Chapter 2: The Uses of Appetite

The first morning in Leuven, I woke before the city did and listened for a house that was not there.

For a few seconds I lay perfectly still in the narrow bed, eyes open to a ceiling I did not know. I waited for the small domestic signals that had ruled my boyhood: the scrape of my father’s chair, the radio muttering in the kitchen, the newspaper snapping open like a flag of occupation. None of them came. Instead there was a bicycle bell in the street below, distant and bright, a shower coughing to life somewhere down the hall, someone laughing behind a closed door with the rough happiness of a student still drunk from the night before. The room smelled of old wood, dust, and my own clean sheets. Ten square metres. Bed, desk, wardrobe, window. I had lived in worse rooms and slept in ditches, tents, barracks, armoured vehicles and hospitals. But no room had ever frightened me quite like that one, because it belonged to me and no one had told me what to do with it.

Freedom, I discovered, did not arrive like music. It arrived first as a lack of interruption. No one knocked. No one ordered. No one forbade. The shower kept coughing somewhere down the hall, the bicycle bell rang again below the window, and the day stood there with its hands empty, asking what sort of man I meant to be inside it.

I sat up, put my feet on the cold floor, and reached for the notebook on the desk. Study. Road. Strength. Food. Sleep. Money. Want. I had added the last word on the first night and had nearly crossed it out twice before sleeping. It looked indecent among the others, too naked for paper. Want was not a task. Want was the thing beneath the tasks, the dangerous animal I had kept chained so long that I no longer trusted the sound of it moving. But I left it there. A man cannot rebuild a life if he refuses to name what the life is for.

I dressed quietly, laced my shoes, and ran before breakfast. Ran was generous. What I did that morning was a negotiation between memory and lungs. The old mind knew cadence, posture, the relaxed hands, the rhythm of breathing low in the belly. The young body knew only protest. After ten minutes my calves were tight, my shirt stuck to my back, and my breath came high again, the old shame waiting at the edge of the road with its hands in its pockets. I did not stop. I slowed until the breath came under command, then continued through streets washed clean by early light, past shuttered cafés, church stone, delivery vans, rows of bicycles chained together like sleeping animals. Leuven was beautiful in a way that did not ask my permission. The city had been here before me and would continue after me. I found that comforting. A man who has been given a second life can become drunk on the idea that everything is about him. Stone is a useful correction.

Routine settled over the first days, plank by plank. The kitchen downstairs was shared by five people and cleaned by none of them with any conviction. Someone kept leaving a saucepan in the sink with pasta welded to the bottom. The fridge smelled faintly of cheese, beer, and betrayal. I labelled my eggs after the third one disappeared, then felt ridiculous for doing it and did not stop. Student life, I remembered, was not freedom in its noble form. It was freedom with bad plumbing, borrowed pans, thin walls, and strangers using your milk.

I woke early, ran or walked, washed, ate, read, attended orientation sessions, found the library, bought second-hand books, learned where to get cheap vegetables, and discovered which laundrette did not eat coins. In the evenings I trained in the room as much as the floorboards allowed: push-ups, squats, planks, slow mobility work for joints that had no business being stiff at twenty. I found the university pool and swam badly at first, not because I had forgotten the strokes, but because the body had forgotten patience with breath. Water is honest. It accepts no argument. Either you move through it cleanly or it takes your panic and feeds it back to you.

The lectures began with the usual theatre of first-year medicine: pale faces, new notebooks, nervous laughter, the faint medicinal smell of ambition. Everyone was trying to look clever without appearing to try. I recognized the performance because I had died under it once. This time I took a seat halfway down the hall, not hidden, not exposed, and opened my notebook. The professor spoke. I listened. The difference between fear and attention is visible only from the inside, but it changes the way a man sits. I felt people notice before any of them knew they were noticing. The old James had folded himself around apology. This James sat like the chair had no verdict to offer.

