The Laughter


 
 
 
 
 
 
 Contents
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Contents
 Chapter One: It Began as Lust
 Chapter Two: Welcome Back to Fall 2016
 Chapter Three: “Do You Hate America?”
 Chapter Four: The One Great Love
 Chapter Five: The Flutist
 Chapter Six: Look for the Shame
 Chapter Seven: As Dead as the Dead White Men
 Chapter Eight: “It’s All Pretty Fucked Up, No?”
 Chapter Nine: The Boy Let Go of My Hand
 Chapter Ten: Look What We Let In
 Chapter Eleven: #ImNotRacistBecause
 Chapter Twelve: A Fortunate Man
 Chapter Thirteen: Un-American
 Chapter Fourteen: Before All Hell Breaks Loose
 Chapter Fifteen: The Stupidest Man in America
 Chapter Sixteen: You Said You Would Dance
 Chapter Seventeen: Look for Me in the Songs
 Chapter Eighteen: “Is She Safe Here?”
 Chapter Nineteen: “These Women Don’t”
 Chapter Twenty: Dishonorable
 Chapter Twenty-One: The Laughter
 Chapter Twenty-Two: Clean
 Epilogue
 
 
 Acknowledgments
 About the Author
 A Note from the Cover Designer
 Copyright
 About the Publisher
 
 
 
 
 
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 iv
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Contents
 Chapter One: It Began as Lust
 
 
 
 
 Dedication
 
 
 For my son
 
 
 
 
 
 Epigraph
 
 
 Let the new gods of the earth try as they can,
 They cannot hear the sob of her ecstasy.
 fahmida riaz, “The Laughter of a Woman” (in We Sinful Women)
 
 
 Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches,
 and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given
 them a good run for their money, and I will now.
 
 
 g. k. chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Chapter OneIt Began as Lust
 
 It began as lust, that much I will admit. The events and emotions that came after were harder to reconcile. I, Oliver Edward
 Harding, am not one to trifle with the truth. The thing about truth, though, is that it sometimes reveals itself in the recounting,
 not in the living. So, while it is still fresh in my mind, I must revisit the events of these past weeks, in particular, the
 matter of the boy.
 
 
 The straight and sure lines within these pale margins of my mind leave no other trail but those of my design. Only here might
 one find a true “safe space,” as it were, to borrow a phrase from the luminaries of our time. Do I take a risk, then, by spilling
 my thoughts in ink? Do I dare reveal the workings of my heart in some clumsy assembly of words? Oh, but it is such comfort
 to hear the scratch and whisper of pen on paper, to write by hand the way I once did as a boy with a journal. Here I am, then,
 on a page, in a fresh notebook, committing my story to sight. My story and theirs.
 
 
 Before I dwell on the story of the boy and his aunt, I must state that something has been taken from me, something precious and tender, and the loss of it is so great that it may smother my account with searing emotion at times, of the kind no associate of mine would generally ascribe to my personality. I will attempt to sluice out such emotion, lance this open wound of the ghosts within, although I will not delude myself that a complete exorcism is possible. I must remember that the police prefer a clean retelling of incidents. Unblemished. The gendarmerie, the boy would call them. They are leaning on me to make sense of all that happened. I must organize my thoughts here so they can have the spotless narrative they so desperately need. I won’t, of course, share my written accounts with them, for I hardly imagine them avid readers, but I will deliver to them as lissome a truth as they deserve. Were it not for their urgent and unannounced visitations multiple times a day,