Screaming to Get Out & Other Wailings of the Damned

by J. F. Gonzalez

  When the police left, I pleaded with her to tell me what she’d done. She gave me that grin I knew so well, the one that suggested she’d just pulled off the best practical joke of her life. All she said was, “Let’s just say I’ve been working on getting you back into my life for a long time and I am not about to give you up now.”

  That first week I learned that things hadn’t gone very well for Lucy since we broke up. She’d dropped out of school before she could officially flunk out. She later left her job at a sports bar she’d worked at and drifted through several low paying jobs and low rent apartments. She chased after a lot of guys, trying to recapture what she and I had with men who were a little too free with their fists. She got into drugs. Hard stuff, like meth and crack. Somehow, she was able to pull herself out as fast as she fell into that particular rabbit hole, but the damage to her self-esteem was already set. She spent the next ten years drifting from apartment to apartment, job to job, and boyfriend to boyfriend. She never married, never had children.

  “Things would have been better if we’d stayed together,” she told me at one point. We spent a lot of time on her worn sofa talking. I later learned she’d taken a week’s vacation from her job as a secretary to prepare for my emergence into her world. She’d anticipated my reaction and wanted to be there with me for my adjustment. “We would have been happy, Doug. Things wouldn’t have gotten so bad for me.”

  I played devil’s advocate by asking her how that was so. Her explanation was vague. I realized then that she’d brought me into her existence for her own selfish reasons. She didn’t care that by doing so she’d disrupted my life, that she’d probably affected Andrea’s life forever. My children no longer existed, all the people we’d come in contact with and developed relationships with...all changed forever. All the impact and influence we’d had on people’s lives, good and bad, were now gone as if they'd never happened.

  I tried explaining this to her and she always countered with, “You were happy with me in college! We used to have fun! Don’t you want that again?”

  “But...Lucy...we were changing so much the last six months we were together, there’s no way we would have—”

  She stopped me with a kiss.

  She tried that a lot at first. And every time I would push her away and say something like, “Are you out of your mind?” or, “Lucy, I’m married now!” or “Lucy, it’s over between us, it’s been over!” She never got the message. I finally broke down toward the end of her week-long furlough from her job.

  Lucy and I spent the final two days of her vacation holed up in her apartment living on take-out food, beer, and bottled water. Lucy had clothes for me—at first I thought she must have picked something out for me prior to my emergence into her life. Finally, on Monday morning, she rose early, kissed me, and stepped into the shower. When she came out she said, “Aren’t you going to get up?”

  “Huh?”

  “You have to get up and go to work.”

  “Where do I work?”

  She gave that little half-sigh/half-laugh thing she used to do. “Where else, silly? You still work at the warehouse.”

  I really am in hell, I thought as I got out of bed. I walked to the cramped closet and opened it. Sure enough, five pairs of blue coveralls and work shirts were hung up in a neat row. The work attire of my college days. Had I stayed with Lucy, I would have never left that dead end loser job.

  The thought of not even going to work came to me and left just as quickly. The past few days I’d settled back into what had been my old life with few difficulties. It was like climbing onto a bicycle after having not ridden one in a decade.

  Walking down to the corner to catch the bus that would take me to work...it just came to me.

  Sitting in the bullpen in front of the warehouse supervisor’s office to wait for the start bell with my fellow comrades in blue collar...it just came back to me.

  I was pleased and a little depressed to recognize some of the guys I’d worked with in my college days were still there. The guy that ran shipping and receiving, Steve Hedke, was now a supervisor. One of the guys I used to work with picking items for shipment, John Rizzo, was now a Team Leader. Somehow I’d been elevated to the leader of my own section of the warehouse, which I apparently ran very efficiently. I eyeballed my work area and within minutes that particular job function came back to me. I was finished before noon and, as if I’d never lost my touch, I loafed around and pretended to work for the rest of the day.

  I took the bus back to the apartment and let myself in with the key Lucy had given me that morning.

  Lucy wasn’t home from work yet.

  I headed straight to the battered Dell PC Lucy kept in the dining nook, booted it up, and managed to gain Internet access. I typed in Andrea’s name followed by her maiden name in Google.

  I didn’t get any significant hits, but I did get a hit on one of those ‘Find Anybody’s Address’ websites that, for a fee of $40, promised to provide me with Andrea’s current residence, phone number, and job history. The teaser link verified what I already knew about her – it showed a former location in the city of Costa Mesa, where she’d grown up.

  I wondered if her parents still lived there.

  I didn’t follow through that night. Lucy came home about an hour later and asked how my day had gone. I told her it was fine. As we watched sitcoms that night, I wondered how this was possible. How was it possible that this alternate version of myself had been absent from the lives of my former co-workers at Free State and then suddenly been thrown into their mix, as if I’d never been gone? I couldn’t get over how my co-workers seemed to accept me as if I’d never left. The same could be said about my ID/Driver’s license, my wardrobe, the things that were presumably mine in Lucy’s apartment.

