Irrational Fears

by Spencer, William Browning

“Forget it,” Kerry said. “You’re not my type.”

  “Tell me your name and I won’t have your friends hurt. I’ll let them, and you, and your esteemed counselor, Wesley Parks, leave.”

  He spoke quietly, no menace in his tone.

  Martin Pendleton pointed the shotgun at Dorian Greenway’s head. “She doesn’t care to talk to you,” Martin said.

  The tribe of The Clear opened their mouths and emitted a rattling hiss.

  “Kerry Beckett. My name’s Kerry Beckett.”

  Dorian nodded. His followers fell silent again. “And a beautiful name it is.” Dorian tilted his head back and shouted. “Bring Wesley Parks down, will you, Mark?”

  Parks sat next to Jack in the van.

  “Are you okay?” Jack asked.

  Wesley Parks smiled, a rictus, a grimace that was not reassuring. He nodded his head violently. “Fine. Never been better. Ready to listen. Receptive. Might have been narrow-minded, once, but that’s the past, ancient history. Ha ha.” Wesley Parks shouted then. “I’m listening!”

  “What did they do to you?”

  Wesley was shaking badly now, his eyes wide. “Oh, nothing. I swear, nothing.” Wesley clutched Jack’s arm. “I’m a little nervous, okay. That’s all. Because I know, you see. I know that any of us can just lean back, just blink, and slip away. This reality sheath is flimsy. You can fall right through. And then you’re there. Too bad, but there you are. That’s what they showed me. And that’s enough, you know, to make anyone a little nervous. They gave me something though, gave me something for my nerves. I’m going to be right as American rain, you watch.”

  “That’s good,” Jack said. Jack was thinking of Hinkle again. Those Sunday boys sent me right to Hell, he’d said—one of the last things he’d said before being devoured by a toilet.

  “For my nerves,” Wesley said, opening up his fist, fingers coming unstuck with a rusted, jerky motion.

  Jack blinked at something gleaming yellow in the man’s palm.

  “What’s that?” Jack asked, leaning closer.

  Wesley snapped his fingers closed. “Mine!”

  “Okay. Sure. What is it?”

  Wesley Parks was grinning maniacally now. “Heh heh.” He opened his hand again, slowly, reverently. “Gummy bear,” he said, the way a mother, leaning over her newborn infant, might whisper an endearment.

  “Ah,” Jack said. The little piece of rubbery candy, accepted on faith by children throughout America to be shaped like a bear, lay on Wesley’s palm, a misshapen jewel. “That’s a gummy bear, all right,” Jack said.

  Wesley snapped his hand closed again. “That’s enough. Don’t be trying to swallow it with your eyes.”

  Wesley turned away, peering out the van window at the night.

  Jack sighed. The day had been unduly long.

  Jack looked behind him and saw Kerry in the back of the van, bent low. He thought, at first, that she was crying, sobbing profoundly. That would explain the animation of her shoulders and head. Peering into the darkness, he saw that this was not the case. She had produced a tissue and was furiously rubbing the palm of her hand, frowning fiercely.

  Jack felt a sharp pain, a multicolored hurt darkened by the sure knowledge that he was not the one to comfort her.

  The van careened toward New Way and the prospect of weeks of alcoholism treatment. Martin Pendleton’s driving had not improved since earlier in the evening, and there was still the chance that they would all die in some catastrophic vehicular event.

  Jack realized that his mood had degenerated; such a death now seemed hopeful and optimistic.

  Hope returns, like a dog to its vomit, Jack thought. He’d been in New Way a week when the darkness seemed to lift a little.

  He’d spoken of Sara in group, not intending to, and then guilt had possessed him like some malign and brutal demon and he’d found himself sobbing, helpless, stupid with grief, and he had fled the room and Kerry had followed him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shouting through the door, and he let her in and told her about Sara and heard himself apologizing, stupidly, saying, “We weren’t lovers, we were just friends, just starting to be friends, really...” as though his hurt, the destruction of his world, was unwarranted. As though he had no claim to such grief, that was for Sara’s grieving parents, her sullen, inconsolable sister.

