Night Walk

Adam Haslett:

“The expectancy was exquisite. Sheltering the tip with his right hand, he lit it with his left. First came the heat on the lips and then the warmth in the mouth and then his lungs slowly filling. A deep, full breath. Instantly, the calm rose up through the back of his neck, spreading like a flood of perfectly cool water across the surface of his overheated brain. He was in it now—that longed-for gap in time, that merciful pause.

The girls were asleep. The phones were quiet. The media had gone home.

Exhaling was a meditation unto itself.

The speed at which he moved from one performance or task to the next had grown vertiginous. Which, strangely, made the pleasure of executing each one all the keener. Not only to reply by hand to a few of the public’s letters each night, but knowing precisely how to communicate his sincerity through the dark eye of the camera as he explained for the White House website what reading the letters meant to him—there was a pleasure in the exactitude of all this. The strain of it and the pleasure twinned.

A cigarette suspended all that. And for a moment, even here amid the splendor and consequence, it joined him back to the counterlives: the kid who didn’t care about his grades; the freshman listening to the young leftists quote Nietzsche and Foucault; the short-story writer alone in his room after a day miming faith in progress (kneel and you shall pray), believing for a few evening hours that a well-wrought sentence might set people free. Before the organizing principle of Michelle. Before the sorting power of a more concrete ambition. Taking him briefly back to the comforts of the slacker and the cynic. That dark, scattered home promising its own kind of safety.”

via generic1