A few years ago, my cousin tried to kill me when people ask why. I don't know what to say. Usually I mumble that he didn't have a reason I say that he didn't even think he had a reason. We had the argument that day or any other in forty years I say that we Think of each other merely as cousins. We were best friends. We spoke for hours every week, often late at night, squinting through the portal of a video to exchange complaints about our lives and show off household projects. I say that we had been. planning for months to get together that weekend, with organised, the family reunion at his house. my son and I were staying in his guest room while a swarm of aunts and uncles and cousins spill, into a nearby hotel. I had spent the day with

m watching our kids play in hotel pool, but everyone was planning He gathered back at my cousins house for a party that evening. I say that none of our relatives knew there was conflict between my cousin in me. Neither did I, and neither did he. There was no sign of anything wrong until he tried to kill me. when I say this. I know it doesn't make sense. I know it sounds incomplete. It sounds like a story. I tell myself to avoid responsibility, and maybe it is. This is man to man published in the New York Times magazine. Written in red by Will Hilton yeah

voice. He said, can I talked with limbs daddy That was how it again he was, ending in the doorway of the guest room with an easy smile. my son and I had just returned from the pool to get ready for the party We brought along my sister's sun and another cousins daughter kids, dried often and on the dead to play video games. While I straightened the room, With a careless way, they glanced up on my cousin appeared at the door, his mouth to frame blocking the exit, gave them no concern. I can still hear the humour in his voice, as he asked their permission to speak with me. I remember that he called them boys, even though one was not should that

Detail of alarmed me, I wonder now, and what about his kids? Where were they where they upstairs with their mother, as he said, or was he alone? When we returned? Did our arrival interrupt him make too much noise coming inside. or had he already vanished. To rage from the whispers he heard the previous night. I think of my son in that moment, stretched across the bed with his cousins. I can still see the red Nintendo clutched in his hands. His little finger stabbing the keys to inflict some imaginary violence. His mouth and sister were not with us. There were five hundred miles away. We had left them in the house that I spent

Two years, hammering together the home I was tearing apart, I had just moved out a few weeks earlier: the marriage ending the family in pieces. I remember the sadness in my boys. We pact our bags to leave and away my cousin seem to sense it. He leaped from his pick up at the airport to envelop us with hugs. then pulled off the highway a few miles later to buy a nerve football. Some gaudy beach store stopping again a few miles later to pick up a youth size, Carolina, Panthers Jersey. I watched my, sons gloomy face light up, as he tried to Jersey on chattering with my cousin about CAN Newton. I remember thinking they would always have that in common. The easy enter of seasonal sports, the patter of teams, statistics, which always seemed fast,

He was to me until I became a father until I began to look with envy on the touchstone of sports between generations of other men. I remember how my son reacted to my cousins presence in the truck that day it was the same way. I had always responded here myself. There was some. soothing in his confidence, he carried himself with a blunt authority that boys are groomed prize. He laughed easily and off slapping the wheel with his palms. Until the dashboard shook when he talked football. He made casual gestures of throwing and running with the fluid motion of a man built to play. As we put into the driveway he stepped to the pavement and told my son to go long ducking his head back into the cap. While my boy raced across the yard, then taking a step

backward and lofting the ball skyward to land in my son's open arms for the rest, day. My boy war had Jersey, he worded. In the following morning, when we left for the hotel pool he tossed it by his pillow to slip on later I wonder now if he was still wearing the jersey that night, sir, did by relatives he barely new on the patio of their hotel. While my parents huddled beside my broken body, in a surgical unit of the emergency room, praying that my ruptured organs and battered skull could be repaired I think of how little my boy understood in a moment too young to be told what happened and how confused he must have then, with his father, missing with his mother and sister, far away with none of you

grandparents incite with a crowd of great ants, Second cousins, showering him with cake and presents it his knife birthday. he was nine And his family was shattering and suddenly his father was gone. but I've come to understand is that my absence wasn't sudden at all. I had been missing all his life, Had abandoned him, I want my boy, Understand that I failed him, for how long and why he needs to know that when he becomes a man he will be. to fail in the same ways you'll be encouraged to fail. You'll, be told these things aren't failures.

I want him to know how our lifetime of failures, let us that night to the bird day, he celebrated alone with fraction his family father on the edge of death. I need to tell him difficult truth? It I'm still learning myself voice? Can I talk Williams? Daddy. I looked up and saw him in the doorway. I returned his smile. I told children. I wouldn't belong across the room and stepped outside the afternoon sun,

was behind the house, leaving the yard and shadows my cousin said: let's talk in the shop, he began walking toward his garage. I followed him passed a wooden, staircase and tyre swing hanging from chains. When we came to the big metal door, he pulled it open and waited for me to enter nothing about this struck me as unusual. I thought you wanted to smoke some pot. He always wanted smoke a ball agent care. If I smoked with him, I had no interest in smoking. That day I couldn't handle the party stoned. I always enjoyed sitting with him on the metal stools and his workshop surrounded by June saw blades and stainless steel, fastened errors and coils of rights blue packs tubing, while he crumpled a bird into a pipe growing more calm with each city took warlike. The version

him that I liked best. I stepped into the garage and him closing the door behind me. I walked down a row of work beaten to that hung from the wall and perfect order. I liked my cousins attitude about tools. He hated plastic junk. He looked for the best secondhand equipment he could find, took it apart and restored it, sir Thus, he found the time to maintain everything he had. He talked about this in the language of paternal duty. A man took care of his things. He tended what was his He filed the teeth of his chainsaw blade and oiled the return. his framing nailer, sometimes just to amuse ourselves. We sent each other pictures of. August workshops in magazines, the spotless man cave with a checkerboard floor. The matching sets of novel gizmos that communism

pouch oddly miniature circular saws and flimsy drills with a quarter inch chuck his equipment heavy with steel. It hung from brackets anchored framing the wall. Some other electrical cords were spliced. The paint chipped in the lustre gone. But everything was built to last and put to work. I passed a yellow jack hammer and a shelf of foreign sewer pipe. Turning in a small room where he kept his work bench. I heard in behind me and when I turned I saw a blur of motion, His hands flew to my throat. Since my trachea shut the force was stunning, my lungs stopped

