The Endless Concord, Chapter 17

XVII. The Big Weight


Two Halves Don't Make a Whole, by Dr. Idleman, Chapter 2: “The Shallows”
Vertigo is a loss of identity, not a loss of physical placement. We live in a society of constant vertigo, like sailors on a grand vessel. The plank is punishment for identity. The plank is freedom from vertigo. Identity is affirmed only when one is jettisoned from this ship, a ship where all destinies remain alike…

I threw the book in the trash. Looking at it there atop the garbage in the trash can reminded me of the teamwork ball and things I left behind. This maneuver seemed like a clean start.
Rainy was due in two days. Waiting for our visits was reassuring. I woke up in the morning earlier than usual and went through the classifieds highlighting jobs I knew I would never apply for. Each one guaranteed a different direction, some other course I could take, long networks of personalities I could assume, entire lives I could live. Highlighting the ads arranged some commitment to these potentialities; exhilarating, fresh. I was down to about two hundred dollars and knew I would eventually make some decision, even if it were to do nothing at all.
After some research I learned I was eligible for unemployment due to the circumstances of my departure from the Plaza. But when I went down to the office and pulled a ticket from the red ticket dispenser and waited in a room filled with all sorts of women with hoop earrings, men with overcoats and no t-shirts underneath and lice waiting for the next wave of shaggy haired people and woolen scarves, I was informed I needed some confirmation from my superior, that being Willis, and was given forms I would need to fill out at home as their offices were closing early. Back in the apartment I stood with my hand hovering over the phone contemplating calling up Willis and that inevitable sympathy I knew he would contrive out of sheer habit, when lo and behold there came a knock at the door. I received a visitor for the first time since Rainy a week or so prior.
“Clement…uh…Launders?” A large man in uniform asked, lumbering over a clipboard with one of those post office pens with the chain attached to it.
“I’m here to pick up the refrigerator.”
We studied the refrigerator that lay on its side in the hallway.
“Did the landlord send you?” I asked, surprised it hadn’t already been moved.
“Er…maybe, is your landlord named Frank Othello?”
“Christ…” I said, opening the door all the way and motioning him to do what he needs to do.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry, nothing, go ahead, it’s all yours.”
He motioned to another man who was leaning up against the stairway having a cigarette.
“Those things will kill you,” the first mover told him.
“I know,” replied the other man, bending down to stand the refrigerator upright.
“Sir?”
“Yeah?” I asked, about to close the door.
“You need to sign for it.”
“He wants me to sign for it?”
“It’s policy.”
I signed for the refrigerator, watched them leave, and began to close the door when I caught the sight of a woman barreling down the hallway.
“Tonya?”
“Good, you’re home. We tried coming the other day but no one was here.”
“I was in Seattle…this is uh…unexpected to see you here.”
She pushed open the door and held it with one hand while motioning me to step back, which I did, totally bewildered, and waved down the hall. “It’s okay,” she said.
Right then Willis, Randall, Marvin and Frank appeared at the door and all five of them stepped into the apartment.
“What is this?”
“I’ll put on some coffee,” Tonya said, abandoning the defense stance, the kind they taught us in training, and walked into the kitchen.
Willis motioned me to sit down, starring at my fist, the one I used to hit Idleman. It was red and covered in blue spots. I hid my hand where he couldn’t see it and waited for whatever comes next.
“Frank?” Tonya called out from the kitchen.
“Yeah…I uh…there’s no coffee machine any more,” Frank hollered into the kitchen.
“I keep a French press in the cupboard,” I said, standing up to help Tonya, when Willis, who was hovering above me, gestured for me to sit back down and announced he would take care of it.
I watched Randall and Marvin wonder around the room. Marvin would find a place to stand, kind of lean up against the wall and cross his feet, nearly fall, and prop himself back up, astonished, as if he had just woken up. Randall looked up at the ceiling fan and moved his head around in a clockwise motion, switching every fourth bar or so to a counterclockwise motion and then switching back again. Frank hung around the door, for, I gathered, an easy escape if I had decided to turn on him.
Tonya came out with the coffee with Willis behind her, setting the mugs down on the coffee table and watching me take a sip and contrive a satisfied nod of the head.
“We figured the movers would get you to open the door, just in case you were holing yourself up in here.” Tonya sat down next to me with her hands on her knees.
“So does that mean I get my refrigerator back?”
“Hey that wasn’t part of the deal!” Frank said, hammering on the door and pointing at Willis who motioned back that he wasn’t going to betray this deal they made.
“Let bygones be bygones with the refrigerator,” Willis said sitting down, “that isn’t why we’re here.”
“Why are you here?” I asked.
Marvin burst out laughing.
“And why are they here?”
Tonya and Willis looked back at Marvin and Randall as if noticing them for the first time, “We’re taking them to the SSI office after this, today’s SSI day, had to bring them with.”
“And you?”
“We’re here to help you. Frank came to me the other day, said you had ‘Went over the edge’ and suggested I do something about it. And I…well I was going to come anyway, because of what happened. I hoped we could talk about that later. Thom also called.”
“How does Thom know how to reach you?”
“He’s resourceful. Anyway, you should thank me, I assured him you would be getting ‘Intense psychiatric care complete with lasers and electrodes to the brain and everything.’ He was polite and amiable after that.”
I nodded my head. “I don’t know what you’re expecting to find here.”
“How’s the coffee?” Tonya asked.
“It’s good, it’s mine isn’t it?”
“No, we stopped by the Good Dollar on the way over, stuff for the office kitchen.”
“Ah.”
“We sure had a scare at the parade huh?”
“Why do I feel like people are tip toeing around me?” I asked.
“Well, because they are,” Willis broke in, “you made a mistake that cost a person his life, you lost your job, all of your appliances were stolen, you have a drug and alcohol abuse history, there’s a pattern here, an ending to all this.”
I watched Marvin and Randall go into my bedroom. “Uh…Willis?”
Willis stood up and dragged them both back by the arm. “That’s not OK! You understand? This is someone’s house, do you go around like that in someone’s house?!”
“Okay,” I said standing up, “it’s been fun…”
“We’re not done here…”
“I think I’ve had about enough,” I interrupted Willis.
“Hold on,” Willis said, taking Randall and Mravin by the arm and escorting them out the door, grabbing Frank too, who winced and stood his ground, grimacing at Willis. A short standoff took place where the two of them just kind of starred one another down when Frank finally walked out of the room defeated. Willis then politely motioned Tonya to leave.
“Uh uh, no way, I ain’t on watch right now, you aren’t even paying my ass for this. I’m here to see that Clemy here don’t blow his top,” Tonya protested.
“Please? I’d like to speak with him alone. Why don’t you hop in the van and take them down to SSI, I’ll see you back at the Plaza.”
Tonya hesitated for a moment, put her coffee down, and kissed me on the cheek. “It ain’t the end of the World baby, there’s always in with the new and out with the old,” she whispered, patting me on the shoulder and walking out of the room.
The gesture felt warm and reassuring.
“Let’s go for a drive. Is that your rental car out front? Is that what you used to get to Seattle?” Willis asked, picking the keys up off the table and spinning them around his finger by the ring.
“Can I have my car back?”
“No, I need it.”

“I just want to say this and get it out of the way. I think it’s important we talk about other things,” Willis began, rolling down the road at fifty miles per hour, “but about the way things ended…I had no say in that, Roswell had a firm grip on my testicles, you have to realize…”
I waved him off. “Water under the bridge.”
“Good. Just as long as you know…”
I motioned him to stop.
“Okay, okay,” he said, “moving on.”
We turned onto highway five heading North and the car picked up speed.
“Frank informed me of your kind of, oh, falling off the edge of the earth there,” Willis set in, “he said you were depressed and drinking pretty heavily, watching a lot of television, which is, you know, a bit abnormal for you. You were always active, following the news and making little comments and so forth. I’ve never known you to be so…I don’t know, resigned? Yep, that’s it…as if you’ve turned in your resignation here.”
“It’s funny how you can feel fine until everyone asks you how you feel all the time.”
“But is it that simple? I don’t know…you know it’s a funny thing working in this field. There’s these constant reminders of where society has failed…where we’ve failed.” He looked over at me and back at the road. “These reminders…they pace back in forth, they spin in circles, they shit themselves, they scream from the depths of inner consciousness…howling like that, like dogs at the moon. It’s an inconvenience for us, the people who have to play the janitor of this system. My psychiatric degree and my certificates amount to just that, janitorial work. We’re caretakers, jail keepers, undertakers, and janitors all in one, but more than anything we are the hand that covers the mouth from making its presence aware to the rest of the World, we’re hiding under the bed. The hysterically disorganized mother that feeds the child pain medication so it might go to sleep…so she can go on fucking well into the…”
I motioned him to stop again.
“Do you remember Charley?” Willis asked after a short silence.
“Yeah Willis, I remember Charley.”
“Fucking Christ right?” he said awkwardly.
I glanced at him out of the corner my eye and nodded my head in agreement.
“Is this it?!” he asked, shaking his head.
He said it again after I didn't respond, and then again, then another time, and finally he was shouting it out of the window moving down the road at something like ninety miles per hour. People honked and moved out of the way. Rain blew through the sky and the trees, plotting to climb in through the window and drip down onto the dark gray interior of the car, welling up in little puddles that would eventually be sopped up using the inevitable newspaper technique. Willis had his head halfway out of the car as it swerved around forcing me to grab the wheel and attempt to get a handle on things.
“Come on!” he yelled.
I shook my head violently. “You’re on your own.”
“Come on!” he said again.
“Is this it?!” I said under my breath.
“Again!”
“What is this Willis? Some kind of hip new therapy you copied down from an infomercial? A mantra, is that it?” I yelled out at him over the sound of the wind.
He rolled the window down more. Water was definitely getting in.
“I don’t know,” he said shaking his head with a big smile, “Is this it?! Come on!”
“Is this it?!” I said again, with the same volume as before.
“Think of Lance, huh?”
“Is this it?!” I yelled out of the window, in unison with Willis.
“Roswell! That bald headed coffee addled power marketing head fuck! Think of him and his Goddamn teamwork ball!”
We yelled the words out of the window again.
“Charley? Forever wasting away in that goddamn armchair we bought from the office warehouse for fourteen-ninety-five?” he spelled the words out while hammering at the dashboard with his open hand. “Sun falling over the buildings? All those people down there going about their busy little lives? And there’s old Charley! Up there in that window! Heart too fucking big for the weight of the World! Lights out like a white-dwarf, a silent collision of fate and melancholy for no one to see! Fucking Christ! Is-this-it?! Is that how it ends?”
I studied Willis, his eyes were red and teary, a face I had only seen once from him. He was grave, the way he looked that night when we discovered Charley's body.
We went down the road like that for over an hour, the windows rolled down, rain pouring through, our heads hot with cold and delirium, yelling our heads off, as if each exclamation were somehow putting cracks in the glass that separated us from ourselves, this part of us we buried away and wanted back. I had never seen Willis behave this way, and I was sure I’d never see it again. Part of me knew all along that this was the way he dealt with things. No one could ever be that stolid, I imagined, and here he was, howling away. It seemed to make sense. I realized I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else but in this car screaming my head off at the walls encasing the highway, at the tops of the Douglas Firs and midday moon. This moment, I told myself, is the center of my life, this one exclamation that meant everything.
The words left us and echoed on down the onramp, no longer under our control like a top spins off the fingers carving direction out of momentum and the shape of the Earth. Willis set on a destination unknown to me. I thought I should ask before thinking better of it and let him just drive where he wanted to drive. He could pilot the rental car clear into outer space. There would only be a short stop at the mechanics where he would wrestle with the price for a while, excited over this special they have on rocket boosters and wondering whether or not he could somehow save on fuel if he converted the engine into bio-diesel, weighing out his options like this before hopping into the car, waving off my questions with a stern nod of the head, and taking off clear into orbit. “This one really kicks out at you!” He’d yell over the clatter of the engine, “I mean, you know when you’re breaking the atmospheric lens!”

We hit a point in the road where there was less traffic and it turned into one of those highways that meant you were in it for the long haul. The rain blew through the window, knocking the car around with Willis just kind of piloting the thing grinning from ear to ear. On the side of the road were the occasional stores people occasionally stopped in to collect food and things in bulk. This scenery just went on like that. I thought about the direction things were going with Rainy, about finding work and the general future one contemplates when speeding down the highway with the windows open. I felt this heavy weight gather up in me all at once. It kind of gathers in the stomach and sends you hurtling through the car, through the road, down into the hot center of the earth. I had found Idleman and had never asked the questions I wanted to ask, questions I could never put into words. I looked at my face all swollen with cold through the side-view mirror and started laughing. You have to laugh, continuing on past the weight to the next step, something just a continuation of everything before it, something you can turn around and study; an algorithm, like the way the knight moves on a chessboard.
I remembered the painting by Brink I kept on the wall; the broken, manless ship and the wild ocean swallowing it whole. I realized my fascination for the painting wasn’t the destruction or the helplessness, it was that, for the brief moment in which the idea was captured, the ship and the ocean were one thing.
Willis pointed to a sign out on the side of the road, looking at me with wet eyes and a wild grin. The sign read, Welcome to the middle of nowhere.

The Endless Concord, Chapter 16

XVI. Recovery


On the drive home from Seattle a thought entered my head. It was something like a conscious affirmation of something I had known all along. It came in an image of Rainy, confused, shaking her head at me. “Quit mentioning his name!” she said. Then came an image of Rutherford. He was leaning back in his chair and telling me he was close friends with Rainy's father. I had thought about it that night on the drive home, “Before he moved back to San Diego...” Rutherford had said. Suddenly it hit me all at once and I pulled off the road, sitting there like that and chain smoking cigarettes trying to put it all together. Idleman was Rainy's father. The thought of if seemed too big, bigger than me, and the more it sunk in, the angrier I felt.
I turned around right before I-5 hits Portland and drove in the opposite direction back towards Seattle, speeding as fast as I could. The lines in the road and the scenery seemed to kind of blend together in one big mesh of grey. My head felt cold and angry. I didn't want to look in the review mirror, afraid of what I might see. So I drove like that, without looking back. I thought about moving down an empty road in the night, I thought about Lance pacing around in the office and telling me he was on the line. The environment began to look like the way he described it in his interview with Idleman, and for a moment I knew what he was talking about.
There was a series of coincidences here. I tried letting it sink in while I drove down the road at 60 miles per hour in the ice and sleet, chain smoking cigarettes and drinking copious amounts of coffee. So Lance was born at Clariton Hospital in 1966 where two young doctors, Idleman and Rutherford, would eventually begin work. At a young age Lance moves to San Diego with his family. Roughly five years later, without having previously met Lance, I gathered, Idleman moves to San Diego where he takes up his practice. Lance has a mental breakdown and is sent to Idleman’s office where Idleman becomes his doctor. At some point Idleman must have moved back to Brooklyn for a short time, but long enough to start a family, and moved back to San Diego a second time and eventually Seattle. Meanwhile, Rainy, Idleman’s daughter, visits her father in San Diego every so often while living with her mother in Brooklyn where she eventually falls in love...well, maybe that’s pushing it, but at least gets married to Idleman’s good friend and aging colleague Dr. Morgan Rutherford. They moved to Seattle around 03’ where they lived for a short time and separate. At some juncture a very mature and completely insane Lance Bennett bounces around Seattle and Portland, Idleman publishes several books, and Morgan looses his mind. Born in the early 80’s in Idaho and now working in Portland, I come along and close the books on the whole situation. People are far more involved in one another’s lives than I had ever imagined.
Somewhere outside of Seattle, the outskirts of Tacoma, I imagined, I pulled off the road and sat on the hood of the car smoking a cigarette in the dark looking out over the fields and buildings behind them, all lit up and shimmering in the night sky. Like streams feeding into lakes this industrial system of warehouses and smokestacks feed into commercial outlets that feed into downtown. A large whirlpool of graffiti and cement with an empty space in the middle. Here on the outskirts I felt I was being pulled in, dragged by the legs into this network of glass and steel. Men don’t become themselves. We never had a chance.
When I reached Seattle I was too amped to check in for the night and go to sleep. So I looked up Idleman's name in a phone book I found outside a diner and, to my surprise, there it was, right downtown. I pulled up to it and parked my car in the parking garage near the Plank St. Market. It was 3:00 A.M., and for several hours I had nothing better to do but pace outside of his building. It was a large office building with a gothic flare and gargoyles hanging off the arches. It seemed about right. I vibrated from one side of the street to the other trying to place the last month’s events in my head in the proper order one more time.
So I met Lance, Lance died. I soon find out a man named Idleman worked with Lance and a man named Rutherford compiled his case file in Brooklyn. I met a girl connected to both of these people who shared a connection with me beyond this triangle of relativity. We shared something bigger, and we shared it right at the time when I needed her the most, a time when I was lamenting over a man on the line I accidentally murdered. I tried putting it all together in the right order but it was difficult making it all out. Maybe it will take shape later, but there was something else, there was Idleman, and soon he would be in this building here and I would confront him, unsure of how, but I would confront him.
At 6:00 A.M a man in a suit walked by, handed me a five dollar bill, patted me on the shoulder, and told me it gets better. I shook my head confusedly and walked across the street into Idleman's office building. I waited in the lobby until 7:00, a time, I imagined, that would make my appearance seem legitimate.
“Hello, I'm a friend of Dr. Idleman's. I'd like to see him please?”
The woman behind the black marble countertop regarded me with indifference. “He's not in,” she said, not looking up.
“Yes but I'm a friend of his and he'd like to see me.”
She looked up at me and then over my shoulder. I turned around to see what she was looking at. Two security guards stood behind me at the door.
“I mean, I'm a client actually. I'm a client and I'd like to see him, you see I am having a breakdown...seeing elephants fucking in the street...that sort of thing.” I made my hands and body shake as I spoke, but oddly, it didn't seem that forced. My hands and body where already shaking.
“He won't be in for another half hour, would you like to wait?”
“He's here isn't he? Rainy must have called him. Where is he?” I asked, spinning around me.
She waved her hand at security.
“You have to leave sir, at least until he comes in.”
“Fucking skank!” I snapped, wheeling around quickly and surprising even myself.
Security dragged me out of the building and soon I was street side again. I began walking quickly down the sidewalk unsure of where I was going. There was a diner right up ahead and I decided to duck in and try getting my head together. I had a cup of coffee and some breakfast while reading the news and taking several trips to the bathroom where I splashed water on my face to wake myself up. The newspaper I had procured from the bin they kept by the door was wrinkled up and out of order. There was a story about a woman who stabbed her husband over a row about music, she was quoted to have said, “I mean, who doesn’t like Bruce Springsteen?” There was a riot at a soccer match in Chile and some kind of economic collapse in Bangladesh. I flipped to the front cover. There was a picture of two men shaking hands in a boardroom. The date of the newspaper was a few months old and I remembered Lance looking at the very same headline. “Can you imagine?” he had said.
I paid my bill and walked out into the street being bustled around by the foot-traffic of the people around me. I began walking towards the parking garage when, there, just ahead of me and across the street where I dropped Willis off just a few years prior, was Dr. Idleman. The coincidence of having left Willis at this very same intersection hit me and I could feel the strings tightening. There he was, Idleman: Rainy's father, Lance's doctor, Thom's biggest hero, the butt of Willis' satire, and my, for reasons unbeknownst to me, mortal enemy. I noticed his large head, the way the white stringy hair on the sides of it would shake whenever he looked around, the self-assured, doctorly way in which he carried himself. He was reading a newspaper and waiting for the light to change, drinking a cup of coffee with his free hand. At the sight of him I could feel all the frustration and anxiety I’ve had in the last several months well up in me all at once.
The light changed and, instep with the pedestrians around him, he walked to my side of the street. I marched briskly forward and met him halfway on the sidewalk, grabbing him by his plaid blazer and walked with him, pushing him in the direction of the office building but doing it in such a way so to look natural to the people around us.
“What are you doing?” he asked, nervously and quietly, also weary of calling attention to the situation, apparently afraid of what I might do if the crowd around us had discovered my harassing him; clever.
I walked the two of us into the diner I had just left.
“We're getting coffee.”
“I already have coffee!” He gestured with the cup he was holding while we walked, briskly and arm and arm down the sidewalk in the early morning light.
“That's OK!”
I pushed him into one of the booths and he sat, starring back at me, with the look of a cat you just ruffled up from its slumber on his face.
“There better be some goddamn good reason...”
“Shut up.”
“Do you even know what you're...”
“Can I help you?” A waitress asked, looming over the two of us and apparently not picking up on what was happening here.
“Two coffees please,” I said, trying to sound rational and collected.
“Do you even know what you're doing?” Idleman said in a whisper after the waitress had gone, leaning in close to me.
“The coffee is on me,” I said with a smile.
“I'm leaving,” he said, trying to gather himself up in the coffee stained leather booth and leave.
“Just sit down!” I shouted, pushing his shoulders down and alerting the customers around me, who now froze and watched what was happening here in silence.
“What is it? What is this? Who are you?” Idleman asked finally.
“That doesn't matter, but the point is, the point is who I'm not...” I said blankly, trying to register what that means.
“Do you even know why you brought me here? You don't, do you? Just spit it out! What is the meaning of all this!”
“I um...I...” I hadn't planned on any of this. I thought, on the drive down here, that I'd suddenly know what to do when I saw him, the questions I wanted to ask. They were there, I was sure of it, but when he sat in front of me like that, I couldn't seem to recall them, I couldn't seem to recall anything. I wanted to believe Lance's death was his fault. It was because of him, because of his rationality, that the World looks like it does. Lance was a kid who wanted to play guitar, that's it.
Idleman sat starring back at me. His eyes were weighty, self-assured. There would be no debating with this man. He had a look of intelligence that couldn't be argued with, whether externally grown or intently mastered.
I got up to leave and began walking towards the door. He stood up behind me.
“You need to get your head checked!” he shouted behind me, and quickly produced one of his business cards and threw it in my direction.
I swung around and slugged Dr. Idleman. It was hard, and he fell hard. The sound of a two hundred and fifty pound man being hit and knocked to the floor with the coffee cups near him trailing shortly behind, the quiet of the room otherwise, and the moan a sixty year old man makes when he is attacked, was all-at-once, filling the room with a kind of stillness, a surreal intensity no one in it would ever forget.
“I love your daughter,” I said with a shaky and cracked voice on the way out as he stumbled to his feet.
I drove home that afternoon in silence, thinking of nothing but the sound of the tires over a road stretching from Seattle to Portland. The more ground I covered the more things seemed to fit in place. It was almost a shape I could look at, that I could touch.

