Read Clearly Now, the Rain for Free Online Page B

experience. That’s truly what it means to be “first world”: insular. I was alone in a universe so hard-knock, so raw, that grisly death caused only a soft stir—how could I not feel like an alien?
    Likewise I only know now why Serala flew into my mind that afternoon, why it was her that I wrote a letter to with a trembling hand in a downtown bar: she was the loneliest person I knew, because she saw things distinctly from others. And perhaps she saw things that others did not, as I felt I had—the twisted pleasure in the dying man’s face, the appalling amusement in the driver’s.
    Not only that, though—it was also that Serala didn’t share my privileged cocoon of insularity, that violence both by choice and by the whirl and stab of fate’s hand was not foreign to her like it was to me. She had witnessed violence as an EMT volunteer on the fast roads of New England—lodged in my brain are her tales of scraping motorcyclists off the asphalt, or cutting leather from a spine-damaged man who would later threaten to sue over his ruined jacket. I know these traumas sometimes excited her; I can see her dark eyes alive on the shoulder of the turnpike, reflecting the spinning red of sirens. I can see her, working around a shattered body, perhaps altered by adrenaline or something more. I know that she experienced violence at the hands of others, though she always refused me the specifics. I know that she even inflicted violence from time to time when she was scared enough.
    When I tried to talk about it—both the sight of the dead man himself and the nightmares that came later—my host mother would wave her slender hands in a cancelling motion, rub at the crucifix on her neck. My fellow students would rotate their faces sharply away from my words like birds. Though Samar and my father were sympathetic, the buzz of the interminable phone line brought me no tangible empathy. Serala was unreachable except by the pen but I had the assurance that when the words fell, she could catch them, and that made all the difference.

Five
    That summer my dad stretched his strained credit—to say nothing of his destroyed body—and took my brother and me and our ten-year-old Lab, Sky, to the borderlands of Minnesota. We spent a week portaging and rowing through countless lakes with Dad’s old friends, catching walleye and roasting them on campfires. My dad was determined and strong, plodding up steep slopes with his cane, fatigue and pride alternating on his face. Evenings, Luke and I would take a canoe and circle whatever little island we’d planted ourselves on for the night. Ostensibly we were fishing, but mainly it was a chance to smoke joints, practice Spanish, and talk about Dad.
    Luke’s sinewy arm whips back with the rod and I dodge the yellow lure, nearly dropping the joint.
    Cuidado! Shithead.
    Luke gives me a stoned giggle by way of apology. The lure plinks into the mirror of black water thirty yards away and he leans against the middle bar in the canoe, reaches back for the joint. We both gaze toward shore where Dad is trying to navigate a steep slope at the bottom of which Sky’s bright blue racquetball bobs in the water. Sky stares at the ball and back at my dad in the same way she looks at the walleye coming out of the fire. Dad missteps and slides on his right heel a couple of feet, then gets his cane planted and rights himself, shockingly.
    Whoa!
Luke exclaims, like we’re watching a sporting event.
    Dad, presumably stilling his heart, pauses before the main event of bending over to retrieve the ball and casts his eyes out to us. He’s wondering if we saw. I wave; Luke throws a thumbs-up. Dad wags his cane, apparently proud of not falling rather than pissed at himself about slipping.
    You think that Dad got what he was looking for?
    The question blindsides me.
    You mean even though he smashed himself to bits?
    I intend the question to be sardonic, but