Second Life

Most people, when confronted with the failure of their dreams, separate into one of two camps. The ones with good parents, who built up their kids with praise for the good they did, see it as a setback, and picked themselves up and try again. Those with bad parents, those who forgot that it takes ten “attaboys” to cancel out one “you idiot, you’ll never amount to anything!,” tend to drink themselves into oblivion and self-destruct. Most of the latter group choose spouses like their dysfunctional parents, so they are more likely to self-destruct. Some see this as natural selection.

A rare few straddle both camps. They come from basically good homes where the parents, for whatever reason, fell into self-pity and treated their children as if they were victims who were entitled to success because of that victimhood. Although they are usually successful, the people who marry such partners always get hit from left field by the infidelity of the person with whom they hoped to have families, grow old, and maybe reunite on the other side after the drama of death subsided. They never see it coming.

Such was the case with Travis Denning, age 32, as he stared across the small valley that held a busy road, peering out from the garage apartment of a friend in the lush suburb toward the row of high-rise condominiums opposite. Although he personally liked the idea of a condominium where he would never mow another lawn again, he remembered the words of his mother: “nothing good ever goes on in a condominium.” In her view, people sharing a roof, whether condominiums or offices, unleashed the worst of the seven deadly sins. That included lust, a whispering voice in the back of his mind reminded him as he watched the energetic but discoordinated copulation through the tiny glass lenses.

As a systems engineer, Travis specialized in a few intangible skill sets, but first among them was diagnostics or “debugging” as the worms called it (“worm” is old Management slang for programmers, since your average programmer, coder, or developer might as well live under a rock for all of his — and it’s usually a he — awareness of the world). Management had its own epithet for engineers: “machines.” Travis wore this with pride, since in his lifetime, most of what went wrong had happened when people got emotional. He was not only cold as ice and as relentless as steel, but repetitive like a two-stroke engine or transistor. He could be warm with friends (this was a social skill he learned long ago like all the others, through study and practice) but he liked his mind free from the clutter of emotions, trends, and social influences. He was never one for keeping up with the Joneses or trying to be trendy.

His wife, Dana, and he had what he called “sensible nerd sex.” It began with silly innuendo like a corny television program and then flowered into gentle smooches all the way to the stairs. They never made out on the stairs — too much risk of injury if someone slipped, and they were both sensible people — but instead hopped like little fornicating bunnies up to the bedroom, where they locked the door so that their two kids would not intrude. She would stroke him briefly, covering him with the kisses that he found the most appealing thing in the world, but already he would be impatient, and she would delay him only enough to intensify the eventual explosion. They made love, in the oldest meaning, with close affection and he would hold on until she had at least one orgasm before flooding her with his seed.

“We should do that again,” he would say.

“Soon,” she would reply. “I’ve got to do the laundry and make dinner.”

“Yeah, and I’ve got to rebuild the back deck,” he would reply.

Laundry, deck, dinner, yard… there was always something that needed doing by each of them. They had picked up a run-down house on the east side, near the university, which had “good bones” as his father would have said, but needed endless work, so getting out the door of his day job and fighting through fifteen minutes of traffic from downtown netted him a chance to spend another few hours sanding, painting, sawing, hammering, and otherwise re-building (more than renovating) this old but solid house. His first big move, since their neighborhood was still “gentrifying” i.e. money trickling in slowly enough that there was no HOA to nag him like a French emperor, was to enclose the porch that ran around the house, since it was built on top of the same slab. With another thousand square feet to work with, they needed reinforced support walls and a back deck to replace the porch, and then he could expand the upstairs out onto the little flat roof over the fireplace. At that point, they would have their dream home in a neighborhood where the meth and crack dealing were gradually being replaces by soy lattes and Volvos.

His day job tying together oilfield systems for an energy company took up a lot of his energy, but less of his time now, since he had carefully cultivated his role. In his eyes, the average job was four hours of work surrounded by a week of silliness like meetings, trainings, group bonding, and informing management of details that they would never understand. He built trust with management and his team, got everyone on the same page in terms of vocabulary, and now spent three weeks a month working about twenty hours a week, and one week in the field, a necessary evil that was the core of his job: applying theory by checking every detail to make sure that it was doing its part, and ensuring that the theory fit how nature worked. When you get details wrong on paper, you get a lower grade from the teacher; when you get them wrong at a drill-site a few hours into the wilderness, people can die and landscapes can be poisoned. Not that there was much wilderness left anymore, he thought, but to the guys in suits, anything too far from a mega-discount outlet mall was basically jungle and anarchy.

He had thought they had a good life, too, until a single detail caught his attention: she stopped carrying a specific book and refused to tell him about it.

Despite his hopes to keep her at home with the kids and house, Dana wanted to be relevant and have social stature of her own, outside of simply being a mother. That meant she needed a job, and not just any job, but a meaningful job, so she took one at the school just five miles down the road in what was still seen as a “developing” or perhaps “challenged” area where poverty, drugs, alcohol, gangs, and neglect intersected. South Central High School always made the news because it gave reporters those human interest “hope” stories that make bored people home alone in front of the television or at work scrolling through their little phones feel important and good inside, those nice warm fuzzy feelings we seek when we feel life has left us behind. There were always new hopes for the city there, overcoming poverty and working toward college, and Dana felt proud to be one of the people willing to sacrifice her own wealth in order to raise up the downtrodden.