My arms shot up too bad his away, but he was many times stronger and he slammed my back against the wall. His stance was perfect. He was centred grounded with his torso guarded. His millet retraining at work. I tried to shout, but nothing came. I felt my chest seas for air. I hoped he could see the confusion in my eyes. His were slits of rage. Clenched his hands so tight around my neck, that veins bulge studies temples and his face was deepening read. I wondered if I had accidentally broken, something in the house or a few is playing a joke and didn't realize his own strength,

thought my body going numb. I was starting to black out. He tightened grip and pressed his face close to mine and hissed. What does I'm all out mean. I thought of my wife. Five hundred miles away was glad she wasn't with me our daughter, would be safe with her, and our son was in danger with me Look back now. I wonder how often that was true, how many times in ways. They were all on safe with me, my wife, and I had been married for twelve years but we'd known each other. Much longer, we first as young children, when I turned up at her house for pottery lessons from her mother, we dated briefly in high school but lost

contact after graduation. We finally reach- next it an hour. Late twenties at a gathering of old friends. She was living in Austin and I was planning a trip there for work. We made plans to meet for a drink. We talked into the night. We both confessed to feeling adrift on the frontier of our thirty. She was in graduate school working to restaurant jobs. That left no time for herself. I was a journalist who spent most The year travelling and had no sense of home, few weeks later, I called her from Delaware I was on my way to a job in Missouri. I asked if I could see her again before I returned. To the house I was renting in New Mexico we planned Then, two days together, the second morning I changed my flight.

Three days later, I bumped it again. Eventually, I canceled the ticket. The life that we began in Texas was a torrent. activity. Each morning we went for a run down. Town had breakfast and cycle to work. Then we met for a swim practice at noon and spent the evening paddling across town Lake and kayaks. we split the bills and the chores. We shared the cooking and cleaning the things we did separately. We did for a reason. I was more likely to stitch the seam of a coat because I like to so she kept track of auto service because socket cars if she was sick. I made stock for soup and, if I was than she did, we married the next summer in a small ceremony at her fathers community garden afterward, we flew to ITALY, envisage

did her grandmother in the area and we drove to the Alps and checked for a week on the french Porter in the fall. We took a road trip from Texas too, Mexico capping under a full moon white sands. National monument, we climbed sandy appeal, can slept in the ruins of an old large. On the summit. We spent a few days on a patch of land but I owned in the Sunni Mountains Buildings Foundation of a small cabin. In the spring we hold our bikes to Florida and rode three thousand miles up the coast to Canada as recrossed Virginia. We got at the missed on the Blue Ridge mountains and decided to move. There can Texas. We searched online for property and settled on a little grey House near Shenandoah National Park. It was perched at the top of a longer road with views across the Piedmont,

we imagined ourselves, hiking and cycling. Raising of edged garden and a handful of kids. We backed our lives, to a twenty six foot. Moving van and made the fourteen hundred mile DR pulling The last hair pin turn on snow. the December night many times since I've tried to remember how we expected this to work. Parents of small talk Dron do not spend their days cruising down. Mountain roads on marathon runs in century rights without any friends or relatives in the area with only one. neighbour for miles around. We, have a minute of support when we had children, the nearest city, Almost an hour away. We had no plan for work. I would be able to write from home, but her career depended on human contact in Texas. She had finished the course work for a doctor

in art history and held a university job with benefits. There would be Oh faculty appointment in the wilderness, or even a restaurant, for picking up shifts We would have to get by on my income, but our mortgage was twice the rent in Texas Health insurers. cost eight hundred dollars a month and with kids are expenses would only rise. It seems to me that we spent no time considering these issues are where they might lead us isolation the financial pressure, the fatigue of re children, the eraser of her prefer no identity and the lingering insect in mine, a lifelong go with male identity, but I had never fully resolved the walls of my cousins works

spun. His grip on my throat was a noose. I heard him saying what does I'm all out mean kept ass, Again and again I had Breast answer him, but I couldn't have answered if I did. The words meant nothing to me: I couldn't imagine why he thought they would. all I knew was that he wanted to kill me. I can see that in his eyes it was more than anger. it was impatience, kept is Rip around my neck and washed bay, squirm waiting for my body to give out This violence is never surprise, made before it was essential to whom he was. He grew up in the steel.

of Pennsylvania and learn to handle himself in a fight by middle school. He tower over kids our age, his drowning in hormonal rage. He hated school hated teachers. hated the cops and made sure they knew. It was old enough to drive silver car in plastered the windshield with letters that spelled out criminal. He walked on the sidewalk, bellowing laughter and Hocking Luke on the street, any who saw him could tell at a glance tat. It was a bad idea to press him just in case he carried a knife. Eventually he got a gun. I never saw him shoot it. He said It was real and I believed him when his fan visited mine, we disappeared into my room tugging, a bottle of stolen booze and examined

his latest weapons, I was from a different world. We lived in Baltimore City, while other white families raced Suburbs, after the nineteen sixty eight riot plunging population by hundred nineteen thousand residents. In the space of a decade my parents loved the city and double down. they bought an old row house volunteered and health clinics marched for gun control. My my Their took a job as a social worker at the Lorens Chea Poch when school for pregnant teenagers. father left her white shoe law firm to hang a shingle of his own downtown on knights, and we Ganz he often returned to work coming home. After my mother had put us to bed, she did most of the king in cleaning his job paid most to the bills. Neither

seem to mind this division. There was a tenor of equity between them. Even now they spend hours at dinner each night, debating the events of the day and the world. my own relationship with my father was more turbulent. I lived in fear of his temper. He aspired to a model of masculine reserve, but he saw cowboy movies. I mean this literally with our four vcr came mandatory screenings stage, coach, high noon and searchers each one followed by an impromptu disquisition on the virtue of restrained power. Every time I expect to see one

