When Is a Man by Aaron Shepard

ends are even, smooth. This wood may have been cut for posts and beams. Carved, perhaps, with an adze. So it might be an artifact. Of a sort.” The other professor, the hopeful one Paul had spoken to earlier, shrugged and wiped his hands on his jeans, his weathered face glum beneath his thick eyebrows.
    Some of the students were billeted in farms near the excavation site, but Paul stayed at a hotel in Skinnskatteberg, in a room that had a small sauna off the bathroom. That night, he scrubbed himself with a coarse loofah in the shower, then sat in the sauna, exhausted from the hours of shovel work. He held his right arm out and turned it back and forth in hypnotic half-circles, noted the veins that protruded, the shadowed definition of biceps and triceps. His legs, pressed against the cedar bench, revealed the curved, impressive knolls of his quadriceps, his thighs yielding only the slightest undercarriage of fat. The orange, fire-like glow forgave every blemish and mole, the wiry copses and ridgelines of body hair. His member was thick and partially engorged from the pleasurable heat, his scrotum relaxed and heavy between his legs. In that moment, Paul thought he understood something about an athlete—how his body, unlike his mind, didn’t differentiate between victory and defeat. His body felt the deep satisfaction of physical labour, it wanted to celebrate and find release. It was amazing, all things considered, how good he felt right now. Physically, at least.
    He was finished with the dig. The moment that waterlogged piece of wood hit the boardwalk, he’d lost all interest. All that remained was the pointless folly of coming here, the comedy of self-deception. The trip had cost him dearly, and not just the money he’d thrown away. There would be repercussions at home, even beyond the ones he could easily guess.
    Something surged through him, a deep, wild impatience—he needed to seek a crowd, noise, women. There’d be lots of students from the local college as well as the field school and instructors at the pub. Tomorrow it would be time to go home and take his punishment. But right now, he would give himself a night out, while he was still an ocean away from the consequences.

6

    The grey body being pulled from the water, a man on each flabby arm, the head and chest sagging toward the water. The men’s faces both straining from the weight and recoiling from the touch of dead flesh. If only he hadn’t seen that. The memory cast an insistent shadow, made it impossible for him to forget the wildness of where he was, the vast, unforgiving space. It had left the traces of its horror on the water like a film, like oil or fish slime.
    By noon of each day he’d run out of things to do, even if he took his time cleaning the fence or entering the morning’s data. There was nothing to do but wait for night. Sometimes, in the idle time while he sat by the river or in the shade outside the trailer, minutes went by with his mind gone wonderfully blank. But then the image of the corpse would flicker into sharp focus and cut through his reverie. When it faded, he’d find himself trailing after a gloomy thought, and the river would become something menacing.
    He was angry, too, about pissing himself again, this time in the simple act of bending to scoop a fish out of the weir. His underwear hung on a line by the trailer, rinsed in the creek. He thought he’d gotten the humiliation out of his system—the humiliation of surgery, of the catheter. He’d been invaded by people who knew more about his body than he did. When they sent him home, he’d known even less about his body. Not technically, because since the diagnosis he’d learned more about his inner workings than he’d ever wished to know. No, the surgery had made him ignorant on a gut level—disconnected him, as if part of him had been left behind, a part that now belonged to clearer, higher minds.
    After