Travis knew that this fit deeply into her psychology, since in addition to being the most amazing person he had ever met, Dana was tragic. Born Danielle Ruskin to a prosperous family in small town Tyler, Texas, she grew up in the shadow of her older sibling, Clarice, who died young of a tropical fever that blew through after the troops got back from Vietnam. As a result, Dana and the two siblings following got treated as if they were precious, rare, and doomed objects, and this made them both a little spoiled and a good deal chomping at the bit to escape the managed suburban jail sentence her parents had contrived for them. As she entered puberty, her father had the misfortune to be at the grain silos he operated when a teenage malcontent lit up a cigarette outside the empty Tower Seven.

Filled with grain dust which had been thrust airborne by a careless airblast from an errant employee trying to clear Tower Six, the ten-story grain silo detonated immediately, sending a large chunk of masonry crashing through the office. Dana’s father is known for his last work in the office, which was to along with another employee shove uncomprehending workers into the metal stairwell, protecting them from the rain of stone which crushed much of his upper body. He lingered on for several days in the hospital before finally tiring of the pain, possibly aware that he would never run, jump, climb, or ride as he had as a boy. After a bright sunny funeral where no one ate the canapes, Dana’s mother took over the grain silage business, followed by his brother, and the ensuing load of work and learning ate up the family. Dana grew up a neglected child who had once been able to have any toys or clothes that she wanted, but now took what the thrift store offered when her mother had time to stop in.

As Travis saw it, Dana was a ray of light that just about hid a silvery shadow. She loved her shadow, since it gave her a sense of entitlement. She had grown up poor, after being born rich, and had suffered just like her students. She identified with the underdog, and this made her view Travis, who had grown up not rich but comfortable in the upper quadrant of the population, as spoiled and possibly lazy, in contrast to the virtuous poor in their suffering and long hours. Where he, as an engineer, worshiped simplicity and efficiency, she saw these things as artifacts of privilege that stole money from the marginalized, even if the oil from his fields got everyone, rich and poor, to work and gave them a semi-functional local economy. He knew of this tension but, in the grand tradition of stoic men, hoped rather than believed that it would pass in time.

“You’re home early again?” she would say.

“Yep, I got the whole thing working in record time, and it’s more robust than the previous configuration,” Travis would say.

Dana would pause for a few moments. “So, how’s the deck coming?”

Travis never felt much guilt. He put in as much work around the house as she did, although he did “man things” as his mother would have called it while Dana did “woman things.” He had torn the house down to the studs while they were still living in an apartment, reboarded the entire thing including the former porches, and re-sided the house. The deck became an engineering project of its own, since he wanted to not only build a large space for them to relax, but cover it with a roof to shelter it from the sun, all while not making it butt ugly like so many of the additions his well-heeled friends had splashed out unknown sums for. But he let into his heart the first resentment, and he took extra time with the deck, simply because she was always urging him on to work, work, work as if work were an end in itself and not a means to an end.

He felt some guilt for it, of course, but that lush sensation reminded him of his own parents, who had worked such long hours at their jobs that nothing he could do would ever measure up. When he brought home a report card from the first letter of the alphabet, they immediately responded with queries about what summer internships and volunteer activities he had planned in order to get into a good college. He shocked everyone by going to a second-tier state school, getting solidly good grades and working directly with industry, so that his application to a first-rate graduate program in engineering at Texas A&M University not only got immediate consideration, but slid him into a research group where he could make contacts directly with the energy industry. Travis refused to feel tragic about this; he had never missed a meal except through punishment, and at some level, he knew his parents loved him, even if through a fug of their own confused feelings of martyrdom.

In his mind, Travis saw himself as a good husband, although the one thing he took from religion was that all of us are flawed, and whatever deity exists tolerates us simply because we can have enough goodness in our hearts to try to overcome ourselves. For Travis, holiness came in the form of solid engineering: theory that turned out to work in the real world, resilient designs that avoided risk, and most of all efficiency so that no one wasted their lives trying to babysit yet another heap of glitchy technology. In the moments when he conceptualized, blueprinted, and built his systems, he felt like he was making himself understand the works of an absent deity whose genius had infinite dimension. He tried to do the same in his home life, but being a slightly nerdy and highly masculine engineer, he saw it through the man-filter, and this led to the unraveling, since he was not meeting his wife on terms she could understand.

“You know, we could sell this house,” she said one night, as they lay cuddling after another round of lovemaking that blasted his socks off (at least, he found one in the stairwell and another on top of the dresser).

“I just got it to where we can enjoy it,” he murmured. “Why would we sell?”

“There are all of these deserving families out there,” she said. “We could sell it to them for a fair price, like what we paid for it.”

“Honey, that’s your thing,” he said softly. “My thing is to do good, and be rewarded for it. The problem in this world is that not enough people who do good see any reward, so even less people try to be good.”