This time. I came to understand this as a reaction to the volcanic forces in himself yeah bye, my sister and I were little and our mother was out. It would fumble Tahiti can of ravioli and set the table rowing frustrated and furious. When I complained dinner was too hard or to call to spicy or not enough, I enjoyed the fleeting power. It gave me to provoke him even as I dreaded the moment he would blow the worst was not physical staying of his hand across my face. It was the sound of his footsteps, chasing behind me when I bolted from the table racing up the front steps And down the back until at last he caught up in me too. A wall is expression, tangled in fury, hurling epithets with his crime,

face inches from mine. It would take years of therapy individually and together George, a lasting peace middle school brought its own torment. I was an abysmal student, learn to read two years later than my classmates whoever's. you'd or completed homework button publics. rules evacuated by white families, administrators pamper, those of us who remained after year. I tracked into the highest tier of gifted classes, with grades on the verge of failing passing among a slender minority of white students in a system

of glaring racial apartheid. Discrimination fosters global, Can I got, or than my share it was my stringy blonde hair whipped into an Opie tangle, or maybe it was just bad luck that I speed up more than most. that wasn't true in my neighborhood, where I had inexplicable fortune. I think I was that Only boy in a three block radius, who was never bloodied in a street fight or my friends, was stopped to the And brutally beaten by teenagers in the alley behind my house when he was about twelve. But my good luck at home did not extend to middle school. most my friends got along fine trouble seem to find me. I remember the sound of wooden hall passes connecting with my skull as I stood at the urinal Irene

by being tossed around the playground at recess by older girls. I remember coming back from it to the bathroom one afternoon when you saw me through the door of his classroom and leaped from his seat. Shouting nerd. and rushing into the hall to stand in my way after a few head fakes to see. If out, when she hauled off with the real thing landing. If a dozen blows on my left eye before my friend done Hey materialised, to stop him! I continued to class. Ass with ringing years in my eye swelling shut when a man from the US. This removal crew looked down from his ladder and said next time swing. First, night, I stole a bottle of concealed from my mother's bathroom. I spent the next week painting away that dark circles under my eye. I don't know how much of this I told my cousin it see. I never had to he pray

fear and other boys, but he knew Or preyed on me, when you visited my house. He would regale me with stories of his own recent fights, making a point to emphasise that even he took beatings he showed me cuts on his hands and complained that his mid section hurt. But it was clear to me that he relished combat weather won or lost, He seemed immune to the insecurity said I couldn't escape, showed me how to carry myself in a way that suggested confidence I didn't have here. He, the man on the latter's advice, to swing first. me how most of my friends despised my cousin. They avoided me when he was in down. If we stopped by their houses, he found the liquor and down He was smash and neighbours window or ten

in tenor of parked cars swing like a whip, one of my friend reminded me recently of a beating. He gave to a kid in the parking lot throwing or fragile body to the ground while the rest, I stood aghast. I had cotton that night his violence was ambient. It was endemic, but I knew wouldn't turn on me. We could walk through the city anywhere at any hour and there would be no trouble he couldn't manage. I loved the shelter of his violence. It gave him the power to make wrong right. It made no difference that he never did Only that he could. I loved that when he came to a party people made room for us to pass, I loved when he told me about breaking

port you in half and beating two guys with the fat end. I love TIM, even when I hated his violence. Even when it hurt me. I remember a night in the last year of high school, when we picked up some of my friends on the way to a party, my cousin satin, with a boy who was dating the girl. I liked I was pulling around curve in the road when you, The boy to break up with her last in the mirror and saw that my cousin had put a gun to the kids head. I wasn't sure what kind of gone it was whether was loaded, her even real, but I or to the shoulder and told him to put it away. He did unfazed, it meant nothing to him

we dropped the other kids at the party, but didn't go in ourselves by Monday on. My friends were furious. Some stop speaking to me, was furious with my cousin, but I knew what he intended. I love that he loved me enough. make everyone hate us both. Remember when you rarely had to pay sales tax for stuffy Bonamy internet, while the law of the land changed and twenty changed and businesses have been struggling to comply ever since, if your business cells online or an marketplaces abba lair, I can make your life easier with real time sales, tax rate calculation and automatic return filing apple era into

with more than seven hundred of the most widely used European E systems find out how avalanche I can help you save time and reduce risk at a dot com, slash the Daily Avenue era, tax compliance done right when I left for college that full my cousin ditched his own care persons. And a month crashing in my dorm. We were aged all night. I skipped every class we broke into buildings for anything we could steal, we loved a container of gas, leaned the woods and torched piles of brush. When a kid in the dining hall complained that we were smoking, we stubbed out cigarettes in his food. In November, my cousin left campus to join the army. I can you'd the rampage without him. By January, I was buried in administrative charges. They ranged from a trivial complain

but I was running a gambling ring to the series the accusation that I had set a doormat. Carpet on fire that wasn't, true, but school administrators had plenty of good reasons to expel me in February. They did when I called home to give my parents the news I heard anguish and my mom whose voice my father came on the line and asked me let them know when I landed somewhere else machine aimed humiliated with nowhere to go. I packed bag and climbed on a bus. I spent a few months surfing couch and over staying. My welcome with friends my cousin in his training and deployed to Europe where he found with a german woman when he brought her back Pennsylvania I made my way to his father's house for their wedding reception. Halfway through the evening, someone approached made a whisper

that my cousin was spinning out. He believed that a relative was, Flirting with his new wife and flew into a rage. after a noisy confrontation outside a neighbor called the police. I went to the backyard and and my uncle bathed in flashing light, trying to convince a throng of is that everything was fine. I remember thinking that I had come to leave my cousin behind was no way to reconcile the man he was with the one I wanted to become still wasn't sure who I wanted to become, but something in me felt wrong. in a general way. It seemed that I had surrendered my identity to my fears. That my relationship with my cousin was built on a lifetime of insecurities. I didn't want to be the kind of person who took refuge in his brute power

