Fight Club

The head chakra. Chloe talked us into caves where we met our power animal. Mine was a penguin.
    Ice covered the floor of the cave, and the penguin said, slide. Without any effort, we slid through tunnels and galleries.
    Then it was time to hug.
    Open your eyes.
    This was therapeutic physical contact, Chloe said. We should all choose a partner. Chloe threw herself around my head and cried. She had strapless underwear at home, and cried. Chloe had oils and handcuffs, and cried as I watched the second hand on my watch go around eleven times.
    So I didn’t cry at my first support group, two years ago. I didn’t cry at my second or my third support group, either. I didn’t cry at blood parasites or bowel cancers or organic brain dementia.
    This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you.
    Then there was Bob. The first time I went to testicular cancer, Bob the big moosie, the big cheesebread moved in on top of me in Remaining Men Together and started crying. The big moosie treed right across the room when it was hug time, his arms at his sides, his shoulders rounded. His big moosie chin on his chest, his eyes already shrink-wrapped in tears. Shuffling his feet, knees-together invisible steps, Bob slid across the basement floor to heave himself on me.
    Bob pancaked down on me.
    Bob’s big arms wrapped around me.
    Big Bob was a juicer, he said. All those salad days on Dianabol and then the racehorse steroid, Wistrol. His own gym, Big Bob owned a gym. He’d been married three times. He’d done product endorsements, and had I seen him on television, ever? The whole how-to program about expanding your chest was practically his invention.
    Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one, if you know what I mean.
    Bob didn’t know. Maybe only one of his huevos had ever descended, and he knew this was a risk factor. Bob told me about postoperative hormone therapy.
    A lot of bodybuilders shooting too much testosterone would get what they called bitch tits.
    I had to ask what Bob meant by huevos.
    Huevos, Bob said. Gonads. Nuts. Jewels. Testes. Balls. In Mexico, where you buy your steroids, they call them "eggs.”
    Divorce, divorce, divorce, Bob said and showed me a wallet photo of himself huge and naked at first glance, in a posing strap at some contest. It’s a stupid way to live, Bob said, but when you’re pumped and shaved on stage, totally shredded with body fat down to around two percent and the diuretics leave you cold and hard as concrete to touch, you’re blind from the lights, and deaf from the feedback rush of the sound system until the judge orders: "Extend your right quad, flex and hold.”
    "Extend your left arm, flex the bicep and hold.”
    This is better than real life.
    Fast-forward, Bob said, to the cancer. Then he was bankrupt. He had two grown kids who wouldn’t return his calls.
    The cure for bitch tits was for the doctor to cut up under the pectorals and drain any fluid.
    This was all I remember because then Bob was closing in around me with his arms, and his head was folding down to cover me. Then I was lost inside oblivion, dark and silent and complete, and when I finally stepped away from his soft chest, the front of Bob’s shirt was a wet mask of how I looked crying.

    That was two years ago, at my first night with Remaining Men Together.
    At almost every meeting since then, Big Bob has made me cry.
    I never went back to the doctor. I never chewed the valerian root.
    This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. If I didn’t say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. They cried harder. I cried harder. Look up into the stars and you’re gone.
    Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever felt. I wasn’t host to cancer or blood parasites; I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around.
    And I slept. Babies don’t sleep this well.
    Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born.
    Resurrected.
    Until tonight, two years of success until tonight, because I can’t cry with this woman watching me. Because I can’t hit bottom, I can’t be saved. My tongue thinks it has flocked wallpaper, I’m biting the inside of my mouth so much. I haven’t slept in four days.
    With her watching, I’m a liar. She’s a fake. She’s the liar. At the introductions, tonight, we introduced ourselves: