He had a chance once, maybe, to change his circumstances. It was on a pier overlooking the Colorado River, flowing like his own dull pain below a bridge of salvation. Salvation, he liked to note, was something he carried with him out of inertia. He never managed to reaffirm or reject his faith in anyone, anything. He just left it there, in limbo, hoping it would resolve itself without his pesky interference. But on that bridge, something transitory and wild fluttered into his mind on the devil�s wings. His blue-white eyes narrowed and seemed to perch just above his flush cheeks. He could feel the salty breeze penetrating his bald-spot, that disastrous evidence of failure. But his thoughts were scrambled like the radio-station of a car driving through county lines as the slow murmur of his wife reminded him of something he once desired. It had felt like a conversation between God and an atheist, each stubborn in his views on the other. God�s insistence that, �yes, I do exist!� are nonetheless relegated to phony superstition and ghost stories. Everyone thinks his view is the correct one. God is not exempt from this. Spencer�s wife went out of her way, through no definitive action of her own, to remind him he loved her, but he still only half-believed it. It was so distant and indistinguishable in his mind�a blurred horizon between the ocean and sky on a foggy day�but sometimes he remembered the way he felt when he first met, first desired her. Her hair was a wide frame on her face, her eyes so dark they looked more like holes into her mind. Her hands were dry but pristinely manicured, always. Her tone of voice undercut the things she said, as if she was forced to read her lines from a script, forced to be the reluctant hero of his life. She was not reluctant. She was not a hero. Her beauty was, and in its own way had continued to be, calculating. He was used to the sadly hopeless organic beauty of nature, but she eschewed�or, rather, undermined�that. Hers was so vastly different from the cruel bully of a world he had grown up with. Maybe it was a sense of hope, some sad notion of redemption, that attracted him, but it was probably something more miserable than that. No matter the reason, the damage had been done and he was now, though he hated to admit it, a sort of employee of hers. A follower. A drone. A member of her royal army�her personal empire. They had been rich once, but that went away. They weren�t exactly poor, but there really isn�t an accurate description to their financial status. Somewhere between well-off and scraping-by. He resided always in the large areas of the bell-curves. �������� It was forty degrees outside and falling. The rain was just beginning to clear as Spencer looked out the window at his poor wife. Their deciduous tree, the one Spencer remembered mentioning to the real estate agent when he bought the house, framed his wife�s hurried movements to and from the car. She was jerky, almost as if illuminated by a strobe light. Spencer noticed that her hopeless dance steps seemed to have been drawn on the bottom corner of a children�s flipbook. He loved those books as a child�the magic they let you create. But here, it was a perversion of that magic. Here, the image was not of a monster or a soccer ball kicker or a car driving off the edge of a cliff. It was his wife, in all her imposing glory, decisive and controlling. Finicky. There was, he had to admit, no better word to describe her. �Are we ready, Freddy?� She called back towards the house as one of their four cats�the small, grey one�jumped onto the window-sill, blocking his perfectly framed picture of the front yard. He had classified the cats into taxonomies, refusing to call them by whatever ridiculously patronizing names his wife had bestowed upon them. They were The Small Grey One, Big Black Cat, Multicolored Scourge of God, and Pathetic White Kitty. The Small Grey One jumped on things: laps, window-sills, expensive vases�nothing was too good to be jumped on. Big Black Cat was a little overbearing at times, but Spencer had grown used to it. It was the oldest, the ruler of the house. If one tried to move this cat, it would grow angry, hiss, spit, yell, claw. Of course, no one bothered to test this hypothesis and it was taken simply as fact that the cat went where it pleased. Multicolored Scourge of God was a calico tabby that had destroyed everything it touched�couches, chairs, dishes, carpeting, shoes. Spencer, beyond the point of caring about possessions, had joked among friends that the cat had the anti-Midas touch. Sadly, amongst his wife�s friends, cats were a frequent subject. Then there was Pathetic White Kitty. Though Spencer tried to remain unbothered by the cats, by what the cats stood for, he couldn�t help feel some sense of sympathy for that small, sickly white ball of deformity and sickness. It was a clumsy, polydactyl thing that neither warranted nor received respect from the other cats. It was the cat that would eat the chocolate milk and sloppy joe concoction his elementary school classmates had made, for a dollar. �Uh, yeah. I guess I�m coming,� he called back, but remained perfectly still. Then added, as an afterthought, �Wilma.