  Over the next several days I would arrive home before Lucy, get on the computer and do web searches for various aspects of my life with Andrea. The company I worked at, Kaiser Development Systems, was still a powerhouse and had obviously done fine without my presence. I wondered what the reaction of my former co-workers would be if I popped by unannounced at a meeting? Would they recognize me?

  On the third week of my stay at Lucy’s, I called my parents. They hadn’t moved from their home since I’d left, and I assumed they’d stayed at the same house in this existence too. Mom answered the phone. She recognized me right away, asked me how work was going. I told her it was fine, then asked if she’d heard from Andrea.

  Mom had no idea who I was talking about.

  I was on the verge of reminding her, telling her about her grandkids, and wisely shut my mouth. I don’t remember what I said. Some mumbled excuse, I guess.

  In talking with Mom, though, I could tell things were different in a world where I’d never left Lucy. In my world with Andrea, Mom and Dad were enjoying retirement. They traveled. They doted on their grandchildren. They pursued hobbies. Not anymore. They were taking care of my younger brother, who was a quadriplegic, something I pieced together during the course of our conversations. When did that happen? I wanted to ask. Mom blathered on about taking Jim to his physical therapy classes, and Dad’s job at the Auto Club (why hasn’t dad retired yet?). I nodded and kept up my end of the conversation as if I’d known all along this stuff was happening and then begged off, telling Mom that Lucy was coming home. At the mention of Lucy’s name, I detected a slight change of inflection in her voice: disapproval. “Okay. Well, have a good week, Doug, and take care of yourself. Be careful.”

  “I will,” I said.

  I told Lucy about that conversation and asked if she knew what was wrong with Jim. She claimed she didn't want to talk about it, that it still upset her to even think about it. I let the subject go.

  The next day I researched Jim’s accident via Google searches. According to the police blotters in the news sites I found, Jim was driving under the influence when he hit another car, killing the driver. He was left physically disabled, charged with vehicular manslaughter, and received a
two year suspended prison sentence.

  He’d been driving to a party, following his brother and his brother’s girlfriend, Lucy Murphy, in their car.

  No wonder Mom hadn’t sounded so enthusiastic to hear from me. Much less hear Lucy’s name.

  I still had no idea what was going on with Andrea, but I was determined to find out. My parents obviously hadn’t fared so well, my brother Jim less so, and it was all because of my decision to stay with Lucy. The choices I’d made had rippled outward, affected all those who were close to me. The question was, how did that affect Andrea?

  The next day I paid $40 at one of those ‘Find Anybody’s Address’ websites and obtained Andrea’s current address and phone number.

  I got directions to her house from mapquest.com.

  Then, three weeks later, when Lucy was comfortable that I was slipping into a semblance of complacency, I called in sick to work one morning, took the bus to a car rental agency and an hour later found myself behind the wheel of a Ford Focus, heading south to Costa Mesa.

  I’d told Lucy that I was going out with the guys after work (“Shawn’s wife is throwing a party for him”) which dovetailed nicely with Lucy’s own schedule that day; she had to pull in overtime at the office she worked at. The extra time would provide me with plenty of opportunity to hopefully encounter Andrea personally.

  I found her apartment and saw it was a nice luxury building. Andrea had lived well before we’d met and married, so it didn’t surprise me that she was living large in this version of her life. I parked the car down the street and watched the building.

  Around five-thirty a blue Saab pulled in to the subterranean parking structure. I recognized Andrea immediately. I got out of the Ford, ran to the driveway, and managed to slip in before the gate could close.

  I didn’t want to scare her, so I hung back while she parked her vehicle. Seeing her get out left me with a lump in my throat. Her hair was longer and styled differently, but the outfit she was wearing was dead-on still her. She hadn’t changed much; or, correction: I hadn’t changed her much.

  “Andrea!”

  She turned at the sound of her name and her pace to the parking lot’s exit quickened. I jogged after her and called her name again and said, “Wait!” I didn’t notice her hand dart into her purse.

  “Andrea, I know this is going to sound weird, but hear me out for a minute.” I had just approached her, was about to touch her shoulder, when she whirled around and brought a can of mace up.

  “Get away from me!” She yelled.

  I stopped, held my hands up. “Listen, Andrea, you don’t understand!”

  “You slipped past the gate and I don’t know who the fuck you are,” she said. “I understand plenty. Now back the fuck off!”

  Yep, she hadn’t changed all right. She was still assertive, a no bullshit kind of woman. I stepped back and tried again. “You don’t remember me?”

  “I don’t fucking know you!” She was backing up toward the exit gate now, finger still on the mace trigger.

  “Doug Thompson,” I said. “We met at the mixer Corporate Financial put together at the Hilton in Pasadena—”

  If she remembered that, she didn’t show it. Her back was almost at the gate now.

  “You have a daughter named Alisa and a son—”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Your parents live on Chestnut Street in Costa Mesa.”

  That got her. “What?”

  I let my emotions get the best of me. I stepped toward her, trying to appear gentle and non-threatening. “I know this is going to sound weird, Andrea, but...in another life...you and I are married and—”

  I never got a chance to finish. She let me have it with the Mace. My eyes began to sting and I screamed, doubled over in pain.

