure that they closed the public library, too.”
“Shit. Fucking West.”

Later, as intoxication held us more firmly in its grasp, the entire party mingled together, photographers and art dealers and Marines who had gone on to work as mechanics and construction workers and teachers and doctors.
“Smitty, you’re a fucking idiot for getting married. My wife drives me fucking crazy.”
“Sid, I read some of your books, and they kick ass, man. Who’d have thought you’d turn into a fucking writer, you know?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Tommy. I haven’t seen you in like five years. You got fat as fuck. You should go for a fucking run or something, man.”
“Yeah, man, I married Stacy. She’s pregnant with our second kid right now.”
“I just been working at my old man’s body shop, taking care of things. He’s getting too old for that shit, anyway.”
“Hot damn, I love my wife, but if I weren’t married I would do some nasty fucking things to that stripper. Just look at them titties, man.”
“Hey, Smitty. Whatever you do, don’t have kids. Once you do, you stop fucking and start buying diapers and taking them to soccer practice and shit.”
“Yeah, the new gallery is working out really well. Brooklyn is turning into a pretty big hot spot. It’s really cutting edge.”
“Congratulations, Jonathan. You guys are a really cute couple.”
It went on and on.

Breakfast the next morning was unpleasant. We drank too much. We drank like we were Norse gods, or had some intention of being mocked by our offspring so that they would allegedly be stained black and cast out into the wilderness after we single-handedly saved all of botany and zoology from a tremendous flood. It always made sense to me that Noah got hammered drunk that one time: he had just confronted the fact that the deity whom he worshipped was a genocidal maniac, and had watched the entirety of human civilization to that point be casually and utterly obliterated. It’s a wonder that he wasn’t suicidal. Honestly, who would complain if his first action was to build a brewery? There really wasn’t anyone left to complain: all of the people alive in the world owed their lives to Noah and his fidelity to the Lord his God. Ham absolutely did deserve to be put on a time-out from humankind for the rest of his life, the ungrateful wretch.
When I woke, and I assume that this was the case for Smitty also, pain cascaded downward in malicious curtains, an exceptionally well-rounded pain, a dull ache like chastity for a lecher seeping into my bones, and there was a high, whining pain in my head. My viscera were clawing with sepulchral limbs at the muscles in my abdomen, and they stirred restlessly like Bedouins, like the longing for utopia, expressing the discontent of disenfranchised masses as they paw at a pedagogue’s feet. My legs felt like white noise drifting away in the wind. It was an experience like the pain of listening to campaign promises, dulcet tones dropped nonchalantly from on high to be coveted by unwashed hands, the promise of a new future, the fallacy of a government that truly cares for the populace made plausible by our own hope, the thin façade stretched translucently over the knowledge that the elected proxies to popular sentiment are engines that combust money, and they power their upward motion by peddling their own self-importance, by the prostitution of integrity to the interests of the wealthy few who scorn the vulgar mass of humanity, and all the while they are silhouetted against this shroud of mass delusion that springs from the longing for a humane humanity, backlit by the inferno of industry while they huddle their true nature away in the inaccessible avenues of power.
The hangover seemed to dull the keen edge of infatuation in Smitty, and Angie looked displeased at his flagging ardor, temporary though it may have been. Maria simply had a vindictive look upon her face, as if every second I spent in agony was just recompense for my noisy and uncoordinated arrival in the early hours of the morning.
“I never could understand why you like to read the Bible so much,” said Smitty, gesturing tenderly with a piece of bacon.
“Yeah, it’s strange. It’s only alluded to in basically every literary work ever, and a lot of philosophical works, and provides a lot of the rationale for most of the actions of the Catholic Church, which, you know, more or less ruled Europe for a few centuries. Useless.”
“Okay. That’s convincing. And if you don’t care about those things?”
“Then first of all, you’re an idiot, and second of all, it’s still pretty useful.”
“Useful in what way?”
“Fucking with people, mostly.”
“Ah, yes. Your nobility is really shining right now, Nancy.”
“It usually is. But seriously, take the whole homosexuality thing.”
“No I will not have sex with you. Seriously though, I just don’t see it. Even if you do have a well-reasoned opinion on the matter, what are you possibly going to say that will change their mind? There’s nothing that you possibly say; they’re going to believe what they believe no matter what you say. So all that you end up doing is picking fights that nobody wins and looking like an asshole.”
“Yeah, but I am an asshole.”
“I know, Nancy. I know. It’s all stretched out and rubbery, too. Horribly unattractive.
“Is this seriously the conversation that we’re having at breakfast on the morning of our wedding?” said Angie. “You guys can’t think of anything a little more pleasant?”
“Sorry, Angie. I’m not really housebroken yet.”
“No kidding. He doesn’t even have hand towels in his bathroom,” said Maria.
“What do you use to dry your hands?”
“My pants, usually.”
“You have a lot of work ahead of you, sweetie. At least Jonathan had towels in his bathroom.”
“Yeah, there’s a hard road ahead of us.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s just going to be a lot work civilizing you.” Smitty had covered his face with a napkin, ostensibly to cough.
“Go ahead and laugh, Smitty. So where are ya’ll going on your honeymoon?”
“We’re going to Greece.”
“Oh, that sounds wonderful. How long are you staying?”
“A whole month.”
“Wow.”

