by Ron Currie
“Claire would disagree with you. She thinks it’s all on us.”
“She doesn’t think that,” Larry says. “She feels that. There’s a difference.”
“Okay,” I say. “But what can I do about it?”
“Intergender relations are not my forte.”
“You’ve never had a girlfriend.”
“I’m gay.”
“So you’ve never had a girlfriend.”
He smirks.
I crouch in front of the doorless refrigerator and dig around in Parmesan cheese and smashed cantaloupe until I find two bottles of High Life. I rinse these under the tap and hand one to Larry.
“You know I’m only fifteen?” he asks.
“You’re a mature fifteen,” I say.
“That’s what Humbert said about Lolita.”
“She was twelve. And don’t flatter yourself, Larry.”
He shrugs and twists the cap.
I slide down and sit on the floor among the juices and honey and shattered things, letting my injured leg stretch out in front of me. Larry swigs from his beer and makes a face. That scrunched-up look of distaste may presage a lifelong abhorrence of alcohol, or it may indicate, paradoxically, that this is the thing his amygdala has been waiting for unawares, the biochemical puzzle piece that fits just so with his neurological reward system. He may end up a vehement teetotaler, or he may be found dead at thirty-five with more booze than blood in his veins. It’s impossible to know.
For a while we observe an agreeable silence.
“The other day,” I say eventually, “I went to Market on the Mount. You know the place?”
“The hippie food store. On Riley Hill.”
“That’s the one,” I said. “So I park the car and walk up to the entrance. It’s a set of double doors. And the door on the right has a sign that reads PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR TEMPORARILY.”
I look up at Larry. He meets my gaze, holds it for a moment, then raises his eyebrows as though he knows I’m fishing for a response but has no idea what I expect him to say.
“How on Earth do you use a door temporarily?” I ask. “Tell me, Larry. Help me out here. I need to know.”
“Well there’s what the sign says, and then there’s what it actually means. It’s not that tough to understand. They just made a syntactical goof.”
I hoist my beer and toss it across the kitchen. It smashes against the far wall, leaving a Rorschach of fluid and foam on the plasterboard.
“Everything is an utter mystery,” I say. “Listen, I studied Kant in college, passed with a solid B-plus. This morning everything was fine. Now my wife is gone. And I don’t understand why.”
Larry takes another drink of beer. “She’ll be back,” he says.
“How do you know that?”
“Because what she’s trying to get away from can’t be outrun. In twelve-step programs they call it a geographic cure. Never works.”
“It’s not exactly a comfort to me,” I say, “to know that she’ll always be tormented.”
“Well, anyway.”
“Should I ask where your knowledge of twelve-step programs comes from?”
“My father’s been sober four years.”
“Good for him.”
“Not really,” Larry says. “It made him nasty. He’s got nothing to help him relax now, except treating people poorly.”
“Well, I guess I’m sorry about that, too.”
“Hardly your fault,” Larry says. He leans over and holds his half-finished beer out to me. “You want this one? I’m not really developing a taste for it.”
I take the bottle from his hand and toss it against the wall. More glass, more suds, more dribbles of beer flowing floorward. The eggshell paint begins to bubble in spots.
“So what are you going to do once everything’s broken?” Larry asks.
“Haven’t really thought that far ahead,” I say.
“Do you know where she went?”
“Yes.”
“Then go get her.”
“It doesn’t really work that way among adults, Larry.”
“Then how does it work? Among adults?”
“Well, one adult expresses a desire to be left alone, and the other adult honors that desire. Or gets slapped with a restraining order.”
Larry thinks about this. “Okay,” he says, “since you don’t understand anything, I’m going to go ahead and explain something for you.”
“Alright.”
“You’ve destroyed your house.”
“To an extent.”
“Made it unlivable.”
“By most people’s standards, certainly.”
“In other words, you’ve given yourself no choice but to leave.”
“One could argue.”
“That is not an accident,” Larry says. “The question is, why can’t you just be honest with yourself, pack a bag, and follow her wherever she’s gone?”
From where I’m sitting I have a view of the sky outside the kitchen window, just beginning to brighten from black to slate.
“The way I see it,” Larry says, “there are very few things that we can’t do anything about. My mother’s dead. Nothing to be done there. But your wife … what’s her name?”
“Claire.”
“Claire is not dead.”
“No.”
“You should remember that.”
Claire is not dead, and yet unless she returns there will be no release from this grief. I will never leave this place. The one thing I have learned is I have learned nothing. The moment I pulled the Desert Eagle from my waistband, and every moment that preceded it, are indelible, everlasting, and so too, therefore, is Claire’s sorrow. These are all notions that Larry, precocious as he is, cannot grasp. So I don’t try to articulate them. Instead, I begin to cry for the first time since the bunker in Texas. Great seismic sobs, a display for which Larry seems ill-equipped. His eyes go wide, then are dragged to the floor by the gravity of embarrassment. He nearly pants with relief when I compose myself enough to tell him I have to prepare for work, that the very first light is the time when I bathe and put on my unremarkable wool suit and drink coffee and drive across the river and do my job, and that being the case, it’s been nice talking to him but he should probably head home.