The Endless Concord, Chapter 15

XV. Rutherford


We didn’t sleep together that night, nor did we after dinner the following night. However it was decided I would drive up to Seattle to see her a week after she left town. This was enough. We had only this one priority and it gave me a sense of purpose. I wondered if this is why people get themselves involved in this whole business in the first place. I was crossing those country roads that lead nowhere, this one looked somehow more commercialized, more on ramps and off ramps, more people with a sense of destination. I wanted to hang on with Rainy, she gave me a wholeness.
I thought about Lance and Willis less and less until finally altogether. These two characters seemed a part of some other life, and here was this new one with Rainy. I would go grocery shopping, clean the apartment up, look through the classifieds for work, talk to Rainy on the phone, read some and go to bed. Days seemed to drift by.
I tried figuring Rainy out in my mind, putting the bits and pieces together, these explanations she gave me, to make a life-form. So long as I guessed at the details in between it seemed like a plausible human being. She was born in Brooklyn and went to school there, traveled around the States and lived in France for a couple years. She still drinks Pastis, besides the language it’s the one thing that really grew on her. Somewhere along the line she moved to Seattle, for reasons why remained vague but it didn’t seem to matter. We were largely uninterested in these details, they seemed to come up mainly out of necessity, and when they did the idea was to get through them as quickly as possible, more because we felt it necessary. We understood this is what people do when they get started, but these talks soon became less frequent until finally nonexistent. I didn’t really want to know about her upbringing and she was comfortable with that, and on the other hand, she had absolutely no pretensions as to my heritage whatsoever. This was a good thing, it seemed. We agreed people were interested in the histories of their partners only when nothing else could be discussed, only at that point where all other topics of interest were exhausted, only then can this leap into banal conversation be made, and these details seemed just that to her; banal and tiring. I couldn’t disagree. So after our first two nights together things began again in the present. However there would be relapses, these would be unavoidable.
The first of these took place on my first trip up to Seattle to see her. It had been nine days since our meeting together at the apartment. Since then there had been two weeks of solid dating, enough, I imagined, to get things going on a close level. I rented a car, a little blue Saturn -Willis still had the hatchback- and drove up there with the window partially rolled down chain smoking and avoiding the freezing cold splashing water as best I could. She lived in a small duplex apartment in Queen Anne in a neighborhood that reminded me of Thom. Kids skied down community streets into cul-de-sacs all bundled up in bright blue’s and yellow’s. Parents footed the snow affirming its compaction. Men wearing colorful beanies waved up at me everywhere I went. There were entire communities of nonsmoking people. I felt I would outlive my welcome.
Her place was clean and warm. She had thick carpet that left foot prints, big Native-American wool blankets, and a snow white well groomed cat that seemed rooted to the spot –a loafer paid in fish and milk whose only job is to just kind of give the room a winter ambience.
“That’s Garfunkle,” she said, pointing at the cat who acknowledged her with a look of bored indifference as I walked in.
I waved at Garfunkle.
“So this is the place,” she said shrugging.
“I want to wake up here every morning,” I said, looking around the room and associating every object in it with her. Standardized pictures of her time in France, a wooden sail boat on the mantel, the electric fire, a Norse God, a fuzzy forest green toilet lid cover, tea tree facial soaps; I could roll myself up in her apartment and disappear.
“You want to?” she asked, drawing closer and hugging me.
The fact that we hadn’t had sex yet became remarkably apparent.
“Shall we get a couple of drinks?” I asked, nervously slapping my thighs with my hands and feigning interest in a picture she had hung on the wall.
She stood by the Eiffel Tower bundled up with dark colored scarves. A man stood near her playing a violin and wearing an Anglobasque beret looking solemnly at the ground. She wore a facial expression of nervous excitement. Another man, dressed like the violinist and holding a flute, held his palm out to her in anticipation. The movements of her body indicated she were taking a step away from him.
“It’s the middle of the day!”
“Well…” I broke off, shrugging.
“I’ve got some Pinot Noir in the cupboard,” she said walking into the kitchen.
“That will be fine,” I said, sitting down on the couch.
I tried activating Garfunkle but there was no use, he was on the clock.
“So what have you been doing?” I called out to the kitchen.
“What?” I heard echo through the room.
“What have you been doing?” I yelled.
“Oh, yeah. Just kind of...you know?”
“What’s that?”
“Huh?”
“Again please?” I sounded out.
She brought out the glasses and set them down on the wooden table all littered with Scientific American and National Geographic. We drank in silence.
“A refill?” she asked after we had downed them in only a few minutes.
“Uh, please,” I said, pretending to wonder if it were a good idea.
“So how’s it been going in Portland? Have you talked to Willis at all?” I heard from the kitchen.
“No, haven’t talked to him.”
“Are you going to see your brother here in town?”
“I might swing by.”
“What’s that?”
“I might swing by,” I hollered.
“Oh okay.”
She came back with the wine glasses and again we drank in silence.
“What uh…what vintage is this?” I asked, eyeing the empty glass down and setting it on the table.
“I don’t know. Should I check?”
“No, that’s okay.”
We sat in silence a little longer, looking around the room.
I looked at her seriously for the first time since I came in. She had braided her hair in two locks that came down to her shoulders. Some curly parts hung on the freckles by her bright green eyes. She drank wine with her hands cupped around the glass pretending not to notice the look I gave her. Garfunkle yawned and shifted his weight on the top of the couch between us. The air conditioner was again present.
I finally lunged at Rainy. She lunged back. We rocked back and forth on the couch kissing violently. Within seconds her shirt was off and I was kissing her warm body. She sat back on the couch and I pounced on her, causing Garfunkle to jump onto the coffee table and knock off the glasses. Rainy tore my shirt off throwing the buttons all over the room and just like that we made love.
It went like that until evening time and we decided on going out for dinner. I thought I’d take the rental because her car is too small. Rainy said she knew a place –a small Greek joint with a floral veranda. The hostess suggested we sit inside and gave us a look when we suggested the veranda.
“It’s ice cold out there.”
“Sounds good, keeps the joints active,” I said while she looked on in bewilderment.
It was ice cold but good. The sky was a dark blue and the stars were coming out. Every waking moment more would collect in the sky. It was the first time I ever registered the idea that stars don’t abruptly appear, as if day suddenly became night. There was this other thing, twilight. The day leaves in grades and visible shapes slowly form in the sky, you can even watch them, like shells on the floor of the ocean become visible after the sand you kicked up settles down. This thought made Rainy happy and we rubbed one another down to stay warm. I thought about those drives I took when I was younger, the slow change in environments, the absence of borders, the harmony of land.
“Can you blow rings with steam?” She asked, making a straw sip motion with her mouth and blowing into the air.
“I don’t think so. You can try it with a cigarette,” I said, pulling a stick out of the pack.
“I don’t smoke,” she said crassly.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, “for some reason that fact didn’t compute.”
“Compute,” she smiled.
The waiter came with the menus and we selected whatever we couldn’t understand at random. As we talked and waited for the food to come a man stood not far from us starring at Rainy. He was well dressed and looked about forty-something. He had a concentrated look in his eyes, and he didn’t seem to notice when I looked back and forth between him and her trying to make something out of it before finally bringing the man to her attention. I wondered whether or not it was a good idea. Rainy turned around mid-sentence and studied the man, a fresh look of worry falling over her face.
“Hello Rainy, I apologize…I didn’t want to interrupt,” the man said, approaching the side of Rainy’s chair and looking at me.
“No, no interruption,” I said, shrugging and looking at Rainy.
The man smiled at Rainy .
“Clement, this is Morgan.” she said as the expression on her face lingered.
“Ah, Morgan Rutherford,” he said, politely shaking my hand.
“Dr…” Rainy added.
I thought about the name, it didn’t seem to ring a bell although sounded familiar.
“Morgan is a friend of my fathers, he lived in Brooklyn for a long time, and,” she looked at him nervously and back at me, “he’s a friend of mine.”
Morgan again nodded politely and the two exchanged astonishment for having run into one another.
“I hope I’m not interrupting?” asked the Doctor, making to pull up a chair.
“Well actually…” Rainy began.
“Uh, no, not at all,” I broke out, while Rainy and I exchanged looks.
“Very good.”
The waiter came out and Morgan suggested we celebrate this crossing paths with champagne and ordered it immediately. Morgan worked at a hospital with Rainy’s father when she was quite a deal younger. The history was orated excitedly by Morgan while Rainy kind of gazed at the horizon distractedly. When Rainy was twenty she moved here with him and became engaged to be married.
I snapped to attention on hearing this last part.
“Rainy was a young social butterfly and I was a man eager to make a fresh start after so long working at the hospital and the two of us hit it off swimmingly,” he announced excitedly.
I nodded my head and watched Rainy stare off into space.
“I’ve been here in Seattle since, work just dictated that I be here, ah champagne…”
The waiter went around pouring glasses and Rainy gulped hers down eagerly and tapped the glass for more. I tried examining the bottle without looking rude about it.
“So are you a friend of Rainy’s?” Morgan asked after tasting the drink.
“He’s my boyfriend,” Rainy broke in.
“Ah, I see, well aren’t you lucky, young man!”
“Yes I am,” I said, reaching out to hold Rainy’s hand and laughing nervously.
Rainy drank another glass.
“When two fluttering young bees roust about in the glorious winter’s day, one might hear but a…”
Rainy got up.
“But my dear!” exclaimed the Doctor, who too got up.
I stood up reluctantly.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Uh…to the restroom?” Rainy said.
We all looked at one another and Morgan and I sat back down somewhat embarrassed.
“So I guess you two are lovers?” Morgan leaned forward, in all seriousness after she had walked out of earshot.
“I guess so.”
“And how is that going for you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“I’m sorry. You see, I probably shouldn’t be here. The truth is, I had already eaten dinner…I just, well I saw the two of you come in…Rainy she, she’s a basket case...allow me to say that, yes I believe so, she is a hand-full…”
“That’s enough,” I said, trying to figure out what to do.
He wore this green turtleneck that betrayed his body. A brim hung around his chin and flopped down in woolen cloth to his sternum. The fabric would fold into other folds and layers. It was difficult to tell where he was coming from.
“Let me just explain. I’ve known her many years…many years…”
“Like when you were nearing thirty and she was only just being born?” I asked.
“Now, OK, now I understand you’re upset! But that’s alright! That’s no problem. Here you are, the two of you, new together and I am just some old codger who happened to just waltz in here and upset your new partner here…this must be confusing for you, I’ll allow that. I’ll allow for it.”
“I just don’t want this to turn into something.”
“It won’t! It won’t! Believe me I’ll leave before she gets back, let me just say what I need to say here.”
I waved my palm out in the air and shrugged.
“After all is said and done. I love her very much. I want you to know that. She means the World to me. We came out here together, and it’s a given there was an age difference, but we got through it. Her father was a good friend of mine. We worked together at Clariton for a good many years before he went back to San Diego, he’s very successful now. I was a few years younger than he, about forty-eight, when I first noticed the fine young dove his daughter had become. She had supple…”
I waved my hand at him and shook my head.
“Okay, well then all right. In any case, we were going to be married. Although at times I’m under the impression that she only didn’t know any better, and this feeling that perhaps she might run away from me was always present. I’m no fool. I’m under no delusions women at that age stay with one partner their entire lives. But what was to come…well that I could have never predicted.”
“I take it, more than one?” I put in.
“Yes, a great many,” Rutherford said solemnly furrowing his brows and taking a sip of champagne.
His movements looked comical in a way, as if he were miming sorrow.
“When did it happen?”
“A few months into it, after we had already made the move to Seattle.”
“Why come here?” I asked.
“Like I said, her father moved to the West coast years ago because his profession was just more lucrative here, we moved so Rainy could be relatively close to her father; she visited him in San Diego once a year for most of her young life, and because, in my line of work, Seattle is an excellent place to settle down. It’s the weather; people fall apart, they need doctors. After our falling out I moved back to Brooklyn, but I couldn’t stay, a year was enough.”
“I see.”
“So, moving on, they came and went. I knew they were there, I mean, I knew they were coming; I wasn’t surprised. I dealt with it in my own way, I’m not going to bore you with that, but the problem here, and the root of my surprise, were the numbers. It would be at the very least, several times a week, but sometimes several in a day! Why there were artists, businessmen she picked up at the coffee shop, janitors, African-Americans. The numbers Clement! I had lost my mind following her around on these escapades…and she enjoyed it! As if she knew I were following her! The little princess!” he said, shouting this last part out and crinkling his lips as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.
I starred at him blankly, trying to process the randomness of this episode –on our third date.
“She ruined everything! The dirty little damsel! The nasty little strumpet!”
“That’s just about enough I think!” I said, interrupting him and causing him to look up at me as if he had just awoken out of a deep sleep.
“Yes, yes you’re quite right. I’m sorry. We’ve made up since. I’ve seen her one other time since our breaking up. We’ve made up…I shouldn’t be going on like this. I know she doesn’t want to see me. She never wanted to, I understand that now. That is why…that is why. Anyway, I should be going now,” he said getting up.
“I think that might be a good idea,” I said, getting up and politely shaking his hand.
“Good luck to you, enjoy the champagne. Please tell her I…well…tell her whatever you’d like.”
“Take care,” I said, watching him saunter off mumbling aloud.
“Nasty…nasty little whore…” I heard him say in the distance.
I sat back down again trying to understand what just happened and noticed Rainy looking out at me through the window. I waved her over.
“Is he gone for sure?” Rainy asked.
“Yes, I think he’s gone for sure.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why? It’s not your fault.”
“Well…I know what he probably told you.”
I laughed nervously, “I understand, he uh…well you were Lolita and he was an older man at the uh…”
“Clariton hospital.”
“Yeah, it’s uh…” I paused, allowing that word to sink in. “Clariton?”
“Yes, in Brooklyn, Clariton,” Rainy said, tilting her head and forming a smile, “What’s up?”
I ran out to the street. Several cars with tinted windows pulled away from the building. I approached them and tried looking in before they pulled away. A woman in a yellow Jetta threw an orange juice bottle at me and called me a creep. On the back of the car was a sign that read, “Baby on board.”
Rainy ran after me. “What are you doing? Don’t leave!” she shouted. “It was a long time ago, I’m not like the way he said. He’s fucking crazy!”
I continued to run down the street looking in car windows until finally I saw a green turtleneck not far ahead walking along on the other side of the street. It had to be him. I ran towards the man. Rainy called out behind me crying, “Clem don’t go!” Her voice sounded terrible. I couldn’t ignore it. I turned around and motioned to her with my hands that it’s fine. “It’s not about you, I’ll explain later, go back to the restaurant!” I said, turning around and sprinting towards the man. He turned the corner and when I reached it I was put to a halt with a blow to the head.
“Stay away from me!” yelled a flamboyant voice.
I stood up slowly with my vision foggy and tried connecting that voice with Rutherford’s.
“I warned you! Creep!”
There was a hand directly in front of me, I saw a finger, and I definitely saw a small black eye, and out of that eye came a bursting gush of yellow liquid. I seemed to register what was happening a split second before the liquid came out and was able to block it from getting in my eyes, but that didn’t stop the burning. I fell to my knees trying to wipe it away from my face when Rainy approached, having to step back from the acid haze.
“What happened? Oh my God!” Rainy yelled, trying to cover her mouth.
“He attacked me!” I saw the figure of a green man stepping back. “He just attacked me and I sprayed him!”
Rainy grabbed me and led me back to the restaurant cursing the man with the spray and trying to piece together what happened. I went straight to the restroom and spent a half hour flushing out my eyes while Rainy periodically checked in with little solutions she said the kitchen staff procured to help me out. The cook suggested onions and so she brought onions. The hostess said raw meat might help because it works for bruises and wondered, “Does this work for pepper spray eyes too?” Someone in the blurry fog around me suggested citrus and began to squeeze limes on my head. The staff offered to call the police but we told them it was fine and that it was only a misunderstanding. They asked us if we wanted to wrap the food to go and Rainy said it would be a good idea. The cook or someone from the kitchen took the opportunity to say the food wasn’t spicy, and don’t worry, pepper free.
Rutherford didn’t pay for the champagne. We had to use an ATM accompanied by a young waiter. Rainy promised she would pay for it.

