Right now I want to talk about Jack. This is the Jack I mentioned before, the one who dated Gloria before I did. She left him to be with me. I guess you could say I stole her from him, if you want to be negative about it, but I didn't do it on purpose. I mean I didn't set out to do it so much as it just happened. You can't help who you love in this world.
Not surprisingly, Jack was unimpressed with what I considered fate. He didn't give up on Gloria easily, and even after I proposed he swore he would win her back eventually. For a long time I worried about him, about his resentment, but after we were married he faded from our lives. In time I forgot about him.
Then, three years ago, Gloria took a job at the same company as Jack. She didn't bother telling me he worked there until deep in the interview process, long after I could mount an opposition campaign. She claims she didn't know about it herself. To make matters worse, three months ago she accepted a promotion that means she now works for him directly. Can you believe that? I mean, honestly. Has Jack really been plotting his revenge for thirteen years? Or is this another one of life's infamous coincidences?
Either way, every time seven o'clock arrives and Gloria's still not home from work, I grow a little angrier. Wouldn't you? She sees him every day. She sees him more than she sees me. And then when I ask about her day, how things are at work, Gloria tells me I'm being obsessive. But all I'm doing is asking about her job. We end up talking about Jack by association. He's her boss, for heaven's sake.
Isn't he?
Or am I hallucinating that, too?
I keep hearing the old man's voice, the guy in the bathroom. I keep seeing his ruddy face and hearing his ominous words, but we all know I can't say for sure if it really happened. Just like no one else saw the blue orb. I clearly hallucinated that. And once you accept you are hallucinating, how can you say, really, when it stops? When you have a bad dream at night, it ends when you wake up. But when you're talking about a real-life, daytime hallucination, how can you ever know for sure when you are back in true reality again?
There's a very good chance I hallucinated everything in the church today: the blue orb, the old man, the improved sexual equipment.
Which means I could still be hallucinating. I may not even be writing to you right now.
And you may not be reading.
Think about that feeling you get in nightmares, the blazing, irrational fear. That's exactly how this feels. If you can't trust what you see with your own eyes, what you hear with your own ears, how can you trust anything?
If my brain had a reboot button, this is when I would push it. I need to shut down and regain some kind of balance. What I really want to do is go to sleep and make all of this disappear. But as soon as I close my eyes, I imagine the car is moving, like I'm no longer sitting in my driveway but fleeing across the desert, followed by a couple of gunslingers. I imagine my car slamming into something, and then I'm falling, my life flashing before me. I've had this dream before. I can't remember when. It's as if I have the dream and then forget about it.
Everything you know is a lie
, the old man said.
But what does that mean exactly? Even if this very moment is a hallucination, there must have been a previous moment that was not.
My heart is racing. I can feel blood pulsing in the tips of my fingers, in my ears. The world seems to shimmer. Everything is blurry. I'm breathing too fast. It seems insanely hot in this car.
I wonder if I jumped out the door and ripped off my clothes, if I tried to rip off my very own skin, if anyone would try to stop me. I'm not sure it matters anymore. For the first time since my dad died nine years ago, I feel like crying. If you can't have faith in the most basic information about the worldâfacts you take for granted every minute of every dayâhow can you live from one moment to the next?
I have to go inside. I don't know what else to do. I'm scared to death that I'll say something crazy to Gloria, that she'll finally realize how lost I am, but I'm even more afraid that if I sit in this car by myself any longer I'll drift so far away from solid ground that I'll never be able to make it back.
Do you think Gloria would listen if I tried to explain how I feel? If I told her I'm seeing things? How do you explain to someone that your mind isn't working right without them automatically thinking you belong in a mental hospital?
It seems absurd that I would ever keep anything from her. There was a time when the two of us were so close it seemed like we communicated telepathically. Even the first moment I saw her, when she stood in front of me at that fraternity party and asked for half a giant Twinkie, somehow I already knew she was the one. It was strange and wonderful, almost as if I'd met her before. But lately it feels like someone has turned off the connection, because we're never on the same page about anything. And the worst part is I don't understand how it happened. Gloria doesn't seem like the same person to me anymore. She would probably say something similar about me, and maybe she would be right, because more and more I think I really do belong in a mental hospital. Like right now I am thinking that.
And I'm also hearing numbers in my head again.
9â¦7â¦9â¦3â¦
pauseâ¦
2â¦3â¦8â¦4â¦
I think they must be special numbers. Something very special is happening to me, like a gift, and all I have to do to receive this gift is finally let go of my fake life, let go of Gloria and my stupid job and everything that has been holding me back, and embrace the one, true reality.
6â¦2â¦6â¦4â¦
pauseâ¦
3â¦3â¦8â¦3â¦
Those numbers are like a path for me to follow. They lead somewhere very important, if only I couldâ
A loud, thundering sound shakes my numerical world, jumbles everything, and my eyes flutter open. The sun is white and overpowering. What the hell?
“Thomas,” someone says. “Are you going to sit out here all day?”
It's Gloria. I'm in the car. Gloria is standing outside the car looking in at me.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I don't know what happened.”
“It looks like you fell asleep. Why don't you come inside? The neighbors are going to wonder what you're doing out here.”
“Okay,” I say. “Give me just a secâ”
“It's all right. I'm going back inside. Just don't be too long, baby. Okay?”
Shit. I was dreaming all that.
Â
Maybe I'm not going crazy. Maybe I'm just exhausted and getting worked up over nothing. Maybe I can go inside and talk to Gloria and everything will turn out to be okay.
Maybe.
FOUR
B
ut when I walk inside, my house feels like someone else's. There's an unfamiliar smell, as if someone besides Gloria and me was recently here. I feel like I'm intruding. I know that doesn't make any sense.