“We could get another, and do your renovation,” she continued. “You know, like house flippers.”

Travis winced at the scoff that burbled out of him unbidden. “House flippers take a wreck, throw on a cosmetic improvement, and sell it for big bucks,” he said. “That’s not good, that’s bad, just looking good, although not as good as you do right now.”

“Well, that way you could do good for the deserving, and still come out ahead,” she said.

Having learned from his mother and father that often the best answer was to say nothing, he stayed silent, and slipped into a troubled sleep.

Travis had a secret life, although he would have revealed it to his wife had she been interested enough to ask. She viewed his world as man-things, and considered whatever he did in the room in the forgotten southeast corner of the house — his office — as both a mystery and somewhat beneath her. She might have been interested to see, in the floor-to-ceiling bookcase he had constructed from oak boards recovered from a demolished shed on one of their “digs” or oilfield ventures, a shelf under the ones creaking with engineering textbooks, guides to the C++ programming language and its many intricacies, and geophysical refrence tomes. On this shelf, two removed from the floor, books of a different sort mellowed under the pale electric nights as he read late into the night. He liked grand stories, whether westerns or the epics of Faulkner, and women featured as prominently as men in the writing. He found a subtle kind of adventure in the urban identity crises of Barbara Pym, the country struggle for self-respect of Miss Read, and the quest for knowing oneself of the later works of Mary Shelley, just as he did in the adventures of Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, and Dashiell Hammett.

Just as every addict has a pusher, Travis Denning had a favorite bookstore. Blue Bell Books took up the lee side of a corner building in the “unimproved” section of downtown that being isolated from the rest by warehouses, experienced very little of the traffic in drugs, sex, and violence that made much of the rest uninhabitable after dark. It still had burglar bars on the windows, but these were painted a bright blue like the sign above on the one-story brick cube. Unlike your average bookstore, this one seemed to be dedicated to a special collection: books that were important to know in order to live a good life. This meant the kind of stories he liked where some ordinary (but not average) person encountered a struggle beyond their strength, yet worked up the will to approach it nonetheless. The good guys did not always win in the big stories, but they always won over themselves, he thought.

He had found it while driving to pick up a fidgety little gadget for one of his wellheads, and on impulse, had stopped in. He almost immediately regretted it. Over a worn green carpet, metal shelves loomed, stocked with books of mostly used condition, casting angular shadows on the floor as the lights above flickered. There was an old school desk at the rear with the obligatory computer screen and credit card terminal. If he had hoped for a comfortable chair, no such thing presented itself, and the walls despite being painted a cheerful blue radiated a kind of sickly green in the stuttering light of the fluorescent bulbs above. A woman seemed to be alternating between stocking books and answering the phone, and he reflected that she had designed her appearance to be ugly. The khaki pants looked like they came from a North Vietnamese uniform, and her peasant blouse might have been standard attire in a Mexican cartel. Instead of stylish shoes, she wore hiking boots, and had pulled her auburn hair back in a ponytail that showed the ragged results of what he guessed was grocery store generic shampoo. Her large glasses entirely obscured her face so that he felt he was staring at an owl, but she had a pleasant smile which would sneak out from behind her clouded face periodically as she made a little “hmmpf!” sound when sliding books onto a top shelf.

Travis had finally located the section, indicated by letters printed on one of those scrapbook-style label printers, for authors whose names began with “P,” when the light cut out again.

“What the hey?” he mumbled, then, looking up, “a flaky ballast, maybe a bad line.”

A voice cut into his musings. “Yes, I know the lights don’t work right. Yes, I will do something about it. No, that’s not now,” she said, too shrilly — on the edge of anger — for Travis.

“No need to take it out on me,” he said. “I get it: you run this shop, it’s your baby, and everything’s going wrong. When you get done being Christ on the cross and are ready to be Buddha under his yew tree, ask me nicely.”

“No charity,” she said firmly. “I’ll get to it eventually.”

Travis gave her a look that silenced her immediately, and she stepped back. We should describe Travis here: at five feet and eleven and a half inches, he had light brown, almost blond hair, and the kind of face that you might have seen on the cover of an old Western. He was not beautiful, but handsome in a functional way, and not muscled, but muscular, as any man who enjoys hiking, building things, and cultivating a garden of sweet habaneros would be. His face presented a blank not because of a lack of thoughts, but a detachment from the world, she decided after a moment. At first, she had feared him because of the sudden violence for which high testosterone men were known, but on reflection thought him unlikely to act unfairly. Men with this kind of power almost never took interest in those they could harm easily, since there was no challenge in it. Nonetheless she stepped back quickly.

Seizing the stepladder, Travis stepped up and inspected the light. He reminded her of the slow, methodical approach her father took which used to irritate her as a little girl. First the cover came off, then with his pocketknife he checked the screws, then tightened the conduit. He reset the bulbs, blew out some dust, and re-settled the cover. The flickering continued.

“Well?” she said, a bit more brattily than she intended.