A professor of physiology, dry as chalk and twice as abrasive, asked a question no one wanted about cardiac preload. It was not difficult, but it was early, and early questions are not tests of knowledge so much as invitations to panic. I let the silence run two seconds too long, then answered. Cleanly. No upward lilt at the end, no apology tucked under the words. The professor looked at me a moment longer than the answer required. “Yes,” he said, almost grudgingly, and went on. Around me, a few heads shifted. No room turns all at once, but a few people filed me somewhere new.

That afternoon, a tall blond student named Mathis asked if I had studied medicine before. I said no. He frowned as if the answer had failed to behave. A girl with red-framed glasses asked whether I wanted to join a study group. I said perhaps. Another girl smiled at me in the corridor and held the smile just long enough to make it a question. I thought of Nora, of the dark room above Pieter’s party, of her hand reaching back for mine on the stairs. Nora had not been a miracle. That unsettled me more than the kiss itself. A miracle happens once and lets a man remain grateful but unchanged. A pattern makes demands. A pattern asks him to reconsider the world.

The first message from Pieter arrived that evening while I was making eggs on a hotplate that barely deserved the name.

I smiled despite myself. There was no wound in the message, no grasping after significance, no tragedy. Nora had wanted me, had had me in the ways we chose, and had returned to her life with her dignity intact and a story she seemed to enjoy owning. That was new knowledge too. Desire did not always arrive carrying chains.

The message from Lizzy came two days later, from Gent.

No answer came at once. I leaned back in the chair and let myself enjoy, very carefully, the shape of the question she was not asking. Lizzy had no claim and knew it. I owed her no confession and knew that too.

I read that three times. Then I put the phone facedown and returned to the eggs before I could make the exchange smaller by explaining it.

By the end of the first week, the notebook had begun to accuse me. The study numbers improved. The money column had a plan. The food column was ugly but honest. The body column looked like evidence from a crime scene.

The mind was improving faster than the body. Study was ugly but obedient. If I sat long enough, the pages yielded. Money required patience and silence, both of which I had in unpleasant quantities. Food was a matter of buying the right things and not negotiating with the wrong ones at midnight. Sleep came harder, but even that could be disciplined. The body was different. The body remembered things it could not yet perform. It knew angles, distance, timing, leverage, the small tells in shoulders and hips that announce intention before the conscious mind has chosen it. But knowing is not doing. Every morning run reminded me. Every set of push-ups reminded me. The old skills were locked inside a young engine that coughed smoke after ten minutes.

I could train alone for strength and endurance. I could hit the heavy bag in my room only in imagination, since the floorboards would have reported me to the whole house within thirty seconds. What I needed was contact. Mats. Weight. Resistance. Another body making honest arguments. So I asked around, followed two bad directions and one useful one, and found a martial arts club behind a sports complex on the far side of town.

The club met in a converted hall, a place of old mats, sweat, canvas bags, and fluorescent light. I stood at the edge of it one evening after lectures and felt the body remember before it deserved to. The smell alone was enough: rubber mats, old leather, damp cotton, the metallic edge of bodies working hard. I had spent more hours than I could count in rooms like it across the world, learning and later teaching all the small ways a man can be broken, moved, stopped, saved from himself. This body, softening less each week but still far from ready, wanted to claim a history it had not yet earned.

The instructor was called Hugo. Late forties, heavy through the chest, close-shaved head, ears that had suffered honestly. He looked at me once and saw the weight, the posture, the eyes, and perhaps the mismatch among them. “Experience?” he asked.

“Some.”

“That means either none or too much.”

“Some,” I said again.

He snorted. “Warm up.”

The warm-up humiliated me. There is no kinder word. The others bounced through it, loose and loud, spending youth as if it were an infinite account, while my lungs burned and my shirt darkened. Running in the morning had built one kind of endurance. Mat work demanded another. Burpees, sprawls, shrimping across the mat, rolls, footwork drills, then bag rounds that made my shoulders fill with acid. One student smirked when I bent with my hands on my knees. I did not blame him. I looked exactly like a man who had mistaken memory for fitness.