  Andrea retreated to the safety of her condominium’s secure grounds and now that the gate to the parking garage was closed, I was trapped. I moaned in pain, eyes squeezed shut, my hands and fingers trying to rub the mace out of my eyes and the next thing I was aware of, the police were there.

  I was arrested for trespassing and harassment. Lucy didn’t have the money to bail me out.

  Neither did my parents, for that matter.

  I did tell everything to one of the detectives that questioned me. He listened to my story with concern, left the room, then returned later and told me that Andrea had never heard of me, had never met me, and, furthermore, her parents had never heard of me. He summed things up by telling me that I’d been employed by Free State for fifteen years as a warehouseman, that I’d maintained the same address with Lucy Murphy for five years, that she and I had been together for close to fifteen years and had never married. “Where did you learn that from?” I asked.

  “Lucy,” the detective told me.

  I think I went crazy then. I remember yelling, demanding that I see Andrea, that I could clear everything up. To make a long story short, I was brought in for a psych evaluation and later released.

  Back in our apartment, Lucy told me that there was no use fighting it. “You’re with me now,” she said. “For better or for worse. Don’t fight it, honey. When you fight it you just make things worse. Just...relax and everything will be the way it was and we can be happy.”

  I didn’t want it the way it was. I wanted things to go back to the way they were before I was drop-kicked into this nightmare.

  A few weeks later I went back to Andrea’s condo complex. Once again, I was arrested. This time a good public defender had the case thrown out on the grounds that a restraining order wasn’t filed against me, so technically I wasn’t stalking Andrea.

  I got Andrea’s email address, her home phone number, her new address. The Internet is a really wonderful tool if you know how to use it. I spent the month documenting our life together in emails and letters, telling her how we met, our courtship, our lives together. I told her about our children. I told her things about her life, about her parents, that only somebody close to her would know. Her parents hired some big shot lawyer who filed a restraining order against me. I was arrested again for waiting outside of Andrea’s office building, hoping for a glimpse of her as she left for the day.

  Through it all, Lucy wouldn’t give in. It was like I was the rebellious child and she was the stern parent pulling on the leash, making sure I didn’t hurt myself too badly while I flailed around and tried to break free. I’m sure she felt I would eventually grow tired of this and give in. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t going to give up on my kids...on my life...

  I couldn’t give up on Andrea.

  Things were going to go bad for her.

  If there was one thing my following her around had done, it was getting familiar with her social life. And what I saw wasn’t very comforting.

  I realize that in this new world, Andrea isn’t my wife. So to see her with another man creates pangs of jealousy. Like every good stalker, I began to obsess over her boyfriend. I copied his license plate number and ran a background check.

  Mervin Osborne was a Harvard Business School graduate with a condo in Newport Beach and a VP position at Sachs Investments in Mission Viejo. Andrea had been seeing him for two months when I learned through my extra-curricular spying that Mervin had been convicted of spousal abuse from a previous marriage, and was a suspect in a murder the authorities could never pin to him – that of an old college girlfriend.

  When I learned all this I was surprised. The Andrea I knew was strong and wouldn’t take shit from anybody. Hell, she bossed me around in our marriage. The Andrea I knew was not the kind of woman to be a punching bag for some yuppie with a cushy job.

  But then I thought of that dark, edgy past she had when I met her. I remembered her being thrilled with danger, of always being the first to take risks in anything – rougher than usual sex, driving fast, sky diving and other daredevil activities. Some of that edge was tamed when we settled down, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that without me, that edge never would have been tamed. She would have
sought more danger.

  She might have even learned to like it.

  The more I dug into Mervin’s background, the more I stole time away from the apartment to follow them around in a battered old Ford I picked up used for a thousand bucks. On one occasion Andrea wore dark sunglasses for an entire week. Sunglasses were never her style in my world and they weren’t in this one, either, until the week she wore them. The week they came off I noticed the slight swelling around her eyes as she and Mervin went out on the town.

  He was beating her. And she was still with him.

  A week or two later, Andrea’s left arm was in a cast.

  One week she didn’t show up to work. I later learned she’d been in the hospital due to injuries suffered from a fall.

  The Andrea I knew would never have put up with this.

  The Andrea I didn’t know obviously saw something in this violent relationship. She saw something that attracted her to it the way heroin attracts a junkie. She would want more until it killed her.

  There was no way I could let this happen.

  Lucy watched this all from afar with a sense of detached amusement. My obsession with Andrea was like most people’s obsessions with certain TV shows or novels. Lucy recognized this; she seemed confident that I was never going to be released from her world, so she remained content that I would stick around. Why not? By this time I had been with Lucy for over a year and hadn’t left yet. I’d certainly had plenty of opportunity. We’d even resumed our sex life. What else could I do? I had to maintain some semblence of normalcy.

  I knew what I had to do. I had to find a way to go back to the world I knew. If I could go back, I could change everything.