Thomas World

by Richard Cox

  Kevin rolls his eyes. “I already plugged the cord into the stereo, Sherri. All you have to do is stick it in the bottom of the iPod.”

  “The cord fell behind the stereo!” she pleads. “And there are so many wires back there. Please?”

  He grabs the iPod from her and walks around the bar, into the living room. The stereo is housed in a black cabinet and stands next to a big, black widescreen TV. The rear-projection kind, back when big TVs were three hundred and fifty pounds.

  “But don’t put on the song yet!” Sherri instructs him. “I want to wait until David gets here.”

  “Why do you want to wait?” I ask.

  “It’ll sound so much better when we’re tripping.”

  I don’t want to hear anymore about this song, since for Sherri it’s a way to remember the graphic artist. And anyway, my redlining mind needs something to do, so why not talk about myself?

  “I got fired from my job yesterday.”

  “Holy shit!” Sherri says. “Really? That’s like me! They fucking canned my ass.”

  “I guess it’s for the best. I hated the damned rat race. The inside of my building looked like a maze. I’m surprised they didn’t hide cheese in our cubicles so we could find our way to them.”

  “I hated working in an office. I’m glad I got fired.”

  “And today I tried to sneak in and grab some files from my work computer, but they stopped me.”

  “I always keep backups of everything. I sometimes try to write poetry, or I do sketches in Illustrator, and if I lost those I think I would kill myself.”

  “I do a lot of writing, too. Screenplays, mostly. I got something optioned a few years ago.”

  “I would love to make my living writing poetry, but I don’t think people really do that.”

  One part of me realizes Sherri and I aren’t having a real conversation. I’m trying to tell her about the tectonic shift in my life over the past few days, and all her answers have something to do with her. But somehow this doesn’t seem to bother me. It’s all good.

  Everything is good.

  At some point I realize Kevin isn’t in the living room anymore.

  “Where did Kevin go?”

  “I don’t know. Probably back to his room. He feels threatened when other guys come over.”

  “And how often does that happen?”

  “That’s not something you ask a girl,” Sherri laughs. “Besides, do you keep track of all the women you take home?”

  The way she says that, with such nonchalance, again illustrates how different our worlds are. To Sherri, since I was at a bar and not wearing a wedding ring, I must be the kind of guy who enjoys frequent casual sex. And to be honest, I’ve often wondered what that sort of life would be like. The desire to sleep around is the basis of this question in the Ant Farm simulation: Do the ants derive genetic benefit from reproducing with a variety of different ants? The scientific answer is, as a species, yes we (humans) do. But, as Kevin pointed out, individually we don’t necessarily benefit at all. Promiscuous people have a tendency to spread disease and end up with multiple families. And are they any happier? Really happier?

  I can tell you this: From the moment I met Gloria, even before I touched her, I never wanted to sleep with another woman. Even when she was still with Jack, I felt like I would be cheating on her. I know it doesn’t make sense, but that’s how I felt.

  After she left me on the playground, alone with the stars and Jupiter, I found my way home and went to bed. But sleep eluded me. I couldn’t get Gloria out of my mind. I thought of high school chemistry, where I learned how atoms want to be “happy,” and they go around looking for other atoms that have just the right type of electron shell. Because all atoms want to be complete, and only certain atoms will bond with certain other atoms. I thought about how whole I felt when I spent time with Gloria. No other person, not any of my friends, not even anyone in my own family, had ever made me feel this way. I also knew I probably wasn’t thinking clearly, that I was probably having a kind of irrational, chemical reaction, but even that didn’t deter me. These “chemical” reactions happened for a good, evolutionary reason. And maybe they also happened because there was something larger at work that I didn’t understand.

  While I was thinking about all this, not sleeping, my telephone rang. It was almost one-thirty in the morning.

  Gloria was on the phone.

  “Are you sleeping?” she asked.

  “No. I’m wide awake.”

  “Me, too. Are you hungry?”

  “Hungry?”

  “I need fast food. I’ll come pick you up. Where do you live?”

  Ten minutes later I was sitting on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building, rigid with excitement. I imagined what she might say. The two of them had a fight. She had asked him to leave. They were broken up. They were taking a break. The possibilities might be endless, but if she was on her way to pick me up, nearly all of them were good.

  She showed up in a silver Nissan Maxima. I was smiling before I even climbed in.

  “Is this your car?” I asked her.

  “Whose car do you think it is?”

  “Look over there, smartass,” I said, and pointed at my own car.

  It was a white Maxima, probably the same year as hers.

  “Oh,” she said with a smile. “Smart man.”

  We drove out of my apartment complex, into the main road, which at one-thirty on a summer morning was empty. Like we lived in a ghost town.

  “What do you feel like?” she asked.

  “Whataburger.”

  Gloria smiled again, broadly, obviously holding in a secret.

  “You know what, Mr. Phillips?”

  “What?”

  “You and I sure do think alike.”

  “Nice of you to notice.”

  A few minutes later we were sitting in the drive-thru, bathed in electric orange light by a big “W” sign. She had lowered her window and was ready to order.

  “What do you want?”

  “Whataburger with cheese, fries, Coke.”