� Those little afterthoughts, those modest attempts at cleverness, were one of the few things he was proud to have maintained through the years. His face remained stoic as he walked through the living room, out the front door, down the walkway and into the passenger side of the car. �I call shotgun,� he said her, completely devoid of emotion. It was something he said a lot. It was a part of his routine, his act. She would always respond tiredly with something similar to, �It�s just you and me, hun. And I�m no one�s chauffer.� Spencer played the words out in his mind before she spoke. �It�s just you and me, babe. And I�m not going to be your chauffer,� she said while moving her head subtly from left to right. Then, as if in a state of unparalleled creativity, she added, �They don�t pay me enough to do that.� That�s a new edition, thought Spencer. There may be hope for the both of us. �������� The freeway was long, which juxtaposed maddeningly with their short patience. They didn�t say much of anything, save a comment now and then on the radio station. Spencer tried to blame their lack of conversation on their ample time spent together throughout the years. The well of new topics had run dry long ago. Spencer just sat there and stared at himself through the rearview mirror, not out of vanity but rather of a need for objectivity. He noticed that to an outsider, the situation seemed mundanely normal. And perhaps, despite the boiling emotions ricocheting across the walls of their insides, it was. But who am I, he thought, to say what normal is? He looked out the window at the other drivers, big vans or big sports utility vehicles stuffed with luggage and children. He tried to imagine their lives. Houses with one too many grape soda spills on the carpet; a little dog that wags his tail at anyone, completely unprejudiced; the jar of candy on the coffee table�an unpopular book in place of a missing leg�that changes with the seasons. Red and green M&M�s, Cadbury Eggs, Red, White, and Blue M&M�s�do those even exist?�, Snicker�s Bars, repeat cycle. There was a screen door with a rip or a vase with a crack in these homes. He was sure of it. Every home has its stories�the door that doesn�t lock all the way, the hiss of the ceiling fan, the motivational poster that covers up evidence of a short temper. Everyone keeps scotch tape in a drawer with stamps, coupons, some pens and paper. That drawer is always near a phone. This, he supposed, was what normal was. His attention shifted like his wife�s eyes on the mirrors between his imagined worlds and reality. The radio program, something funded with federal grants��robbing us with taxes for the mundane purpose of a fake culture,� as his wife would likely call it�was interviewing a professor who had written a book about her autistic child. The child didn�t have much conscious thought, but he would nonetheless instinctively follow light, wherever it happened to be coming from. His mother would often find him staring with stone eyes out a window or into a bright television screen. The host kept mispronouncing the boy�s name, which seemed to irritate the mother, though she said nothing. Regardless, the mispronunciation undermined the meticulously contrived care the mother had put into transforming her child into a tawdry symbol; relegating her own flesh to a tired, shopworn metaphor. Exploited. �What a sweet, brave mother,� said Spencer�s wife. �This world could use a few more people like her.� Spencer let out a noise from the side of his mouth that, on the surface, sounded like an affirmation of the statement. He had gotten good at these ambiguities; learned early in his career that people interpret things how they want, regardless of his intentions. He need not give his opinion anymore, especially where his wife was concerned. �I mean, she just�I�I couldn�t imagine�� She was frowning, grasping for some tangible truth, but finding only the thick vinyl of the steering wheel cover. Why, thought Spencer, was she so insistent upon talking of this? Couldn�t she talk of something I could agree with without compromising my integrity? He smiled a little at the thought of erroneously convincing himself his integrity wasn�t floating in a small lake, by way of the Colorado River. His wife mistook his smile for mockery of her inability to articulate. Both grew silent. �������� The night that, under other circumstances, would have been referred to as his only lapse of fidelity took place in a Carson City hotel bar. He was trying a little too hard to scrape out any semblance of solace from a glass of Seagram�s Seven and, as the bartender put it, �sprite �stead of Seven-Up, �yaokaywitdat.