I go into the kitchen and get some water from the refrigerator, gulp it down in giant swallows. Get more and gulp that down, too.
Gloria is in the study. I can hear her typing, probably already working on her blog. I don't want to interrupt her but we need to talk. I need to tell her I don't feel quite right. That maybe I'm depressed or mixed up a little, that maybe I've been seeing things that aren't there. As I reach the study she stops typing and clicks on something with the mouse. When she looks up at me I notice her eyes are red, as if she's been crying.
“I'm sorry about what I said in the car. About your brother. I didn't mean to upset you.”
“I don't understand, Thomas. Every time we're doing a little better, it's like you sabotage it. It's like you don't want us to work. Is that it? Do you not want to be in this anymore?”
“Of course I do, Junior.”
“Then why do you try to hurt me?”
“I don'tâ¦I didn'tâ¦I wasn't trying to hurt you.”
“It's hard to know how to feel about Michael. It's confusing. I've thought about this a lot, about what God has written, and about how much I love my brother. I don't know what the right answer is, baby, but I know us arguing about it doesn't help anything.”
“I justâ¦a lot of things don't make sense to me anymore.”
“Like what? Like going to mass? Like our relationship? What doesn't make sense?”
“I don't know. I just don't feel very well lately.”
“Thomas,” Gloria says. “I know what it's like to question your faith. You know I almost left the church when we were in college. Meeting you helped turn me around.”
“You almost left the church because of Jack.”
“And meeting you helped turn me around, I said.”
The numbers in my head are back. A woman recites these numbers against a constant pattern of static and noise, interrupted by occasional crackles of distortion, and underneath it all I can almost hear a melody of some kind. Haunting strings, dissonantâ¦possibly electronic.
2â¦7â¦9â¦5â¦.
pauseâ¦.
0â¦2â¦8â¦8â¦
“I was in a terrible place,” Gloria says. “Jack made me feel awful, like I was such an idiot for believing in God. Like I was a child, like it was all just a fairy tale. I hated that.”
“He doesn't make you feel like that anymore? You see him every day.”
“We don't talk about that. We talk about work.”
“Work can't be the only thing you ever talk about. You're there all day long.”
“Don't do this,” she says.
“Don't do what?”
“Please. I don't want to talk about Jack again.”
“We never talk about Jack.”
“You have to let it go, Thomas.”
“I'm not the one who brought him up just now. You did.”
She looks at me strangely, as if I'm not making sense.
“Baby, I didn't bring up Jack just now. You did. Don't you remember?”
I don't remember that at all. I try to rewind the conversation to the point where Jack was introduced, but Gloria interrupts me.
“Baby, this isn't going to work.”
“What?”
“I can't do this anymore. I can't fight with you anymore. If we keep doing this it's going to make me want to leave and not come back. I love you to death and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, but I can't do it like this.”
“Junior, what are you saying?”
“I'm asking you for the last time to let it go. Let Jack go.
You
are my husband. I love you, not him. Yes, I loved him once, and I know it's bizarre and uncomfortable that I report to him now, but I'm with you. You've always been my rock, baby. You're my solid ground. I love that about you. So trust me and find some peace about this. Please?”
“Okay,” I say. “I promise not to bring him up anymore.”
“Thank you. Come here and give me a kiss.”
I walk over and bend down and touch her lips with my own. I know she's right. We can't go on like this.
I don't know when I'm going to tell her about what I saw today.
I don't know if I should.
These lips don't feel like Gloria's.
FIVE
I
grab a beer from the fridge and sit down to watch the game. It's been on for a little more than an hour, so I start at the beginning and watch it in high speed, fast forwarding through the commercials and only watching when the Cowboys are on offense. It would be nice if real life were like this, wouldn't it? Skip through the boring parts? Only live the highlights? I wonder what would happen if I could fast forward to this evening or tomorrow or next month? What will Gloria and I be doing then? Are we going to make it? It's Sunday and she's in the study and I'm in the living room, and though I know all couples have their routines, we weren't always like this.
I'm sure to you it seems like we're the most obvious and boring couple in the world, two young kids from middle America who met in college and married too young. But it wasn't really like that. After high school I had this idea I would move to the west coast and write screenplays and date actresses. I had no intention of getting married at all, or at least not for a very long time. But then I met Gloria and everything changed.
She'd been dating Jack for almost a year the night I first saw her. It was the fourth of July and most of the student body was home for the summer, yet there must have been three hundred people at this party. Some fraternity house, I can't remember which one. There was booze everywhere. Cases and cases and cases of beer, kegs stacked like barrels of oil, rows of cheap vodka bottles (an occasional Smirnoff or Absolut hidden among them), and more whiskey than I'd ever seen in my life. Plenty of food, too. Acres of pizza, bags of corn chips and potato chips, cookies, several boxes of Twinkies. I was moderately buzzed and craving sugar for some reason, so I took two of the little yellow cakes and smashed them together to make one big one. If you've ever been drunk you understand the logic. And just as I was about to take a bite of my creation, someone cleared her throat behind me.
I turned and saw Gloria, blonde and tan and stunning, and felt my face flush red. She was one of those college girls so gorgeous that anything you did or said in front of them felt foolish. You never expected someone like her to approach a guy because she didn't have to. The guys all came to her. They prepared witty things to say and made sure their hair was styled just so and walked with their shoulders thrown back. Yet here she was, looking right at me, having appeared from nowhere, while I was in the process of shoving a yellow rectangle of manufactured cake into my mouth. I couldn't imagine what she might say.
What she said was, “That's a big Twinkie.”
I burst out laughing. I couldn't help myself. I was so embarrassed and waiting for her to cut me at the knees, and the last thing I expected her to do was quote
Ghostbusters
.
“It is,” I said with a smile. “You want some?”