Sol had taken the bitter pith of memory with him, discarding the fruit as feeble nostalgia. Three years had passed while he survived on a falsified amalgam of letters and photographs, dialogues and promises.

             “I could marry you,” she had said to him. He was quite sure of that, quite confidant it had in fact taken place much in the in the manner that he replayed it. Her wearing that floral blouse which could have been a hand-me-down from some poorly attended yard sale, were it not for the way it advertised her breasts: young and dense, irresistibly understated.

            Yet he continually tempered this memory with another fictitious one: “We’re too young for this, Sol,” she had said to him. “We need space. We need time. Can’t you see that we’re drowning?”

            And so they had ended their romance at her sudden decree, and while Sol was aware that the incident was of his own invention, he found its authenticity wholly irrelevant.

            Of what importance were the origins of a thought, of a feeling? What right or wrong could be identified amongst memory? Their relationship had been terminated, irreversibly so, and Sol felt entitled to eulogize it as he saw fit.

            Three years now. Three years since summer camp, since that intangible country annexed by adolescent lust. Three years since his arrival, unschooled in the language of the body.

            “You’re nineteen, motherfucker! Nineteen! High time you got your dick sucked!”

            Such encouragement was bountiful, offered unsolicited by every male in attendance on the hilly campus; faculty member and fellow counselor and subordinate camper alike.

            “Sol, man. Listen. I’m fourteen, okay? Five years you got on me, and no disrespect—you’re my counselor and you’re cool and all—but word is you’re fresh. You’re a green-dick. I could, y’know... introduce you to some girls.”

            But Sol required neither pity nor assistance, for he soon found himself in a position of considerable demand. The exotic name and the dark complexion, the baby-blue eyes with the curled lashes; these factors, trivial to Sol, at last converged to draw attentions from all fronts.

            First came Daphne, the lanky blonde with the pigtails and the upturned nose, slipping compliments and innuendos into otherwise innocent conversation.

            Then Kate, the polka-dotted redhead with the compelling midsection, casually squeezing his sides as she passed. Kissing his cheeks. Touching his ears.

            Then Orly, the Israeli exchange student, fresh from the army, her coquetry masked in a tomboy persona. Short-cropped bangs and ruptured laugh. That curled grin beneath her scowl.

            And Sasha, the spectacled brunette whom he’d embraced jokingly one night, and whose hand had run down his thigh and danced across his groin, who had approached him again with a pout the next day, “Orly says she likes you and wants to know if you like her too.”

            All these girls, these names and faces and lips and tongues, more than Sol had enjoyed in all his lifetime! Didn’t they recognize his inexperience? The degree to which he was unprepared?

            Only six months ago had the boy’s body completed the change it began at the head of his eighteenth year. A shifting of gears, a churning of hidden mechanics.

            And as the fat released him, as the boyish bulge of his waistline shrunk to reveal a well-proportioned physique, what remained of Sol the Comedian, so intent on countering his repugnance with wit? Or Sol the Depressed? Sol the Heavy-Hearted and Self-Loathing? Was he expected to abandon these compatriots, these brave doppelgängers who had stood beside him through the torment of his darkest years? Was he asked to bury them in the blubber now discarded? For these shapely girls whispering in the dining hall and the oak groves, they knew only of Sol the Slender, Sol the Desirable, Sol the Calculatingly (they assumed) Humble.

            Sol, who surely, with his cleft jaw and puckered lips, could not possibly be a green-dick.

            Could he?

            So Sol explored the privileges of the newly-liberated—the measured eroticism of the lingering stare; the whispered promise of the prolonged embrace; the hesitant flirtations and skittish groping—and all infused with an air of innocence, with a buoyant lack of culpability. For what repercussion could follow such folly, so harmless when compared to the encounters that surrounded him?

            “Did you hear? I finger-banged Jenna behind the basketball court last night. And guess what? She wasn’t wearing any panties!”

            How to make sense of these confessions? How to apply such lurid imagery to the rosy captions of Sol’s own exchanges?