We sat on white folding chairs festooned with crepe paper roses and draped in white cloth that absorbed dust and dye and sweat and miscellaneous detritus so that they became painted with smears like ghosts’ faces, and the pink, pulped mock floral bloom rustled in the breeze and then went limp from humidity, a flaccid and forced gallant reflex. We sat smoldering under the sun with involuntary heliotropic faces. The priest stood atop a transient dais as a silhouette, a dark inking infringed upon by bellicose lances of sunlight, so that the entire ceremony became a contest of astronomical proportions, as if Helios had lent his chariot to the nuptial couple’s guidance and they were determined to wrap the occasion in overbearing celestial majesty. The stage had been erected in front of an enormous trellis twined with climbing roses in full bloom, and they added their fragrance to the dank air, which was ripe with the scent of sodden lawn and vegetation slowly moldering in the heat, and also a citrus breeze.
The stage served as a focus from which an entire support system spread in a single direction, like a bullet ejected from a firing chamber, the edifice spectators serving as reinforcement for the formality of love, on one hand a popular reciprocation of the magic moment, and on the other a gaggle of judging eyes weighing and measuring the moment with perfect precision, holding it up against the half of the population that divorces, lending the weight of their observation to the seriousness of the vows and the temptation to break them. Behind us sat a cluster of musicians holding burnished wood and shining brass, so that to look back at them was to suffer the pain of the sun’s reflection in the polish, and after an indefinite while they began to play jauntily.
Somber-faced relatives marched two by two down the aisle, some with faces like masks serving as levies against the flow of tears, others maintaining an assumed dignity, all uncomfortable with the pomp, sarcophagal stone-carved faces with a morbid rigor. The groomsmen lined in a row, fighting the glare from the brass instruments, eyes clenched to narrow cracks in a gnarled mass of wrinkled skin, with Smitty standing at their head, trying to remain still but shifting his weight in miniscule steps so that he traveled three feet in five minutes. He exhaled in silent gusto, the music giving voice to his sighs.
Finally, everyone was in place, and it was still except for the bridal march. Angie walked down the aisle with her arm through her father’s, a gauzy blob of white.
As Angie stepped onto the stage, I looked at Maria, who was studying the detail of a shoe intently. She looked up and I caught her eye. She smiled at me and then turned her gaze to the wedding, bracing her shoulders.
The priest spoke in measured tones about love and fidelity and commitment and marriage, giving a speech warm and resonant with care, but there was something rehearsed and repetitive about the address, as if he had carved a new façade for the thing, a façade with ornate friezes depicting a whole life, but the façade had been attached to the dull lump of an aging building. It seemed as though the structure of his message hearkened from earlier days, as if the subject matter had once been a bare minimum for a married couple, the bars of a cage stinking from masculine indifference, the bonded servitude of the wife, dinners waiting on the table for the husband when he returned home, unspoken domestic abuse, an endless list of the woes contained by marriage in the age when nuptial vows were truly unbreakable. It seemed as though some overhaul were needed, as if new tools needed to be provided for an age in which the husband could not ignore the needs of his wife, in which the pair of them earned a mutual living, in which dinner was prepared by restaurants and reheated in microwaves.
The priest spoke on, and Maria and I looked at each other with furtive eyes, wondering if this is what the future held in store for us. It seems that a few principles and the words “I do,” are frail things with which to handle the future, with all of its impositions and sorrows and joys, with the great curtain that hangs down in front of the present so that we cannot know what our lives hold. Marriage is a staggering act of faith, to agree to confront this great unknowable tract of wilderness hand in hand, until death pries apart the clasp.
Angie said, “I do.”
Smitty said, “I do.”
And then they kissed.