“Third time’s a charm…” Rainy said sarcastically as she drove the car back to the house and I sat in the passenger seat. “You gonna tell me what happened?” she asked, watching me ice down my face and turning back to the road.
I rolled down the window. The breeze felt good on my forehead.
“I thought he was Rutherford.”
“I gathered that, what made you want to see him so badly? Did you want to verify everything he told you was true?”
“No, it has nothing to do with you. It’s Clariton hospital. His name is Dr. Morgan Rutherford. Lance was born in Clariton Hospital before he moved to San Diego,” I mumbled impatiently.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Lance Bennett, Morgan compiled his case history.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yep.”
“Well what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to ask him some questions, I have to know.”
“Have to know what?”
The wind shot through the car blowing receipts around.
“I don’t really know,” I said finally.
“You don’t know what you have to know?”
“Yes. I don’t know what I have to know.”
We drove on in silence. I thought about asking her how I could get in touch with Rutherford but thought it better not to. She had broken off contact with the man, it seemed, and even if she did know, I knew her reliving the pain of having to think about him ever again wouldn’t be worth whatever it is I wanted from him. He wasn’t Idleman. And besides, if I wanted Idleman I could go straight to the source. An established author and Doctor isn’t hard to find. I could find the both of them on my own. But is that what I want? What would I say when I see them? What more is there to learn? Crazy man died, end of story. Was there more to it?
By the end of the night I was resolved to drop it. This story had to have some kind of ending. It can’t continue on with some other investigation brought out by a careless counselor sometime after Lance’s death. He’s dead. It had to end there. Rutherford was himself a lunatic, there would be little he could tell me. According to the case file, he had only compiled Lance’s youth history, there’s the possibility the two had never even met. No matter how many times I ran it through my mind, this longing to understand Lance, to dig further into him kept surfacing, and there was this other thing, this one line, “Before he moved to San Diego.” Lance lived in San Diego, he was also from Brooklyn. None of this made any sense.

I awoke the next morning feeling better, and there was Rainy with coffee and light coming out from the window. Her bed was warm and comfortable and I remembered what I said about never wanting to leave, this time taking it seriously. We ate breakfast and talked about whatever was in the news and I knew right then the night before would never be discussed again. We did the crossword, the Sudoku, and then split up the funnies and read them aloud. Rainy liked pointing out ironic headlines and making up new ones. We did that together for a while until I remembered I should probably visit Thom.
“Do you want me to come or do you want to go alone?”
“Go alone.”
“Okay.”
I changed back into the shirt without the buttons out of the overnight bag I brought –the other one was soaked with pepper-spray, kissed Rainy and headed towards Thom’s.

He buzzed me through the gate and I drove in and parked near his blue Jetta, or one of the many blue Jettas there in the parking lot.
“Upstairs,” he sang into the speaker with a buzz that unlocked the door.
“Clemy, meet Ross, Ross meet Clement,” Thom proclaimed standing in the middle of the living room bouncing around with a big smile. Ross, who looked strikingly like Thom, rushed forward and shook my hand excitedly.
“You knew I was coming?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah! I buzzed you in silly,” Thom said with a tilt of the neck, “what’s wrong?”
“I need to borrow money.”
Thom looked at Ross and then back at me. I looked around the room. “This place is beginning to look more and more like a catalog.”
“I know!” Thom said laughing and clapping his hands.
“Please, sit down,” Ross said, indicating one of the love seats.
Four navy blue love seats rested on a white woolen carpet near a table of some inanimate steal and glass.
“Tea?” Ross chimed.
“No thanks.”
Thom sat down across from me and next to him, Ross. Several moments passed, it was impossible to tell, of them just kind of looking at me with big smiles.
“What is this?”
“We’re not going to give you any money,” Thom said finally, both he and Ross nodding their heads emphatically.
“Goddamn it Thom.” I said resolutely, standing up.
“Wait till you hear what we have to offer.”
“Thom, I need a loan. I ask you only because you don’t impose any interest rates, otherwise I’d go to a bank, but frankly this isn’t worth the trouble. I’d rather deal with them. When you became such a bastard I have no idea…”
“You see the way he talks to me?” Thom turned to Ross who nodded in agreement.
“Five years ago you were normal. It’s this…it’s this city. Idahoans shouldn’t move to Seattle…it’s no good for anyone...”
“Where do you get off?” Thom yelled, noticeably offended.
“Okay okay,” I said finally, walking over to the window, “let’s hear the proposition.”
“I don’t know if I want to tell you now, after this.”
We all three exchanged glances.
“What he means is,” Ross began, “we have an arrangement that might suit all of our needs, if you would only quit making the…remarks…we would tell you.”
“I’m sorry who are you again?”
Thom wiggled in his seat in aggravation, huffing his nostrils and oscillating excitedly. Ross padded him on the knees and looked at me with wide eyes. Ross was pissed off.
I made a zipping gesture with my mouth, thumb, and forefinger.
“I am an innocent third party aware of your relationship with your older brother. He’s told me everything, the way you talk to him, the way you ask him for money…”
“I can’t, I just can’t!” Thom said, throwing his arms in the air.
I looked on in astonishment.
“You see? You see what you do to him? Now you just listen. I’m aware of your alcohol abuse problems, your history of substance abuse, your getting fired from your job. You are a louse sir…”
I tried interrupting.
“Excuse me!” Ross began again, “A louse!”
Thom got up and skipped obnoxiously towards the kitchen.
“Your older brother and I are what some might call 'Successful people.’ We have ideals, beliefs, and above all, stability. These things are strangers to you. But not anymore! We’re going to help you get back on track. This is what you might call, an intervention. Thom knew you would be heading up this way and needed my support. That’s why I’m here talking to you now. It’s time to get in shape buster!”
“We’re going to exercise?” I thought about Jane Fonda, Ross and Thom all going out for milkshakes together.
“Laugh all you want! You’re not going anywhere! You’re checking into a drug clinic and I’m going to make sure you get there!”
“I’m sorry?” I asked laughing nervously. “Are you joking? Do you think that because I got laid off I’m addicted to drugs? I did some coke when I was a teenager, this is really getting out of hand...”
“We read on MSN.COM social workers are most likely to have relapses. We know the statistics.”
Thom came out into the living room with a piece of paper. “Here are the warning signs. You fit these descriptions of a high-seeking addict.”
I grabbed the paper out of his hands and read it aloud.
“This can apply to anyone,” I announced after I finished reading.
“Not here, look at this,” Thom said, pulling the paper away and pointing at number nine, “'The user will borrow money and get defensive when asked what it’s for.’”
“You never asked me what it’s for!” I shouted.
“We didn’t need to, we already knew! And have a look at this, number twelve, ‘Will reject offers of food and drink as they will appear unsavory in comparison to the drug.’”
“We offered you tea, that was a test,” Ross added.
I looked at Thom in bewilderment.
“Drug addicts hate food,” announced Thom.
“Show him number seven,” Ross said pointing at the paper.
“'The addict will appear disheveled, sometimes showing signs of lack of sleep, and will often have bruises or scars on the face from falling down during moments of drug crazed lunacy.’”
I looked down at my shirt with the missing buttons from Rainy and felt the scar on my head from the escapade with Rutherford’s doppelganger.
Ross looked on with smugness, Thom looked sympathetic. The internet printout they were holding displayed a picture of Dr. Idleman.
“How are you feeling Clement?” Thom asked finally.
“We’re here to help you Clement,” Ross added.