  It was hard to say what finally brought the outburst on. Eunice had talked interminably about the wrongs her children had done her and about conversations she had had with Jesus in her dreams. It was bad enough, Jack felt, to have to listen to a lengthy, unedited narration of Eunice’s conscious day; it was far worse, a much greater imposition, to have to endure long monologues describing what went on when she was asleep. Eunice not only described her plotless dreams, she analyzed them in depth.

  Neither Ed Tilman nor Gates had had much to say, although Tilman expressed concerns with security at New Way. “They could come in through the woods. The back door wasn’t even locked last night. They could cut our throats while we were sleeping.”

  “Who this ‘they?’” Gates asked—a good question, Jack thought, not sure whether Tilman was referring to The Clear or some covert government group. Tilman just shook his head sadly, and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.

  Al talked about what an old fart his father was, always down on anyone with ideals, like traveling around the country on a motorcycle or getting a tattoo that promotes world peace.

  Al was in love with a rock singer named Lisa Perks who sang in Georgetown clubs with a band called Potamus. He loved her and went to all her gigs and drank beer and sniffed glue mainly because he was heartbroken and trying to forget her. He had written her a love letter once, slipped it to her by way of a waiter one night, and she had gone up on stage and said, “This next song is for the creep at the back table who can’t spell,” and she’d sung a love-dissing song called “Get a Grip.” After that, humiliated, he’d had to go to her performances in disguise, a false beard that—in combination with sunglasses—gave him a ZZ Top look, which was pretty cool and he thought maybe she’d fall in love with his new style and much later, after they were lovers, he’d have to reveal that he was the guy she’d made fun of once. That sort of thing happened.

  He’d had his disguise on the last time he’d been stopped for drunk driving, and he remembered the cop peeling the false beard off him and studying it with distaste, as though it were a dead rat or a rotting flounder.

  Kerry had received a letter from her mother. She read part of it to the group. Her mother was dating a man named Reno who was always in trouble with the law. ‘“Don’t get involved with someone who always ducks down in the car when a police cruiser goes by or who has a half dozen names depending on who he’s with or who goes for a gun when the doorbell rings,”’ Kerry read.

  “That’s typical loser advice,” Kerry said. “People like my mom and her friends got lots of advice for bad situations, like what to do for a black eye or where to cash a rubber check so it will take the longest time getting back to the bank.”

  Kerry would sit in group rubbing the palm of her hand, her pale forearm resting on her blue-jeaned thigh, as fragile-seeming as blown glass. Martin had driven her into town to have the cast removed. At night, and sometimes during the day, she wore a lightweight plastic splint, but in group her arm was bare, vulnerable. The constant scratching and massaging of the hand that Dorian Greenway’s tongue had accosted was habitual now. It worried Jack and was certainly something that Wesley should have addressed.

  But to say that their alcoholism counselor wasn’t entirely attuned to his clients’ needs was an understatement.

  Sometimes Martin Pendleton would sit in group too, but he obviously had little patience with therapy and would rarely last more than five or ten minutes. Therapy was Wesley Parks’s job, and Martin wasn’t much interested. As far as New Way’s director was concerned, AA was the treatment for alcoholism, and therapy was just a sop to the mental health professionals.


  Martin wasn’t in group enough to notice that Wesley wasn’t entirely lucid. Jack had plenty of time to observe Wesley Parks, and it was Jack’s conclusion that the man was losing his mind.

  A new, obsequious note had entered Wesley’s voice and demeanor. He would nod his head rapidly when a member was speaking. “Yes, yes,” he would say. “Absolutely, right you are.” He would lean forward, a shameless earnestness in his shoulders, a sycophant prepared to laugh at the boss’s joke.

  He had been a confrontational counselor, but that was gone now. Now he was filled with phony heartiness. “It’s not that bad,” he would say. “We are going to be just fine.” It was this “we” that troubled Jack. Wesley Parks had always been remote and, well, disdainful. Now he was frightened and invoking the protection of community. “I’m just one of the guys,” he seemed to be saying, with the nervous laugh an aristocrat might muster when the revolutionaries broke down his door.

