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1. "Blow me, Blofis," was pretty much the anthem of his childhood -- nobody really knew what it meant early on, just that it was naughty and made the adults frown at them and was therefore fun to say. At the high school on base, they were all a little more educated, but by that point, Paul had stopped getting upset and started getting even: every time somebody thought a blowjob joke was totally the original approach to take, Paul just grinned, curled his hand slowly and jacked it off in front of his face, poking his tongue into his cheek in the same rhythm and letting imagination do the rest. It made the girls shriek and cover their eyes and the guys shut up quick. He still had the kind of name that made people hide smiles whenever it came on over the intercom or during roll in class, but it wasn't so bad: there was Marjorie Seaman, too, a sophomore who tied ribbons around her neck and ankles and wrists and claimed it technically wasn't against the uniform code, who met his eyes in the auditorium and smiled; not the mean smiles of everyone else, but softer, conspiritual, saying without words, they can't shame us for what we can't help.
2. His mother wanted to name him Abernathy. He's not sure why: every time it comes up in conversation, he's too busy staring at her in renewed horror to ask for the reasoning behind it. Fortunately, recognizing the nature of her last name, she gave up that dream and unobtrusively named him Paul in the hopes that he would survive to adulthood without feeding her arsenic.
3. Born in West Berlin in an autumn-colored October, he grew up on the American base there. His friends were all military brats who came and went in four-year rotations, but Paul never moved: his dad was in the service, he knew, but he died (he assumed, having no evidence of his dad's existence beyond a wedding ring on his mother's finger and half his own chromosomes; there aren't even pictures in the house,) which technically would make his mother and him civilians, but General Hawthorne never brings it up. He smiles and ruffles Paul's hair once a year or so and tells him chin up, young man, be proud, and it's a while before Paul realizes they're military charity, basically, and when he tries to explain this to Ingrid at freshman orientation at NYU, she snorts and tightens her hemp scarf around her deadlocks and goes, "well, that's oxymoronic," and he pretends to be offended and winds up with her phone number instead.
4. But no, really. Paul grows up speaking several different kinds of English, as he likes to put it, and can imitate any European accent imaginable on command. He doesn't learn German until eighth grade. Even then, he's pretty bad at it and it's never good enough to really help him off-base. The base itself has that cramped, one-stoplight feel of a small town, and the ever-changing faces of a big city, and Paul looks at the barbed wire fences and the men at the gate with AK-47s and smiles, thinks, home, in that quiet, inside voice that never changes.
5. When he's seventeen, the Berlin Wall comes down. He's not supposed to be out, but he is, and he stands there in the street where the people are yelling and pulling the Wall apart with hammers and bare hands, and then the people from the West are hugging the people from the East, laughing and clapping hands and mingling, and just like that, it's just Berlin, it's just Germany, and it's suddenly the biggest, strangest idea Paul's ever encountered: a change that monumental, a melding of two completely separate entities, like taking two hemispheres and making a brain, or the planet Earth. He stands there and can't remember to breathe.
6. He gets his first girlfriend that fall. Her name's Nadia and she's the kind of girl that makes him want to tuck in his shirt and open car doors and have her home by the curfew her father sets. She breaks up with him because he's "boring." He's more confused than heartbroken, because all he tried to do was be respectful.
7. His second girlfriend is Ingrid. Paul still has lingering anxieties about dating, but Ingrid is so low maintenance he kind of forgets she's his girlfriend for days. She smokes so much pot that she routinely calls him at 4 in the morning to talk to him about all the problems with transubstantiation and organized religion in general, and why anarchy is just as much a bullshit theory as democracy. She's everything he came to New York to find, he thinks; that freedom, that new edge of wildness and vibrancy, the American way. She steals his shoes and drags him barefoot out to feed the ducks, and he lies with her in the grass and thinks, is this real? Can life really be this good?
8. After her, he doesn't date again for fourteen years.
9. Paul reacts poorly to criticism; gets defensive before he gets reasonable, even on the stupid stuff, like being told he missed a line while filling out forms, or getting a dirty look for checking his phone in a theater. The thing is, though, is that he doesn't know how to react to praise, either.
10. The teaching job at Goode High School isn't something he goes looking for. One thing leads to another, one job leads to a favor for a friend leads to an offer leads to another job leads to him, twenty-seven, straightening his tie and clearing his throat and wondering if this is where he was supposed to end up, a bunch of high school seniors looking at him and hoping he'll just go over the syllabus and then let them go.