            “Hey, Sol.”

            “I like your shirt, Sol.”

            “Wanna hang out sometime, Sol? Walk around the lake?”

            Sol entertained every invitation that came his way, still wholly ignorant of the sensual cipher employed by these girls—Daphne and Kate and Sasha and Orly—these female bodies now inexplicably attracted to him.

            He could imagine running his fingers along their cool thighs, even winding an arm beneath their blossoming breasts, but could never achieve any true connection to that dark, wet fountainhead of lust. For Sol, the genitals were still a thing of religious proportions: to be dreamed of and prayed to, but never encountered.

            This calm and, in retrospect, blissful phase of his abstinence was at last shattered by the introduction of a final, irrepressible element. His voice.

            I remember the incident well, with crystalline clarity in fact, for it occurred during the evening that I first became aware of Sol as both a friend and a threat.

            Tents were split into groups of thirty and spread out on an expanse of grass, while counselors struggled to reign in a tension that seemed primed to explode. Campers screaming and wrestling and tearing down the hill in sudden bids for freedom.

            Hoping to subdue what now verged on unrestrained chaos, Sol began to play guitar. Then, as he began to hum to himself, albeit hesitantly, the chaos dissolved into a hushed state of worship.

            His eyes closed, his damp lips held apart, Sol cooed in a silken falsetto which seemed to drip from his chin and slither up from the grass. A thing so perfect, so wholly-formed, as to be a fundament of the subconscious.

            As his fingers danced across the fretboard, tapping out the cadence to one of the summer’s popular ballads, the group’s female contingent released an audible, enamored sigh.

            By the song’s midway point, a bra had been flung at Sol and had hooked itself around one of the tuning pegs. By the final refrain, three more had been contributed, and the group had regained its frenetic state, though now directed entirely at the unveiled minstrel.

            I suffered a pang of resentment as a girl launched herself atop him and showered Sol with kisses, forcing him into the grass and prompting the other counselors to at last take action.

            “What happened back there?” Sol asked me, as we made our way down the hill.

            I was shocked to discern a genuine naiveté within him; one which I had assumed, along with my fellow counselors, to be put on. Sol appeared completely ignorant of the spell he had cast, and ignorant too of its inevitable consequence.

            Sure enough, requests began pouring in for Sol to make appearances in various cabins, singing in lieu of the usual bedtime stories. He appeared in tent after tent (most of which were on the girls side of the campground), crooning softly in the stifling heat that he attributed to the summer’s humidity, but which I knew to be the swampy clutches of female desire.

            He walked with Daphne on Wednesday, had lunch with Jade on Thursday, and on Thursday night traveled into town with Shyla to pick up supplies.

            “And you’re not hooking up with any of them?” came the incredulous reply. “Not any of them?”

            But Sol knew only how to initiate conversation and administer song, to receive casual flattery and deliver that full-mouthed pout, yet had no grasp on that fabled barrier between flirtation and intimacy.

            “It’s just like when you kiss em, Sol. Only you take it further. Go for that ass, brother.”

            But Sol hadn’t kissed them. In fact, he hadn’t kissed anyone at all. Ever.

            And as he disclosed this revelation to the late night group of male counselors gathered on the baseball diamond to swig from a warm flask of vodka, I recall feeling the urge to protect him, to aid him, to act as confidant rather than gossipmonger in this horde of excitable adolescence.

            Perhaps it was my role at home of older brother to two siblings, or my sense that Sol had no male role model—no brother, no father, no debauched and parasitic uncle—that inspired my empathy, but it proved ineffective, regardless. For I found no opportunity during the ensuing years to influence or alleviate the course of his struggle.

            By morning, all relevant players were aware that, yes, not only was Sol a green-dick, but he had never kissed a girl, and with that knowledge they became hunters, became seductresses, became sirens vindictive of such vulgar chastity.

