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in the laundry, inside-out, to keep their fresh indigo color.
    Then he said, “You know, they say some Indians would will themselves to death when captured.”
    â€œKill themselves to death. That’s funny,” I said.
    â€œWill,” he said.
    â€œI know. I heard you,” I said.
    He worked at his toes with the clippers, digging at the springy stuff from the edge of the nail’s underside. I watched a curl boing on his forehead. Then he set the clippers down and pulled at a loose a tab of skin by the nail so that the crease where it met his flesh filled with blood. When he tapped the side of his toe, the blood formed a bead. “I like to make sure one tiny bit of me is in a speck of pain at all times. It keeps things in perspective.” Then he said, “And take this from the Indians: never be without the means to kill yourself, just in case. That’s what I say,” he said.
    So, yes, he was dramatic, but that kind of thing can work when you’re young. It can get you thinking.
    What else: quite deeply set gray eyes that sometimes looked a little greenish. A five o’clock shadow almost every time of the day.
    I mean, say I was a boy, and Ted took me camping and we sat at the edge of our fire in its little rock circle instead of on the floor of his living room or his balcony, and he took out a flashlight and shone it up his face and told ghost stories—Anne Boleyn with her head chop-chopped, or the golden arm, or tromp-tromping up the stairs, whatever they’re telling these days. There is an obvious tradition of scaring children—Grimm’s tales and all those “Daddy’s going to get you” games. Is the point, I wonder, to keep children home, where they believe they are safe? Although they are not safe. Or the game could be for parents who want to believe they can control their children’s fate, to frighten or protect them at will—shifting their vocal tones, or shifting the angles of their outstretched arms so that what once would strangle becomes a comfort to crawl into. Either way it works either way, because everyone wants to believe. The children want to believe, and the parents want to believe. It’s a good little outfit.
    For Ted with his toenails it was absolutely about control, the way you hear about girls cutting their arms and legs with razors, the way, in fact, girls I knew were probably cutting themselves at that moment, right as I watched the edge of Ted’s toenail fill with blood, only I didn’t see it that way, with the girls I knew. I thought of it later: how this is the age when you start noticing that you are a series of orifices. People are looking at your mouth. They’re looking at your ass. There’s a way that cutting yourself is a matter of beating them to the punch, of breaking your skin before it’s broken for you, so you can feel what it feels like, so you can watch it try to heal, so you can watch yourself live through. Your body seals itself up and the marks leave a record, writing on a wall, a kind of hieroglyph, your skin like paper.
    Ted’s version was he had this secret little secret of this bit of pain, which he let me in on, and that made me sure he was hiding more. The point of telling a secret at all, I suppose, is to point out how much else must be hidden.
    Weeks later, I was still thinking about the Indians, and I took to quizzing him. In the grocery, I zoomed up behind him, riding the cart like a scooter, and dragged to a stop where he knelt, picking a soup. “Ted, how about now?” and he said, “Knives at the deli. Or see, I pull the shelf this way, I’m crushed, thousands of falling cans. And I’m carrying a pen,” he said, put his hand in a fist, and tap-tapped on his chest over his heart to show me where he’d stab. Once, in the waiting room at the dentist, I said, “How now?” and he was fed up, and bored, so he said, “Look, brown cow, it