I didn't want to be someone who trashed a campus just to feel more powerful himself. Anyone could see these. Compensatory gestures for what they were. I was modeling myself on the noxious behaviour that I found most threatening and reassuring and others. I climbed aboard a greyhound bus with an open pass and no destination. I remember peering through the window on my way across the great plains, wondering if I had grown up somewhere quiet, whether I might feel more quiet inside the desiccated lands of New Mexico appeared as an empty canvas in the garage. Nearness of the desert, where beaming hippies dotted the horizon banging, drums and piling up ramshackle homes from straw bales and tires. It seemed possible to far and another sense of myself dapper job and Albuquerque sweeping floors and appeal

place and rented an apartment with a coworker near the city center. One of our neighbours ran Tibetans store and I stopped in one day to see him. He was on the phone but raised a finger, to signal that he wouldn't be long. I spent a few minutes looking around the shelves were lined with oils and candles incense and folded fabrics. I pulled a boutiques wrong from stack and shook it open. It was muted orange with intricate swirls and floral designs, When my friend hung out, I asked him how to tie it around by waste. I left the store with it on the net. Two years I work constantly. I worked to parties Hiking in the mountains and ambling down city streets- I know it was only a piece of clothing, but it felt like. step away from my past and towards something unfamiliar.

I grew my hair, long tied it and braids adorned with beads and feathers. I looked is cartoonish is you're, probably imagining, but that was the point it. It a revelation that you could walk through town barefoot and shirt lists and a wraparound skirt with silver crosses dangling from pierced nipples with business. tattoos with your b In feathers, swaying like a head dress and no. even shrugged. I knew that my cousin would have laughed if he'd seen me a year earlier. I would have laughed at myself. After a hiking trip in Northern Mexico, I returned with food borne hepatitis that spiraled into debilitating fatigue. I spent a week in hospital then slumped back to my parents house in Baltimore for a long recovery, my mother,

insisted that my father and I begin therapy to heal the wounds of childhood and once a week we say into the cushions of a social workers office. Downtown dredging up and see getting through memories of a broken dynamic to kill the rest of time I volunteered at a local magazine or one of the editors was in her celebrity she's nearly at eight, older perpetually draped in scarves and jewelry, with a wonder phrase of auburn hair. We became friends then more. She took me to movie. Premiers all send gallows at snooty museums. Some of her friends didn't approve jail bay. They said cradle robber snapped that no one would notice if she were a man at parties we sometimes bumped and

HU, a tall lean artist with dread locks and deep bronze skin? I would notice myself watching him across the room. I've never been interested in a man before, but it was easy to believe that someone could reach the age of twenty two without discovering his inclinations? Were My relationship with the older woman fizzled out around into the artist one night at a club. I found myself in the center of the dance floor with my head tipped back ass. He kissed me. I was. Treat by his interest and gave him my number when he invites made a dinner I accepted, I dont know if we saw If each other in the next few weeks to call it dating, we met up a handful of times, but we never really clicked I'm. New York and began writing freelance articles. Four magazines.

When an assignment took me back to New Mexico, I decided to stay over the next two years I fell into a close relationship with an older man. Each time I returned from a reporting trip, he would screw me up from the airport. Dropping my back. Eggs at the house I was renting and driving us to dinner. We travelled together. visiting friends in the mountains and taking vacation overseas. We stayed up late cook, elaborate meals and watching uranium films which but our relationship was septuagenarian marriage, but we knew that for each of us it was a placeholder for some one yet to come by the time I re connected with the from high school. I had come to a maddeningly, simple conclusion. I believed that the

pensions of male identity were toxic but ultimately toothless, the crusty arc types of my. Others, cowboy movies and a thousand cultural narratives, the expectation. and for how a man should live and feel we could love and What ways they could all be thrown aside. A man was free to be ass. He was he to find the terms of masculinity for himself. He could love other man and welcome intimate relationships in whatever form they came. Finding a more fluid gender. I don't he was a simple is choosing to Missus what I believed. the rage in my cousin disappeared for an instant. I don't know much time had passed by then in and out of consciousness and everything's want

members a sudden shift in his expression from fury to confusion his eyes wide. His right hand loosened my neck, but his left hand kept its grip. We seem to be trapped between two instincts and struggling to choose one depressing right form into my neck. For a moment, then go again, took a step that without is gripped him. me up, I could barely stay on my feet. Speed, teetering in silence, I wondered, if you would, let me go, then the real beating down. How can I described the way, brutalized me, then I've spent the past here trying not to let it hardly is if he wanted to punish me for his own moment of uncertainty, he launched

forward grabbing myself with both hands and flung meet side like a rag doll. My body Back against the wall, and I began sliding towards the floor, but he rushed over to lift me up me against the door frame about stuff He threw me again here ask me from one side of the room to the other each time I made contact with the wall is too dug in my body, each time I slumped forward. He pummelled his fists into my gut. I heard him shout what does I'm all out mean? I spoke that I didn't know he screamed. Are you my wife, where you selling drugs in my house? I pleaded that I wasn't. I wouldn't

I told him that I didn't understand what was happening. I try raise my arms to block the punches, but they wouldn't move battered every inch of my body. the shoulders to hear a shriek He was going to kill me he didn't answer. He kept pitching me around the room. Pounding his hands, my body sale. the main part of the garage he followed look down, I crawled into a ball He crouched me flogging a fist into my head. I heard him grunt the effort. I thought my skull ricochet the concrete again and again bouncing my head off the pavement. He's wearing himself out

blows grew further apart. Finally, they stopped. he stood and I watched him walk back to his workshop. He took us on the metal, stool and began rubbing his against his forehead. I believe you he said quietly I can tell you not lying a long pause. Then he muttered. I think I'm losing it. I tried to pry myself from the floor. My skull was throbbing in my insides felt like liquid, when a managed Stand I braced for him to charge at me. He didn't move. It was hunched forward on the stool like a child, he said again, I'm losing it. I felt a surge of anger run through me. I lurched into the works.