            “My god,” Sol reeled, sipping a soda while I smoked behind the bunkhouse. “My god, she just jumped on me. In the stairwell last night, she kept rubbing my leg. Then she started up here,” he said, indicating his thigh. “And then… and then…”

            But I already knew the rest of his story. Everybody did. Her hands were insistent, immune to deterrence, and released him only afterward to sulk back to his cabin, his sweater pulled low to cover the stain.

            First blood had been drawn.

            The predation continued during his next walk with Jade, and as Sol sensed her closing in, he tried to extricate himself, but she had him by the shoulders and turned him into her kiss. A deep, wet embrace which lowered him to the ground.

            Before the week was out, Sol had adapted a defensive swagger, a crude imitation of the sexual bravado practiced by those around him.

            He strutted about and delivered high fives, rejoicing nervously, “I did it! I did it!” Though the truth was more akin to, “She made me do it! She made me do it!”

            Sasha had invited him to the empty room (a spare apartment whose key was passed between those staff members deemed worthy), and after half-heartedly debating the dangers of such an encounter, Sol arrived at the blank door, and hesitantly, fearfully, on the verge of paralysis and nervous debilitation, knocked.

            “My god... My god...” he said, swigging from his orange soda as though it were whisky. “We got in the bed and she took off her shirt and her boobs were just… they were just…” He swallowed hard before continuing, “And then she told me to touch them. She told me to touch them!”

            Sol returned to the room twice more before the key was demanded of Sasha, and twice his pants were removed and his newly socialized member was swallowed whole.

            “It’s the end that scares me,” he reflected in typical melodrama. “Are there rules for that? For when you’re about to, you know… on little Sasha’s face?”

            I shrugged off the question, discomfited by the line of inquiry.

            One thing strikes me now, however: Three years after the fact, and I can still remember him saying, “Little Sasha’s face.”

            Little Sasha? Was she not the corruptor in this case? Was she not the provider of sin in this affair?

            I recall also noting, during a chance encounter some years later, that Sol’s mother wore a crucifix which she kissed compulsively, and now wonder to what degree religion plagued his sexual conscience.

            Mine had been through many stages of varied abuse, but I’ll gladly confine this report to Sol’s difficulties, and not my own.

            The liaison with Sasha, heated though it was, disappeared along with the empty room key, and Sol spent his evenings stretched out on the grassy expanse, reflecting on his transformation, and curious as to how his triumphs would be embraced once the summer session had come to a close.

            “Good for you!” his mother applauded him. “And is she nice? Do you like her?”

            It was Daphne he had come away with in the end. Daphne who had been the first and final foray, and Daphne who had informed him in no uncertain terms that, yes, they were indeed dating.

            Sol’s victory lap was cut short by his mother’s question, one which had not yet been posed to him, “Do you like her?”

            Did he like her? Was that expected? Nowhere in the scattered rule book presented by so many eager libidos had anyone warned him of this particular concern.

            Sure, he liked her. He thought he did. He probably did.

            Sure, yeah—of course he liked her.

            But enmeshed in such a hallucinatory tour of the erotic, Sol hadn’t registered much of a distinction between any of the girls he’d allowed to experiment on him.

            Dating. What was that but one more idiom of the amorous?

            Hooking Up; Getting Down; Laying Into; Dating. It all meant the same thing, didn’t it?

            Besides, what did it matter if he liked her? They had hardly laid into each other.

            Sure, they had kissed: late that night on the bench overlooking the campground, a canopy of pinpricked starlight illuminating her smile.

            Sure, they were hooking up: behind the cabin where he had nibbled on her earlobes, touched her hair, caressed her neck.

            Sure, they were dating: she had said they were, hadn’t she? That final night, crying all over her strange floral blouse.

            “I love you,” she had whispered. “I’ve been loving you since the day we met. Is that stupid? Oh, Sol… I love you. I really think I do.”

            So, yes. They were dating.

            “I’m going to visit her on Labor Day,” Sol told me later that year.

            He took the train up to Boston and sent me a postcard during the holiday, a gesture I found embarrassingly intimate.