The shower door rests in hundreds of jagged pebbles on the floor of the bathtub, as hostile to my feet as a bed of razor clams. I lay a towel over the shards, step in gingerly, and lather myself under the spray. I’m forced to shave blind, owing to the fact that I destroyed the medicine cabinet mirror. I dress by twilight, and later, downstairs in the kitchen, as I try to make instant coffee with hot water from the tap, the room brightens enough for me to realize I’ve put on a jacket from a gray suit, pants from a blue one.
Outside it’s already midday-warm. The van groans to life and blows hot air through the vents even though the air conditioner is on. I back out of the carport and drive through mostly empty suburban streets with the windows down. When I stop at intersections the engine bogs and hacks, threatening to stall, and I reflect that Claire failed to tell me the van no longer runs that great. This omission seems significant, but as usual I can only speculate as to what that significance is.
I park the van in the municipal lot. I cross the street and enter the office with the warm fluorescents. People sit at identical desks with identical cardboard coffee cups. People stare into computer screens. People rub their eyes, pick at breakfast pastries. People talk into headsets.
Ours is a thoroughly modern life, so despite the fact that I’ve destroyed my phone there are ways for Claire to get in touch. She has my office number. She has my email addresses, both personal and business. There are no fewer than five social media websites through which she could contact me.
Colleagues drift in and out of my office throughout the day, and I address them with a steel-belted formality. “I’ve been meaning to consult with you regarding this matter,” I tell them. “I’m afraid that issue has already been deci
ded,” I say. This stately diction is unusual even for me, but no one seems to notice. They nod their heads and scribble notes. They promise to get back to me, to check the numbers, to arrange a conference call. Nobody asks why I look so haggard. No one inquires about my limp, or mentions that I’m wearing a mismatched suit. In fact, when I’m not engaged in work-related conversation, it’s as if I’ve suddenly been rendered invisible. I pass people in the hallway and they keep their eyes trained on their electronic devices. I have energy only to finish the coffee but not to start a new pot, yet no one complains.
I have ceased displacing air. I am a ghost.
And then, when the schoolhouse-style analog clock on the wall strikes five, I find out why. My coworkers burst into the office as one mass, bearing balloons, kazoos, party favors. They wear pointed hats and wide smiles. Two of them carry a massive cake impregnated with so many candles it’s like a scale-model forest fire. Someone puts one of the pointed hats on my head, pulling the elastic-band strap under my chin. Others clear paperwork from my desk and replace it with the cake. Tiny paper plates and a clutch of plastic forks are deployed. Under the candles the cake bears a message, written in green frosting that is quickly becoming adulterated with hot wax: HAPPY 45TH, K!
I had forgotten it was my birthday, in part because of the trauma of Claire’s departure, and in part because it’s not really my birthday. This date was chosen, years ago, by some anonymous bureaucrat when I entered the foster care system as an infant. I needed a date of birth to be a full and legal person, at least as far as the state was concerned. It’s been a useful marker for everything from job applications to the purchase of age-restricted goods, but it has certainly never held any celebratory significance for me. Claire and I never marked it, and neither did Sarah and I. The only reason my colleagues know is because the information can be found in my personnel file.
Everyone in my office sings “Happy Birthday,” almost on key. I look into their faces; I can put names with roughly half of them. They seem to genuinely wish me well, these people. They must be so happy in their own lives, it strikes me, to be able to call up such generosity of spirit on demand.
The whole thing is very nearly unbearable, and I have to look down at the cake before I start crying again.
Make a wish, they tell me. They say this jokingly—after all, they are adults, rational members of a rational culture, and they have not believed wishing for something can make it so since they cut their last permanent teeth.
But I am game. I believe. I compose a wish, and hold the thought in my head long enough that it can be transmitted to whatever force is the arbiter in such matters. I am, in this moment, as deeply, hopefully irrational as any person has ever been. I believe in voodoo and black magic, mojo and cooties. I believe in luck, jinxes, angels, good and bad karma, the influence of planetary alignment on the minutiae of everyday human business. I believe the slaughter of goats and/or virgins is a useful tool for achieving one’s goals. I believe in the power of my mind to manipulate the physical world, to turn the Fit around and bring Claire back to Ohio, to Toledo, to the cul-de-sac, to our home.
I inhale deeply and purse my lips.
Remember, my colleagues tell me as I lean forward in my chair: you have to blow them all out, or else your wish will never come true.
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