tHE sYMPTOM7*

The man in the hat awoke, or so he thought. He felt a crick in his neck, where the clavicle hasps the breastplate, and a dull pain in his upper back, where a vagrant cracked him with a truck axle when he refused to share his soup with him. He coddled himself from bed, the lean-to pole punching his skull, and lit a half-smoked cigarette. The plastic tarpaulin was loose and flapping, a kite without a tail, a windsock in a hurricane, the linoleum curling up from the dirt floor, a fetus left to shrivel outside the womb. He felt an anger swell up in him, a distemper that left him feeling waylaid and ill at ease. He had felt this way before, but not with such urgency, a need to flee the corruption of his life. Life is corrupt, not me, he thought. I am the symptom, not the source of the fester. He searched for another half-smoked cigarette and having found one under a curl of linoleum, a fetal pergola without a tent pole, he lit it with the one still in his mouth, his teeth clenching down hard on the filter, his eyes sunk back deep into the copse of his forehead. Today I will see what I can do, he said to himself; see if the fester can be moiled from the symptom. The tarpaulin flapped madly in the morning wind, jets of last night’s rain funneling off in droves. He scrubbed the cigarette butt into the linoleum and went back to sleep.