  He would sometimes stand up abruptly, as though a noise had startled him, and leave the room. On returning, he would apologize, saying, “Got a bladder that won’t take no for an answer.” He would utter a feeble laugh, wiping the beads of perspiration from his forehead with a tissue.

  His comments did not always seem to the point. Why, for instance, did he interrupt Eunice’s extended oration on her oldest daughter’s sloth to say, “Even a blind pig will find an acorn sometimes”?

  Skewed platitudes punctuated Wesley’s speech now, as though the door to some brain closet of dusty, mutated slogans had sprung open, spilling its contents onto the man’s tongue. “Even a dog can look at an exotic dancer,” he would say, or, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the jacuzzi.” If he was aware that these were not the original, pristine aphorisms, nothing in his delivery showed it. It was not, in fact, clear to what extent Wesley was participating in group. His eyes often looked as though they were focused on the Dali-esque webs of invisible spiders.

  Jack had become accustomed to Wesley’s new, Zen-like group leadership, and he found it less irritating, for the most part, than the man’s earlier, confrontational mode.

  Now Wesley would let people talk, which is what they needed to do.

  Kerry had been talking about her baby brother, who had died in infancy. She described the thrill of holding him. She had been nine years old, and she remembered holding him in the dappled sunlight, sitting in the porch swing, his warmth and perfect heft a proof that God existed and was good. She had loved God then, before she learned that the God of losers was cruel and arbitrary.

  “I miss him,” she said, falling silent.

  “I miss Sara,” Jack had said, and then, appalled, embarrassed by this echo of shared loss, he had added, awkwardly, “A friend. She was murdered...” And his voice had fallen away, shocked by this absolute, this unspeakable thing, given voice.

  He surprised himself with tears and fled. Kerry followed.

  He’d met her in the backyard of Dean Hirshom’s house on a cool September night, some obligatory faculty gathering. It was the beginning of his third year at George Washington, and he was drinking his first gin and tonic of the day, and the alcohol had just struck a match in his stomach when she came into view, a small woman in a blue dress, her feet bare, her eyes large, brown, and alert in the manner of nocturnal creatures enlivened by the dark.

  She smiled when she saw him, a wide, generous smile, and he said, pointing at the sky, “There’s Mars.”

  “Actually, that’s Aldebaran,” she said. “It’s an orange giant, the main star in the constellation Taurus.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “Well, ‘There is no sin but ignorance,’ as Shakespeare says.”

  “Actually, that’s Marlowe,” he said.

  She giggled. “We need to find some common ground, something we both know nothing about.”

  Later, when he knew Sara Janson better, he would discover that she was informed about most things, and that finding a good-sized vacant lot in the land of her learning would have taken some doing. She was a grad student, returning to school in her mid-thirties. Her major was astronomy, but she seemed to be studying just about everything else too.

  She had known, for instance, that Shakespeare was not the author of Marlowe’s line-—and she had confessed as much three months later.

  “Correcting a woman picks a man up,” she had said. “You looked like you needed a lift. The male ego is a hothouse flower, you know.”

  Sara Janson was an expert on the male ego and had married one of its more florid examples, Dr. Winslow Janson, chairman of the mathematics department.

  Jack was already acquainted with Dr. Janson from various faculty functions and meetings. Winslow Janson was a big man, the physique of a ex-high school football player now settled in a less active life and beginning to go to seed, bit of a paunch, a ruddy beer-fed face. He looked more like the owner of a successful car dealership than a mathematician. But, by all accounts, he was brilliant.

  It was also generally conceded (by colleagues and students alike) that he was an asshole: arrogant, loud, vain, combative, petty, self-satisfied, rude.

  When Jack had known Sara long enough to ask, he asked her why she had married the man. “I fell in love with his mind,” she said.

