*


Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: “Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.”


*


Weil: “You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.”


*


Four days after he has killed Jean, he is back to fighting in a cage.

Day one, in San Francisco with Hank and Storm, searching for survivors, finding ash where people and places once were.

Day two, stumbling off the jet, in the mansion again, turning to ask Xavier a question—forgetting, remembering; then turning to ask Jean the question instead—forgetting, remembering.

Day three, agreeing to Storm’s request—on the phone, from San Francisco, where she is staying for a few weeks to help with the clean-up—to become a full-time physical education and self-defense instructor; being shown to his now-permanent room; knowing that this, surely, is the only decent life open to him.

Day four, at eleven o’clock in the morning, right before the burial of the only occupied coffin in the garden, he leaves the mansion on one of Scott’s old bikes and speeds to White Plains, where he knows there are at least two underground cage-fighting bars.

He goes to one, throws a few punches for good measure, then proceeds to let his balls be nearly beaten off of him. For the first half of the ride home, he can barely see the road in front of him, can barely sit on the bike without screaming.

By the time he is back at the mansion, only a few of the students are still dressed in black, and his flesh is cool and quiet and whole, and he thinks, Decent life, decent life, decent life.


*


Blanchot: “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact … ‘I’ am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside.”


*


Two days later, a recently-cured former mutant at the cage-fighting bar tells him about a mutants-only fight and torture club in the underground cellar of an abandoned factory in Danbury, which is even closer to the mansion than White Plains.

“It’s fucking vicious,” the man says. “There are barely any limits on powers, just time limits and property damage limits. It’s the kind of place you go to die.”

And he has to thrust his shaking hands in his pockets to hide the half inch of claws that slide out in anticipation.


*


Because it would be too suspicious to leave in the middle of the night—and by now, he knows well what can happen to a mansion full of mutant children in the middle of the night—he leaves in the middle of the day, during his lunch breaks.

On Monday, half his face and neck are burned so deeply, the residual heat in the metal continues to warm his face until dinner, beneath his smooth and not-at-all flushed flesh.

On Tuesday, he is thrown against a wall so hard his right arm pops cleanly out of its socket and hangs at his side, heavily and uselessly, while his opponent, a tall fellow who resembles Piotr, pummels his stomach with blows. The arm climbs back into the socket by itself, and even he is surprised at the sound of his own howling.

On Wednesday, he is felled by a spray of venom that eats his flesh through his jacket, second jacket, shirt, and undershirt, stopping only when it hits adamantium.

(Afterwards, he has to make a short trip to the Walmart on Newton Road, where he buys two 10-packs of black shirts, while his fellow shoppers studiously take no notice of the blood-ringed hole in the chest of his clothes.

He undresses in the parking lot, hidden by a Ford Tahoe noisy with four children in soccer uniforms, eating from McDonald’s bags.

He stuffs the new clothes on top of the wounded clothes in the empty helmet compartment, and makes it back home before judo class begins. And when his students see him, they all say things like, “That’s right, it’s gotten pretty hot recently, hasn’t it, must be summer already.”)

On Thursday, a young woman makes blood pour from his eyes, ears and nose with a series of high-pitched whistles that he finds mildly arousing, until he starts to feel his temples about to burst—and now he finds it definitely arousing.

On Friday, there is a special, once-a-month, anything-goes mêlée, and he finds himself on the ground with four bone claws buried in his left buttock, while at least six feet stomp on his neck and back, far too lightly.

On Saturday, the kid comes home cured.


*


“Hi, Logan,” are her first words to him, coming up behind him in the common room, where he is watching a boxing match.

“Hey, kid,” he says.

“Look what I can do,” she says, and he turns around to face her.

She reaches out and pinches his cheek, just shy of too hard, and there are no pockets to hide his claws, so he buries his hands in the couch cushions, way in the back, where no one will see.

She says, smiling, still holding onto his face, “Not bad, huh?”


*


Xavier, Scott and Jean are dead, while he is alive: that this could be the actual condition of the world—a world in which there is still ice cream, mild weather, televised sports, holidays, requited love—seems to him like a joke without an ending, a joke interrupted mid-way by the death of its teller.


