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Show Acting Alone pa g e 148 Attitude is all, even among automatons devoid of any identifiable attitude of their own. Axelrad swaggered into the mess tent like a returning hero. He stooped, like Mr. Cicerone, just a little bit to fit himself under the flap - though Axelrad himself didn't need to - and he held his bunny high, for all the blind glassy eyes of the kitchen staff to see. He got himself an armload of implements off the rack and commenced peremptorily skinning and dressing the carcass as though it were some great prize. Before coming to know the old man and having the Inner Strength made known to him, Axelrad would have been painfully conscious at this moment of the inadequacy of a single rabbit to feed over two-dozen large individuals. Previously in his life he would have allowed this rabbit's inadequacy to filter down inside of him and dredge up his own chronic feelings of moral and spiritual inadequacy. Such bad feelings had always lurked somewhere in the bottom of Axelrad's heart ever since his Bar Mitzvah day, long ago, when his father, a plastic surgeon who'd created the very faces of several of Axelrad's acquaintances, had officially rejected Axelrad before God and the whole world of men (women, too) because it had become apparent that he was the runt of the litter and wouldn't soon transcend the boys' rack in department stores. His father was powerless, even with all his plastic skills, to do a god-damned thing about it. The powerlessness was what had bothered Dad the most, not the shrimpiness of the boy. Axelrad was able to understand that now, with the old man's periodic help and reinforcement. But such an understanding of our parents' foibles is never enough all by itself to conquer the bad feelings of inadequacy that they've instilled |