  “So predictable,” she said, and then ordered for both of us. Her meal was identical to mine, except instead of the full-size sandwich she asked for a Whataburger Junior.

  “Junior? I thought you said you were hungry.”

  “I have to maintain my girlish figure, don’t I?”

  “You ordered a Whataburger Junior. Are you twelve?”

  “Fuck you.”

  We both laughed.

  A few minutes later we were on campus, looking for a place to stop and eat. She settled on a dark corner of the football stadium parking lot and we each dove into our food. For a while neither of us spoke. The moon was low in the sky, orange, and far too big. I didn’t notice the beer between her legs until she pulled it out to take a drink.

  “Want some?”

  I swallowed a bit and imagined I could taste her mouth on the bottle.

  “So, Thomas,” Gloria said, “I actually brought you out here because I wanted to tell you something.”

  “I thought so.”

  “What do you think is going on with us?”

  “That’s not a statement,” I said. “It’s a question.”

  “Be serious for a minute.”

  “Okay. I think we are two very lucky people.”

  “Because we get along really well?”

  “No. Because we are a match.”

  She left that alone for a while, chewing on her Whataburger Junior. As you’ve probably guessed by now, that’s how she earned her nickname. She orders it every single time.

  “Thomas,” she said. “I—”

  “What?”

  “I came out here to tell you nothing can happen between us.”

  “You what?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you understood.”

  “That I understood?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Why are you saying it like that?”

  “Because you already told me nothing
was going to happen.”

  “Well, I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re trying to convince yourself of that.”

  “I am not!”

  “Gloria. It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “And you’re here with me instead of with Jack. And he’s in from out of town.”

  “He’s asleep.”

  “Gloria.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. You’re right. There is something between us. I don’t know what it is. It’s just…”

  “Extraordinary?”

  “No. I don’t know. But. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have a commitment to Jack.”

  “Are you happy with him?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Then why aren’t you with him right now?”

  “Thomas, don’t make this harder. Please.”

  “You made it harder by coming to pick me up in the middle of the night. It was already hard enough, Gloria. I don’t understand what you think this is supposed to accomplish.”

  “I wanted to be clear with you.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but you just made things a lot muddier.”

  We didn’t speak much after that, and a few minutes later she dropped me off in front of my apartment. I wished her luck with Jack. I went inside and didn’t sleep.

  Now, back in the present, I think about how Gloria left our house this morning, crying, and I find it amazing and scary how far we have come…and also how life always seems to circle back on itself.

  If Gloria and I divorce, what will we do with the house? In all the years I’ve been with her I never once imagined someday we would have to sit down with attorneys and divide up our assets like a couple of angry corporations. And yet right now things don’t seem as bad as they should. Right now everything is pretty much okay, and it’s possible to fool myself into believing they might stay that way.

  This is what cocaine feels like. Even though I’m thinking about Gloria, how we found each other, how much I will miss her, that doesn’t stop me from taking Sherri’s hand in mine. She curls our fingers together and I gently nudge her toward me. I feel an obsessive need to kiss her again. This is probably because Gloria and I haven’t really kissed in years. We used to. We used to lie in bed for hours, our noses touching, our lips. But somewhere along the way we just sort of stopped. You wouldn’t think it possible to have sex without kissing, but we do it all the time.

  Sherri resists me, though, when I try to pull her closer.

  “Not now,” she says. “Kevin could come back at any time.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Yes. I’m not that coked up. Not yet.”

  “So what do you want to do while we—”

  But I never get to finish that sentence because the front door barges open, and here comes David carrying a rolled paper bag.

  “The asshole just a got a bunch of new shit,” he explains to us.

  Sherri smiles. “This is going to be so much fun!”

  I feel like the odd man out here, like a third wheel who stumbled into all this by accident. Neither of these dudes probably want me here, and Sherri seems flaky enough to change her mind anytime.

  But still, somehow, everything is good.

  And apparently it’s about to get even better.

  TWENTY-THREE

  We’re sitting in a makeshift square on the floor. A white plastic plate sits before us, and on this plate lie a pile mushrooms. I don’t know what I expected them to look like, but this isn’t it. They look like a pile of dead weeds and grass.

  There are some big chunks and a lot of small ones. They’re kind of beige-brown and don’t smell particularly good.

  On another plate stands a jar of honey surrounded by folds of ginger. Each of us has poured a glass of orange juice.

  “They won’t taste very good,” Sherri says. “If you don’t have a strong stomach they can be difficult to keep down.”

  David divides the various pieces.

  “Thomas, this is a little less than an eighth. You’ll probably trip pretty hard since this is your first time. If I were you, I’d dip the pieces in honey so you don’t taste them going down. You can also try some ginger to keep your stomach from freaking out.”

  The ginger is soaking in lemon juice, just so you know. This is supposed to help with something.

  “You think there would be a better way to do this,” I say, and they all look at me like I couldn’t have said anything dumber had I tried.

  “Anyway, Thomas. You can also wash it all down with some orange juice, which is supposed to help the trip along.”

  “Are we all going to do it?” I ask.

  “I’m just going to eat a little,” Kevin says. “Someone has to be responsible in this group.”