*


Blanchot: “Where is the least power? … When I live, or when I die? Or again, when dying doesn’t let me die?”


*


When Storm comes back from San Francisco, she calls him into Xavier’s office. She tells him that the government is awarding them with Medals of Honor for their actions at Alcatraz; that there will be a ceremony in Washington at the end of the week. She says that they—herself, Logan, Hank, Pete, Bobby and Kitty—will all take the jet together.

He says, “No way in hell.” She looks down and sighs, “I thought you’d say that.”

On the day of the ceremony, he aches to go to Danbury. Instead, he stays at the mansion, and long after all the children are asleep, he remains awake in the kitchen, listening for the slightest noise or sound.

Suddenly, he hears talking coming from the common room, and he marches toward it—and the kid is there on the couch alone, watching television. She turns around to look at him.

“You didn’t go with them,” she says only.

He pauses, says, “Someone’s gotta stay here and babysit the house.”

“Kurt’s here,” she points out.

He doesn’t answer, but glances at the television screen. “Wanna watch I Love Lucy?” she asks.

“I don’t know it,” he says.

She gazes at him, but looks away just a moment before he becomes uncomfortable.

“It’s good,” she says. “It’s funny.”

Then she turns back around to continue watching. She does not invite him to sit next to her, but, without looking at him, continues to talk, explaining the different characters, the various back stories—

“Oh, this is a good one! In this one, Lucy and Ethel get a job at a chocolate factory—”

—so that he finds himself standing behind her for the next several episodes. And even when she is no longer talking, but only occasionally bursting into laughter, he remains there; walking away only long after the laughter has turned to steady breathing, after she falls asleep.


*


The next morning, there is an envelope taped to his door. He doesn’t have to look inside it to recognize the medal. He throws the envelope away without ever opening it.


*


He learns from one of his more capable students that the kid has decided to train under Hank to become a paramedic, in lieu of leaving the mansion for college like many of her friends. When he sees her in a hallway with her boyfriend, he asks her about it, and after clarifying, “emergency medical technician, actually,” she confirms the news, pure pleasure in her voice.

He asks, “Why?”

She says, “It’s something I thought of doing when I was a kid, but then I couldn’t, of course. I thought I never could. But now—”

She stops and smiles, then mock-grimaces. “The downside is, Hank has me working pretty much twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

He looks at her arms in a t-shirt, at the bare hand being held by Bobby’s. “And you don’t mind that?” he asks.

She looks down and says, “It’s good to know I can still help.”

And he remembers, as if he has just been shot, that Hank is now the only doctor in the mansion.

Bobby says proudly, squeezing her hand: “You should see what Rogue can do.”


*


And on Sunday he goes to Danbury before recalling that the club isn’t open on Sundays; so on the way back home, he steers the bike one-handed, the other hand lodged in his abdomen.

At the Connecticut-New York border, he stops at a gas station long enough to change shirts, purchase a container of Clorox wipes and a container of baby wipes, and he wipes the bike, then his body, of every trace of his blood, before going back to the mansion.


*


Blanchot: “It is as though he said: ‘May happiness come for all, provided that by this wish, I be excluded from it.’”


*


He sees her only in passing over the next several months.

Sitting with Hank in the cafeteria and nodding earnestly at every word he says; on her cell phone talking to Bobby, who has moved out of the mansion to study somewhere in the city; apologizing to her friends for missing some birthday party because of a late night in the medbay caring for a young student with a high fever.

Meanwhile, the rumors begin to circulate that the Wolverine has a secret lover in the city whom he visits during his lunch breaks; or, better yet, a secret apartment, and a different lover every day. And if Storm hears about it, she never mentions it; letting his private business be his private business, as if it is the least she can do, in exchange for obliging him to stay.

When his students tease him about it, he only gives them a grin and replies, with what he hopes passes for an air of smug, oversexed satisfaction, “For that, another five laps, brats.” Predictably, they all groan and protest, like teenagers in a sitcom.

