The Unbinding Read Free Page A

that was worth listing as an asset on the do-it-yourself last will and testament I bought online one night four years ago after watching a medical program about mad cow. I had a mother, a sister, and a nephew, but none of them lived within five hundred miles of me, and the people I thought of as my closest friends—a guy from high school, two other guys from college—lived even farther away. And while I had my share of girlfriends, they rarely lasted for more than a few months, which was how long it usually took them to acknowledge that the “real Kent” they kept pushing me to show them (and accusing me of hiding from them) wasn’t there, as I’d told them from the start.
    Then AidSat hired me and gave me life.
    And not just one life. Hundreds of them, thousands, attached to mine by fine, invisible cords that I can still feel on my skin when I leave work. It’s one of the reasons I’d rather walk than drive these days—it doesn’t shred the tender hooks and loops that fill up what most folks regard as empty space. There’s no such thing, though, I’ve learned. The air is dense. The “nowhere” from which people think their troubles appear—the cars in their collisions, the tumors on their X-rays, the letter bombs in their corporate mailrooms—is, if they’d just pay attention, packed solid with soul.
    What’s happening with Sabrina is proof of this. I’m closing in on her.
    It feels like fate.
    It started when Peter P. sent me home last Thursday. My plan was to drop by the health club, grab a smoothie, and spend an hour on the ski machine before returning to my apartment and finally getting going on this journal, which I’d been putting off for the same reason I put off everything: a feeling that something else was more important. My problem was that I’d postpone those other tasks, too, and usually end up doing some needless third thing, which I’d leave unfinished when I realized it was needless.
    At the health club, while I was changing into my shorts, I got to chatting with a new member, Rob, who, it turns out, is from Minnesota, too, and lives in the south unit of my complex. He told me he’d seen me in the parking lot and at the video store on Station Street, which is across from the building where he works. Rob’s in telecom, a new outfit called Vectonal , and he sold me a low-cost voice-and-data package right there in the club while we were skiing. He also talked up an old movie he’d rented recently, a movie he said he suspected I’d enjoy because he couldn’t help noticing at the video store how much time I spent in the foreign aisle.
    I decided Rob had me confused with someone else (I don’t do subtitles; I’ll buy a Stephen King if I want to read), but then I remembered the way the foreign aisle snakes around into the action aisle and abuts the fantasy shelves. I asked Rob to describe the movie’s plot, but he told me its plot was its “least involving element.” We’d moved to the smoothie bar by then, and I sensed that Rob was talking for the benefit of the grad-school girls who run the blenders. He hadn’t mentioned yet whether he was single, but he seemed as single as I was just then.
    “I like the spot behind their knees,” I whispered. “That’s the skin that never ages.”
    “Because it’s untouched by the sun,” Rob said.
    “By anything. Guys don’t usually touch it, either. Women are virgins there.”
    “That matters to you?”
    “At a certain level, maybe. I think it matters to most men, deep inside. It was obviously fairly important in the past, so how could it just have, you know, minimized? Evolution doesn’t work that quickly.” I studied Rob’s eyes as he listened but I wasn’t sure if they showed all the understanding I was hoping for. Then again, I’m not a skilled analyst of faces, perhaps because I can’t see them in my work.
    “Virgins still have all their
charge
in them,” I said, laboring to refine my point. “They’re like a new car