11. Ten years later, he realizes that he didn't really have a great life's dream that he isn't achieving. He's perfectly happy where he is.
12. ENG220 Creative Writing is a once-a-week night class at the university, and he takes it to keep himself up-to-date with modern writing techniques (it looks good when his teaching contract comes up for renewal.) He's uncomfortable at first, because it's mostly kids who aren't even old enough to drink yet -- the only other person in class who's near his age is a woman who sits in the back, mousey and quietly determined. He doesn't know much about her, personally, but her writing is solid, fantastical even, and when she reads aloud, Paul finds himself easily believing in the magical themes of her stories, caught up in the cadence and flow of her speech. She's not the best, but when they get assigned a collaborative project, he crosses to the back of the room and flops into the chair beside her in his best imitation of his students, and goes, "well, hey there." She just looks at him for one, too-long, "oh crap I just embarrassed myself irreparably in front of a girl" moment, and then throws her head back and laughs. It's a brilliant sound.
13. Her name's Sally. She's recently widowed from a guy whose name is almost as unfortunate as Paul's own. She likes the same kind of breakfast cereal Paul does (the more sugar the better,) and has one delinquent thirteen-year-old son (and not the cool, I think I'm a rebel kind of delinquent that Paul's used to dealing with in school, but the actual thing, complete with behavioral problems and a bad school record, and she makes no excuses for him, looks Paul right in the eye in pride and defiance, and he smiles, tries not to be uncomfortable.) They sit side-by-side in class, listens to the freshmen spin tales of epic love, the chance meeting of men and women (and all combinations thereof) and Paul looks at Sally sidelong and wants, abruptly, to try.
14. His favorite season is spring: the full week of it that Manhattan gets before all the leaves are suddenly fat on the trees and the humidity spikes so high everyone starts turning on their desk fans.
15. He wants to do it right: a fancy restaurant, a candlelit dinner, a velvet box pulled from a tuxedo pocket while the waiter hovers nearby with a dessert menu, but instead they're in Sally's kitchen: he's putting barbeque rub over some beef shanks and she's cutting watermelon, and he looks over and asks, "what are you doing?" And she blinks a little, like he startled her, and looks down at her hands. "Oh," she goes softly, and laughs. "Oh, this. I used to do this for Percy when he was little: using a cookie-cutter to cut star shapes out of his watermelon slices. I guess I don't have to do that anymore," she finishes, even quieter than before, putting the cookie-cutter to the side, and Paul thinks, unintelligibly, this, and gets down on one knee right there.
16. He bought the ring for Ingrid, originally, and he had it on him when she bled out in the back of an ambulance when they were twenty-two. Sally knows it's recycled, so to speak, but when she slips it onto her ring finger, her knuckles stained watermelon-pink, it's a feeling like everything is back where it belongs, like his heart's finally been given back to him.
17. They come at him from both sides one day before Monday Night Football, sit him down at the kitchen table -- which, even after all this time, is only really seated for two -- and tell him the whole story, from the very first moment Sally met a stranger's eyes in a cabana on the beach. Sally, who flushes and looks left when she's lying, holds his gaze steady, like she's telling him about property taxes or the direction she wants to take her novel in, and finally, he stops staring at her in wonder and looks up at Percy, who's leaning uncomfortably against the fridge. His first thought is, I knew you were a freak, and his second is, you're fifteen, kid, and I think you're the bravest person I know, and he thinks of Marjorie Seaman, from high school, her unfortunate name and the way she smiled about it, refusing to be ashamed about something she couldn't help, and he cuts Sally off mid-sentence by standing up. Percy looks alarmed, shoulders braced, and when Paul pulls him into a hug, he just looks startled, and then happy.
18. He forgets to wear deodorant to his own wedding. This is, bizarrely, what he remembers most about that day.
19. "Paul," he says, contemplative. "As in Paul the nonbeliever, struck from his horse on the way to Damascus?" "Actually," his mother explains. "I had been thinking more like Paul from the Beatles."
20. New York sleeps. Sally's beside him, shotgun crooked in her arm and skin coming up flush-bruised under her collar from the recoil kick, and Percy's on his other side, sword in hand and blood streaking darkly up his arms: not his, he asserts at the wounded-animal noise Sally makes at the sight of him, and Paul can't see what they see, whatever it is that makes them bare their teeth, but he picks up a sword and throws himself in with them, because it's what you're supposed to do. It's right, it's a feeling like tearing down the Berlin Wall to make one Germany, and Paul thinks, this is home, in an ageless voice.
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