Subtraction. Mary Robison

my friends. I’m just axin’.”

      I said I wouldn’t mind going to fetch Raymond Hollander.

      “Oh, you met Raymond, huh?”

      “I’ll say I did.”

      “There’s a bad story there. I’ll tell it to you sometime. I’m not the hero of the piece.”

      We were into the stream of cars now.

      “Such a surprise,” I said.

      In blackness, the instant the room door clicked shut, I heard Raf open his zipper.

      “What do I know, but you seem too messed up.” I snapped on a lamp with a pleated shade.

      “Yeah, I’m wrecked,” he said. “And yet, it’s funny. I look down and I’ve got this potato pointing at you. If that’s not funny, well then, I’ve been reading all the wrong philosophers.”

      He collapsed against the wall in a corner of the room and was sliding. When he reached the sculpted floor carpeting, he said, “Aw, hell.”

      “We should get some solid food for you, Raf. And I have B vitamins that you ought to take, so you can think.”

      “You got it all wrong. I can’t fuckin’ stop thinking. The horror show runs all the time now.”

      “I know. That’s what I mean. So you can think well and clear again.”

      “I got clear thoughts on you,” he said.

      “Aw, thanks,” I said. “You can show me sometime when you’re really here. When it’s really Raf I’m talking to.”

      He stopped me with a look, fierce and sudden and serious, his glass eye sending furious points of light. “You’re talking to me, Paige.”

      “And who might you be these days?”

      “Another dying animal,” he said with a shrug.

      “Back on the death thing, huh?” I said, but his eyes dropped.

      And there he was in the corner, his dark figure stretched out, his face stilled, sleeping.

      The bureau lamp’s pleated shade made harsh darting light shapes so I angled it to shine on an empty niche, and switched on the soft track lights bordering the wall high above the bed.

      I padded around barefoot, in and out of the shower, emerging at last with a skimpy motel towel safety-pinned like a mini sarong.

      All I wanted was Raf conscious, but I didn’t try waking him. I thought about lying beside him on the floor.

      Instead I flumped onto the jumbo bed and pulled magazines from my rope tote bag—Granta, an American Poetry Review, an issue of Zoom.

      “Don’t ask me about Raymond Hollander,” Raf said from the corner.

      “No, I wasn’t going to. I left you for dead over there, old son.”

      “I Lazarused. That’s been happening lately, just when I’m really enjoying being dead.”

      “Oh, stay on the fucking floor,” I said.

      “Too late,” Raf said.

      I glanced around my magazine.

      He was having great difficulty scaling the bed. He was hauling himself by his arms and hands, as if climbing from a diving pool.

      He lost hold and fell out of sight.

      “Come on, up and over,” I said. “You can do it.”

      He stripped off his jacket and T-shirt, and lunged onto the mattress, landing beside my legs.

      “Well, that was almost,” I said.

      Raf said, “This is the moment all those grueling months of training were for.”

      “That’s right.”

      “The hours on the practice mattress . . . The work on technique . . . All that is over. Right now, right here, it’s just a question of pride and character; a question of will.”

      It was one of Raf’s better nights. He was ambitious and strong, which surprised me, and it surprised me that he could carry through.