“Let's go, Mr. Phillips.”
William's face is a frightened, strained blur as I am led past him. By now a small crowd lines the cubicle hallways, and a constellation of heads has popped up all over the building. Geoff walks me past this group of spectators, out the door and onto the sidewalk.
“You have two choices, Mr. Phillips. I can escort you completely off company property, or leave you to your own devices here. I would prefer to leave you here. But if you attempt to harm any property of the company or the vehicles of any employee who works here, I will have no choice but to take further action. I am well within my rights to do so. Have I made myself clear?”
I'm seeing stars, a kaleidoscope of colors.
“All I wanted was a file.”
“I'm sorry, Mr. Phillips. I am asking you to leave now.”
“Okay,” I say. “I can manage from here.”
“Please be safe, Mr. Phillips. Do you have a cell phone? If so, I suggest you call a cab. You're in no condition to drive.”
“I have a phone.”
“Good. Use it.”
Geoff disappears inside the building.
Once again, I am left alone.
I hate myself.
EIGHTEEN
I
shuffle toward my car. When I'm finally inside, I collapse into the driver's seat and rest for a bit. I must be drunker than I thought because I swear the sky looks orange, like the color at sundown, even though it must still be mid-morning. For a while I decide to close my eyes, and when I finally open them again, that white Cadillac is sliding by in slow motion, the gaunt, wild-eyed driver screaming silently at me. His eyes appear to have the silhouettes of bats in them. Following closely behind the Cadillac is a brown sedan, and through the windows I see two men in gray suits and Stetson hats. They look over at me. The one closest to me smiles. His teeth are long and sharp-looking, like wolves' teeth.
We'll get you
, he says to me, though I can't really hear him. His voice is in my head.
Eventually we'll get you
.
And somehow I know he will.
Somehow I know I'm already dead.
NINETEEN
M
y eyes open, and for a split second I don't know where I am or why I'm in my car. But it all comes back to me quickly, a motion blur of William and my screenplay and the melted entrails of my home computer. Gloria in the kitchen, crying, backing away from me, asking for a divorce.
I am overcome with grief, having lost my wife, having lost everything, and my eyes are beginning to fill up when someone knocks on my head. I hear it more than I feel it. Actually it's not my head they're hitting directly but the window upon which my head rests, and my first thought is that Gloria must have come back after all. I look around at her, unexpectedly and unabashedly grateful, tears in my eyes, and that's when I see the person who I thought was my wife is actually Dick Stanton.
His eyes are trained on me and seem too big for his face. My head rests at a weird angle against the glass. I turn away, not wanting him to know I was about to cry, but he knocks on the window again. For a moment I think I might just ignore him, wait for him to leave, but that seems absurd. So instead I push the ignition button until the power comes on, and then roll down the window, hoping my eyes don't betray me.
“Dude,” he says. “What're you doing?”
“Um.”
“You were sleeping in your car,” he offers helpfully. “Or judging by the smell in there, I'd say you were passed out. Your eyes are all red.”
“Right,” I croak.
“What the hell is going on, man? Are you okay?”
“I've been better.”
This response is useless to him, and he just stands there looking at me. I'm so disappointed he isn't Gloria that I can barely force myself to speak.
“I was fired yesterday. Today I wanted to get a copy of my screenplay from the work computer because my machine at home died. But William wouldn't let me.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“I don't know.”
“You don't look too good, man. You want to go for a drink and talk about it?”
He glances at the cup in my console and smiles again. I look at the clock on the dash and am astonished to see it's after five o'clock. I can't believe Geoff the security director allowed me to sit out here this long. How many people have walked by and looked at me?
My mouth is a litter box. It's sandy and tastes like shit. I don't really want to talk to Dick or anyone else for that matter, but what else am I going to do?
“Okay,” I say.
Dick suggests a bar near downtown, which is about a ten-minute drive on the freeway from here, and I agree.
“You okay to drive?” he asks.
“Yeah. I guess slept it off.”
He gives me another once-over, as if to convince himself I'm telling the truth. Then he says, “All right. Just follow me over there.”
TWENTY
O
nce we've sat down and ordered a couple of beers, I share with Dick the bullet-point version of my story: the morning at church, the termination of my employment, my subsequent obsession with the ant farm game, home computer failure, and my doomed attempt to get the screenplay file from my work computer. I leave out anything about Gloria. When I get to his part, where he spaces out in the cafeteria, Dick is incredulous.
“I spaced out?”
“I guess that's what you would call it. You stopped talking and looked right past me, staring off into who knows where.”
“For how long?”
“I don't know. Ten, fifteen seconds. Twenty?”
Or longer,
I want to continue, but don't, even though I couldn't say with any certainty how much time passed while Dick sat there staring into space. The interval could have been measured in seconds, sure, but it could have been longer.
We're at the wine bar, or rather sitting on the patio outside the bar. Nearest us, a couple of lawyers in dark suits laugh heartily at each other's jokes; at another table, two skinny kids sporting spiked hair and vintage T-shirts talk in voices too low for me to hear. While I look at them, a girl saunters up. She seems vaguely Eastern European, maybe Slavic. Her hair is long and coarse and black, her eyebrows arched seductively. And while she seems to be blessed with a figure straight out of
Playboy
, her curves are hidden under a loose-fitting white tank top and a lacy white skirt that's too big for her. She's also wearing galoshesâ¦black galoshes with white polka-dots and pink soles. You'd have to see it to believe it.
Dick says something I miss.
“What?”
He nods in the direction of the girl, who is making a ruckus with her friends.
“Not worth the trouble. Although all men, married or not, do have a break-even point.”