            But the letter was brief, it contained only three lines:

                        Here in Boston.

                        Already seems like so long since camp.

                        Is this how it feels to get old?

                        —Sol

            The implied despair and the absence of any mention of Daphne struck me as immediately worrisome.

            Sol, the unlikely beneficiary of an aimless sexual inheritance; Sol, who had had high-fived his way through his carnal christening; Sol, who had infused the entire male staff with a proud sense of fatherhood at his giddy self-discovery... What had become of these gleeful incarnations?

            The flurry of movement which was Daphne’s college campus in no way resembled the grounds of the previous summer. Daphne appeared vibrant and adult, her hair no longer braided, her legs peeking from beneath a pleated skirt. She towered over him and wrapped her arms around him twice, three times. Again and again as rope or as ribbon.

            “How I’ve missed you,” she said, holding him as a mother would a child. “You haven’t changed at all.”

            Daphne’s room was a rectangular cell, sparsely adorned with prints of Matisse and O’Keefe, and her small desk held a laptop and a three-ringed binder, its reams of printed notes perforated by holes at the margins, and the lights were yellowish, and the lamps were twisted, and something immutable had changed.

            “I’ll graduate in three years and get a job as a curator,” she told Sol while he ate pizza and drank soda, staring fixedly out the window at the trees beyond. The blazers and handkerchiefs. The backpacks and berets.

            “I’ll graduate and become a curator and then we’ll get married!”

            Sol next saw Daphne during Thanksgiving, electing to drive the stretch from Los Angeles to San Francisco to share the holiday with her family. The interim had been passed largely on the phone with call after call, most of which had baffled Sol in their fiery intensity and vacuous content.

            “You didn’t ring me yesterday, Sol. I tried to reach you at noon and then again at four. You know it’s important to me. Important that you call. I was worried all day, and had so much to tell you. But you didn’t. You didn’t call.”

            And with that same sideways shrug he used to allay her every grievance, Sol had committed himself to Thanksgiving with her family, introduction to her younger sister, interrogation by her father, and subjection to that most intimate of admissions: her childhood bedroom.

            There on the ruffled mattress, in view of the steep grade to the Embarcadero and the lipstick links of the Golden Gate Bridge, she pulled him inside of her.

            “It’s time, Sol” she whispered, tugging on his hips with her arms, her ankles. “It’s time.”

            And Sol, who until then had managed to postpone the act in one way or another—headache, hangover, humbly confessed anxiety—now committed the deed which he’d imbued with such crippling significance, and felt in return no great revelation, no great regret, no great indication of the moment at all.

            “Congratulations,” she whispered as he entered her. “Congratulations, Sol.”

            “You two look like you’re meant to be together,” declared Daphne’s sister, looking Sol up and down. “I can tell. I know these things.”

            “Oh yes, Sol. At last. You’re finally mine.”

            “Please, Sol, have some turkey,” Daphne’s mother babbled, planting another thigh on his plate and ladling from a boat of gravy. “Eat, eat. He’s got such good manners, doesn’t he, dear?”      

            “Yes, Sol. Yes yes yes…”

            “My daughter tells me you have a wonderful singing voice. Maybe after dinner you’ll sing for us.”

            “Oh, Sol. You feel so good. Mine at last… Mine forever…”

            “You take care of my daughter,” Daphne’s father whispered, edging Sol into the foyer, laying a meaty paw on his shoulder. “You take care of her, now.”

            And gutted by the charge, Sol acquiesced. “Yes, sir. Of course.”

            “Oh, Sol… Sol… Yes. Yes. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.”

            On the bed. In the car. On the cold tile beside the toilet. On the padded edge of the living room footstool.

            “Ohmygod, Sol. Yes. Yes.”

            After Daphne’s parents had vetoed her suggestion that Sol spend the night, he called me from his motel room, spavined, eviscerated, enfeebled.

            “How do you do it?” he whimpered. “How do you deal with it all? This isn’t hooking up,” he whined. “This isn’t getting down. We’re not fingering or blowing or eating out. This is sex—real sex.”