I sat at a table with Maria during the reception, watching Smitty as he painfully and soberly made polite conversation with aged relatives, some of whom were strangers brought into the fold through the act of marriage. He bore a polite countenance behind which lurked impatience and lust, a complicated lust that longed to get drunk with his friends, to make love to his wife, to be on a plane bound for Greece together, already impatient with the plane ride and longing for sunny beaches and marathon fornication. I toyed with the mouth of a bottle of beer with sweating flanks that dripped condensation, and looked towards Maria.
“That was nice, enough, I guess.”
“Yeah, it was.” she looked around at our relative isolation. “Do you think it will last?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to think that it will, just to be charitable, but it really doesn’t seem like either of them thought it through.”
“But they’re so cute together. They’re just all over each other, like nobody else exists.”
“That’ll only last for so long, though. I mean, we’re not like that, and I think that what we have is just more stable.”
“Maybe. I kind of wish that we had been nauseatingly cute together for a while, though.”
“Really? Because I’m entirely capable of only referring to you by pet names and groping you in public, if you really want me to.”
“Ugh. It sounds so dirty when you put it that way.”
“Yeah, it really does. I don’t think that you can force that kind of thing. I think it’s just a kind of temporary insanity, and when you recover, you look at the actual relationship that you’ve built, and it’s not a whole lot more than a lot of honeys and dears and sex. But I hope I’m wrong: I hope that they’re happy together for the rest of their lives.”
“Me too. I feel like there’s not enough love in the world: it’s too bad that marriage is such a complicated thing.”

Smitty had invited many of our old friends from the Marines. They were heavier now, with more facial hair and an expanded brood, but when we talked we broke into the vernacular that had been lying derelict among the weeds of our syntax, and their faces broke into the joy of revisiting the pride that had grown from shared hardships and nonsense and also the instruction that we should be proud of those things.
We were unsure of each other’s first names.
Jones had become paunchy and bearded, obscuring his still youthful features behind fine lines around his eyes and stray gray hairs in the shag of hair. His knuckles were inlaid with grease and calloused in jaundiced massifs and cracking laccoliths, and they clutched a glass of whiskey. I introduced Maria. He was a little drunk.
“Shit, Nancy. She’s beautiful. You seem like you’re doing pretty well in the world.”
“Yeah, I’m doing all right. How’ve you been?”
“Good, man. I ain’t getting shot at no more, so that’s a fucking improvement, right?”
“Fuck yeah. Jesus, I thought I’d never get the stink of that fucking place out of my nose, man.”
“It made me hate kids. All those little fuckers running around begging for food and money and shit, fucking irritating.”
“How’d Suzy take it?”
“She doesn’t fucking care, man. She fucked off with a Jody during my second deployment. Mailed the fucking divorce papers to me while I was in fucking Al Asad.”
“Fuck that shit. Bitches’ll do it to you every fucking time.”
“No shit, man. That was a fucking shitty day. Got mail call and then an hour later we went out on patrol.”
“Fuck me.”
“Yeah, we’d been out for fucking twenty minutes when motherfuckers hit us with an IED. Lead vehicle was fucking destroyed, just a wreck man. Fucking guys inside were fucking hamburger. I think one of them got off with some nasty scars and plates and screws and shit, and one of them lost an arm and three fingers on the other hand. Fucking awful.”
“No shit, man.”
“No shit. So we set up security, and those hajji cunts are coming out the woodwork, but the guy who’d been manning the fifty was fucking unconscious, bleeding to death, and they were sending a lot of rounds downrange so it was fucking impossible to get up there and take over for him. I thought I was gonna fucking die that day, I tell you what.”
“Yeah, I’ve had that day.”
“You ever dream about that shit?”
“Yeah, man. One time, we were manning an LP/OP, just shooting the shit, you know, and I see this little fucking fourteen year-old piece of shit getting ready to throw a fucking grenade. Gave him a double-tap to the grape, he dropped the fucking grenade, it goes off, tears everything to shit. He was in fucking pieces, you know?”
“Fucking grenades.”
“Anyway, I figure I’m going to dream about his face for the rest of my life, you know?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“You been doing all right with that shit, Jonesy? You aren’t cracking up or anything, are you?”
“Oh, fuck no, man. Life’s good for me. Got a new wife and a couple of kids. The little fuckers keep me too busy for me to get depressed. Plus I been working a lot down at the shop, keeping busy. Keeping busy is the real key, I think.”
“You might be right about that, man.”
Maria said nothing after the initial formalities. What could she have said?

She found her voice later that evening.
“How often do you dream about that little boy, Sidney?”
“I don’t know, maybe a couple of nights a week.”
“Have you ever thought about seeing a psychiatrist, or talking it over with anyone?”
“I’d really rather not, honey.”
“But Sidney, it sounds like it’s kind of a big deal.” I took her hands in mine, and looked into her eyes.
“Honey, I don’t want to talk to anyone about it who doesn’t know what it’s like. I don’t want to talk to a psychiatrist who’s been sitting over here his entire life in wealth and comfort. To be honest, I don’t know if I even want to stop dreaming about that sort of thing. I don’t know if I would say that I feel guilty, because everything that I did was in self-defense, but I appreciate the gravity of killing someone. I think that if I stopped dreaming about it, I would feel like I had lost the part of my soul that remembers the enormity of that act. I mean, that kid, he was only like fourteen. He had parents who loved him. He had a wife and a job and children waiting for him somewhere along the line. I took him from his parents, and I took his future from him. I don’t want to forget that. And I don’t want to be put in that circumstance again.”