  Back then, intellect had seemed everything, the power and the glory, the sun at noon in the Sahara. Those annoying personal traits, the container for intelligence, were to be endured with good humor.

  Jack had been reading student papers in his office two months after his first meeting with Sara, when he looked up and saw Winslow Janson standing in his doorway.

  The math professor beamed. “May I come in?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  Dr. Janson pulled up a chair and sat down, leaning forward, elbows on the desk. He was wearing a blue sports coat and a white shirt, open at the collar, no tie.

  “What is the state of American literature, Dr. Lowry? Is it relevant? Is it just whacking off? I have never cared for fiction, its vagueness, its symbols that cannot settle. It is grown-ups lying when they know better.”

  “What can I do for you, Dr. Janson?”

  “To the point,” he said, nodding, smiling. “Fine. All right.” He paused, picked a pen from the desk and tapped it against the desktop. “I wish to know if you are sleeping with my wife.”

  “No.”

  Janson nodded, grinning. “That is also what my wife tells me. Fine.” He sat there, tapping the pen on the desk, blinking. Slowly, he put the pen down and stood up. “I believe you, Dr. Lowry. I believe that you are not taking my wife’s clothes off and fucking her in some motel, fucking her the doggie style, the missionary, perhaps the funky chicken. But you want to do this. You are hoping, with time, it will come to pass.”

  “I don’t—”

  Janson shouted, slamming a fist on the desk and making the coffee cup jump in its saucer, coffee splashing onto a student’s Faulkner essay.

  “You don’t find my wife attractive? You are going to tell me you don’t find my wife attractive?”

  “Your wife and I—”

  “No. I don’t wish to hear your explanations for your daily lunches with my wife, your laughing and leaning close to each other, brazenly, in the cafeteria. You will tell me that you do not wish to see her dress rising over her head, her brassiere (black lace) unhooked (in front), her breasts shimmering like fruit.”

  Jack stared at the madman who had stopped talking, his mouth still working, his tongue red and swollen. Janson stood back from the desk, took a deep breath and recovered himself, let his arms fall to his sides. “No more lunches,” he said, his voice flat, dust. He waved his hand without lifting it, a gesture of dismissal aimed at some invisible dog. Then he turned and left.

  When Jack told all this to Kerry, her role was that of high priest to his confession, and so he sought absolution, speaking the arguments that, over the years, he often repeated in his mind.

  “Sara said she would not be deprived of my company because of h
er husband’s jealousy. She was not, no matter how much he might wish it otherwise, chattel.”

  Kerry nodded. “Sure.”

  “But I knew...” Jack said, switching to self-condemnation, “I should have known he was crazy, dangerous.”

  “Hey, knowing a dude is bad don’t mean you should bend over and let him kick your ass,” Kerry said. “Sara was right.”

  Sara and Jack had made a concession to her husband’s jealousy. They had stopped eating lunch together in the cafeteria. Instead, they had begun meeting in off-campus restaurants. Her husband believed that eating anything other than a piece of fruit in the middle of the day was a custom responsible for many health problems, and so he was always in his office at noon, either alone or in the company of a student he was reprimanding for feeblemindedness.

  Jack had, of course, fallen in love with Sara. He did imagine her dress rising over her head; he did envision her falling into him as the world was transformed by desire. He said nothing of this. He suspected that Sara might love him too, but they both understood that the clandestine nature of their meetings required a balancing decorum. They could meet secretly because they were not adulterers. A convoluted thought, perhaps, but one they both understood perfectly.

  And then, in the sixth month of their relationship, Jack had said, “You should leave him.”

  Sara had shaken her head. “No, Jack. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, okay.”

  “Okay.” But it hadn’t been okay, nothing like okay.

  The red numbers of the clock read 2:14 when Jack answered the phone that morning. At first, he could not understand the voice on the other end, thought perhaps some drunk had dialed a wrong number and was now sobbing incoherently into the phone.

  The sobs took form, shaped words: “No more lunches. I told you. Sol Never now. No doggie lunches, no missionary, no funky—” The phone clattered; a dial tone returned.