I ran as fast as I could. Thom had locked the door with the key from the inside and hid it somewhere during my talk with Ross. I had to take the fire escape. It wasn’t like it was in the movies. Every step I took bolts seemed to be falling off the thing. You don’t just fly down. You have to take it slowly and weigh your steps, careful not to let your leg fall through the gaps between the metal stairs. People on treadmills in the gym below Thom’s floor looked on confusedly as I ran to the car with Ross and Thom, who had taken the elevator, racing closely behind me. I couldn’t be sure, but Thom looked to be carrying a brown lunch bag and a harness of some kind.
“We’re here to help you Clemy!” he screamed from behind me.
I was able to lose them in a lackluster car chase and headed back to Rainy’s.

“I’ve got to get out of town,” I said as I came through the door tracking quickly melting snow into the living room.
“You just got here,” she hollered from the kitchen.
I told her what happened and she couldn’t believe it.
“I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true, they think I’m a drug addict.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I need to go back to Portland. When Thom resolves to care about someone…no matter how misguided he is, he’ll have the whole police force on them…”
I examined the possibility of crisis control looking for me.
“He wants to institutionalize you?” Rainy asked laughing.
“It’s not funny. You don’t understand the way these people think. They’re all hyped up on morning news and Idleman.”
“Idleman?” she asked, puzzled, giving me an awkward look.
“I have to get going.”
“You just got here. No one’s sending agents to my duplex.”
“The networks of management these people exist in are vast Rainy. Right now there are little Idleman's crawling all over the skyscrapers of Seattle looking for Thom’s renegade brother!”
“Quit mentioning his name!”
“What?” I asked confusedly.
“Just...” her tone changed, “why don’t you calm down or I’ll institutionalize you myself,” she said in a sexy drawl.
“It’s not funny! I’m not delusional. These last couple of months have been bizarre. Nothing has happened…and yet everything has happened. Things don’t normally move this quickly for me…”
She gave me a questioning look.
“No, no, no, I didn’t mean in that way, this is fine,” I said gesturing to the two of us, “I mean in other respects…Willis, Frank, and now Thom –all of these relationships now totally irreparable. What happened to just going to work and reading the newspaper, having a cup of coffee and a drink later with a friend?”
“I don’t think that lifestyle would suit you.”
“But that was my life before…”
“Lance?”
“Yep.”
“I thought we weren’t going to bring it up? It’s ridiculous that you keep bringing it up. You’re like some kind of disturbed veteran! It’s not that bad.”
“What would you do if you were me?”
“Take everyone’s advice to degrees. For instance, listen to some of what your brother says and try to find some shade of stability, like a job or something. Listen to what I say and drop the subject of Lance and ‘The meaning of life’ or whatever it is you’ve been going through and think about forgiving Willis, and maybe get something else to occupy your time.”
I thought about it for a while. “Okay. Sounds like a plan,” I said finally, “I’ll go back to Portland, call Willis, find some new healthcare job, and pick up a hobby. How’s jazz saxophone sound, huh? Maybe I can play the sax at a bank or something, they can hire me out, like ‘Jazz up your mortgage’ you know?”
“You asked for my opinion.”
“I need to get going.”
“I’m only trying to help.”
“Don’t say that!” I hollered, edging towards the door.
“Say what? That I’m here to help you Clement?”
“Who told you to say that?” I yelled, moving quickly towards the car without waiting for an answer.
“Call me when you’re not a goddamn lunatic!” She called out from the house.
I paused and stopped before entering the car and sat down on the curb to think. Children continued to ski down the street with parents walking briskly behind them. Men in yellow parkas threw a Frisbee through the air and exaggerated the retrievals. Is there something here I’m missing? I thought to myself.
I stood up and turned around to notice Rainy still on the porch.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not looking up and making a show of kicking my shoes around in the snow bashfully.
“It’s okay,” she replied in a soft, maternal voice.
She came down from the porch and there was an awkward embrace. She promised to come see me within the week and I told her that would be fine.