after him cursing spitting blood on the floor, he was rubbing his palm against his head. It looked as if you were trying to peel the skin off. I touch my own head and felt a lunar landscape of welts and returned sticky with blood. I stumbled to the mob sink and turned on the faucet adept my head into the stream much loved swirl and the train monitor around. He was still on the stool murmuring to himself. wanted to shout. Instead, I waited he glanced at me and back at the floor and said I heard a voice on the recording

I didn't hear my cousins voice for several years after the party at his father's house. There wasn't any conflict between us or even an acknowledgement that we stop talking. I just wanted to keep my dear. Since and I guess he wanted the same: bumped into and once or twice at family events and got occasional updates on his life from relatives. One of them showed me a picture of him in Germany, glowering at the camera and his army uniform with a black pray. I heard that served in the range, a regiment of the special operations command and that the army threw him out, though this come stances were never clear. He ended I stayed in Europe for a while then returned to the United States. I knew They lived in Pennsylvania for a couple of years, then moved us South Carolina other than that I did

know much about his life or want to. My wife is clearly relieved by this. She numbered his reputation from high school some of her face. Still held me responsible for the time he pulled the gun on that kid. In my car she wanted no part of men like that she hated violence and she recognized the attendant day you're of men who valorize did in our first months together I felt her watching for signs of that instinct in me when we bicycle up the east coast. Together, we stopped by his house. He was drinking heavily Weaving around with no shirt and the word rage tattooed across his stomach in three inch gothic letters

every few minutes he would emerge from the back room with some new shot gun or a rifle or laser cited pistol. My wife was repelled. I wasn't surprised as we continued north. I promised myself not to untangle our lives with his mother, we settled in the mountains of Virginia another year had passed. We had a sense of the life. We remain and saw no reason to think it would change, the change was instant. It was obliterating Nothing about our lives, converted to the mountains, my wife couldn't work To double my income to support us and we adopt in the only way that seem to make sense. I say each day at a desk in the spare bedroom, trying to generate writing assignments whilst

took on the household responsibilities. We conceived our son few months later and decide did that it would be good for him to have his mother close at hand. I converted my office into a nursery and built a studio on the far side of the property. From my work leave the house after breakfast to spend the day their foes late. I left a plate in the sink asking my wife to add it to her dishes from lunch. She never objected, and eventually I stopped asking by the time I got home in the evening. She had dinner, ready afterward, she did the dishes. While I returned to the studio for another hour or two of work conventional roles of breadwinner and homemaker alien, yet familiar. I began to joke that in our house it was nineteen. Fifty three our sun was not

easy child, and none of us were sleeping. We spent hours Rockingham to sleep at night only to hear him crying ass. We shut the door exhaustion emptied us. It followed anywhere. We went on, we drove to On four groceries, my wife sat in the back with our sun and when his cries tapered, I would see her slump over his seat in spontaneous slumber. Sometimes I fell, asleep, stop lights king to blaring, horns. By the time we got home hours later. We were too tired unpack our bags. We through on the counter and began the ordeal of getting the baby to sleep. Later we stood at the stove and silence, choking down fork, fools of pasta directly from the pot.

When six months passed, and he still wasn't sleeping, we understood that he had some kind of colic he would take a bottle or touch a passive fire. He would only At his mother's breast. our isolation made this worse spending. All day with just one parent. He grew increasingly dependent He began to see me as the stranger who appeared at night to remove him from his mother's arms. He would come at the sight of me entering a room terrified that, might leave. I knew it was wrong to be heard by this. He was an infant and without grow it. I knew that, but I ached I began to dread the war

come at night. I often came in near midnight. I was falling behind work, my brain lagging from lack of sleep and I was consumed by the fear of working too slowly to pay our bills. My wife and I began to clash. We had never thought before. We argued over time and money in the best way to care for our son. We are you'd over what to do when it was for. I am, and he was crying for this and flower. Said that we should leave him in his cribbed cried out and self soothe. I had no reason to believe those thing. I'm not even sure I did. I spouted jargon from tough love parenting manuals. That gave me an excuse to stay in bed. When I pulled

the blanket over my head muffle, the sound of his crying, my wife would hoist herself upright and returned to his room alone. Our life was a vault. Each day we thank deeper into the roles of house bound mother and work obsessed father. In a world of our choosing, this division might have seemed indefensible and incoherent have recognised how untenable it was to saddle each other with separate burdens to carry alone, the world we knew and had always known. It was easy to accept that division. As normal It was the same divide we had seen in our parents and grandparents on screen and countless novels, one that

echoed the marriages of most of our friends, we tried to accept the new roles we inhabited even as we presented them in our and Anna each other, wife had been working all her life. She and selling daffodil bulbs to her neighbours when she was eleven. She worked her way through college And then graduate school she built a professional life. She was more, five to depend on my income and determined to manage ass much ass. She could. I would like to say that I offered more support to her than I did was drowning in my own frustration at the responsibilities on me. I was

I agree that she didn't monitor the cascade of bills for the mortgage utilities and phone, but she didn't keep track, money we had nor accounts or one minute. A check might arrive. We rarely voice these frustrations. Mostly we drifted apart. Neither of us had the energy to bridge the yawning chasm between us. When I look back now I can still furnish the same excuses I made then. There was always a way to explain our division of labour as an adjustment to life in the mountains. but I was a father who spent no time at home who

as already estranged from his son, who expected his wife to perform all the functions of domestic life. One night I awoke with a pounding in my head, my skin was burning and I couldn't move. I lay in bed for an hour in excruciating pain and it faded, and I fell back to sleep. It happened again at my desk the next week, a bolt of pain, shot through me. crumpled to the floor of my studio, groaning and agony and tell it subsided. My wife's father, a doctor explained that these were the symptoms of panic attacks. The first of my life. I did nothing to address them more examine their causes. Instead, I disappeared.