“Diagnostics time,” said Travis. “There’s nothing wrong with the fixture despite being, uh, entry-level. This is not the only light flickering. It could be that all the ballasts are bad, or that you have an electrical problem.” He tracked the conduit back to the the rear of the facility where there were two doors. Yanking open the first, he spotted a toilet and sink, so he opened the second, to his chagrin noticing the harridan pointing to a sign on the first door that said RESTROOM. The unmarked door yielded a back office which was basically a stack of books and a desk with a lamp and brown paper bag on it. Lunch, he thought, as he probed behind books for her electrical panel. Without waiting for permission, he squeezed the clasp and opened the creeling metal door, then shined the desk lamp into it.

“Aren’t you worried about, um, getting electrocuted?” she said.

“Just looking for now. Diagnostics means tracing a problem then eliminating candidates. This here is a hard problem, since you have two good candidates that I can’t exclude. These breakers are corroded, like you caught some floodwater in here a few years back and your landlord didn’t tell you about it. Those ballasts out there are the cheapest, uh, items that China can ship, so they may or may not be a locus of multiple failures. But for me, if this were my man-cave or whatever, I’d start here with these, since you’ll want to replace them anyway someday.”

He saw the look across her eyes: she was calculating. Balancing the cost against the monthly, versus how much business she was losing, versus (if he read her correctly) the risk of having a very literary fire break out. Then the face turned hard.

“OK, I’ll take care of it,” she said.

“You probably want to replace this whole box, which looks like it’s from the Korean War era, but you can probably just swap out the breakers to save some money –”

“I said I’ll take care of it,” she said. “Thank you for your help, but as the business owner, I –”

“I’m not trying to white knight you here,” said Travis quickly. “But I know a guy who can do this for less. He’s just got a little alcohol problem, but –”

“You want me to trust my shop to a drunk?” she asked, eyes on fire. He was coming to like her eyes, which like the sign of the shop were a cornflower blue, but darkened when she was excited. Or angry, he reflected.

“Look, lady, I’m not trying to burn you here. He’s got a little drink problem, so you want to get him here in the morning. He’s a good electrician, and he’d cost five times as much if he were able to get through an afternoon without a couple of tall boys, but I’ve known him since he was little and his daddy died, and he’s never been right since. I’ll just write down his number on this bag.”

She thanked him again, then handed him a flashlight. In the dim light, he used the circle of radiant energy to find a copy of Some Tame Gazelle, and took it to the register with a grin. “I’ve been looking for this,” he said.

The eyes darkened again, but she was self-possessed enough to avoid a double-take. “For your wife?”

“No, she reads those deep novels, you know, characters who are flawed and struggling to accept themselves, then they move to Italy and start up a solar energy consortium or something. I just like stories, where people make good of a mixed bag.”

Back at the office, he unpacked the white paper bag and took out the book. A card fell out: “Blue Bell Books, ‘adventures in reading,’ Agnes Schultze, proprietor.” For reasons unknown to him, he stuck it in his wallet.

Thinking of books, he recalled the clue — one of those isolated events that in a diagnostic sense, indicated something in motion which was out of the ordinary — he had seen this morning. His wife left for work with the dawn, and always packed her bag the night before. Usually it had four teacher’s guides for her four classes, but he noticed only three. The English, History, and Philosophy books were there, but not the Social Studies guide. Knowing that a single fact rarely told a whole story, he waited, and it remained the same the whole week.

He stopped by the school on his way downtown for a plat from the Office of Property Records. Maureen, the receptionist, greeted him with a smile. “Looking for Dana?”

“Yep,” he said, grinning back. “Was going to see if she wanted to do lunch.”

“Well, you just missed her.”

“Isn’t it early for lunch?” asked Travis.

“True that,” said Maureen. “She didn’t tell you? She’s head of the department of English now, so she’s no longer teaching social studies. She has a free period before lunch now, and after lunch, she takes departmental issues. That means she’s only teaching three classes, lucky duck,” she said, whispering the last part.

“I guess I’ll catch her later,” said Travis.

Suspicion did not enter his heart, but like all good engineers, which is a small subset of all engineers, Travis liked mysteries. He was the kid who would have pulled on the rope snaking out under the circus tent, mixed the unmarked chemicals in the basement, or oiled up his dirt bike so he could jump faster over the heap of clay behind the Buchanan house (old Tom retired out here after finding his wife, Daisy, cheating on him with some city slicker from Minnesota, and had a fierce temper and a more vicious backhand, so they feared him, but hated the thought of a bike jump like that going unchallenged even more). It was probably amazing that he had survived this long, but he shrugged that off with a grin when the thought rose effervescent to the front of his consciousness. He parked his truck around the corner, took out a baseball cap he won in a company lottery two seasons ago, and slouched while reading a “field guide” in the shadow of the doorway of a closed business across the road. After an hour and a half, his patience was rewarded when a white Volvo chattered into the parking lot, its battered sides and loose belt proclaiming virtuous poverty, and his wife and a man got out.