            And though I didn’t want to admit it then, I agreed with him completely.

            It was painfully real. A curse made corporeal.

            He escaped down the 101, passing between sentinel skyscrapers to flee the peninsula that very night, turning off his phone and throwing it, if not out the window in true dramatic fashion, into the trunk with his bundled belongings. And for a moment the boy who was continually playing catch-up, the child who felt eternally pitted against his own congenital naiveté, felt that he may have advanced too far.

            His thoughts ran backwards, to a time when the young man was younger still, and not yet a thing to be achieved or desired.

            Imagine it: Lumbering onto the stage as that rotund exaggeration of a child. Heavy arms and heavy underarms as he lays his elbows against the piano.

            “Heeeere’s Fatty!” one of the students shrieks in a Jack Nicholson impersonation.

            But Sol has no anger in him. Merely sighs and turns toward the keys.

            He is fat. At least the insult is accurate.

            Fine. Good laugh. Sol can handle a laugh.

            He begins to play, coaxing subtle inflections from the instrument, and as he gains momentum he grunts with exertion and stomps the pedals, erupting at last into a flurry of arpeggios, and springing to his feet, he sends the bench toppling behind him.

            It crashes off the stage and splinters beside the front row.

            “You want the fat? You can’t handle the fat!” Jack Nicholson shrieks again, and as the auditorium bursts into a layered response—shock, protest, gleeful mockery—Sol continues to play, hovering above the keys and beating out a glorious crescendo.

            His eyes shut tight, his lips held open, thick pearls of sweat cascading down his forehead.

            And when the moment arrives for lyric, when the song at last yields to his lilting soprano—his one redeeming force!—Sol remains silent.

            Better not to speak, he decides, abandoning the piece to help recover the broken piano bench.     
            Better not to say anything at all.

            I knew of that previous Sol, that vague imprint of the man to come, but only as I knew of the Sol who found himself so suddenly valued at camp that summer. And as I knew the Sol of the aftermath following, who plod thoughtlessly through his relationship with Daphne. Or of that snarled and knotted Sol which was yet to come.

            And by that I mean, I knew them only to the extent that he revealed them to me: Intimately, and not at all.

            It was Sol the Fearful who called on me a few months later to commiserate with him over a neat pink envelope he’d received in the mail.

            A card was enclosed, the front of which displayed a newborn’s wrinkled features. The swollen eyelids; the wormlike tongue.

            Inside, in celebratory colors, a bright font declared, Surprise!

            The card was signed, simply,  Love you, Daphne.

            “Is this a joke?” Sol wailed. “Is this supposed to be funny?”

            He seemed sickened by the message. By it’s gaiety. Surprise!

            “Some play for attention?” he demanded. “Some attempt at control?”

            He waved the card before me, on the verge of tears. I knew better than to suggest that the letter’s implications may in fact be sincere.

            Sol filled me in on the card’s backstory over jellied toast and sugared coffee at a nearby cafe.

            “She’s been depressed,” he said. “She’s been leaving awful messages, begging me to fly to her. She calls me at midnight and tells me she’s spent the entire day in bed—A whole day! Can you imagine?—then waits silently on the phone for my reply. ‘I need you,’ she’ll say. ‘I cry and cry and can do nothing else. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. Leave tonight,’ she’ll insist. ‘Leave tonight and fly over, or I’ll do something drastic.’ ”

            As he recounted the conversation, Sol’s eyes hung heavy in his skull. Weighted down by guilt, that inexorable corollary of love.

            “Is this my fault?” he asked me. “Am I responsible for this?”

            The card had been sent in jest, in the end. No actual pregnancy had occurred, though I didn’t discover this myself until two years later, following Sol’s disappearance.

            “My God!” Sol’s mother yelped. “My God! Of course he’s alive!”

            I’d only meant to emphasize the suddenness with which Sol had vanished, but at the mention of her son’s demise, Sol’s mother leapt into such a fit of spitting and crossing herself that I feared she’d begin to grieve.

