“Tammy, I’ve told you again and again…” I was starting to get worked up.
“Hang on, Pete; I just got another ca—”
Five minutes later: “Back with you, Chet,” chirped Tammy.
“It’s Pete, goddamn it!”
“Don’t you talk to me like…”
“Listen, Tammy, you can’t possibly pay for that house on what you’re making. You need to get rid of—”
“I’m never going to sell it! No apartment will allow twelve cats, it’s worth less than it was when I bought it, and I don’t want to drag my son into bankruptcy and ruin my good credit, and shit, I got another call. I’ll text you—”
And Tammy was gone in a storm of text messages and call waiting. She wasn’t much different from Bob, except that Bob hid in cyberspace, while Tammy bombarded people with endless communications, so that she would have no time to listen to anyone. By the end of Tammy’s electronic monologue, my teeth were clenched and buzzing. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and suddenly, it was awfully quiet in the Federson household, and awfully boring.
I was sitting with the coffee mug resting on my knee, amidst the mail and books, in a nauseous funk on the floor of an eerily quiet kitchen. To quickly fill what I knew would be a lonely, unbearable silence, I turned on the radio to WFMT.
I gulped down the last of the coffee as Liszt’s 1st Piano Concerto began with Martha Argerich at the piano. When Martha punched out her first chords, they resonated in my solar plexus, displacing the gremlins and stimulating me to action. Soon, I was full of gremlin-resistant, heebie-jeebie-blocking positive energy.
I needed to move, to get something done, something tangible. I needed a project and that required a decision. I spotted the dust mop that had been leaning against the wall for so long that it had left a mark.
Decision made!
I poked the mop under the bed and pulled out bits of rotted food, dead insects, dust bunnies, dirty pens, napkins, wadded-up notebook paper… and a bottle of pills.
That’s where they went.
At one time, I had put all of my pills—uppers, downers, pills for depression, pills for lethargy, and pills for anxiety—into one big bottle. The rationale was that it would be harder to lose one container than five. Right? Then I lost the bottle by forgetting about it after I’d thrown it against the wall the year before.
Another swipe with the mop revealed the presence of The Excitement Of Algebra!, a library book due two years ago. A few years before, I’d had some ideas about going back to college to get my Bachelor’s degree, but I had to repair my miserable undergraduate GPA first. At the top of the academic list was algebra. I had failed it twice in high school and twice in college, and spent so much time obsessing over it that my other classes suffered, which was why I’d flunked out of the university at the end of my sophomore year. With a low draft number, I’d traded the dormitories of college for the barracks of Vietnam. Within 24-months, the Army and I parted company—with prejudice—because my captain was convinced that I didn’t have what it took to be a soldier.
So, the gremlins had made sure that my study of algebra was indelibly linked to my tour of Vietnam. I threw The Excitement of Algebra!, which I had never opened, on the kitchen floor.
Next, the manic dust mop dragged out a clanking plastic Kroger bag with a stylized sketch of the American flag, under which was printed: 1776-1976. In this patriotic bag was a half-full fifth of vodka with a price sticker on the cap: $1.50. There was also a pocket watch with a fisherman etched on its cover that I had bought in Europe while on a student tour in 1970. Next to the watch was an old, yellowed computer-punched photo ID of me, made four decades and fifty pounds ago, and clipped to the ID was a bright photo, taken in the super-realistic colors of Kodachrome, of an olive-skinned girl with high cheekbones, brown eyes and curly brown hair parted in the middle.
Catherine!
The shade of red in the booth in which she was sitting was brightly saturated, and the dark wood wall behind her seemed to glow: Catherine was sitting across from me in a booth at Pagliai’s Pizza in Carbondale, during my sophomore year of college. And for a moment, I was there again, sitting across from the girl I should have married.
In 1971, I’d plodded through my emotional life like a somnambulist. I’d dealt with my ever-present anxiety by ignoring all but the most superficial human interactions. Catherine Mancini was a girl of Italian descent who lived with her family a few miles down the road from SIU. She was pretty in a country way and had a cute way of talking, a combination of a Southern and Midwestern dialect. I loved the way she said “quit” (“kuh-wit”). She’d said “quit” to me a lot. But what set Catherine apart from the other girls I’d dated during college was that her personality was made up of a critical balance of empathy and assertiveness that could have awakened me from my emotional slumber, had I allowed her to.
I didn’t remember much about my college years or the drab intervening decades. Liberal doses of vodka and pills had darkened or blotted out most of the memories. But I did recall that Catherine had tried to lead me out of the haze, and I pretty much ignored her. And when we finally broke up I wasn’t even upset about it, because I was smitten with Tammy, and so I relegated the memory of Catherine—who I was much better suited for—to a Kroger bag.
And now I was kneeling at the side of the bed with the mop and staring at the photo of a pretty young girl whose image I hadn’t seen in nearly forty years.
The contents of that grocery bag condensed my life story into a Tweet: Opportunities offered me@frightened. Opportunities terrifying@scared. Opportunities rejected@misery
I thought about my Testing Unlimited! job with c-a-t and r-a-t, Bob with his water filters, Tammy with her house, and me who never mastered algebra or broadcasting or anything else.
I looked at that slim, clear-eyed teenager on the student ID; touched my face, and felt the nerves running beneath my exceedingly thin skin. Muscles corded around the nerves until they tightened into lines of tension on either side of my jaw, like strings on a violin. The strings were wound too tight, so my neck was bent by the pressure. This nervous energy sunk my cheeks until they were hollow cups, traced wrinkles down either side of my nose like gashes, and drew dark rings around my eye sockets, from which crow’s feet radiated like jagged scars.
God, I wish I could start over again!
I dropped my hand from my face and it landed on the pill bottle.
I took two pills, washed them down with a swig of vodka, wound my watch, and stared at Catherine’s face. Soon, voices speaking gibberish and noises that sounded like rushing water and leaky faucets filled my head. I felt a sudden acceleration...
…And found myself sitting upright with my head lolling against a train window. Sunlight was bouncing off the glass of skyscrapers, passing through the window, and refracting deep in my eyes.
What the hell?
I was on some train, passing the massive black column of the Willis Tower—formerly the Sears Tower—in downtown Chicago. The train rumbled over switches and crossed over jammed expressways with ramps twisting in all directions. Soon I could see glimpses of Lake Michigan.
“Theh