Contemporaneous: Chapters 68 – 69
68. Over breakfast of cereal, I text Dom: Hey, mate, I have to cancel today. Sorry about the late notice. Some stuff’s come up. Please read the script. I know you haven’t, and I don’t want to get into an argument but I know you just bluff your way through these meetings all the time. Be prepared come Thursday. I want to succeed. I want you to succeed. But you really have to do this for me and for yourself. It’s a shit, passive-aggressive message, but I think of being straight out with Lana last night, and that worked. Well, sorta. Well, until the morning. Dom texts back immediately: Ok…
Contemporaneous: Chapters 42 – 44
42. The phone rings. I almost don’t answer it, because I think it’ll be Lana, launching another salvo – part of me worries she’ll show up on my doorstep to continue this, although she’s only ever done that when she incontrovertibly knows she’s the one who’s fucked up, and wants to be conciliatory. You can place those visits along with Halley’s Comet. And my head’s raw. My ears are raw. I’m raw. Like I’m recoiling in expectation of some inexorable, scathing deconstruction of all my inadequacies. I wonder if this is how tortured prisoners, where the expectation now is just as horrifying as the experience itself. Fuck that. What I…