� He had already grown to the point of being okay with pretty much anything, though the bartender was a little too chatty for his tastes. ��S coke now for ever�tin. Try get sumthin� else, tell ya no. �S all franchised. Rows an� fountains. Coke don�t make it, you can�t take it. Shame, too. People like Pepsi juss as much. More maybe. Some people, anyway. �S all different tastes, I guess. Makes th� world go �round. That an� gravity.� The guy could talk for hours and Spencer just let him, didn�t have the heart to stop him. He only half-listened to everything the strange man said. A pale, slender woman who seemed to be wearing way too many articles of clothing, given the atmosphere, sauntered across the bar, sat down next to him and ordered a Long Island iced tea. Spencer noticed that she had even gone out of her way to deliberately pronounce the �d� in �iced.� Meticulous knowledge of language, he noted. �We hadda import these from Long Island, y�know. �S why it�s so �spensive,� said the bartender. These were his jokes, his pathetic attempts at entertainment, his struggle for connections with his customers�with, likely, anyone. He looked up at her with wide eyes and an open smile, waiting, presumably, for uproarious laughter. She raised her eyebrows and nodded her head, as if to acknowledge some faint intrinsic humor in his words, but her lips remained sealed. Comforting, noted Spencer, but honest. He conveniently excused himself to make a phone call, only to wander around the lobby for a few minutes and return. As he hoped, his seat had been taken, so he sat next to the woman. He ordered another seven and seven, ignored the bartender�s �y�only gettin� one type a� seven, but you know that,� and glanced down at the woman�s hands�slim, beautiful, perfect. No rings invaded the smooth white skin. Her nails weren�t long and weren�t painted, but were scrupulously maintained nonetheless. They only subtly held her straw�Spencer�s eyes traced the straw up to her pursed lips, absent of lipstick but nonetheless somewhat voluptuous. He began thinking of opening lines. Lines that would lead to conversation. Lines that would lead to something. �What brings you to Carson City? No. Too conventional. Also, none of his business. �How�s the Long Island iced tea? Boring. And she�ll think he�s a lush. �Can I b� His thoughts were interrupted by the bartender slamming the drink down, asking �You two know each other?� The woman looked over at Spencer, possibly for the first time. �Why, no!� She said and spun her barstool to face him, �I�m Elizabeth.� She extended her beautiful, smooth hand towards him. He grabbed it gently. �Spencer.� �So what�s your story, Spencer?� She was sort of funny, more outgoing than he had imagined. He told fragments of his �story,� omitting things like his marriage, embellishing things like his money. She seemed to be doing the same, though he couldn�t imagine what she was omitting. She looked at her watch, which until now had been tucked underneath her long sweater. �Oh my gosh, I�m late!� she cried, swinging her chair nervously and knocking over his glass. �For what?� Asked Spencer, staring at the shards of his broken glass as if he were at a viewing. �Oh just this award thing. It�s not really a big deal, I mean, someone gets one of these things every year. But anyway, call me later tonight, we�ll get together,� she said scribbling hearts and numbers on a napkin. �I will,� he promised as she gathered her effects, sucked down the last of her iced tea, threw a twenty dollar bill on the table, and left. He folded the napkin neatly, placing it pristinely in his breast pocket. But he did not call her. He had somehow lost her in his obscurity, confined to his own retreating sense of obligation. It wasn�t until a few days later, in the wintry glow of dusk falling on the city, that he read about her award�some prestigious literary prize�and her speech�an eloquent discourse on lost truth. He managed to find strength in his own suppression of regret. �������� The tires rolled slowly, a little too slowly, thought Spencer, as he watched them cross the pavement in the rearview mirror. His