And as they run, already on the other side of the field, he can hear them saying to each other, as if their voices are in his own ear:

“He totally is; why did we even have to ask; she’s probably hot as fuck; wait, don’t you mean ‘they’re probably hot as fuck,” and then a chorus of laughs.


*


One of his students falls over in the middle of a basketball game. He is about to unleash a wave of foul-mouthed mockery, when he hears another student crying, “He’s not breathing, Mr. Logan, he’s not breathing, I think he has asthma.”

He rushes the boy to the medbay, and when he sees only Rogue there, alone, he opens his mouth to scream at her to get some fucking help—until she wordlessly scoops the child from his arms, lays him in the nearest bed, places a mask over his face, and administers a shot of epinephrine—and he remembers that she is the help.


*


“So you’re the real deal, huh,” he says, when the child is stable.

She laughs. “What’d you think Hank was teaching me, candy-making?” and Laughlin City seems a thousand years away.


*


One Saturday, he is about to take the bike to go to Danbury, and he runs into her in the garage, standing next to a relatively new Yaris, which he has just noticed for the first time. He finds it hard to believe he hadn’t already noticed it; it stands out, sorely, among all the now-unused Italian and German supercars.

“Hey,” she greets him. “I’m about to go to the city to visit Bobby. Wanna ride together?”

He shakes his head. “No, kid, I’m good.”

“Be environmentally friendly, carpool,” she says. “Plus, you can introduce me to your girl.”

At the look on his face, she laughs. “The rumors are legendary, Logan. Come on, get in the car.”

“No,” he says, more roughly than he would have liked. “It’s all right. I got some things on the bike to check out before I take off, anyway.”

She looks at him. “All right,” she says, and slips into her car. He lifts his hand in an awkward wave as she pulls out of the garage, and doesn’t lower the hand until the car is out of view.


*


After all this time, he has gained something of a reputation at the club, as the “superhealing mutant who lets you beat the shit out of him without fighting back,” so much so that the organizers offer him his own regular position, eager to capitalize on the novelty of his situation. They offer him his own special chair, on his own special platform; they offer to compensate him handsomely.

He refuses, knowing it would draw too much attention, knowing it would be a step too far. But refusing hurts him; and on the way back home, once again he has to steer the bike one-handed. And this time, he goes to a different gas station to clean himself up.

Still imagining what it would be like to sit in a small chair, on a small platform, alone; giving his entire body up.


*


Blanchot: “He said to himself: you shall not kill yourself, your suicide precedes you. Or: he dies inept at dying.”


*


Rogue moves into a room two doors away from his; she is no longer a student, but an important part of the staff. She is now an adult, who lives where all the other adults live.

So now he runs into her in the halls much more often: far too early in the morning, on her way to the medbay; far too late at night, on her way back.

He is terrified that she will, once again, hear him in the middle of one of his nightmares and be moved to help him—and his terror is answered much too soon, when two weeks after she moves in, he is screaming inside a water tank, then screaming on top of a burnt-out car, holding a woman’s body in his hands; then, finally, screaming in his own room.

And she is already there, just out of his claws’ reach, saying, “Logan, wake up. Logan.”

All he says when he can finally breathe again is, “How’d you get in here.”

“Master key,” she says, and he must look horrified, because she adds quickly, “Hank has one, too; it’s to be able to get into anyone’s room, in the case of a medical emergency.”

“Nightmare counts as a medical emergency?” he asks.

“Sometimes,” she replies. Then she looks around his room. “Jesus. I haven’t been in here in a while.”

He stares at her. “You nostalgic for the last time?”

She laughs. “No—I used to come here sometimes, after you left for Alkali Lake.” He raises an eyebrow. “Not a lot; just whenever I was feeling down or lonely or fed up with it all. I’d come in here and just cry and cry. It was like my secret hideaway.”

“Sounds cheerful,” he mutters. “Now, if you don’t mind.”

She looks at him, and then her eyes flicker elsewhere for a moment. Then she looks back at him again, and says, “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

He doesn’t notice until the next morning that on the ground there is a recent receipt for the Danbury Walmart, and he thinks he must be getting lazy.

