What Things Are Made Of

Nerves of Titanium

45 Nerves of Titanium Handcuffed and chained, he uses a concealed lock-pick to escape a coffin buried in hot sand. The chainwrapped cage dropped into Arctic water through a hole drilled in three feet of solid ice can’t hold him. But what yanks me upright in my motel bed is when—doublecuffed , straitjacketed— he’s shoved out of an airplane. If he can’t pull his parachute cord in ninety seconds, he won’t need to find a new career. I, who get dizzy on a curb, watch his thin hands probe and pluck while skydivers film his every twitch. I, who absorbed calculus with Hendrix twanging and my roommate banging his girl behind a glass-bead door, have attention deficit disorder compared to this freak: lock-picking while he falls twice 46 as fast as if he took the standard limbsspread starfish pose. What if he breaks his tiny pick? Or drops it? What if his hands shake, or get too cold to work a lock? (Mine do, just watching.) Keats, bent over his odes; Newton, his calculus; Beethoven, his Ninth— Tiger on the green, Kobe at the line, Rice snagging a pass while tacklers howitzer at his head— all were hysterics next to this nut from Tennessee. “He never hung out much with girls. He’d ruther play with his handcuffs,” his mother drawls. “Wish he had his old job back at Burger King,” sighs his wife as he begins to spin. He’s toast, I think—just as he lifts his hands, his orange chute 47 blossoms overhead, and—see!—he comes floating, God-like, down to crowds who praise him from the ground, or (ignoring spousal snores, as well as sexsqueals from next door) cheer, from motel beds across this land, a man apart. Unlike us. Lock-pick in hand. Free. ...