Training Max: Chapter 10

 

“Hurry up and wait,” cousin of the more formally named Parkinson’s Law, was the slogan of the Armed Forces, especially its Air Force. It turns out his Captain wanted nothing from Max apart from cloves for his teeth.

He sent Chris two pictures just then, of himself and of his squad in various poses of boredom. It relieved her: she thought they would go full radio silence for two weeks. It would have been alright had that been the case, though, having learned the hard way with all her fifteen exes, and the spaces in between, of the virtue of patience. Or indifference. Sometimes she couldn’t quite tell the difference between the two. Yep, hurry up and wait does not pose problems to her: she could wait, because she didn’t try.

He, however, had the temperament of a bull sometimes, and she remarked upon it. “Is this worth your anger, baby?”

“Silly, isn’t it?”, he would say. But then, he thought, if you can’t treat your lovers as your friends, then what was the fucking point? He added, You, Chris, are everything that’s right and wrong in the world. And yours is a mist I will happily walk through.

Back when she was still working in the hellhole that is Manila, her twelfth ex, Marc, had the same fucking point, to her eternal consternation. Their relationship lasted five years, only because he treated her like he would treat furniture: something to be used for comfort, which he believed was the highest compliment one can pay to someone you had first put atop love’s pedestal. (This order of events had to be necessary: if you do the furnituring first, you will never get past it. However, as Barthes had waxed on and on in A Lover’s Discourse, if you first put the loved one on a pedestal, she will rise up so high in your estimation that she becomes an Image-repertoire of your own making.)

“If Marc were on Mars,” Chris had explained to Max, “then he only needed a bed and a TV, maybe some books by Heidegger and Baudrillard. He will be content to die there.” Such was the power of actual furniture in his life. Marc eventually synthesized both thinkers for his PhD dissertation, earning him great distinction.

She admired him for those things. However, he loved her more than she did him, and willed – willed – to let her go when she finally had a mental breakdown after twenty-eight years of denial; the episode finally being triggered by her rendering a research funded by the World Bank into four languages.

She did the research with Armand and Janice, them being members of indigenous groups. The resulting translation was the opposite of hurry up and wait, and after forty hours of no sleep, she was reduced to hysterics, insanely afraid that objectivity and subjectivity no longer mattered, that words absolutely do not have anchor to reality. She went slightly insane: things were no longer real, for the words were moving so fluidly. It was the equivalent of a shark suddenly finding that he was in the Sahara; it was an anchorless ship on the caldera of Olympus Mons.

She called Marc then, sobbing. “Breathe, banana. And sleep.” Being a veteran of medicines and an accidental guinea pig of one untested horse tranquilizer, he had said what he did without emotion. (Banana was their pet name – he even stenciled it onto his car, underneath Excellence in Execution.) After three days of recuperation he fetched her from the bus station, having returned to the city and to some semblance of fragile sanity, and told her, with certainty, with sadness, with resignation, “You don’t love me anymore, do you?”

Nowadays she would see Tres (her nephew) and Erick (her brother-in-law) react with hearts to Marc’s posts on social media. She knew they were proud of him, and regretted her decision to leave him, especially Erick. Being a man who flexes his spoils, he admired strong men. And being a man of creatures, he grew bonsai and bred champion-line fighting cocks and cats.

Max also did admire strong men, although it was physical prowess that moved him the most. Cavemen. He would, however, consent to admiring Erick for just one thing: his BMW S100RR. Erick had, after all, finished the Philippine loop twice, both in record time, and was a top contender for Motorcycle Ironman.

She knows this about him, even though he would never admit it to her. He can’t admit that he loves her either, then: he was in his training camp, full of boredom and waiting and coiled violence that the words of that language were just wrong to say.

Of course, she noticed. And of course, she understood.