Non Compos Mentis: Mr. Hindsight

NON COMPOS MENTIS The Confessions of Mr. Hindsight a novel XXL BOLÍGRAFO Non Compos Mentis: The Confessions of Mr. Hindsight Copyright © XXL Bolígrafo. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination. First Edition non compos mentis /ˌnän ˌkämpəs ˈmen(t)əs/ not of sound mind CONTENTS 1. Root Cause 2. The Department of What Went Wrong 3. The First One 4. Denise 5. The Man Who Dresses Like a Bat 6. A Calling 7. Priya 8. Polling 9. The Blast Radius 10. Maya 11. The Forum 12. Diminishing Returns 13. Nadia 14. The Ones I Don't Name 15. His Mother's Voice 16. The Kitchen Table 17. Ray 18. The Recruitment 19. Light-skin Mike 20. Ninety-Nine 21. Certainty 22. The Second Column 23. Javier 24. The Diner 25. Annette 26. The Branches of Annette 27. A Treatise on the Clouding 28. The Word 29. Sending Them Home 30. Function Chapter One Root Cause People always want the origin. One clean moment, one cause, circled in red, as if a life were a machine with a single broken part you could point to and say, there, that is where it went wrong, replace that and the whole thing runs true. I understand the wanting. I have spent my entire existence hunting for exactly that frame, the one where it all turned, in my life and in the lives of ninety-nine strangers I could not save and one I still cannot read. So I will give you mine. I have reviewed it more than any footage should ever be reviewed. I am, you should know before we begin, a man who reviews. It is the only thing I have ever been good at, the looking-back, the forensic reconstruction of a thing already lost, and it is also, I have come to understand, the exact shape of my disease, that I can see everything one moment too late to use it, that I live in the country of afterward and hold a passport to nowhere else. I was eleven. A boy with a stutter and a library card, in a town small enough that everyone knew everyone's business and considered the knowing a civic duty. My mother was the best businesswoman in that town, which is why they hated her. She danced, when she was young, and then she stopped dancing and built something of her own, something that made more money than any of their fathers made at the plant, and she paid cash for the truck, and she never once acted sorry, and that, I think now, was the actual crime in their eyes. Not what she did. That she was not ashamed of it. A woman who declined to carry the shame they had assigned her. They could not forgive it, and because they could not reach her, unbothered as she was, behind the wall of her own self-possession, they reached instead for the soft thing she loved, which was me. It arrived the way these things always arrive, sideways, at a lunch table, through a boy named Corey who held up his phone and said a sentence about my mother that I will not repeat, and then said, "That's your mom, right." And here is the moment. Here is the frame circled in red, the root cause, the whole of me in a single second at a laminate table. I knew the answer. I had the whole thing ready, loaded, the defense, the words that would have ended it. She works harder than your father. She is smarter than this entire room and every adult in your house. Say her name again and find out what happens. I had all of it, complete, correct, arranged, the way I would spend my whole life having things complete and correct and arranged and one second too late. I opened my mouth. "Sh," I said. "Sh, sh. She." That was all. That was the whole rescue. The table laughed, and the laugh turned, the way a laugh turns, off my mother and onto me, off the woman they could not shame and onto the boy who could not speak, and somehow that was worse and also, God help me, a relief, because at least now the laughter had a target it could reach, and I understood something in my body before I had language for it, understood it in the throat, where I would keep understanding it for thirty years. The words are in there. All of them. Getting them out is the problem. And by the time they come, the moment they were for is already gone, already laughing, already lost, and you are left holding a complete and perfect and useless sentence, a warning that arrives after the disaster it was meant to prevent, which is, I would learn, the only kind of warning I would ever be able to give. I want to tell you about the stutter, because you are going to be with it for a whole book and I want you to understand it the way I only came to understand it at the very end, far too late, in a kitchen, which is where all of this begins and ends, at one table or another. I thought, for thirty years, that the stutter was my enemy. The thing that failed me at the lunch table, that failed me at Denise's window on the word house, that failed me on a sidewalk on the word deck, that failed me, at the very bottom, in a beautiful man's office on the word yes. I thought it was the flaw, the defect, the thing that stood between me and the sentences that would have saved everyone. I was wrong. It was the most loyal part of me and I did not know it. The stutter only ever seized on the words that mattered, the words with a person on the other end I was afraid of failing, and it seized because I cared, and the caring is where it lived, and on the day near the end when I finally got the hardest word out, in pieces, brokenly, it came out not despite the stutter but through it, because I had finally learned that you do not conquer the caring to speak, you speak through the caring, and the stutter is only the sound of a man who will not, cannot, say a thing he does not mean.