wife was pressing the radio buttons furiously, trying to find a station commensurate to her false sense of interest in the world around her. Her hands, now frail and wrinkled but still containing the pristine manicure that had characterized Spencer�s desire, jumped about the buttons with an irritation for these things; these things she couldn�t control. Spencer pretended not to notice until she stumbled upon a Spanish radio station engaged in a melancholy interlude. �This sounds nice,� she said. Spencer, knowing better, reserved comment. As the soothing contralto voice sang words indiscernible, but nonetheless identifiable as Spanish, to the couple, the wife�s irritation rose to the level of fury at such a betrayal. �Why, I can�t believe this! Why can�t they have an American sing this?� �Who is this �they� you speak of?� Asked Spencer, alluding to the greater problem of his wife�s own innate xenophobia. �It�s not like some corporation sits at a table with lists of songs and languages and then start matching, reserving the most beautiful songs for the Americans.� This uncharacteristic outburst instilled a sense of pride in Spencer. But he grew quiet at her expression, one that mixed shock, distain, and elitism all in a furrowing of the brow. The melancholy contralto continued in the background. �I didn�t mean�I just meant that, I wish I could know what she�s singing.� She quickly turned the station. �That�s one way to find out,� responded Spencer facetiously. �������� They drove that four door sedan straight into the nighttime, breaking silences with sighs and small complaints, until their limbs could no longer take their vehicular confinement. They stopped in a town named for its red sky, a sky which has since receded into darkness. Crimson Heights. The irony, mused Spencer, being that the place was flat and black. They found a restaurant that, due to the nature of the town, had become a hybrid of caf� and truck stop. Teenagers sat as far away from the truckers as possible, each painting, with quick glances, erroneous histories of the wandering tourists. Spencer thought back to his teenage years, when he would sit for hours with friends, creating fictitious biographies of those around them. And now, a few hundred miles away from anything, anything at all, he had become the fiction for these small town philosophers. Do they know about the scars, he thought. Do they know about the money? Do they know about my sister? Could they imagine a world as eventful, tragic, ludicrous, hilarious, somber, poignant, utterly meaningless as the one I had actually been surviving? And even if they knew, would they look upon him with the same reverence to which he had taken, lately, to looking upon himself? And who�s to say their perception would be somehow fundamentally wrong or inaccurate? After all, wasn�t he, Spencer, the one with the bias? This was his life, not theirs. They have a greater capacity for objectivity. It reminded him of the old Emo Phillips joke�was it Emo Phillips?�about how important he thought the brain was, until he realized who was telling him that. But it wouldn�t don on him until later, after their always-joking-never-funny waitress began putting barstools on the tables to signify last call, that his invention of himself was a result of his submission to his wife. In the physical world, until that brief, transitory moment in the car, that explosion of original thought, he had always been subservient to her desires. It was just easier that way. But his imagination, without him really even noticing it, had been carving a world for itself. A prisoner digging an escape tunnel with a plastic spoon. And now he was left with a certain twoness; dualities fighting for a single existence. I don�t want to do this, but it seems to make her happy, and I want to make her happy. His mind had become fragmented with this split, this fault line, irresolvable. The pieces of a broken shot glass. The cacophony of a changing radio. A trucker. A teenager. Must everything be full and defined and articulated? Can�t some things remain unburdened by definition, content in its own indecision? He threw a twenty dollar bill on the table and left, six or seven paces behind his wife. He would still have another twelve hours before the sedan would go careening into a median after having been pinned unaccountably between two semis, and he would look up�surrounded by shards of glass, metal, and pieces of concrete�at the cobalt blue sky and wonder how things would change, incapable of predicting that they would only slowly blur into an image he could never fully understand.
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