But to an ignorant eye it wouldn’t look like anything, and besides, there is no way she would be able to glean anything from that alone—still, he doesn’t stop thinking about it until they finally run into each other later that evening, just before dinner, and she greets him as normally as ever.


*


One day he sees her in the hallway and she has a bandage on her face. His knuckles humming, he asks her what the hell happened.

She laughs and says she was treating a child with talons and, “She was thrashing, and got me, a little bit.”

Then she winks and says, “Line of duty, you know.”

When the bandage comes off, he sees that she has a long, deep scratch from her right cheekbone to her chin, which, after several weeks, becomes a very faint scar. And afterwards, that is how her face looks, permanently; but every time he sees her, his knuckles hum, as surprised as when he saw the bandage the first time.


*


The weather begins to cool again, and, like always, his skeleton makes him feel it sooner and more sharply than everyone else around him. This year it feels even worse, and he curses global warming, then wonders if that makes sense.

But his old jacket is still in the closet, with the venom-eaten hole in it, crumpled into a ball and stuffed inside his old duffel bag. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to throw it away, like the many bloodied shirts left in dumpsters from Danbury to North Salem.

He had taken the jacket off the back of one of the first men he ever fought, a few weeks after he had stumbled out of the underground facility—naked, with no memory, howling at the sight of the claws after realizing: he could not put them down, he could not take them out, he could not throw them away. His entire body a bloody knife.

But he hasn’t found a new jacket he could bear wearing—certainly not at the Danbury Walmart—and it isn’t as though he is an expert on other shopping locations.

Still, he has time; everyone else is still in shorts and light sweatshirts; he is certain he will be able to find a jacket before it becomes noticeable.

One of his students sprains an ankle playing soccer, and he brings the boy to the medbay.

Rogue is there, and while she ices the student’s ankle, she glances at Logan and says, “Jesus, would you put on your jacket already. I feel cold just looking at you.”

Startled, he says, “What?”

He looks down at himself, in a short-sleeved black shirt and jeans. She is not dressed so differently. “You’re wearing the same thing.”

“Yeah, but you’re you,” she says, as if she is saying the sky is blue, as if she is sharing a fact about herself, not him.

And he is still shaking when he helps the boy back to class, her calm words running through his body.


*


Blanchot: “When the other is related to me in such a way that the utter stranger in me answers him in my stead, this answer is the immemorial friendship which cannot be chosen, nor can it be lived in the present. It is an offering; it offers a share of the passivity which has no subject. It is dying, dying outside of the self—the body which belongs to no one, in nonnarcissistic suffering, and joy.”


*


A week later, he is in the common room, watching an old action movie whose name he cannot remember, when a paper shopping bag lands in his lap from above, and he nearly unsheathes his claws.

She is standing behind him. “Got something for you.”

Catching his breath, he looks down at the bag, both eyebrows raised. She rolls her eyes and adds, “It’s not gonna bite you.”

He peers inside the bag, and pulls out its contents: a brown leather jacket, even more weathered than his old one. This one is plain, with no stripes, and a small fur collar.

“I got it in a vintage store in the city,” she says. “The guy said it’s a real G-1 flight jacket. I thought the collar would be good for you. It’s thicker than a biker’s jacket; you wouldn’t have to wear two jackets anymore.”

She reaches over and flips the collar up. “Look, if you do that, it warms your neck.”

He stares at the jacket. His knuckles are humming again, and he can smell everything on it: the scent of her hands, especially on the fur; Bobby’s scent, just at its edges, the boy must have been there with her when she bought it; and the scent of the jacket itself—its age, its warmth, its gnarled animal past.

“Fuckin’ smells like shit,” he chokes out.

She smiles down at him. “I knew you’d like it.”


*


Another day, he goes to the club and a young man electrocutes him until he loses consciousness.

When he awakens, he also feels a moist spot on his stomach, and realizes it is blood; he might have also been stabbed, he doesn’t even remember. The wound has already healed.

