While his father had been rakingleaves outside, making rhythmic WHUSH-WHUSH noises as he created evenly-spaced, identically-sized piles, and while his mother had lain on he couch Resting (as he had learned to call her increasingly prolonged periods of inactivity), the autumnal tableau had been punctuated by a thud, loud weeping, the thunder of adult feet stomping up 50-year-old stairs, angry words fired between the faces of Mommy and Daddy, the withering of Mommy, and, finally, all but inevitably,the final slap of his father’s rough hand against his face.

“…EVER, EVER, EVER…”

His sobs, alternately driven by pain (that which he had caused himself, and that introduced by his protector), seemed only to provoke him. He swallowed them, the way he swallowed the bitter medicine he always received when sick. He had pushed Daddy before. He had learned when to put up shields, like they always did on _Star Trek_. It was inevitably when Daddy had dropped his own.

“…AGAIN. DO YOU HEAR ME?”

Against the far wall had leaned — to be accurate, slumped — Mommy, whose barely audible protest further provoked Daddy, whose head had darted in her direction — jerkily, like a bird of prey spotting a rabbit. His eyes glinted with contempt, and, true to the metaphor, with the recognition of power.

“…YOU……JUST A SPOILED BRAT…YOUR FAULT…”

He had, up until that point, very little time to learn what he would come to call “survival skills,” or “coping mechanisms,” depending on which book you were reading, once far enough along the journey to adulthood and the first stirrings of self-awareness, to Come to Terms With Your Past. To him, it was what he called Hiding Away. It took any number of forms. Optimally, he could find a physical place — under his crib, inside his closet, somewhere in the basement, amidst the maze of still-unopened moving boxes. Other times, he imagined himself watching the events before him as he watched TV, and turning it off, and seeing the picture fade, gradually, becoming a harmless haze of gray dots until it disappeared altogether. In those moments he was able to imagine himself becoming less and less real, his body fading, like the TV image, until he too was a cloud, until his father’s hand simply swept ineffectually through the air where a tiny cheek had been. He had first taught himself this game when much younger — in the Old Place, with huge windows and amply more closets. When he had first learned to walk and speak almost-complete sentences, to his barely developed mind, it had seemed as if Daddy had changed toward him. As if, as he became a Person, a volitional being rather than an intriguing specimen in confinement, he became something around whom Daddy was no longer comfortable.

And now, in this moment, at three years of age (“he’s too old for that crib, what’s going on?” he had remembered Aunt Joanne asking his mother, the urgency in her voice more decipherable to him than the words, which he barely understood), arguably too young for the cognition necessary to process “pride,” his sense of self had felt an odd, warming feeling spread through his chest whenever he did succeed in Hiding Away. Because in those moments, he won. He fooled Daddy (who would have looked funny, all red like that, if the redness weren’t like the fire engines he saw, often, hurtling down the street, heralding something Really Bad Happening. He didn’t succeed in fooling Daddy that way often — not as often as he would have liked — but got to the point at which he was able to look at him and stifle a laugh at the spectacle of that scientific, precise, obsessively organized and no-less-obsessively self-possessed man, taught from his own three-year-old-hood to put his emotions into carefully labelled specimen jars — “RAGE,” “REGRET”, “UNRELENTING SORROW,” “SELF-HATRED” — lined up on their wooden racks like the racks in his basement room (where he was NEVER, EVER to go without permission), looming nonetheless terrifyingly over him, his face increasing in discoloration because decades of the practice of WASP self-restraint would not allow his features to actually contort in anger, firing shouts and well-timed blows (FOR YOUR OWN GOOD) at what he thought was his little nemesis, but what was actually merely his ghost.

Decades later, at a party, he would hear someone drunkenly ask him if he had ever had an out-of-body experience.

“Something like that,” he had replied, before taking hold of a proffered joint.