Travis gave the man a good look. He was tall but thin, with watery eyes and bright orange-blonde hair. His hands moved constantly as he talked. He carried a book, probably a novel by the size, and wore big outdoors shoes, faded jeans, and a threadbare-looking thin short-sleeve button-down shirt over a strikingly white undershirt. His hands sometimes paused to push his glasses back on his nose, and his hairline while slightly receding must have originally come low over his eyes. Travis, who was by nature inclined to accept everyone as they were and judge them on their works not appearance, saw what looked like the typical teacher here: a semi-martyr to his cause, relishing the goodwill that it got him, yet always aspiring for more, possibly through the writing of books like Dana liked, with lots of introspection that flowered into a symphony of self-expression.

So far, nothing unusual here; lunch with a coworker. But Travis was attentive to details. His wife seemed to be fully paying attention to everything the man said and then, just as Travis turned to leave, she put her hand on the back of the man’s arm just below the shoulder. The afternoon grew cold then. He knew this gesture; she would touch him this way when they cuddled in bed, or at least used to, since that had not happened for some time. As often happens, the errant detail became the final piece of a puzzle, yet he could not see the puzzle right now. Travis knew that he would have to debug this situation further to figure out what was at hand.

He called the office, feigned a stomach flu, and took the afternoon off. The department secretary, Marcus, one of the most masculine men he had known despite a rumored preference for the romantic company of other masculine men, asked him bluntly if he needed a few days.

“Not… yet,” Travis said.

“I can clear out the next few days if you need. I hope everything gets better, man,” said Marcus, and signed off.

This led to him perching in the garage apartment of a family friend later that afternoon, looking into a condominium where he could clearly see his wife doing the nasty with the pasty little man from the school. Back at the house he shared with his wife and kids (Candace, six, and Robert, four) Travis sat through dinner, claimed to be working late, and then in the deepest shadow of the night began his forensic examination. Starting just inside the front door, he inspected every object no matter how familiar or insignificant, running his hands down the backs of furniture and looking in the spaces behind drawers. He felt ridiculous, since that was the kind of intrigue he expected from a spy novel, but he also wanted to — as his mentor would have said — cast an unbroken net, and catch anything and everything. It took him the rest of the afternoon, but he hit pay dirt.

 

 

 

• • In the closet above the stove, behind the blenders and popcorn air popper and other appliances, he found an opened package of brown paper bags. Puzzled, he checked the bottom drawer next to the sink; the stack they used for lunches for the kids at daycare and school were still there, also opened, and only a quarter depleted. Why a second batch of bags? his mind asked. He chalked it up to the duality of the human mind: when you want to keep something secret, but not sully something innocent like a school lunch. He sighed and moved on.

 

 

• • In the back of the hall closet where they kept sheets, blankets, and seasonal wear for the few weeks of winter that hit this close to the equator, he found an old-looking grocery bag. Normally, he would have passed this over, but the root of science is a systematic approach with testing, so he tested it by opening it. Out fell what women call lingerie, lacy panties, matching bras, slinky pantyhose, and some kind of choker, a necklace made of lace. The sinking feeling in his stomach gained some weight.

 

 

• • In the cabinet by the back door, stuffed into a cannister that had once held rose fertilizer, a packet of birth control pills, several removed, and a few strips of packets of condoms. Oddly he had no reaction to this, having seen the outline of the puzzle in his mind; this piece merely fit in with the others, since they used the rhythm method during their ongoing debate about having another child, Travis in favor, Dana unwilling to state opposition but clearly unenthusiastic.

 

 

• • In the back of the garage, at the back of the large plastic container market CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS, a cellular phone from an off-brand, obviously a “burner” or prepaid cellular phone, probably from one of the dubious little stores near South Central High School. This brought out another sigh, since at this point he expected not just the shape of the puzzle but the image it would reveal, and all was coming into focus.

 

 

 

He took the phone upstairs and connected it to his computer; he could read the entire contents of its chip like a hard drive. From experience, he knew where to find the files that contained the databases that held her email, social media, and text messages. Databases are logical constructions; in a file, they look like gibberish until broken out into records, and he was able to write up a couple of quick Python scripts to extract text and email messages. Social media was an unknown format, but he was able to extract a name and look up her alternate profile, “Linda Carter,” who seemed to be quite a partier. The text messages held no surprises, nor did the emails.

 

 

Linda: today?

T-dog: fourth period

Linda: wear something special?

T-dog: peach set, no rings

 

 

A normal man would have barfed. He would have raged, called his wife a fucking whore, threatened to beat her lover, possibly even wired the 6V output of his Volvo breaklights to a solar ignitor inserted where the gas tank met the gasoline feed. He would have cried, gotten drunk, lived in a motel, urinated on her dainties, maybe even taken a huge peanut butter dump on her desk with a little flag that says CHEATER stuck into it. However, Travis was not a normal man, mainly because he had lived large, and been acquainted with tragedy. His parents divorcing, a good friend who suicided, a girl he had been infatuated with who died in a single-car alcohol-related accident, a few coworkers crushed or maimed by large equipment. For Travis, life was about what we could do with despite its flaws, not the darkness that crept in everywhere eventually, and this had blinded him to his wife’s weakness. For her, life was about tragedy and trying to stem the tide, not rise above it. And fall she had, he reflected.

