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stippled with sunlight through the window’s leaves. She could try, for just a moment, to imagine what is happening in his head. A bathroom scale barely peeking out from below the foot of the bed, beneath the gauzy hem of the comforter. Even for an instant, to try putting herself in his place.
    The question she asks makes his forehead pucker as he winces. She has crossed her arms. It’s a three-word question.
    ‘It’s not what you think,’ he says. His eyes never leave the middle distance between the ceiling and themselves. She’s now aware of just how she’s standing, how silly it might look through a window. It’s not excitement that’s hardened her nipples. Her own forehead forms a puzzled line.
    He says, ‘It’s not what you think I’m afraid of.’
    And what if she joined him on the floor, just like this, clasped in supplication: just this way.

SIGNIFYING NOTHING
    Here is a weird one for you. It was a couple of years ago, and I was 19, and getting ready to move out of my folks’ house, and get out on my own, and one day as I was getting ready, I suddenly get this memory of my father waggling his dick in my face one time when I was a little kid. The memory comes up out of nowhere, but it is so detailed and solid-seeming, I know it is totally true. I suddenly know it really happened, and was not a dream, even though it had the same kind of bizarre weirdness to it dreams have. Here is the sudden memory. I was around 8 or 9, and I was down in the rec room by myself, after school, watching TV. My father came down and came into the rec room, and was standing in front of me, like between me and the TV, not saying anything, and I didn’t say anything. And, without saying anything, he took his dick out, and started kind of waggling it in my face. I remember nobody else was home. I think it was winter, because I remember it was cold down in the rec room, and I had Mom’s TV afghan wrapped around me. Part of the total weirdness of the incident of my father waggling his dick at me down there was that, the whole time, he did not say anything (I would have remembered it if he said anything), and there was nothing in the memory about what his face looked like, like what his expression looked like. I do not remember if he even looked at me. All I remember was the dick. The dick, like, claimed all of my attention. He was just sort of waggling it in my face, without saying anything or making any type of comment, shaking it kind of like you do in the can, like when you are shaking off, but, also, there was something threatening and a little bully-seeming about the way he did it, I remember, too, like the dick was a fist he was putting in my face and daring me to say anything, and I remember I was wrapped up in the afghan, and could not get up or move out of the way of the dick, and all I remembered doing was sort of moving my head all over the place, trying to get it out of my face (the dick). It was one of those totally bizarre incidents which are so weird, it seems like it is not happening even while it is happening. The only time I even had glimpsed my father’s dick before was in locker rooms. I remember my head kind of moving around all over the place, on my neck, and the dick kind of following me all over the place, and having totally bizarre thoughts going through my head while he did it, like, ‘I am moving my head just like a snake,’ etc. He did not have a boner. I remember the dick was a little bit darker than the rest of him, and big, with a big ugly vein down one side of it. The little hole-thing at the end looked slitty and pissed off, and it opened and closed a little as my father waggled the dick, keeping the dick threateningly in my face no matter where I moved my head around to. That is the memory. After I had it (the memory), I went around my folks’ house in a haze, in, like, a daze, totally freaked out, not telling anybody about it, and not asking anything. I know that was the only time my father