Suddenly I knew what had happened, and why:
Ha ha, oh gosh, I realized, I’d beenblown up.
Blown up by (I suddenly knew his name) Paul Bowman, who’d meant to blow Lloyd up but had blown me up instead, because Lloyd and I had switched cars, just for today, so Lloyd could take mine to the shop.
I tried desperately to ease out of Paul Bowman but found I couldn’t.
Whoever/whatever had put me in there wished me to stay put.
Wondering: Had the deed really been done?
If so, with me not going back to jail and all, I could go ahead and have that family I’d always wanted, one that would admire the shit out of me, as in: Thanks, God, for giving us this dude who’s so frigging responsible because, even though he could still be out there getting all kinds of tail, instead he scores us this tight little rental, with a garage for all his tools and a ping-pong table out back on which he and the son he’d soon have, off his foxy wife, once he met her, would play a nightly game after dinner, although, however, if I, Paul Bowman, a.k.a. “the Bow,” started losing and said it was time for bed? Kid bestjump.
Daddy, the kid might ask. Did you ever kill a man?
I’d rather not answer that, son. Get out of here. Go clean your room. Or else.
From that, the kid would know that, yeah, it was sometimes necessary to blow a motherfucker up, if that motherfucker started threatening your family.
The family you might someday have.
Wisdom that will serve you well, my son, as you grow into a man, a man always a little scared of your badass dad, as is right and salvatory.
—
Because I was now Bowman he suddenly did not seem strange to me.
At all.
Who else could he have been but exactly who he was?
He seemed, if I may say it this way,inevitable.
Aninevitable occurrence,upon which, therefore, it would be impossible, even ludicrous, to pass judgment.
He had left his mother’s womb with a particular predisposed mind and started living, and immediately that predisposed mind had run up against variousevents,and been altered in exactly the way such a mind, buffeted by those exact events,wouldbe altered, and all the while he, Bowman, trapped inside Bowman, had believed he was making choices, but what looked to him like choices had been so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon him that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavishjailing.
His feelings (of rage, of shame, of being worthless, of needing to lash out preemptively at even the slightest threat) were all real and he must suffer them every day, and why? Because he had been bornhim.But he had notchosento be born him. That had justhappenedto him. And then life had happened to thathim,exerting upon it certain deleterious effects, including, but not limited to, the desire to blow up Lloyd, whom he perceived (correctly, by the way, in the relative sense) to be his enemy.
At what precise moment could Paul Bowman have become other-than-Paul-Bowman?
And how? How was the change, the opting out, the departure from the formed-in-the-womb, the choosing to be other than what one was, supposed tooccur,precisely?
He had been done badly, by fate, from the beginning, having been born with certain disadvantages (limited intelligence, crude features, an almost nonexistent sense of curiosity), and then, as he grew, had acquired a host of concomitant disadvantages, such as: a strange, aggressive manner of speaking, apredisposition to be offended, regrettable taste in clothing, and a tendency to slip too easily into mindless reactive violence.
But what, of all of the above, could have been changedbyhim?
That is: even his ability to alter/overturn such negative predispositions as existed in him had also been, I saw, predetermined (baked in, as it were). Yes: eventhat—his ability to improve himself by willing himself to do so—was inherent, fixed, nonnegotiable, had been granted to/forced upon him at birth.
Likewise his ability to alter his ability to alter his abilities.
Likewise his ability to alter his ability to alter his ability to alter his abilities.
And so on, in perpetual series.
From there inside him, I regarded Bowman, his left leg shaking madly beneath the table.
He was so agitated, so ashamed, so afraid of being caught and also (good Lord) would soon learn that he’d blown upthe wrong person,a mistake he would then (stupid! stupid!) have to add to the long list of mistakes he’d made, dating back to his earliest days, like, for example, the time he’d drunk a whole little pot of glue in kindergarten because it had looked so much like a thing of real milk.