I love to leave our house in the mountains. I gave the excuse of work out plan each reporting assignment, as if it were a private honeymoon. Winging off to spend a week in LOS Angeles or Bermuda reporting in article four glossy magazine, usually bout a powerful man at the peak of a celebrated life. I wrote about her special forces team invading Afghanistan about one of the principal architects of the Iraq war about. long friendship between Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and about the betrayal of Colin Powell. I interviewed president's secretaries of state and defence. Is this tycoons, an attorney general? I gave no thought to the comfort I felt with these men were the invisible support that they too enjoyed at home

I remember a frozen morning in our sons first year when I left home to begin work on a book about military archaeologists, were searching for the remains of missing soldiers in the Pacific islands. My wife stood on the porch with the baby in her arms, as I think suitcase him. I pick up. I promised to miss her. I kissed them good bye, a barrel down the long road with irrepressible delight flew to California and to Hawaii, and then the tropics of Palau was gone for a month each night, would return to the quilted blankets. If my hotel room flipping the television and ordering room service and waiting as long as possible to call home

finally did, I would listen the sound of my son crying in the background If I didn't hear his cries, I told myself lucky. I wasn't there at the end of the trip I drew bear crawl up the long road home missing the unfettered life for the man I had left behind. When I reached my doorstep, Carlos volumes wrote. I am greeted by the happy shrieks of my children and my sinks: and crushed.

One day at my desk later that year I sent an email to my cousin. I hadn't planned to contact him, but I didn't question: why did. I just fired off a note asking how he was and we traded a few men. It is about our lives. He was still In South Carolina with his wife, he worked as a contractor and was planning to start a family. I ask If you wanted to chat on Skype and we made plans to connect tat evening. After dinner, I returned to my studio and we opened a door that I had promised myself shut. I've searched my son, To understand why I wrote my cousin that day, I still don't have a perfect answer, but I know some things are true. I know that love can be vestigial, it lingers without cause. Even after a decade apart

still loved my cousin, but love is not the only thing that drew me back to him. but I began to miss in the mountains was the reassurance he once gave me I'd allowed myself to body the conventions of male privilege and paternal absence. I clung to a subconscious hope it his breast Masculine persona would permit my own the first I noticed in our conversation was his dubious southern accent. It seem too come and go, and I guess that he found it easier to sustain with strangers than with me. I was also said eyes by his size, he had always been several inches taller than me, but now he filled out

framing loomed on screen. I assumed that we would have to search for things to talk about within a few minutes, we were chattering about endless trivia, weed Gus the renovation we'd made to various homes. We debated the pros and cons of framing walls with two by six lumber. We laugh about the annoyance of remove crowd haze from rough surface tile. We remember learning to use tools as children and our grandfathers shop. I told him about my land in New Mexico, where the pinion trees caught fire each summer. He had a in forestry management and told me about the fire adaptation chance of southern pines. We spoke for nearly the hours that night we agreed to

again soon. Before long. We were speaking once or twice a week. We played LP through the video link, found a website for online chess and drew up plans for household projects when his wife I'm pregnant. She would pop on screen every few weeks to show me her expanding abdomen after she delivered. I made a small website for them to upload photos on fire, there's day my cousin me, I'm glad to be a member of the Daddy Club with you certain things about him still disturbed me. He talked about getting into scraps and roughing people up. He spouted noxious political opinions and used the term rebel flag. To my vehement objection,. But I found him willing to listen to my perspective and reconsider his own,

Condescending pleasure in trying to open his mind, even as sought his silent approval for the man I had become. Mostly, we avoided serious topics. We roll joints and smoked them mugging for the camera and laughing about arbitrary things. Hanging up he always said. I love you brother. My wife was distressed The conversations with my cousin each time I left the house to call him from my studio. She would scrunch up her face in an expression that I understood to mean him again. When I announced plans Is it him for the weekend and help install twelve hundred square feet of hardwood flooring? She stared in disbelief when he returned the favour a few months later

Driving to our house with a truckload of supplies to repair the heating system, she gave him legal hug at the door and disappeared for the rest of the week owed. Look up from the project coated with sweat ground. spot her on the far side of the property, picking vegetable from the garden with our sun, strapped to her back she aid alone, leaving plates of dinner on the counter for us, her birthday came and went that weak. I gave her a gift and a hug and return to work. Each night, my cousin deny retreated to a terrorist behind the house tending a fire, as I drank a few beer And he pounded a case of cans. That's what happened and telling stories from the decade we spent the part he described his army.

Experience in ways that sounded unlikely at best I'd seen the photo of him in uniform. I didn't believe in when he told me that he deployed to Bosnia, but he qualified as an expert, marksman and trained green brace. The story of his discharge also seemed to change with each telling I knew that he had been caught up an investigation of soldiers selling hashish on base. I didn't by his claims of innocence, but when he said that he wrote used to read on his friends. I had no trouble believing that late one night beside the fire he recalled the traumatic evening in Europe when he was the. some of a savage and humiliated attack by another soldier that was

only story. I never doubted for a man like my cousin. It was devastating to admit such a thing, let alone invented. just telling the story, he seemed less angry than ashamed. I listened quietly but didn't ask questions we never discussed it again. When we finished the project hydro home, we resumed our video chat three or four times a week. He was planning to build a new house and we spend hours going over the design, we studied the lay out of the ground floor with his workshop at one end, and I guessed sweet on the other, we talked about how much fun it would be to bring my family there for visits a few months after him. then? He sent me a string of bewildering emails.

first appeared at six twelve, when a Tuesday evening There was no subject line or message. Just the small attachment. When I clicked, I heard a short reporting of a room with football game playing on television in the background over the next fourteen minutes. He sent six in more emails final he added a message. I'm sorry bother you with this, but it's like. I said these are recordings taken from Ipad sitting on the kitchen island.