But now he is almost going to be late for his afternoon class, so he speeds back to the mansion, his skeleton still charged and crackling, and when he arrives, he hurries into the nearest bathroom to change into a new shirt, stuffing the old one into one of his new jacket’s pockets.

During the training lesson, his concentration is still fraction off, and one of his students ends up throwing him straight into a wall, fifty feet away, and for the second time that day, he loses consciousness.

Thinking, right before it all goes black, Definitely getting lazy.


*


He awakens in the medbay. Rogue is on the other side of the room, tending to another student. When she sees that he is awake, she approaches his bed, where he is already sitting up, about to leave.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” she says. “You’ve been out for almost half an hour. How hard did he throw you?”

“Pretty hard,” he mumbles.

“Losing your touch?” she asks, and it is meant to be a tease, but there is no lightness in her voice. She is looking at him, and it resembles the expression she wore when he told her he didn’t know what I Love Lucy was, just before she looked away.

Then she narrows her eyes, and her hands are suddenly on his stomach, and something wet and cool is sweeping against his flesh.

“What the fuck,” he yelps, leaning back.

She says, “Stay still, I’ve almost got it all.”

At first he wonders how she is touching him, but then realizes she is wearing a pair of latex gloves—and then remembers that she doesn’t need gloves anymore, at all; that she is wearing these gloves only because she is in the medbay, and it is her job.

Then he sees that she is holding up a damp piece of gauze; there is a faint smear of blood on it.

He looks down, and sees that, because he had gotten up too quickly from the bed, his shirt has ridden up to reveal his belly, where the stab wound had been. In his rush back to the mansion for his class, he hadn’t had the time to wipe himself down.

She murmurs, “So what’d he throw you against, you must’ve scraped something.”

He doesn’t look at her. “Must have,” he forces out. “Am I free to go?”

She pulls away. “Yeah, you’re free to go,” she says, balling the wipe up and disposing it, along with her gloves, in the biohazardous waste bin. “Be careful next time.”

“Won’t be a next time,” he says, still without meeting her eyes.

He makes his way towards the door, and she calls, behind him, “Don’t forget your jacket.”

He turns around and she is holding his new jacket up with her now bare hands. In a panic, he remembers the bloody shirt inside it. His eyes dart down at the pocket. The button is still fastened, the bulge looks the same; he does not think she has opened it.

“Thanks,” he says, taking it from her.

“Is it warm?” she asks.

He looks down at the jacket. He nods, and leaves. When he puts it on, it still smells like the medbay, and her.


*


The next morning, Storm calls him into her office—her office, now—to ask him how everything is going. He says, “Great.”

She says, “I’m so glad to hear that.” She runs a hand through her hair, which has now grown past her shoulders.

She says, “You know I was afraid—of how it would all turn out, you staying here for good. For a while, I kept expecting you to take off, no warning, nothing.”

He doesn’t say anything, but grunts.

She looks at him. “I’m glad you didn’t. I’m glad you stuck with us.” Her voice softens. “You don’t know how grateful I am. For everything you’re doing. I see how hard you’re working, Logan. I see how devoted you are.”

“It’s nothing,” he mutters.

She smiles. “You know, the kids love you,” she says fondly. “They tell me all the time. You’re doing really good.”

“Thanks,” he says, and after his first class is over, he speeds to Danbury and lets a woman with superhuman strength beat his face until it is as unrecognizable as he feels.


*


Weil: “I should not love my suffering because it is useful. I should love it because it is.”


*


He has another nightmare, but there are no tanks, no scientists; he is in a forest, he is looking for a woman, and then he is lifted up by his bones and thrown away like trash.

And he hears someone saying, “Logan. Logan. It’s just a dream. Logan.”

But when he wakes up, no one is there, and he realizes that it is already morning, and his breathing is steady and even; the nightmare had passed without awakening him. He can smell her in his room, her scent already three or four hours old.


*


He overhears an argument she is having on her cell phone, out in the garden, slightly too close to the area where he never, never goes: “Well, you can visit me here, too, can’t you—because, it’s a long drive—well, you all did, but I didn’t, Bobby—well, I understand if you feel that way, but it’s still my home, it’s where I work, it’s important to me—fine—fine—fine.”