            “Why do you say such things?” she whispered.

            I explained that I’d neither heard from Sol, nor been able to reach him by phone.

            “Oh, you know Sol!” she rejoiced, her fear dissolving. “Such a spirited child! I think he’s tossed his phone away again. He’s been traveling for quite some time. Said he needed a fresh start, and bless him! He’ll get one!”

            So yet another Sol had emerged from the old, from the discard and debris of his latest failed attempt. A fresh start—I recoiled at the notion, believing no such thing to exist. Sol had not discovered some dramatic pathway to redemption, he had merely followed through on his previous attempt to jettison his phone from the window of his car.

            I pictured that sideways shrug of his. That inversion of Atlas, shirking the weight of the globe with the simple belief that he’d been dealt a bad hand. Surely a man could trade in his cards if things did not turn out in his favor. Surely one was not chained to their decisions, so arbitrary when considered against the infinite possibilities afforded them. Surely one could simply release a cell phone from a driver side window, and with it their attachment to three years worth of personal development.

            Sol called me at last, inviting me to San Francisco, where, he revealed with a hesitancy that betrayed harsh circumstances, he was staying in a hostel.

            Curiosity caused me to undertake the drive almost immediately, eager to loose myself in the monotony of the road and the surfeit of suffering which Sol was sure to provide.

            No apologies were made for his absence, no excuses proffered for his lack of communication. Sol seemed to consider offering me a chair and a cigarette sufficient prelude.

            “Why am I in San Francisco,” he began, staring listlessly through the grated window. “That’s what you’re wondering, right?”

            I allowed that I was curious.

            He took a cigarette from the pack and fumbled it between his fingers, showing no intention of lighting it. “I never meant to be cruel, you know. Not to anyone. Yet somehow, I’ve done harm. Crippling, irreparable harm.”

            He threw the cigarette out the window in a show of frustration.

            “You know what she said to me?” Sol queried. “You know what she said, sobbing, when at last I told her that I’d had enough? She says, ‘There are three men in a woman’s life: The man she’ll always love; the man who’ll always love her; and the man she’ll eventually marry. I guess you’re the man that I’ll always love.’ Daggers, right? Is there anything worse to unload on a person? And what crime did I commit? None! I dealt in love, and now I deal in ruin.”

            He cried freely, and I tried to assuage his grief, mumbling the inanities appropriate to the situation: Hey, there. Take it easy. It’s okay. Tell me what happened.

            Daphne had sent him a short letter in a large cardboard box that was packed with every vestige of their relationship. Every drawing and photograph. Every bracelet and ticket stub. His shirt. A record. Two roses, dried and pressed. A copy of ‘Heart of Darkness’. A collector’s edition of ‘Key Largo’.

            A mutual friend had phoned to reprimand him.

            Her father had called to demand the cost of the plane ticket she’d purchased to surprise him with.

            Surprise!

            “And I paid it,” Sol confessed. “I mailed the check that very day. Four hundred and sixty dollars. Paid it without a thought. I’d promised him…” he murmured. “I’d promised to take care of her…”

            Sol left town shortly thereafter to reinvent himself yet again. Rented a studio apartment in Santa Cruz and began reading beatnik philosophy, meditating on the beach and smoking marijuana. Drowning himself in the cleansing waters of pretense and cliche.

            Yet this new Sol was never far from Daphne. Always the itch, always the worry. San Francisco lay in wait before him, only a short drive away, where at any time she may be visiting her family and hiking through the Presidio, or lazing at one of the coffee shops they’d frequented together.

            The image of her haunted him: sitting absently as he approached her, then that moment of recognition as she registered his presence.

            She’d claw at his face. She’d scream in rage. She’d flee the scene. She’d kiss him.

            “But that’s not how it happened,” Sol revealed. “That’s not how it happened at all.”

            It was a dream which finally forced his return. The clear and powerful image of her. Daphne, and nothing more. 