The Endless Concord, Chapter 14

XIV. Charley the lamplighter


Rainy appeared on Friday and I buzzed her in. She was as tall and pretty as I had remembered and I wondered if I looked any different.
“You keep a good apartment for the depressed alcoholic you make yourself out to be,” she said, stepping over the downed refrigerator in the hallway and stepping into an appliance free room.
“Special muscle wine,” I said, flexing nonexistent muscles and smiling.
“What on earth?”
I poured us two glasses of the $4.00 whiskey and watched her swirl the glass and smell it.
“It has a shoe smell to it.”
“That’s the great Cambodian Alps you’re onto there.”
“What’s this bubbly paper residue?” she asked, pointing out the odd bloated cork material in the glass, although there was no cork.
“Those are flavor crystals.”
It felt good to be in the presence of a woman. I wanted to impress her somehow and I felt oddly capable of it, as if I had been hibernating, all the while stylish replies and airy topics swirled around in my sleeping head. She was anxious to laugh and that was good. We could say nothing at all. We agreed on everything under the sun.
We polished off the bottle of Special Muscle Wine sitting on the couch talking about Frank and Willis and Thom and every job she and I had ever had. She thought it amazing so much had happened to me in the last few months. She thought it good of me not to think ill of Frank for stealing the appliances. She said it denoted a lack of materialism and attachment to Worldly objects. I wondered if she were religious or not and she told me she wasn’t.
“Are you?” She asked, drawing closer.
I tried thinking of a joke I could tell, maybe tell her I am the reincarnation of the late reverend of Gods messianic kingdom, Jim Jones.
“Not really, no, not at all actually.”
“Good, I don’t want to get involved with one of those religious freaks. I had an ex like that.”
“How so?”
“Just over-the-top I guess.”
“What qualifies over-the-top?”
She brushed her hair behind her ears and sat up a bit on the couch to face me. I braced myself for something good.
“Nothing cultish or anything. He was a Scientologist.”
“I see.”
“It’s like religion meets business.”
“The Grand Inquisitor.”
“It’s oriented around maximizing your personal success.”
“How’s that?”
“The subjective can sometimes disagree with the objective, so instead of altering your perception on the events around you, you instead alter the events around you.”
“Sounds like a power meeting at a stock party.”
“In a way it is. But his problem was, he couldn’t alter his objective reality to reasonably suit his own ends.”
“Did he try to…maximize you?” I asked smilingly.
“It’s not funny! It was terrible. He just looked so pathetic. It’s like a homeless person trying to capitalize on his friends and somehow not getting it right. I felt sorry for him.”
“There’s the meek and humble and then there is the vain and self-involved. You expect one to look like what he is. When the first crosses over into the later it’s confusing. ‘Who does this guy think he is?’”
“I think that’s what pathetic means.”
“Yep, a man swimming in shit trying to look dignified. Maybe a top-hat or something.”
“Great, thanks for the metaphor.”
“Is he still an...uh...Scientologist?”
“No, he couldn’t afford to reach the next level. He sold his car and only had enough money to reach like, level 3 or something.”
“Is that how it works?” I asked, pouring us another drink.
“It’s like Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know. Anyway, he went to that same church Brian Seabeck goes to in California. He went to visit. They wouldn’t let him in because it was on some other level and he wasn’t maximized enough.”
“Sounds like the story of my life.”
“…All the Travolta's in the World…”
“So were all those guys trying to ‘objectify’ movies like 'Cocktail' and 'Grease' and program them into our society?” I asked laughing.
“Yeah, have you ever seen ‘They Live’?”
“Yep. A masterpiece.”
“It’s just like that. Some kind of elitest mothership filled with little Cruises and Kidmans.”
“Jesus. Stepford life, Logans run, a Brave New World of little Hubbards running around with lavender hankerchiefs tucked in around their necks.”
“That kind of self-assurance scares me honestly.”
“They’ll tell you you’re weak.”
“And that’s what he did, he told me I was weak.”
“You’re not weak. The weak are self-assured. They wear disguises. They seek unity in the church or the office, some face to get behind. You are powerful in that you know your life will end. You will die and there won’t be any mother ship captained by Brian Seabeck soaring off into the omni-verse.”
“Who would captain your mother ship?”
“Woody Allen,” I answered without hesitation.
She smiled.
I did an impression of Woody Allen trying to give directions to Burt Reynolds using intergalactic anti-semitic coffee shops as landmarks. She got a kick out of it. I thought about putting on some music and starred blankly at the space where the stereo used to be.
“So tell me about your patients…or former patients, whatever. Have you had anything else exciting happen besides the masturbation and the dead guy?”
“Clients.”
“Whatever.”
I thought for a while. Suddenly I remembered that fourth person, the shadow sitting in the room at dawn I tried stifling when I was with Frank and intoxicated the other night, a memory of this man I had long tried burying. Willis had also mentioned it, right after my meeting with Team Teamwork, but I had ignored it. Bits and pieces began to come back to me and I wondered if it were far too depressing for the first date.
“Alright,” I conceded after some hesitation, “but it’s not something I break down into a synopsis.”
“Will I regret it?”
“Probably.”
“OK shoot.”
“What?”
She waved her hand in a rolling motion.
“I…”
“Wait, wait!” she interrupted, pouring out the rest of the Muscle Wine into the glasses and getting comfortable. “Continue,” she added in an English upper-class tone of voice and a roll of the hand.
“I was at the Golden Sun when I first started,” I began, sitting up in my seat and taking on a node of seriousness she seemed receptive to. “It was a place of long corridors that led to stockrooms and stockrooms that led to even longer corridors. The building served as a hotel years ago and had been around since the early 1900’s.”
She rolled her eyes.
“What?”
“Is this a ghost story?”
“No, now listen up…”
She saluted me.
“I only mention the atmosphere because it’s an important detail. The presence of some of these old buildings, not necessarily unique for that time period, carry a kind of well preserved force majeure. It’s this knowing static intensity that just kind of looms heavily, unmoving. It’s like a withered old black eyed woman in the rocking chair of a front porch in the middle of nowhere, the wrinkles between her skin just kind of gathering dust. There’s this isolation to the place. It’s at once a treatment facility, an aging hotel, and finally a depravation tank fallen off the edge of the universe. To work a graveyard in the place…I mean Jesus. They would have made some kind of reality fear show about it. There are no ghosts…just manifestations of something buried deep within us these environments conger up. It’s just a depth; a well of thoughtful hyperactivity. People have lived, cried, loved and died in these places. They resonate.
“This is the background of this building. At the very least it’s twelve stories high with two creaky old elevators, a flight of stairs, fire escape on the side of the building, about 150 bedrooms and a whole network of stockrooms and locked rooms and rooms with desks and rooms without them. We usually kept to the first few floors except for the occasional room check or some massive janitorial problem.
“So towards the beginning of my time there I worked graveyard. My job was essentially to sit there on the first floor and buzz people in and out and keep a log of faces I see and behavior...”
“The strange man in the white lab coat,” Rainy interrupted.
“Right. I sat there every night essentially watching and waiting. If something were to go wrong procedure was to buzz the office on the second floor and those guys would come down and assist me. At night there were usually three of us –two in the office and one at the front desk rotating every two and a half hours. I never really knew what I was waiting for really. I had an idea of why I was writing in the log but it was just an idea. You see, they are allowed to come and go. The purpose of the buzzer is one, to keep their drug dealing friends out, and two, to delay them long enough so that we might identify them and write that we saw them down in the log. If we don’t see someone for longer than three days we know there’s a problem. If the mark in the log says, ‘out’ we know this person is probably in jail. If it says, ‘in’ it means there was probably an overdose and we’re going to find a body in a room somewhere. This place is mainly a drug and alcohol facility, but moreover, it’s an old hotel where people pay rent with government checks. They pick up the meds we give them and that’s about it. We host a few meetings but no one really shows. They bring booze and drugs in all the time and, so long as we don’t see it, there’s little we can do, and the absolute least we can do is make sure we know whether or not these people are dead or in jail.
“The reality is this; people slip through the cracks…these people have been inside one of these cracks their whole lives. The building itself is a tear in the social fabric of things. None of this should be there. It’s an effect of things no one wants to see, no one wants to admit. Does the caretaker of nonexistence become nonexistent? We’re working in this hole and we know it! You can feel it. So you act accordingly. You let your mind drift; you disappear in the corridors for a while with the door ajar. You take thirty minute long cigarette breaks. We all did it…
“So naturally checkmarks were missing from the log and checkmarks were forged. When you’re doing close to nothing, in nothing, you might as well do nothing. The graveyard was the place to do it.”
“Did someone die in their room?” Rainy asked, noticeably interested.
“Not exactly,” I began again, feeding off her interest. “There was a client…I had met him briefly and only in passing. He looked pretty forgettable, I mean, in that kind of work. Deep in that crack. He was anorexic and had an elevated case of scabies…”
Rainy cringed.
“He had this slicked back oily hair saturated in nicotine and tuberculosis and wore this hunter green shirt perpetually covered in coffee…”
“What was his name?”
I thought about it for a moment. The name Lance Bennett danced on the tip of my tongue and I wondered why. It would surface every time I pictured the face of the man. Their names, the images of these men, seem to resonate at the end of a hyper-colored coil, the chemical makeup all busted out of shape and hysterical, melding into one another, forming a confused and twisted life-form. There are fish in oceanic trenches with glow-in-the-dark eyes.
Finally, from this depth, the name surfaced. “Charley Crane.”
“It sounds so innocent,” said Rainy, looking teary eyed.
I nodded gravely and continued. “After a few weeks of working there I finally decided to look over the past logs. I knew I'd be transferring to the Plaza soon and that I might as well make my mark somewhere. The logs would be a place to start. They were dusty, looking as if never read. Well, they hadn’t been. We had been so used to doing the check-mark thing and filing the sheets away we never bothered to really pay attention to them, aside from a few names that were on emergency watch…”
“For the high risk level patients?”
“Exactly, ones perhaps with noticeable track marks that hadn’t eaten in days and so on. Charley wasn’t on that list, his name rarely came up at meetings; his check sheets had floated by empty and unnoticed, and what I discovered when taking an interest and looking into them, unnoticed for three months.”
“Oh my God.”
“Most days there was nothing in the log about him, and other days there were a couple of words so no one would be alerted like, ‘Looked fine,’ or, ‘Self-talk.’ But that was just stuff filled in later because we hadn’t been paying attention; ‘He’s probably around here somewhere so I’ll just write this.’ Anyway, there were stacks of these papers, and finally none at all. The man had just been erased from our little register. It was possible for him; his meds were self-care and he wasn’t on room watch. He was the perfect candidate to disappear completely.
“I reported everything immediately to the other two on duty that night. They were tired but willing to investigate. We knocked on the door. Of course there was no answer. We filed an emergency entry form on the online register and we were in the room within half an hour…”
“Oh my God,” Rainy said again, burying her head in her hands, “I’m scared of the outcome.”
“The room was empty. Clean and empty. No note, nothing. It was puzzling. All logic would have suggested he was probably outside somewhere, staying with a relative, whatever. But it seemed impossible for this client…it was impossible. The second a guy like that steps out of that neighborhood red flags go up. He’d be in a holding facility within a week. These guys have fingerprints and they’re all registered with us. Blinking lights come up on computers at police offices. They can’t legally admit that type of person into a jail for longer than forty-eight hours.”
“What about family?”
“None. We were on that too: missing, dead, murdered. The more we dug up on Charley Crane that night, the more his absolute and total disappearance from our universe was confirmed. He wasn’t out there, it doesn’t happen like that. These people have been living with this identity for so long, they don’t just reverse one day. Medication, treatment, these things aren’t designed to make you get better, they’re designed to keep you neutral, static. Static Charley was a walking red-flag for police and healthcare agents.”
“What about social security money?”
She knew we could have tracked him based on account withdraws, I was impressed. “He had SSI, a kind of card, checks just went into that. We checked into that too. Can you guess?”
“Untouched.”
“Yup. Untouched. A crack in the universe and the man just crawled inside.”
“Is that it?”
“Nope. This is a building with three healthcare employees with nowhere to go and nothing to do. We can’t leave. For eight hours we’re just kind of stuck there, and we were on the case. For the three of us this was all there is. Men naturally become detectives. You don’t want the case to end, you don’t want the daylight to come through the windows. This would be a night without an ending, it seemed to us. We were ready. We made coffee, we searched his case files, we looked at pictures, we interviewed clients.”
“Wasn’t there someone you could call?”
“Of course, there’s emergency administrators. All the administrators from all the facilities become floating emergency staff on graveyard shifts. That night just happened to be Willis. Carla Black was off. We called him and remarkably he came. I hadn’t known him that well at the time. At the plaza I had only done a kind of preliminary shift, but still, there was enough dialogue shared between us for him to trust me enough to get out of bed and drive all the way downtown –which he was obligated to do anyway but they rarely did.
“So by two in the morning three became four. Willis picked up on the ominous significance of our task almost immediately. Although the man, at times, can be a lifeless empty space, there is a kind of cosmic rhythm to him. He is like an asteroid belt. There is mystery to this nothingness. Exploding asteroids in space make no sound. That is what he is, the point where they make no sound…” I paused, realizing I missed Willis.
“So we stood in one of the upper offices with the windows open and the cold air blowing snow into the room. We turned the florescent lights off just leaving desk lamps to light the room. Don’t ask me why we did this, there is no logical reason for it, but that’s what we did. Something phantasmagorical was happening, we were in the gloam and we knew it. ‘This is the gloaming,’ we told ourselves.
“Willis sent orders in all directions and we followed them without a moment’s hesitation. We knew he was in the building, we just knew it, but the circumstances surrounding his being there were something we couldn’t have predicted. That was perhaps this ‘gloaming,’ these circumstances. It was superstition, but this place, this place was like the gate to some other world, and in all honesty, in a way, it was just that. The resolve was to search every corridor, every office, every stockroom we thought had always been locked. Some rooms there were no keys for, others there were, some seemed to open in expectation.
“We split up and searched the building like a torch guided mob of overall wearing family men searches the forest for that invisible thing in the darkness, something they expect to find, this thing they know will be there but will never be fully revealed. The face of the marauder evades the marauded for fear that identification will be something altogether ugly; this darkness that stays deep beneath consciousness, something so totally beyond our comprehension. By this time…I don’t know, maybe it was just drowsiness and delirium, but we were expecting nothing short of the face of God...and we bounced this caffeinated affirmation off of one another accordingly. We would open the door to a room housing Armageddon. We were sure of it.”
“With this lead-in it better be,” Rainy said laughing shamelessly.
“You don’t understand this kind of hysteria! You put certain people together in a place like that, under the right circumstances, and you’re all delusional; the world our clients live in becomes our own. We’re all chasing ninjas and assailants.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
Rainy emptied her glass and set it on the table.
“We ran into clients during our search,” I began again. “They seemed to pick up on the black magic of our task. The faces of dogs tell the story of a storm to come long before it comes. People were banging doors, others were screaming. Jasper was on the stairs vomiting and praying to God. No one really told them what was happening…they just felt it. Schizophrenics are conductive and far more finely tuned-in to the coming apocalypse than we.”
“So what happened?”
“I opened the door to a room and found Charley Crane.”
Rainy looked on with wide eyes red and glazed over.
“It was a boardroom companies used to hold meetings, now converted into a stockroom. Before Charley, the door to this room probably hadn’t been opened in years. He opened it once. I opened it again.”
Rainy cried. I held her and whispered in her ear.
“He had brought food in with him. There was a bathroom there in the room he used for several weeks. He never left. It was said later on he had survived in there for two months on whiskey, soda and dry food. He was dead, I knew it the second I entered the room.”
Rainy shivered and cried more.
“But there was something good about this. When I called the other three up, and we entered, we noticed, somehow immediately and in harmony, the window he sat facing was facing West. Don’t ask me how we knew but we were certain he died during sundown of the day before. And we were right. His medical analysis confirmed he died of starvation and malnutrition at somewhere around 6:00 P.M. Rainy, we discovered his body at sunup the following day. For two months he was locked in that room, and we opened it twelve hours after his death. We didn’t know this man, we were his caretakers and he was a ghost to us, but I speak for all of us when I say that in that moment we’ve never been closer to anyone in our lives than that man. He had somehow slipped out of that crack and into the four of us.”
Rainy sobbed some more and I held her. “Are there a lot of stories like this in your line of work?”
“There are very many.”
“Oh my God…” she said again.
We sat on the couch for a while longer. She sobbed more and I held her. I thought about the look on Willis’ face that night. He was the next in the room after me. He only nodded his head. The World was moved out of his reach with that nod. Willis seemed to have washed his hands clean of all of it in those few moments. The thought of Willis being this far removed and myself being present for that last straw, it was terrifying. Although I had hardly known Willis then, the feeling there were two people that died that day lingered.