 

 

From: Linda Carter

To: Timothy Flannigan

Subject: Wednesday

There will be an awards ceremony for the students who are most improved this semester. It is important to me that you be there. Most of these kids come from the most “at risk” homes in our area, and have with some tutoring been able to raise themselves to passing averages or above. I need you to tell others to come as well. It is at lunch in the gymnasium, and our local sponsor Heartmake Hotel will be providing catering and awards.

Thursday of course is teacher in-service, but we have nothing planned for the afternoon. Want to make our usual rendezvous? My socially-designated owner is on another one of his trips to make money for large corporations who exploit their third-world labor forces. Your socially-designed owner will be halfway through a box of rosé. I’ll wear the matching set you like, the one with the patriarchal lace.

 

 

 

Most men would have cried out to the deities they hoped rather than believed were watching over them, guzzled Jack Daniels (a terrible whiskey, the liquor equivalent of soda pop) until they vomited, then punched walls and blamed their wives. To Travis, however, what was unfolding before his eyes was merely a system disintegrating. Somehow the parts were not working. This could be temporal, like too little oil or too much grit in the substrate, or permanent, such as incompatible parts or metal fatigue. He needed to find out what went wrong and how. Until then, he needed to keep the system stable as long as possible, if for nothing else to maximize his options going forward.

The next day the children went from school to daycare to home at a half-hour after he got off work, and since he was usually home first, he made dinner, which was usually simple — sketty, hamburgers, boiled chicken salad, tacos, pitas, chicken melts — and got everyone settled down to amuse themselves before bed. They usually took a walk together to “look at things,” which meant they took a slightly different path every day for a half hour, and he would ask the children what they saw.

“It’s a new house,” said Candace.

“Uh-huh,” said Travis. “How do you know?”

“Boards,” said Robert. “A skeleton!”

Candace rolled her eyes. “That’s a framework,” she said, triumphantly.

“New word,” said Travis. “Good. Skeleton works too. What does this tell us?”

“Someone new moving in!” said Robert.

“The old house is gone,” said Candace. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Travis. “Could be they are just making a new better one. What do you see in that tree?”

“Nothing,” said Robert.

“Nest!” said Candance. She took Robert’s little finger and pointed it to a dark spot in the crux of a branch.

“Let’s see if we can see the bird,” said Travis. They waited until a robin appeared, carrying something icky, and then went home after it settled in.

Back at the house, he started up on the deck again while trying to shake exhaustion from his head, having a couple hours until darkness. He had planned for a platform the length of the house, starting unreasonably high but descending in tiers, so that the top level would be invisible to the neighbors, but the bottom two would be an inviting area for the children and their friends to play. He had sunk the posts and was building out the frame while the boards he had scavenged from the torn-down house his children had seen were aging in the sun under several layers of lemon oil and tea tree oil. In another couple weeks, they would be ready; he already had them measured and cut.

Thinking in the back of his mind as he sanded and prepped posts for their coats of primer, paint, and sealant, Travis came to a few realizations:

 

 

 

1. 1. His position could not get any worse. Based on the emails and texts, his wife was leading a double life. She could repeat the act, sure, but the messages went back over a year. Come to think of it, she had not had any teacher in-service days that he knew about then, and she had stopped calling him for lunch when she knew he was in town. He could have whacked himself with a board, but having a full life often means not noticing the everyday when it changes a little bit.

 

 

1. 1. She had no idea that he knew. This was perhaps the advantage in not confronting her, drinking to oblivion, or punching out walls. He was now the person in power because he was the leading force making decisions to which she had to respond. Or at least, he could be, and get out of the position of passively adjusting to the new reality.

 

 

1. 1. He loved her but it did not matter. As his mother said, “it takes two to love.” His feelings could now be described as “infatuation,” since she clearly did not love him, as her actions (and words) demonstrated. She had left the family, whether she knew it or not, because in her heart or mind or soul or wherever people make choices, she had decided that she needed something else more than she was afraid of losing what she had. This brought about a heavy sigh, but then the cold feeling dissipated as he realized that this was something that had occurred in the past. No point struggling against what is now part of the world and out of his control.

 

 

1. 1. He believed in God. This took him by surprise. “What the fuck?” uttered Travis. But since he was searching his heart, he found something there: a sustaining, nurturing, and encouraging force that always wanted the good to rise. Some think God is blind, he reflected, but really, God has no time for those who like in the Garden of Eden choose a path away from the good. They have become like old fads, ground down under the wheel of time, and now we look back on acid-washed jeans, teased hair, and jelly shoes and think, again, “What the fuck?” In all of his engineering, he had seen the beauty and genius of God. He would never want to join a church like the one that his parents had attended, nor could he ever believe that words written by man were literal truth. But in his deepest heart, he was sure of the beauty of life and God, and he wanted to reach for that, past the sadness of her doomed affair.