We were all at a movie until coming home at one thousand, eight hundred and fourteen this was last October. I didn't understand, we hadn't discussed any recordings. Wait. What are these I wrote back? Did you tell me about this before auto record, while out to the movies he replied? Listen! and voice real quiet. I plead the recordings again The voice I heard was the football announcers the tv, isn't it. I wrote. He asked me to replace two of the recordings. I did and responded. Nope don't hear it. He wrote back. Ok thanks.

We never discussed the recordings again just ass, we, Never discussed his assault in the army. The reason we never talked about those things was that I never asked he had tried. Raise them, but I would to engage in one to look under the rocks in his life. I refuse see the vulnerability in him. our relationship was built on the confidence he projected in the need that filled in me, my wife and I had to leave the wilderness nation was unbearable. We decided to turn to our families in Baltimore and bought half a duplex on the edge of the city, the bathroom.

Wars were rotting in the kitchen, was a musty mess, so we rented a small apartment. While I completed renovation, the first week of structure and I opened a second floor waterline and discovered that it was rusted solid, a cracked open, a wall to replace the pipe and found a tangle of exposed wire The renovation expanded as renovation do over the next six months. I worked on the House seven days a week, the cost of the project, but our savings and paying for the apartment, in addition to our mortgage only made it worse, but time we moved in. I had been renovating the house for half a year without pause. I hadn't spent more than a few hours with my family and was so far behind on my book that it seemed impossible to catch up. I shifted my focus from construction to writing, but kept the same

schedule. I rented a small office and spent six days a week. Farewell my wife continued cooking and clean doing the laundry and everything else when our daughter was born. We agreed to sleep in separate rooms. I stayed with the baby from eight p dot m until two a dot m and brought her to my wife's bedroom for the second shift on I made coffee and left the house, usually returning in time for dinner. At night. We retreated to our rooms, reading alone or watching films with headphones on once or twice a week. I would slip into the basement, car with my cousin handing the camera around the dingy space. As we made elaborate plans, we shout the designs for a laundry room, a media center and would shop the work I wanted to do on everything except myself

His voice was faint and he stared at the floor as he tried to explain the attack I stood by the mob saint holding the rim for balance struggling to make sense of what he said. He told me that he was still recording his house. He did it at night in secret. He hadn't told his wife, but he was It's that someone was breaking in sneaking around. he didn't know who they were her, what they wanted, but he could hear them on the recordings. They shuffled around Opening drawers and rifling through Cabinet's, sometimes he heard them whispering. He said it was hard to understand what they said. but when he played the recordings over and over, he could usually pick out the words

The night before, while my son and I slept in the guest room, my cousin was recording the kitchen one floor above us here, you the tape. While we were at the pool and heard a voice whispering at four thirty, I am after playing several times he made out the phrase I'm all out. It wasn't sure what that men but he knew I had been in his house. He decided the voice was mine. I was the culprit all along. My head was swimming in the pain in my got was willing. I tried to focus on what he was saying a thousand, questions came to mind. Did he We believe that I drove ten hours to invade his house every night, or was I just the latest intruder in a larger conspiracy to

investigate his kitchen drawers and why did you think Words, I'm all out war. Nefarious founded harmless to me. I had been fast asleep all night But if I had been in the kitchen at four thirty, I am wasn't it possible that as modern myself about an empty glass of water? I didn't bother asking these questions. It was beyond reason and she knew it. He kept tell me that he knew it sounded crazy in that he hoped he wasn't. My thoughts drifted to the children. I wondered how much of the commotion they heard a pictured them huddled inside the guests watching the door in terror. I said to my cousin: I don't feel safe. I told him I have to leave. He said nothing, but I started for the door.

I expected him to stop me, but he let me pass through the workshop and into the garage down the wall of old tools out the door into daylight. I followed the walkway back to the guest room. I saw my son inside he was still on the bed with his cousins. Their heads down playing their games. I wanted to collapse and cry. I opened the door and announced that my cousins children were sick and we had to move my son's party to the hotel. The children didn't bother. Looking up, the rapture of technology can be a blessing. I shall to my suitcase grabbed a bandanna untidy. It loosely around the wounds, My head, my phone was on them stand and I ordered a car service. Then shoved our closed. the suit case I bustled kids outside and piled them into the car slumping this

the driver and pulling the phone from my pocket. I wrote my son that our cousin just went crazy and physically assaulted me. I said that I was taking the kids to the vote, but needed help. When we arrived, I am pretty beaten up. I wrote I'll need some time in the room to nurse my wounds and preferably someone's company or someone else, watches the kids and gets some lunch. Finally, can you arrange all this discreetly until I've had a chance to deal? My sister wrote back instantly coming down to meet you. She said. She would find a relative to watch the children and take me up to a hotel room, did the phone in my lap leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes. I listened to the children babbling in the back. I felt pressure in my God and wondered why

I suspected that I had a concussion, but I still wasn't sure how much other damage he done. I didn't know that my organs were carpeted with damage. but a piece of my left kidney had broken off, but I was bleed internally and was on likely to survive, Without emergency treatment I was floating on adrenaline, as my body went into shock,. the end begins, like any day armor Urge ended on a winter morning, I was passing through the door from our living room to the dining room when My wife behind me. What's going on with you, she asked You always seem angry. I turned around and heard myself say angry a miserable. I said

I thought she was miserable to leaving the mountains. changed. Nothing between us. She had found a job teaching. A few college ass is in Baltimore, but the pay was meagre and I was still spending all my time at work. While she raised the kids and manage the home, I said that it wasn't a relationship, it felt like a business arrangement. I told her that I didn't we loved each other, but I was no. longer sure when we had barely remember a time when the black cloud of resentment was not between us. I said I didn't want to be in the marriage we had and I thought it was too late to change it. It seems to me that we do and speaking honestly, that morning, over the next few days, we talked in detail about what a separation would mean and how to manage it.