*


And now it is winter, and now the roads are icy, and in the cold it takes longer and longer for his injuries to heal. He is still never late for a class, but sometimes he arrives with the skin still tender from a just-recovered wound.

And one day, he is speeding back so fast that the bike slips off the road and crashes into a tree. The damage to the bike is only cosmetic; he can still drive it back to the mansion. He thinks no one will notice; hardly anyone goes to the car garage anymore.


*


Hardly anyone; but the next time he goes to Danbury, a green-skinned girl whips him on his face and chest with her four apparently poisonous tails, leaving deep wounds that then proceed to sear away the surrounding flesh with astonishing vigor—

—and when he stumbles out of the club and into the snow, Rogue is standing in the parking lot, leaning against her Yaris, a handbag slung over her shoulder.

His entire body freezes, and as he stares at her, he can feel the wounds on his face still closing, far too slowly.

She studies his face, and says, “I did say ‘Be careful,’ right,” and holds a towel and a bottle of anti-bacterial disinfectant out to him.


*


He refuses to take the towel and the bottle, refuses to get in her car, refuses to even speak to her except to say, “It’s none of your goddamned business,” so she follows his bike back to the mansion, and he can feel the tiny car behind him, every mile, every minute, and he wonders if she had already been following him on the way to the Danbury.

Once in the garage, he grabs her by the arm and says, “So what. You gonna tell on me, you gonna try to stop me, what. What.”

“Neither,” she says. “Zip up your jacket.”

He looks down, and remembers he still has not changed; though the blood does not show through the black shirt, he can feel it sticking to him, the dried blood gluing the chest hairs to the fabric.

He zips up his jacket. She is already walking towards the door to the mansion. “Come with me,” she says over her shoulder.

“Fuck if I will,” he says.

“Fuck if you won’t,” she retorts. “You’re not going to class with blood all over your chest, and your students are already in the locker room. Come with me.”

He grits his teeth, then follows her. She leads him to her room, locks the door behind them. “Take off your shirt,” she says, pointing to the bed.

He sits, peels off the shirt, wincing as it tugs on the hairs. She takes out what looks like a complicated First-Aid kit, puts on a pair of gloves, soaks a large piece of gauze with some kind of solution, and then approaches him. At first he thinks she is going to touch him, and he leans back, instinctively.

She looks at him, frowning. Then she says, “Wipe yourself down,” and hands him the gauze.

“I got baby wipes in the bike,” he mutters, doing as he is told.

She turns back around, picks up the bottle, and tosses it next to him on the bed. “Baby wipes won’t kill hepatitis B. This is better. Keep the bottle with you. They make wipes with it, too; I’ll get you some from the medbay.”

She looks at her watch. “It’s almost time for your class.”

He looks down at the bottle. Bactericidal/virucidal. Then back up at her. She is picking up his crusted, bloodied shirt and putting it in an opaque bag, along with her gloves. Then she holds it out in front of him, for the bloodied gauze.

“I’m going to dispose of it in the medbay,” she explains, at his look. “The biohazardous waste bin is always closed, no one will see it.”

He puts the gauze in the bag, she turns her back to him again. He waits, but she doesn’t say anything else.

“So what, that’s it,” he says.

“That’s it,” she says. Then she opens her handbag and pulls out something. He sees that it is a plastic Walmart bag, and he feels his chest tighten.

From the plastic bag, she takes out a 10-pack of black shirts and tosses it at him.

“Change and get to class,” she says. “I’m going back to work.”


*


He spends nearly the entire next day with his fists clenched, wary, watching Storm, watching Hank, watching his students; waiting for some indication that she has told someone, anyone, everyone—

But nothing happens that day, or the next, or the next, and when he runs into her in the halls or in the cafeteria, she smiles at him so easily, he feels it on his skin, in the part of his bones that is still bone.

And that week, he finds three packages of bactericidal-virucidal wipes in the helmet compartment of the bike.