The Endless Concord, Chapter 13

XIII. Coping with Coping


I awoke on the floor. The carpet span around the room. I was on the wall and then suddenly on the ceiling. I had absolutely no sense of gravity. I crawled to the toilet and vomited and then sat on the tile by the toilet for a long time trying to imagine what had happened the day before but nothing came to mind. My head felt hot, raging, as if the insides of my skull were melting, or my brain were being cooked on a frying pan. My bones hurt and my body felt weak. I couldn’t bring myself to stand up for fear I’d collapse. So I didn’t, I just sat there, creaking and prostrated on baby blue tile. For a long time I studied the strips of plastic between the floor and the walls. The dust lodged inside. I looked up at the vent in the ceiling, “Nutone” was scrawled across it in 50’s retro cursive. It resonated softly. Judging by the light coming through the window I guessed it was early afternoon. I reached up and turned on the light and watched it burn for a while, starring up at it as if I were going to go blind looking at the sun. I realized I hadn’t studied these things in a long time. When I was younger, I remembered, I would often study the patterns the paint dots made on the white walls housing my room. There’s an education in the tiny details that haven’t yet been exhausted by the busy world. Those subtle little areas of space one would never think about can teach a great deal; some men have blanketed themselves in those places. They have found corners to hide in. There are many of these people in society; a man whose hobby it is to scrutinize the patterns of a snail shell, everyday searching the objects for some hidden meaning, and discovering it –although perhaps nothing he can rationally explain to an audience of busy people. Or a bicycle mechanic discovering an entire micro-Dysnical world in the mechanics of his gears and tiny parts; it’s as if in every object an interactive microcosmic universe awaits discovery. There are cubby holes to crawl into in these worlds. You can live in them, forever wondering about the engineering of a Tesla coil and how this object defines everything else, mirrors everything else. Tiny bugs in Africa, dead ants on a hot sidewalk in Texas, power lines strung up against a bright blue sky on a summer day in the suburbs of Chicago; there is life in these things. They are invitations, hideouts in occupied time in space, eyepieces in which to live through.
I vomited again and lay down on the floor starring up at the ceiling.
I was eventually able to kind of half walk out of the restroom and climb onto the couch in the living room. An empty bottle of Special Muscle Wine sat on the table. Seeing it there filled me with a deep hatred for the Cambodian people. There is absolutely nothing worse than this hangover. I pictured them all huddled around one another and the stack of exports bound for America, laughing and enjoying themselves. A man climbs the distilling tank and pours in this florescent chemical. “Laundry Detergent,” the bottle reads, held above the tank until empty and cast away to the jabbering of Cambodians. A thick musky dirt and grime fills the air as he lowers himself down from the tank, kicking chickens away and receiving pats on the back from his friends, who wear the expressions of men who toiled in steamy, pipe-filled environments stirring troughs and hollering at one another over the sound of burning metal all day. I thought about Lance again while looking at the bottle. I remembered Frank the night before talking endlessly about Carla Black and laughed to myself. He never liked Willis until he learned Willis liked him. When did I pass out on the floor?
I stood up with effort and rubbed the stinging hot back of my head and walked into the kitchen to pour some orange juice but my hand grabbed at thin air when I went to open the refrigerator. I made another effort. Thin air. There was no handle. There was no refrigerator. The refrigerator was missing. I paused and registered the idea that I may have never had a refrigerator. But the thought was lost as I looked over all the “Keep Refrigerated” products strewn about the countertop. Men without refrigerators don't keep products such as these within arms reach. Eggs lay on the verge at room temperature, milk on the brink, cheeses sending out warning signals. The food looked like freshly caught fish struggling for life in an ice chest. The countertop, ordinarily a temporary place of residence, was now the last stop. They had certainly passed that mark. There would be no going back.
I found skuff marks on the tile flooring leading to the carpet and then followed a trail of carpet tracks leading to the door. The thin strip of gold plastic separating the carpet from the tile was torn, as was the thick gold strip of plastic separating the carpet from the outside. The refrigerator was dragged out of my apartment. There were cigarettes put out in the sink. Several cans of beer littered the floor. All evidence pointed to some kind of refrigerator removal party. The microwave was also missing as well as the blender, the juicer, toaster, and the coffee pot. That wasn’t all, there were no television in the living room, no videos, no radio. All gone. A good amount of my clothes were taken as well as my watch. I looked in my briefcase and was surprised to find my laptop computer still there. I walked into the living room and sat on the couch looking at all the empty spaces where my objects used to be. They had even gotten the dust buster.
On the glass table between the couch and where my television used to be was a note; it was dated and signed by Frank. The presence of this letter seemed totally unsurprising, as if it had always been there, in itself a necessary piece of furniture to synchronize the events of my life. It couldn’t have turned out any other way. I knew this letter would be there and I somehow knew the refrigerator would be gone. Why did I put my computer in my briefcase and put the briefcase in my closet? It’s as if all along we both knew Franks role in our relationship, as if I had hired him to make a decision for me. But what decision? The decision to leave? Did I need something to legitimize my moving on? Maybe. When you’re digging a hole sometimes it’s best to keep digging and see if that hole doesn’t bottom out somewhere. Is this why I let Frank stay with me? Did I know it all along? I finally picked up the letter and studied it. The words seemed to fall off the page, moving across it in diagonals and running into one another at the ends of each line, as if he had tried correcting himself on each second line by writing as straight and evenly as possible, not registering the fact that the previous lines were written at an almost 45 degree angle.

Dear Clemy,
If you’re reading this letter you probably discovered that most of your stuff is missing. If you’re wondering if I had planned this out the whole time the answer is that I hadn’t. It was a spur the moment thing I put together with Mingus and some of the boys while you were passed out drunk. Sorry buddy, that’s the way it goes. You’re still probably one of my only friends, this is just the way I do things. Didn’t they warn you about getting involved with patients in training and all that? I heard they did. I heard they warn you about this kind of thing. Good advice. It’s not that we want to do it…it’s just that we feel obligated to do it. If it helps I was reluctant the whole time. We were just kind of going through the motions, you know? We all felt bad Clem. Even Mingus refrained from going through your pockets and taking off your clothes. “I won’t do it, out of respect,” he told me. I almost cried when I heard it.
It wasn’t easy for us. That refrigerator is tough work. Have you ever tried to move one of those things? Holy shit! Man was that work. In the end we just dragged the goddamn thing out. Mingus cut his hand on the coil thing on the bottom. Don’t worry he’s fine. Anyway, so we wound up accidentally dropping that thing outside your door. It looked pretty broken so we left it there. Hey maybe you can fix it or something! Like a project, you know? Something to keep your mind in order? Also, you might have difficulty opening your door, you might want to call someone about that.
The television came out a little easier. Luckily you don’t have too many cables. A lot of people have satellite dishes and all of that junk. You can’t really sell one of those because the companies know their own, so it’s just extra material. We were thankful you didn’t have one. Not even a cable box, which amounts to a lot of extra cords we can’t do anything with. Unplug and go, that’s the way to do it.
Alright kiddo, that’s about it. If you’re pissed I understand, there was a lot of good shit in there. Also, you really need to get your life back in order man. I mean, I know you don’t need my advice or nothing, or maybe you do I don’t know, but man you’ve been depressing the shit out of me. Take it from me buddy, as a guy whose been around the block, once you go down that road it gets to a point where there’s no going back. Hitting rock bottom isn’t a novelty like a lot of these new young kids think it is. When you hit it you know where you are, and there’s no goddamn microwaves and refrigerators down there, take it from me. You’ve got to clean up your act, screw your head on straight! You’re still young, you’re smart, you’re a damn good kid! There’s lots of other jobs out there, quit sitting on your ass alright? Alright. Good luck Clemy!
Oh yeah, Mingus wants to add something.

Mingus: Don’t you go telling nobody! I get you and set you straight mother fucker!

Yours truly,
Frank.

I stood up and opened the door. Sure enough, the refrigerator was lying on its side in the middle of the hallway just like Frank promised. I closed the door and sat back down on the couch to think. Near the cubby hole where the television used to be rested the copy of Two Halves Don’t Make a Whole by Dr. Idleman. The large head on the spine wore a self-assured grin. I told you so, Idleman seemed to be saying. I picked it up and studied the cover, finally opening it and revealing a hologram of the two parts of the body unable to connect. When you move it to a certain angle there’s a cartoon picture of a man sharing both halves and holding his stomach in pain. You can tell he’s in pain because of the lightning bolts all around his face. I opened it up to chapter 1, realizing I was still holding Franks letter, I put the letter back on the table and began flipping through the book settling somewhere towards the beginning and started reading.

Two Halves Don't Make a Whole, By Dr. Idleman, Chapter 3, “A Shallow Pond is a Deep Well.”
Is God God? Is Devil Devil? How is God God without Devil Devil? How is Devil Devil without God God? Isn’t God God because Devil is Devil? This concept applies to all things. Look at your skin. There are tiny cells in your skin. Those cells are made of tiny atoms. Those atoms are active because positively charged particles and negatively charged particles interact with one another creating energy. A battery uses the same concept. Or a magnet –which actually pushes the energy of equal charge away from itself. Positive opposes negative and vice versa. The two work in unison. Here we see the groundwork for life. The wealthy don’t finally realize what they have until they realize the suffering of others. Studies show that the people of isolated communities don’t begin to engage in domestic conflict until those communities cease to be isolated and their media, government and way of life become an object of international scrutiny. Suddenly an island rich with resources is not good enough, an oppressive military is in order, an industrialized economy, a sea of magazines and images telling the populous how it should dress and how it should behave under the new international standards become items of necessity. Here we see oppression in this case spawned completely out of comparison. As could be easily guessed, the people of this World finally realized what they had lost. That they lost it is inevitable. The island World in this example is a man hanging from a cliff searching the darkness for a hand it pulled down with him. Or pulled up? Time will show the hand pulls both up and down. This in view, there are no actions inherently good because there is always a mirror World in which those actions were either the cause or effect of something ultimately bad (in this case the man hanging from the cliff was in bad shape but still had a grip on the rock. Like the island, his falling didn’t result until he reached for the hand of the one on top. Both, of course, fell). Should it be the effect, the effect will then be a cause and so on, forever a roller coaster of conflicting algorithms, a spiral into another spiral into another spiral etc. This is so because life is stimulus and by its nature stimulus is the interaction between opposing factors. It is in our language, it is in everything. Nature again and again confirms death is both the beginning and end of life.
So how then can we begin?
At a human level we must remember that this “stimulus” isn’t necessarily an interaction between two events, but millions of equally opposed events: “How are you today?” “I am depressed.” “Why?” “Because I’m fighting with my wife.”
But is that true? Can person B. really narrow down his emotions to something that simple? Or does it always ultimately boil down to being completely and totally confused as to why he’s really depressed? –in most cases this confusion being the depression itself. (If it were as simple as this people wouldn’t hire psychiatrists!) Identifying the problem is 90% of it, and more than anything accounts for 99% of our jobs. The reality is, however, that at some point person B’s floodgates opened and he could no longer account for his emotions. Imagine too many house guests flooding through your door, your wife tells you “Mr. So and So is frightfully intoxicated and bickering with Dr. This and That…please mediate honey,” but who are these people? You’re in a room packed to the edges with several hundred So and So’s. Indeed, who really are these people!
You realize here that you should have sat by the door and greeted every one of them before they stepped in! If you have any questions you know whom to see! If you have any problems you know where to find them! If you’re in search of a special someone to help you finish a joke you know where to go!
So you see, depression is that crowded house, and more people are rushing in. If you let it go on like this the guests will sober up and start beating up on one another! None of the guests in this story are particularly bad or good. They are neutral. Or they are both in one breath. They are, as people, potentially anything. But for your own good, so as to solve potential problems, you must simply know what they are and where they are and how to categorize them. You must identify them and categorize them from the onset; that way you know where to go when you need to recall something…or when you need to hide something. Every event should be identified as neutral, labeled, and put away in the shelf inside the library of your own head.
The idea here is this; every rock skipped across a pond creates a ripple. Every skipped rock sinks. Sunken rocks are eventually carried to the banks and skipped again. That which begins, ends, and begins again, and ends again, taking on different shapes, different attitudes, different lives. You put the book on the shelf with the label “Fought with Wife,” but inside that book is an altogether different story. It’s rich and complex, adrift on a sea of billions of other nameless little worries and subtle insanities, all of which tell the story of another book to come, and then another. Remember that this book is only a volume in a series, and the series itself is a volume in a larger catalog. Like the house guests of your head; every word, every chapter, and every book must be categorized so you know where to find it when you need it.
Ask yourself what you would name this catalog. Think about it. The only answer fitting is “life.” Life is both horrible and wonderful in the same breath. The destruction caused by the tornado is almost worth watching the tornado destroy. Burned forests create better soil deposits for new forests. Tidal waves give surfers a good ride. The Yin Yang is two opposing life-forms giving birth to one another for infinity. There is no division, no walls. This shape is the energy of life, it is life. The beginning and end of all things is the beginning and end of all things...

