right hand pointing

Life Trainer

 
            I have a life trainer.  This person will borrow my voice and
use it inside my head.

            Don’t call her, my life trainer said to me once.  Make a cone of your hand, the right one.  Stretch out your fingers and thumb as far as they’ll go from the point of the cone.  Keep stretching.  Good.  Now slowly release.

            This worked.  The urge to call my girlfriend’s cell broke up and passed out of my body.

            Other urges remained.  Looking down into my beer glass, I saw the tremor of her one good eye. 

Later I pulled a sudden left and gunned up the hill to her neighborhood.  My life trainer, as I might have expected, was alarmed and joined me in the car within seconds.

What are you doing? Don’t do this, I heard.

“I’m doing it. Don’t hold it against me.”

Human perversity leads us to focus on the bad eye when there aren’t two good ones.  For a long time I hadn’t done this.  I’d learned.  I felt like I needed to wound something, though, and so looked at the eye with which she could not look back after knocking at her door.

 “Who’s there?” called her guest, a guy, a stranger.

“Mark,” she responded.

“Mark who?” 

Say, ‘Mark the square of this day on your calendar with an X and know that it is the end of one thing and the start of something new,’ my life trainer directed.

“Mark my sort of ex-boyfriend,” she said.

            “Mark my words,” I started.

            My life trainer went, No, no!

            And because I was glad to have him there, making it two against two, I listened.

            Make a cone of your hand, the right one.  Place the tips of your fingers to the mesh of the screen.  Press—hard enough that the flesh gets through and would touch hers if she pressed back.  Good.  Count to five.

            I mouthed it.  One, two, three, four, five.

            Now carefully remove the cone of your hand and apply the five tips to your face.  Maintaining the position of each finger relative to the others, swivel your wrist to the left.  Twice more.  Good.  Like unscrewing a lid.  That’s right.  Remove your hand now: you are holding the lid.  Display it.  Let it drop.

            I did all this with care.  And though my girlfriend was staring at me—with disgust and amazement, let’s say—I was thinking of something else.  I was thinking how many of us there must be—those whose lives have been touched by my life trainer.  I was thinking ahead to the probable day when I and another would meet.