            He arrived again in San Francisco and began a routine of casual surveillance. Walking twice a day past her parent’s house, scanning for an extra car or familiar silhouette in the window. He sat for long hours at the corner cafe. At each location in the city, on every park and bus bench, preparing himself for the inevitable encounter.

            “I didn’t mean to upset her,” he said. “I didn’t intend to cause trouble. Just, for my own reasons, to see how she had fared.”

            And when at last the meeting materialized, when in passing her parent’s house Sol found Daphne immobile in the driveway, having recognized him earlier and known it to be more than coincidence, Sol told her all this. Told her immediately before letting the magnitude of the moment sink in.

            “If my father sees you, he’ll kill you,” she whispered quickly. “Come.”

            Daphne took his wrist in her hand—The contact! That contact again!—and led him down the street to the park overlooking the bay. They walked silently, her gaze fixed on the horizon, her expression indecipherable.

            As they stood viewing the grey waters and the network of bridges dissecting them, Sol was struck with the sudden impression that nothing had changed at all. Not a day, not an hour, had passed since that summer.

            He stood momentarily as before: fearless, inculpable, whole.

            “But I was wrong again, wasn’t I?” he asked me. “I’d assumed her to be happy. I had always assumed...”

            He removed another cigarette and twirled it between thumb and forefinger, slivers of tobacco flying from its edge. His eyes glazed over, his mind returning to the memory: the assumed Sol beside the assumed Daphne, holding her assumed hand, surveying the assumed city.

            “Come with me,” Daphne said at last, leading Sol down a slope and further into the park. Through a thicket and into a dense grove of pines.

            She released his hand and lowered herself to the dirt, her legs splayed slightly, a breeze rustling her hair.

            Sol hovered before her momentarily, enjoying the final delusions his mind afforded him:

            Maybe she was looking for a tranquil setting to ease the strain of the past three years...

            Or she wished to enjoy his silent company, allow their inner mechanics a gradual adjustment...

            Perhaps with this movement, she would gesture him to sit beside her...

            Or absently scratch her thigh...

            Or adjust her skirt in some unknown manner...

            But here his conjecture came to an end, for Daphne gripped the edge of her skirt and yanked it upward, shoving her underwear aside and exposing her pale entry.

            “Look at me,” she demanded. “Look at me, Sol.”

            She tugged at the cotton and her underwear began to tear.

            “Sol: look!” She thrust with her hips, offered an unintelligible shriek.

            Sol looked, stilled by shock. The cotton tore away.  

            “There you are, Sol—right there!”

            Daphne pressed a fingernail to the soft flesh of her groin. Drew a pinprick of blood.

            “See it, Sol? Can you see it, baby?”

            Beside her finger, edging against her opening, stood the bluish stain of a cheap tattoo.

            Two consonants and a single vowel.

            That single syllable—

            Sol.

            “Now you see it,” she snarled. “There you are. Right there, against me. Ahhh, Sol. Ugh, fuck!”

            She writhed and wailed as a crowd began to gather.

            Daphne coughed up a harsh laugh, and Sol, his internal monologue reduced to a high-pitched mantra—nonononono—abandoned the misery of the scene and fled the park, sobbing.

            “I ran,” Sol murmured. “I ran away, again. She needed my help, and I ran away.”

            At this point in his story, Sol trailed off, lapsing into a silence which lasted the remainder of my visit. He broke it only once to whisper softly, “My name…”

            And that was my last vision of the man: hunched by a barred window, breathing in the smoke of the city. Thin shadows dissecting his face. A casualty of his own virtues.

            Upon leaving, I made a final attempt at assistance, urging Sol to seek help, to ease his confusion however possible.

            Beyond him, the harbor splintered into fractal sunlight, and as I departed, my mind wandered back to the cardboard capsule that Daphne had sent him. Cluttered with the detritus of their relationship. Topped with that final missive she’d penned in simple cursive and crimson ink:

            I’m a good person, Sol. And you’re just trying to be.