  It’s weird to look at these three and not imagine myself as the most responsible among us. But that’s the whole point, right? That’s the reason I’m here. To do something different. Right?

  I pick up one of my pieces. It’s dry and papery. I hold it up to my nose, and my first instinct is to not put it in my mouth.

  “Go ahead,” Sherri says. “You’ll love it. I promise.”

  I dip the piece in honey until it is completely coated. I pop the whole thing in my mouth and try not to chew. I can barely taste anything other than honey. Maybe a hint of sunflower seed shells, but that’s it. The others are eating theirs, too, and after a moment I grab more of my pieces and dip them in honey. I keep eating them this way until my portion is gone. My stomach doesn’t seem offended, but just in case, I use a fork to fish a chunk of ginger out of the lemon juice and eat it. This tastes worse than the honey-covered mushrooms did.

  “Now you wait,” Sherri says, and eats the rest of her share.

  Kevin and David both work on their mushroom pieces as well, and pretty soon we’re all done, sitting around, waiting. My stomach still grumbles a little but otherwise the whole event was rather humdrum.

  I mean, this is totally normal, right? Two days ago I saw something strange in a church, and since that time I’ve lost my job, my wife, and now I’m sitting on a stranger’s living room floor, eating magic mushrooms. The funny thing is, until this week, my life wasn’t really informed by drama. Yes, my mother was an alcoholic and occasionally abusive. My dad cheated on her and she tried to kill him with a broken beer bottle. But she didn’t try that hard. One day my dad’s girlfriend called her, guilt-ridden, crying, and afterwards my mom went out on the porch and drank too many beers. She always drank on the porch, under the lazy helicopter spin of the ceiling fan, listening to the drone of the air conditioner and the pool pump, staring into space. When my dad got home she threw a beer bottle at him and then pretended to attack him with one of the shards. But she quickly gave up and collapsed into his arms, sobbing.

  Sherri looks up at me, smiling faintly, and I realize again how blue her eyes are. Blue eyes like Gloria’s, like the orb I saw in church on Sunday. They are glowing, her eyes, glowing and spinning. Or so it seems. Like they are tiny blue planets rotating on their axis (axes? ak-seez?).

  “Thomas?” Sherri asks. “What do you see?”

  She must be asking me this because of the little people I see in those cold blue pools of her eyes. Little Roman men fighting battles with swords and helmets and shields, riding on chariots and…and then all this disappears and I see two FBI agents in a brown sedan, following me on the freeway. I see them in a police station, interrogating me. I see them handcuffing me in a house in Berkeley, California. I realize I have seen these law enforcement officers many times. Many, many times. Their names are Scruggs and Smith, and they have followed me for as long as I can remember. They will follow me for as long as I can imagine. They inhabit a wheel of sorts, a wheel that could be the world, a wheel of all possible worlds.

  Sherri’s face is angelic. Her skin is pearlescent, creamy marble. I swear if I reached out
and touched it, it would feel like the smooth texture of a pearl, like a bathroom floor in the Bellagio. My head feels warm and electric, the way your tongue feels when you touch it with the leads of a nine-volt battery.

  “You’re tripping,” Sherri says. “Is it okay? Do you feel okay?”

  “I feel great.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Everything.”

  And I do.

  Her body glows blue, like an aura almost, like the color of her eyes. It’s very faint, but it’s there. And it’s crawling with something akin to noise, a random pixelization. The lamp and other lights in the room emit a steady stream of pixels, particles that glow like grains of electric sand. I know this is just an effect of the mushrooms. I am not really seeing the component particles of matter and energy around me. But the suggestion is very strong, and it sure feels like that’s what I’m seeing.

  I try to explain this to the three of them, and before I’m done, David is nodding and smiling.

  “Sure, man. The universe is particles, flying around, bouncing off each other, vibrating. There really are only a few types of particles that make up all the matter and energy we can see. So it’s not just a cliché…everything really is connected. In a way we’re all one. As far as the universe is concerned, there’s not much difference between you and the air in front of you. Your body is made of higher density matter, more organization. But you, who you are, the concept of self…that’s just a human construct.”

  Everything is beautiful. From here I can see into the kitchen, the digital clock on the microwave, and those blue numbers are like artwork. I stare at them, transfixed. They seem to detach themselves from the microwave and begin to smear into the air, flaring out at the bottom, streaming into everything. My head feels like a football being inflated.

  “More people should do this,” David says. “If they did, the world would be a better place.”

  Sherri begins to giggle. At first it’s just a random sound, a lonely spark of laughter, but then the sparks multiply, packed more and more densely until she nearly ignites, giggling and giggling like a school girl.

  “It’s good times like this,” David continues, “that make it obvious how fucked up everything is. Everything is backwards. Everyone always in a hurry, and for what? So we can sit still? Gotta get to work and sit in front of the computer. Gotta get home and sit in front of the TV. Hurry up and go to the movie, to the ballgame. It’s all so wrong. Life is meant to be lived, man. Experienced. There’s a whole universe of amazing shit out there, and half the people in this country think some crazy guy with a white beard made the world in seven days.”