to the impulse to read, again, what his father had written.  He had just finished hyperventilating, feeling the muscles in his chest clench as forcefully as if he had been bench-pressing a small car (whose trunk is packed with family baggage, he thought), and had worried about what he was in fact doing to himself.  He was forty-three; young enough to have at least a decent vestige of youth coursing through his veins, yet not-young enough, and just overweight enough, to be compelled to steer clear of that which provoked him to the point of what was, as best as he had described it to his psychotherapist, a “self-induced panic-rage attack.”  He had never entirely lost consciousness, since it began to happen, although in moments he thought he saw stars — little pinpricks around a gray corona in his peripheral vision — and these moments scared him.  They were not involuntary, but had become so ingrained in his amygdala’s wiring as to have the same effect, and only gained power with each implosion.

I can’t keep doing this.

This particular day was particularly absurd.  The worst of the smoke-filled crater between them — the word estrangement seemed laughably polite and measured — had passed, in fact, years ago, as had his father’s first ultimatum: You will have no relationship with me unless you treat Greta decently, as she deserves.

“Treat decently,” he thought.  It was a trivial but meaningful choice of words — as with the pages and pages of lies, wounded rhetoric, character assassination, and vehement denials, on its surface it looked and sounded, not only reasonable, but intimated that he, Chris, was the aggressor; that the last three years of cold silence broken by combative exchanges, bursts of thought, that lasted at most through three exchanges of email, were his doing and his doing alone.  It also reflected the impenetrable reality-distortion field in which Chris was now convinced his father had slipped, more and more, until it enveloped him; an emotional Faraday cage that shielded him from the threat of uncomfortable truths that might, conceivably, call for the one thing he believed terrified his father most: self-awareness.  “Treat decently” could mean many things.  It could mean reaching out to the woman  his son had chosen as a partner, and ultimately wife, rather than refusing, adamantly, any interaction with her.  It could mean looking his son in the eye and simply acknowledging at least one mistake.

It could also mean repeating the pattern of self-abnegation that had been the leitmotif of Chris’ relationship to the ever-s0-euphemistically termed “blended family” that he had chosen; the suffocating chamber of unchallenged social mores and family propaganda to which he had pledged his own scared, at times desperate allegiance since graduating college.  Self-abnegation, that is, in the form of denying that which he believed to be true; denying his right to kindness, to courtesy, to basic respect.  “Treat decently” his stepmother, the deal went, and recant his supposedly “vicious, ungrateful lies” that were in fact unassailable truths that, ironically, he wanted not to believe.  Treat her decently, and acknowledge his transgressions

hail, Greta, full of grace…blessed art thou among reluctant parents who resent the very role that they stole, rumbled across like a Panzer division crushing the cobblestones of an unresisting town…blessed art thou among holders of unpayable debt, among the martyrs to narcissism…

and all would be forgiven; and he would — with appropriate dolings-out of shame — be welcomed back into the fortress, the church of unreason, the bunker whose shelves were stocked with provisions; cans of resentment and entitlement to sustain them until the world outside ceased to be relevant.

Fuck her.

It was a simple enough thought.  Fuck her, and her self-aggrandizement; fuck her, and her bullying; fuck her; let her fade into irrelevance as he let the shackles that he himself had forged, clank on the ground beneath his feet.  It was this that he wanted.  It was this that he fought to do.