 

 

1. 1. Her affair was doomed. Love grows with familiarity, but that means the everyday events like changing diapers, buying furniture, cooking meals, and listening to the fears of your partner or children even if they seem trivial and removed from your world. Flannigan fit a type that Travis recognized from college: clearly intelligent, but a critic of his world, not someone who would master it and push it toward goodness. Men like that had a substitute goodness, the symbolic act of “doing good” that substituted for having a good heart, sane mind, healthy soul, and a desire to improve oneself. Guys like Flannigan thought they were perfect, little gods among men, and turned their criticism outward, as well as their hopes. So did Dana. Over time, these hopes would be ground down by familiarity.

 

 

1. 1. She would never know. Her attention was elsewhere, barely even on the kids at this point. He could sleep on the sofa in his office, claim he was working late, and most of all, stop being a husband to her. Any energy he expended on anything but deceiving her was at this point wasted energy. He did not want to hurt her, or drink yucky cough syrup tasting drivel like Jack Daniels, but she had made her choice and in his final act of love, he would honor it. She could not have both, and that was her error. He needed to give her the mushroom treatment — keep her in the dark and feed her warm cowshit — while he decided what he needed to do for his future and most importantly, that of his children.

 

 

 

Travis had built his mind around being too analytical to believe that his wife had been hit by a Martian Zombie Slut Ray that had turned her into some alien being. Rather, like oil under pressure in the layers of rock below his feet, she was being revealed and formed at the same time. Akin to most humans, she had been a bundle of potentials, and she chose some over the others, at which point those came to dominate her. She had chosen self-pity and self-worship, which are one and the same, since the first justifies the second, and instead of making her strengths grow, she had nurtured her weakeness: her misery, her anger, her frustration, her selfishness. He did not think that this was genetic; rather, it came from moral choices, and some make good ones and some bad, according to the whims of nature, science, or God, he supposed.

He realized in this moment how futile it was to keep caring about his marriage. Love stood above ideas; it was something that came from within, in the murky depths of dreams and character. Ideas could be bent because we can all artificially narrow our definitions. Take, for example, “respect.” To him it meant that he would never betray her, a set of actions which included having sex with another woman or even setting his heart on another woman. To her, it meant that she would give him certain tokens of respect, but then do what she needed and if his needs became inconvenient, well, that was too bad, so sad and not particularly relevant to her decision. They both respected each other, each with his or her own definition, and the two had stopped meeting. This meant that the system would not work, and he needed to build a new system while keeping this one on life support.

“How was work, sweetie?” he asked, as he always did.

“Oh, it was fine,” said Dana. “Lot of paperwork. I’m bushed, I –”

“No problem,” said Travis gently. “I’ll be working late in my office.”

And that was that. She went off to the bedroom, stopping by the garage to get her second phone, he assumed. She would hide her panties from today in the laundry, pack herself another bag with the set she was going to wear tomorrow at her lunchtime meeting with goofus, and take her pill on the way out the door, or maybe use the condoms. He wasn’t sure why both were there, but he suspected that she suspected that her beau was hanging the horns on more than one husband, and she didn’t want to pick up an STD. Not because she cared about Travis, but because that would give up the game, and he could imagine the thrill of having such an illicit pleasure, a vibrant secret, among what she saw as her humdrum life.

He finished the book he was reading, took a pillow from the couch and blanket from the closet, then bedded down on the olive green 1950s-era sofa he kept in his office. It was one of the few things he had from his parents, who had systematically destroyed all traces of their former lives after the divorce. That might be genetic, he thought. On a trailing impulse, he went downstairs to the laundry room. Pulling on a pair of the latex gloves he kept for field work, he dug in the hamper until he found the peach panties with a suspicious crusty stain in the crotch. He stuffed them into a fresh sandwich bag, and went back to his office, shucking the gloves into an old lunch bag — he could not leave them in the trash, where she might find them and wonder — and gently sliding the full sandwich into his laptop bag.

Sighing, he went to sleep.

Having sent Marcus a text message saying that he needed those couple days off, Travis slept late. His wife and kids were gone, bundled off to work, school, and daycare, when he awoke. He fired up his laptop and began printing messages, then archived all the files from her phone on a remote server he kept for transfering large files in the field. Then he researched Timothy Flannigan.

It turned out that Flannigan came from a family which had moved out here from Boston after the second world war and made good on the mineral rights under the family farm. Scanning the newspaper archives, Travis found that Flannigan had indeed come from a weighty educational background — Harvard undergrad, Brown for graduate — and from the looks of things, had a trust fund. He found an address at a downtown condominium that no teacher could ordinarily afford. Property records listed a wife as well, and on Facebook her found her, a dour-faced thin woman with long blonde hair. Numerous adulatory articles listed his awards in work with the underprivileged, abused, and impoverished.

“Well, how can I compete with that?” Travis chuckled.

He set to work on what he called Operation: Black Box. He figured that since he knew nothing about her, a power gap had been created, and he needed to even that one up by making himself even more inscrutable. he stopped at the hardware store and bought a new door lock, then hit Walmart to get a burner phone, and finally stopped by Walgreens to get a deluxe family pack of multi-colored condoms, choosing a brand other than the one he had found at home. On the way back, he stopped at the Blue Bell Bookstore.

