Hell, it might as well have been his mantra.  Which, in his own limited understanding of what his friend Steve called “Whuddism” (“White Buddhism,” the practice of extracting the simplest and most easily trivialized of a complex spiritual practice to sound enlightened with no actual discipline.  Tastes great!  Less metaphysically filing! ) was a level of peace, or at least an absence of turmoil, that he could not easily imagine.  “Not again” brought, not comfort, but the feeling of hearing a siren, piercing otherwise still air and growing louder as the urgency that summoned it grew; flames licking that which was nearby and worth preserving.  

He gripped his head in his hands, eyes closed.  He remembered something he had read that morning, while taking a “mental break” from that day’s particularly thorny programming fuck-up — something called “combat breathing.”  Breathe in, counting to four; count to four with filled lungs; do the reverse.  His last therapist had recommended something similar — a slightly different sequence and time span.  The mathematics of psychosis, he thought.  Immediately before the thought that the recommendation that he’d read for free trumped the one that had cost him $275 and a parking ticket.  

Combat breathing.  Military.  What the fuck?

It amused him — amused him, perturbed his mother, had irritated his girlfriend, whose benevolent intensity, proving no match for his own thundercloud-darkened moods, had ultimately led her away – this fascination with things military; with guns, with violence.  Or rather, with the intimation of; the imagined adrenaline flood accompanying, violence.  He was not a violent man.  So he often told himself.  And as a man; as an adult, one who knew better, he had never actually participated in a fight; never beaten an antagonist to the point of bloody submission, never unleashed any of his flashes of rage upon flesh and blood.  It was only the inanimate and the within-arms’ reach that had thus far any cause to fear him, anthropomorphically speaking — the walls of his college dormitory, artlessly hidden with The Clash posters; a mirror; the jagged hole in its center looking like a mouth that had just vomited shards of glass into the sink; a laptop that, after five replaced screens, finally refused to boot up.  But never a living thing; certainly, never an animal (better than most fuckin’ people, his friend Jeff had slurred through a raised mug of watery beer last week), and more certainly, never another person.  Never, at least, as a man.  Never, at least, since the boy within the man had terrified himself.

He sat unmoving for another few minutes.  Unseen by him, the cursor on his screen blinked, content to taunt only the top of his head as he felt the beginnings of the headache that he knew would follow.

Go ahead!  Do it! One shot; one moment of catharsis, one look at the spiderweb of cracks that will only betray your weakness…play all the fucking breathing games you want; asshole…in the end there’s no soft therapeutic cadence to talk you down; tell you you’re — what did that fucking pussy say?   “More than just the sum of your emotions.”  How sweet.  Because that’s exactly, entirely, what you are. It’s all you are.  It’s all you’ve ever been.

It was an old myth; schoolyard-preparatory wisdom from his uncle, who in his father’s absence had taken it upon himself to teach him To Be A Man.  “In all my years as a judge…I have seen more lives destroyed in a moment of anger than I can count.”

He had told Chris this, late one Friday evening after he had stormed onto his aunt and uncle’s porch, having been followed halfway home by Sean Creeden, a fat, greasy-curly-haired underachiever who had initiated Chris into 6th grade with a math book to the back of his head, and not relented since.  “Showing your hatred is their victory,” his uncle had told him.  And he believed it; yet, knew that the next day, when his book bag was ripped from his hands, when a glob of spit slowly ran down his sweater, when whispers of “faggot…faggot…faaaaaggott” intermingled with stifled giggles from those relieved not to be that day’s target, that the victory of which his uncle spoke was a slow, day-by-day erosion; a steady bleeding of his self-worth onto a floor that would be wiped clean ruff night, leaving no trace, only to be dropped on again, and again.  And so one Monday, when after Sean Creeden shoved him into the wall, he felt his fist collide with an unexpected CRACK! with the bridge of his nose, and saw the glint of shock and — was it? — fear in his glassy eyes, it had been impossible to stop; impossible not to follow that punch with another, and another, his ears roaring with his own blood, drowning out the shrieks — shrieks!  — of his tormentor and the commotion of the onlookers and the shouts of his teacher to stop it stop it right goddamn now, his fist finally swishing through the air where Sean Creeden’s bleeding face had been because he was now lying on the floor, clutching his face, blood streaming through his fingers.  And just before his teacher had grabbed the back of his shirt, ripping it nearly in half, it had been equally impossible not to kneel on Sean Creeden’s doughy stomach, grab two handfuls of his greasy curls,  and begin slamming his head into the floor, again and again

whos the faggot now you fat fuck whos the faggot now whos the faggot now

until the teacher and the principal he had called on a panic grabbed him, one on each arm, while he thrashed and managed to kick a by-then unconscious Sean Creeden in his large, motionless ass.

It had been his uncle who had picked him up that day, offering apologies and assurances to the cabal of School Officials who had surrounded Chris in the school counselor’s office, looking at him with varied glances of alarm, disgust, anger; looking at each other with concern — he would later, during his month’s suspension, look up the words liability and mandatory (the latter attached to counseling, a word common in his home’s lexicon).  His uncle had barely spoken during the ride home.  He had not been angry; nor his silence punitive.  And when he had looked over at Chris, whose face had been all but blank with shock and exhaustion, he had reached over and gripped his shoulder.  

“You’ll be OK.  This is bad…this could be very bad.  But you’ll be OK.  And when you’re ready — we can talk about this.”  Paused at a stoplight, he met Chris’ hundred-yard gaze.  “OK?  We can talk about this.  And I’ll do whatever I can to help.  Because the little shit had it coming.”

It had seemed funny, in that moment when he had needs to laugh.  And in the months that had followed, as he had prepared to transfer from Our Eternal Savior Lutheran School, to which its principal had decisively recommend he not return, and as his uncle had met with the parents of Sean Creeden, whose broken nose healed badly and whose concussion had left no apparent damage, steering, somehow, Chris’ family clear of a lawsuit, it became less funny, and, to Chris’ initial surprise and much more eventual regret, calming; calming as had the clean and pure logic with which his teacher, now former teacher, had spoken of both math and God.  Some things, like 2 times 4 equaling 8, just were.  They were; they were clear, and not up for discussion.  2 times 4 equaled 8, as it always had and always would.

And some people had it coming.