I finished reading the chapter and put the book down mildly confused. It wasn’t what I expected at all. I had expected something bland, full of contradictions masked by silly little witticisms and cartoons. This material on the other hand seemed mildly educated, although convoluted and nonsensical, educated. As I read between the lines again it seemed he was trying to come to this point, namely, that there is no such thing as salvation, that salvation is an illusion that creates want. If things are treated neutrally one is no longer susceptible to depression, but going by his logic, no longer susceptible to happiness either. I liked the idea of it. Although it didn’t seem in any way at all new. I got this feeling he was taking a much simpler concept and masking it somehow. The concept of the island was obviously inspired by Aldous Huxley. But the mirror thing was interesting. He was taking Newtons third law and applying it to every area of life. Comparing everyday social stimulus to a cosmic sea of relativity. In other words, oppression creates protest, protest creates oppression, oppression again creates protest. So what was he suggesting? How could this possibly be a self-help book?
I flipped through again intent on reading more but instead put the book down and leaned back on the couch. Moving from the crouched reading position made my whole body ache and again I remembered I was completely hungover.
I put the book back on the shelf and folded up the letter, put it in my back pocket, and went through the groceries on the counter to see if there was anything salvageable. There was spinach and garlic, and the eggs looked okay. It hadn’t been long enough anyway. I figured I had another 24 hours before they skipped over to the other side completely. I made a spinach, egg, and garlic sandwich. I used 3 eggs so as to get the most use out of them before they went South.
I sat on the couch for a while thinking about Frank, Willis, Lance and Idleman. This Idleman and Lance's Idleman seemed totally different from one another. I wondered if perhaps Idleman knew he had to draw a distinction in himself between the way he feels and his practice, but the more I thought about it the more I would tell myself I shouldn’t think about it. I wanted to believe Idleman was a joke, it is imperative I believe this.

That evening the phone caught me off guard as I walked out of the shower still dripping on the carpet. I hadn’t even realized it was there but I picked up the chord and followed it out of the apartment. It was lying near the refrigerator. I unthinkingly picked up. The phone had rang many times since my termination from Estate Healthcare, but I had never once picked up. Frank was instructed to do the same, but this time my picking up the phone was automatic, as if it would somehow dry the cold water being blown off my body from the air conditioning. It was a reflex, and I had regretted picking it up before I heard who was on the other line.
“Hello? Are you there? Hello…talk to me…hello?”
The voice was totally unfamiliar, sounding like a twelve year old boy. What was Frank getting into?
“Yes, this is Clement. Can I help you?”
“Hey! I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all this week. It’s Rainy. Remember? From the pool? ‘Ice-water is the one thing no one’s truly fucked with?’”
“Oh yeah, hah, right. How are you?”
This was the last thing I expected.
“I’m fine. I’m in town for the next month or so, you?”
“Great, I’ve been great.”
“What have you been up to?”
“Oh…just kind of working on...um...projects.”
“How’s the ‘Behavioral health’ center?” Her voice sounded as if she were making bunny ears with her hands on the other side of the phone.
“It uh…I’m not over there anymore. I’m kind of just looking at other options.”
“Really? What happened?”
Why lie? What difference does it make now? If anything this time-period gets to award me it’s the right to care less what people think of me. You get to grow out a beard and masturbate several hours of the day. You get to survive completely on hard-boiled eggs.
“I was fired. Yeah…they fired me.”
“Oh my God! I’m so sorry. What are you going to do? Why did they do that? I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m prying…I guess this is more interesting than talking about the weather or something anyway…I mean if you don’t mind talking about it that is…”
“No, it’s fine. I guess they fired me for being me. That’s the best way to describe it…”
I thought about that. “They fired me for being me.” I turned it over during a short pause on the phone. Couldn’t I have just said, “They fired me?” The meaning is the same; a mistake made is a mistake made by “me,” so because the mistake is some outward reaction to my environment it is collected within me. While the mistake is made I would still be me. From the subjectivity of others the action is a figment of my personality. In this case, violation of confidentiality –liar, accidental med adherence to a client resulting in death –murderer, a failure to advocate control to masturbating clients –incompetent, pervert. But is this me or just me in a former state of being? A me that occurred and no longer occurs?
“I lied, murdered a man and let my clients masturbate in front of children,” I said slowly, wondering if I got it all down correctly or not.
“Hmm…” a short pause on the phone, “well it couldn’t have been so bad as all that as you’re not in jail or anything.”
“That’s true, I’m not in jail or anything.”
“Do you feel bad about any of it?”
“The death yes, but it was an accident. The rest of it was beyond my control…they just wanted someone to cut loose so the public would feel as if justice had been served.”
I thought of Judge Bronson on Court TV.
“Was justice served? Were you really the problem?”
“Frankly, no. Although I was involved in all of it, these mistakes were institutional mistakes, problems bound to happen embedded deep within the system. I was just there.”
“See, there you go, you feel better?”
I did feel better. Not because I felt guilty for what happened, but because here was someone on the other line that seemed willing to make time for a problem. Not necessarily the problem, but a problem associated with me. The idea of it seemed to legitimize me as a plausible figure in society, as if Rainy were somehow pulling me back into the stream of things. Frank would attempt this maneuver for me but it only made things worse. The more I talked to him the more I felt I was going down his road, whichever road that might be.
“Yep.”
“You don’t sound all that great. You alright?”
“I’m fine, just kind of tired.”
“Well, you promised me ice-water, do you want to meet up?…let’s say...” I heard the sound of papers shuffling on the other line. “Friday? The twenty-fifth? Five o’clock sound OK?”
I looked at the calender on the wall wondering when the last time I set a date for a meeting was. I couldn’t remember if I had ever done that. It was the 21st of January. It had been exactly one month and a half since my getting fired.
“Okay. Where?”
“Your place?”
I gave her the address and wondered if any of this were a good idea. My head felt flighty. I looked in the mirror. I looked like shit. I could hardly recognize the sallow, pale faced figure looking back at me.
Thinking about anything too long gave me a headache and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything for at least an hour. I decided it was probably from the television and lack of sunlight. My reading schedule, had after all, dropped down to two or three chapters a month, still stuck on the employment of the assistants given to K. in “The Castle” by Kafka. K. had just begun the relationship with the town girl. His work was remedial and pointless and he would take his frustrations out on the two assistants constantly, often flogging them in public. These frustrations were generated largely from K.’s feelings of alienation. He had come to the town as a land inspector assuming he would be admitted into the castle so that he might meet with the King or some high office. He begins to learn that this is impossible, and that life in this town is a slow race up the thousands of hurtles between where you stand and the people in power. He would, like the protagonist in “The Trial,” never really learn what was needed of him, forever remaining on the outskirts. The more he looked in from his humble vantage point, the more outskirts he would see. Boundaries within boundaries within boundaries. The Castle read like a dream where you’re running and never getting anywhere.
I thought about Kafka asking his story to be burned as a dying wish. The Castle would never be finished, it would instead be taken into the hands of his publisher and published the way it was, uncompleted. There were these two things moving in parallel with one another; Kafka’s incompletion of the book and K.’s incompletion of his journey to a better understanding of his place in this strange town, this World. It’s as if Kafka meant it that way. I had always wondered why he hadn’t just burned the books himself instead of relying on a man whose job it is to publish them. Although they were great friends, it seemed like an odd request.
After starring into the mirror too long and thinking about Kafka, I felt this new development of Rainy was about what I needed to clean up my act. I punished myself because I needed to punish myself. This is what people do when they accidentally kill people. This is what people do when they lose their own identities. I would need to somehow get back on track. I wanted to look good for Friday.
I looked at my little beard and thought it better to shave it off. Beards remind people they have nothing to do and in my case it’s better to assume there are things that need doing. After all, the kitchen and living room needed to be clean and the answering machine needed to be plugged in. This is a good start. Frank didn’t steal the answering machine. Was this some kind of life buoy he had left behind on purpose or something he had simply forgotten?
I got out all the mops and dust pans I had purchased at the grocery store and began filling one of the buckets up with soap and water. The tile in the bathroom was easy because I wasn’t worried about the water splashing around as there was no carpet in there. The sink in the kitchen was another story. The things I thought had went on in the kitchen couldn’t have amounted to the state the sink was in. There were dishes covered in things that could never have been eaten. There was sawdust –although we had never done any cutting, cat hair –although we didn’t own a cat, and what looked like duck meat –although neither of us could have afforded this luxury. The image of Frank and Lucinda eating duck, shaving one another, and whittling sticks above the sink came over me and I just doused the whole thing in disinfectant.

After finishing up towards the next morning, I sat down on the couch and had a cigarette, resolved to quit smoking, and then had another cigarette. I thought about Thom on a treadmill in Seattle drinking coffee and thinking about Jesus. The early morning light of dawn would be pouring into the room through razor sharp blinds. It’s as if Thom would never leave the condominium in my head. He would always be placed there, enacting the same ritual over and over again. I have to believe this. Willis would forever be looking out of the window of the Plaza making subtle comments about the neighbors. Lance will always be wearing the big collared shirt, standing in the wind with his hand resting on the gas tank of his father’s old Indiana Motorcycle. I wondered if when I die these images die with me. Is there some place where K. and Lance Bennett meet?