The girl is bent over the table, carrying on a conversation with one of the guys still sitting. From this angle her breasts push against the side of the tank top, making it clear they are full and round. The guy talking to her is wearing a green T-shirt with a drawing of a dinosaur on it. Underneath the dinosaur are printed the words “Never Forget.” I'm sure the view of the girl's breasts is grand from where that guy is sitting, but to his credit his eyes remain fixed on hers.
“You mean the point where the reward becomes equal to the risk?” I ask Dick.
“Exactly. And she is not yours.”
What Dick doesn't know yet is my graph has been significantly altered by the events of this morning. With Gloria filing for divorce, certain variables must be recalculated to determine my new break-even point. And I have a feeling the girl in the polka-dot galoshes now occupies a favorable place on my graph.
“Anyway,” I tell him, “you spaced out.”
“Okay.”
“And then you asked me if I wanted to know how it works.”
“How what works?”
“The world.”
Again Dick just sits there, contemplating the story.
“Then you told me the truth is numbers. Lots and lots of numbers.”
“Well,” he chuckles, “I
am
a software developer, right?”
I'm not surprised Dick finds my story amusing, but his amusement nevertheless annoys me. Since I was fired and all.
“Then you told me about the
Ant Farm
software.”
“That I do remember,” Dick says. “And the reason I told you about the
Ant Farm
app is because it seemed like you were having a sort of existential crisis after what happened with the priest. About the gays and all. But man, I never expected you toâ¦I mean, I'm really sorry for all this. I had no idea anything like this would happen.”
“Well, it's not like it's your fault. I'd already seen the man in the bathroom. All this was already happening. The game was just one part of it.”
“Sure, man. Sure.”
Dick's condescension makes me want to punch him. But I don't have anyone else to talk to, at least not anyone impartial. Normally for something like this I would call Sophia, and she's probably wondering why I've been so quiet the past few days, but contacting her at this point is just going to complicate things. Sophia doesn't always give me the best advice when it comes to my wife.
After a moment I continue my story with Dick, further detailing my experience with the
Ant Farm
game, the drinking, Gloria finding me passed out. I tell him about waking up in the middle of the night and taking the Ambien. I even try to explain the hallucinations to him, the chairs, and then, finally, reluctantly, I reveal that Gloria left me this morning and plans to file for divorce.
“Dude,” he says.
“What?”
“That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.”
“You think it was a mistake to let her go. You think I should fight for her, right? Drive over to her office and get down on my knees and beg for her to come back.”
“I mean the whole thing is fucked up, man. You got fired from your job, your wife left you, all in the span of twenty-four hours?”
This guy Dick really is a dick. Why the hell am I talking to him about this? Why did I think heâ
“But it's a good kind of fucked up,” he adds.
“What?”
“You've got a chance, man. A chance to do something the rest of us can only dream about. Your life was just reset. Rebooted. You can do anything you want now, man. You could move somewhere else. You could start a whole new career. You could get out of the corporate world and travel the country on foot, like a wandering nomad, yo. Move from city to city and really live there, man. Salt of the earth. Get your hands dirty and live among real people struggling every day. And write down what you see. The real shit. Live paycheck to paycheck, wander from town to town, and when you're done you'll have something so authentic and real it will be an important thing. It could be a film or a book or whatever. But you've been given a chance, man. You're lucky. Use it wisely.”
“I don't know if that makes me lucky or if it'll just drive me crazy.”
“That's the thing. Maybe you want to go a little crazy. Maybe you're
already
a little crazy. Maybe that's what these hallucinations are, like your mind just had enough, and it took over, like a defense mechanism. It got you out of a bad situation, which is exactly what it's evolved to do.”
“So you think it's my imagination, then?”
“Well, that's a lot easier to believe than someone is beaming numbers into your head. Or how that guy found you in a bathroom and told you a big secret in cryptic language. I mean, honestly Thomas: Why you and not someone else?”
I think he's wrong to dismiss the “hallucinations” this way. Someone is trying to contact me, I can feel it. They must be. It can't all be coincidence.
“But it doesn't matter, man. What matters is you are out of a bad situation. You and Gloria both knew the relationship had been stagnant for years. You hated your job. Now they're both over, and let me say it againânot many people get this kind of chance. This clean break. You don't have kids, you aren't broke. You want to sit around in a suburb for the next forty years, waiting to die? Or do you want to live?”
“But if none of this stuff really happened to me, I'm crazy. I need to check myself into a mental hospital.”
“How can you say it's not happening? You just told me everything. I was there for the
Ant Farm
conversation. I found you in the parking lot, passed out drunk. That corroborates your story. Part of it at least.”
“But what about the blue orb? The numbers in my head?”
“I don't know,” he says. “Maybe that was some kind of temporary shit caused by stress.”
“A delusion that lasted two days? Hell, even today I heard the numbers. That would make three.”
“Do you hear them right now?”
“No.”
Dick finishes his beer and sets it down with authority.
“I think you're fine. You sound lucid. You look tired, but who wouldn't be after what you went through the past couple of days?”
He seems convinced. Or tired of talking about it. I have a feeling he's ready to go.
“I actually have to run now,” he says. “You ready?”
“I think I might hang around for a bit. Have another drink.”
“Well, let me tell you something, man. I'm only going to say this one more time, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Don't fuck this up. Don't go right back to what you were doing. Challenge yourself. Try things you've never tried. Get into trouble. Don't be so damned perfect all the time. You already know what you've becomeâa boring, middle-aged marketer with
Â
tentative dreams. Get out there and live hard for a while, and when you're ready, you'll figure out what you
can
become.”
I stare at him for a while before I finally answer.
“Thanks, man. You're right. I promise I won't go back to my old ways.”