A friend down the street was preparing to move, and my wife suggested that I rent the house. I would be close enough children to move freely between us and smooth the transition. We drew up an agreement on three sheets of white paper, We didn't have to sign it cited that I would take nothing but my clothes to avoid disrupting the children space We agreed that our financial accounts would stay exactly as they have been we promised to. Remain cordial, no matter what to preserve the holidays as they are and we agreed a preliminary schedule for custody of the kids a few nights later we sat down to explain that we were having our time being married and that I would living down the street for a while, but that they would see us both every day.

Our daughter was three that year and our sons, ninth birthday was coming up. We had been planning to celebrate with the extended family at my cousins House, We decided that my son and I would make that trip, while my wife and daughter stayed home. Amber sitting on a borrowed sofa at night in my first week at the new house. Writing a message to my cousin about the birthday plans. given all the change in his life right now and the fact that he'll be apart from his sister and mom on his official, be day I'd like to make it feel special for him. I wrote Maybe we could have a little party at the hotel before we all leave for dinner. We were make it special at our house, my cousin responded. We have decorations banners and can get a cake. It food lion.

There is also a toys. Are us in the city. I will definitely sing fun. Perhaps a few fireworks. Now I wonder what happened to my cousin after the fireworks in his house that day that his father arrived from my son's party but left when he learned from another relative. What happened my sister looked at my bleeding skull my hands clutched round my mid section and ordered my parents to drive me to the hospital. I know that by the time we arrived, I was immobilized with pain again full medics, rushed to the car, wasting me onto stretcher and rushing me into the surgical unit. I noted doctors assess the damage as level one. Trauma. They examined my body with a see tee scan and I heard

One say: there's a fair bit of blood and revealed a fracture in my left. Kidney Andy Large left Paris Renal hematoma, along with the bleeding cuts in contusion, that were visible on my head and chest. I know that a doctor put should an artery and my broiling and threaded catheter through my aorta to stand the bleeding. In my kidney I spent the next three days. Spittle, where medical staff cloaked my name on the registry encased my cousin tried to find me. I know when the police arrive to take a report, and I agree and what happened? They sneered with certainty that no one gets beaten, half to death for no reason.

I know that when they questioned my cousin, he confessed everything. He told them about the secret recordings hearing a voice whisper, I'm all out Attacking me for no other reason, he told them he was wrong guilty. They took him to jail and he pointed out. I know he was charged, the felony first degree assault and battery and that he spent They two years in pre trial hearings before he finally pleaded guilty to second degree assault. The judge released him on probation, but imposed a lifetime. Restraining order to protect me oh, that he entered counselling, yet he has no diagnosis of mental illness. My cousin is not gets a frantic, he wasn't hearing voice. Is the best explanation that anyone has given me is that he simply snapped icon.

says that he had no idea. He would attack me until he did. He says the Ray each came over him in the workshop like an animal impulse. But I have learned a few things that may have played a role as well. He later pulled, my sister, that he was upset by something I said to him at dinner the night before. Apparently, I noticed that he didn't clear his plate and I teased him saying, if you were really a man, you'd finish your dinner, he found it inexcusable to question his manhood in front of our family. I have also learned that he was taking supplements of testosterone to help with a back injury. How much of a factor that was I dont claim to know To blame, the male hormone for violent assaults seems far too easy, but I remember that when my father was fighting an illness a few years ago,

began taking medication to suppress testosterone and why our relationship has improved measurably through the years. I found it easy, to get along with him during that period. Then I don't. other time in my life, or maybe none of these things played a role. Maybe my cousin did just snap All I know for sure is that the last time I saw him is the last time I ever well whatever he did later that evening, while I was in the emergency room and are found They celebrated my son's birthday, will remain as unknown to me as the details of his life, on every night to come, but when I look back on the crisis, as my own life ear explode

of our friendship and the implosion of my marriage. I see a common thread. My attraction to my cousin and my detachment as a husband, both reside in the pantheon of male tropes masculinity is a religion, is a compendium of saying the vaunted patriarch, the taciturn cowboy, the errant night reluctant hero, gentle giant and omniscient father like scripture. Each contains a story of implicit values, fraternity dominance, adamant, certitude these are the commandments of male identity, maybe in societies deep through history, those qualities help organise a world of chaos.

But the antediluvian constructs of masculinity are easily weapon eyes, in modern life. The virtue of strength invites abuse. Adamant enables intransigence restrain devolves to disengagement and for Turkey the yields exclusion, the veneration of those traits- is poison to young men. It offers, and the escape from the necessary struggle of self reflection and replaces the work of interior discovery with a menu of prefabricated identities as a teenager I gravitated toward an arc type embodied by my cousin, I envied the power that seem to command and the fear he didn't possess, but my effort

announce that persona in my twenties left many others to face. Conventional models of male identity are everywhere around us. They linger in the air we breathe infuse our politics and our culture As a father and husband, I slipped into the antiquated role of provider. Protector patriarch swimming the position and entitlements male appetite. What I see now is that I haven't fully escape from either the challenge, is not to believe that I have. Not to imagine that I will is to watch for the door Mrs masculinity, taking root in myself each day to acknowledge. Never virtues they contain indecent The rest, it is to see,

you can find again and again what does and ought to guide me. I think that this every Wednesday afternoon my children walked down the street from their mothers house. I think when I hang their coats when we read and play ball games when I find myself distracted or feel my temper, flare misbehavior. I wonder if can give them another model of what it is to be a man, one free of the rose of impulses within us and the expectations around us. I know that my those aren't ready to understand my own crisis and failures, yet I'm just beginning to fail Some of these things myself my daughter to see a model of what she can expect and demand, and my boy needs as all boys need.

Begin thinking about how men fail. He needs know what it means and does not mean to be a man. What the world tell him. It means can't believe it

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