“You don’t happen to have a copy of The Last Man by Mary Shelley, do you?” he said to Agnes, who was today wearing baggy khakis and a fuzzy sweater so thick it looked like she was trying to hide in it.

“Here you go,” she said, sliding a book from one of the shelves after a moment of searching. “Thank you for your recommendation of an electrician.”

“You liked old Greison?” he said, surprised.

“Yes, we got along quite well,” she said. “I don’t judge, either, when I meet people in person. It’s through third party reference that’s so hard.”

“What do you mean?” asked Travis.

Agnes paused. “You know, how everything is a chain… I tell you something about someone else, that I heard from someone, who in turn heard from someone else. This puts that person into a category, which is like a little island — have you read Island, Robinson Crusoe, and The Possibility of an Island? — and we decide whether we want to venture there, but really, it is nothing more than a chain of links made of gossip. Some detail about a person, like being an alcoholic, tells us a detail, not the whole picture. When you say he is a good electrician, I want to visit that island but then, he’s on alcoholic island, and who wants to go there? Then I meet him, and he’s an island unto himself. Taciturn, evasive, obviously still hurting… but afraid to let go of that pain, since he does not know what is left of himself underneath it.”

Travis looked at her quizzically. “That’s a lot of thought for a lady in a bookstore.”

“Oh, please. This is my shop; it is my baby, since my husband left and I got half of the house. After spending seven years following his dreams, I wanted to chase my own, and experience real adventure in life. Not the kind where you jump out of planes and shoot terrorists, but the process of creation. I’ve never run a business before! And now I know much more. I needed to do this to take myself to the next level, to know myself, after having lost myself for too many years.”

Travis felt shocked. “It’s a nice bookstore. It takes a brave soul to venture off into this trade, especially with all the big bookstores out there.”

Agnes looked up at him, her eyes darkening slightly to a cobalt blue. “I’m waiting for something. Not waiting for something to happen, but be ready to happen. To be what it always was. Oh, listen to me, rattling on, and we’ve barely met.”

“Hey, you don’t happen to have those other books you mentioned?” Travis asked, taking the conversation to a lighter note, he hoped.

Leaving the store, he drove home and with a little cussing, installed the office lock. He took out the strips of condom packets, tore the packets apart from one another, and hid them strategically in places where only his wife would look: the utility closet, on top of the water heater where she stuck things found in pockets while doing the laundry, and at the back of the medicine cabinet behind the mango-pomegranate mouthwash that her friend Ella had convinced her to buy. He used the burner phone to sign up for a new Facebook account and sent a friend request to “Linda Carter.”

Then he started strategizing quickly:

 

 

 

1. 1. If he were to divorce her, which would formalize her decision to leave the union, the state would give half of everything he had to her. He knew this from his many friends, coworkers, and family members who had gone through divorces. The drunk frat-bro down at the bar says, “You know why divorce is expensive? Because it’s worth it!” That is half of the equation. The other half is that you lose your retirement, house, and investments by having them cut in half, plus usually have to pay alimony.

 

 

1. 1. He might make out better by staying married to her. His attorney, Allen Stewart, was of the firm belief that any attempts to liquidate or reduce value would be viewed as fraud by the court and end in a jail term. However, anything done before the divorce, including “errors” of judgment resulting in loss, were untouchable. To put it bluntly, whatever he got rid of now would not be something that she could later take. This gave him a mandate to spend on anything he wanted that was intangible, and if he converted that into income, it would be an unknown. Even better, many of these things could be deductible so he would not have to pay double for them by normal taxation.

 

 

1. 1. At the present moment, he had no future to move toward. He knew the marriage to Dana was dead, and in fact even if she did the usual BTB/RAAC act of swearing that it was all her fault and she’d make it up to him by living as his sex slave in the basement, she would cheat on him again. She no longer respected him, by his definition, which meant that she was missing one of the ingredients for love, which in turn meant that she would always flee their loveless marriage for the arms of another. But until he had somewhere he wanted to go, he might as well not rock the boat much.

 

 

1. 1. She was leading a double life, which meant that over time, her burden would increase to the point that she would want to exit the marriage, at which point he would have the strongest bargaining position. For some reason, he felt like she no longer wanted the kids around, since they were going to slow down her exciting new lifestyle. If he became a force of drag, like a parachute trailing behind a race car, on the marriage, she might just blow him off and go somewhere else. At that point, she had no claim on his assets whatsoever.

 

 

 

Travis knew himself to his bones, and that he was not someone trapped in a Victorian morality, but someone of a 3000 BC morality. He believed in the time-proven values of honor, pride, fidelity, chastity, loyalty, and reverence. He had no interest in the trends and fads that flitted across the television screen like bats on meth. As his mentor at school, Professor Dodson, used to tell him: “Things only matter if they endure a century or more, otherwise they are footnotes, and over time will be omitted from future editions of the history books. We will remember Charlemagne, Beethoven, Keats, and Newton for all time, but will The Beatles and Picasso make it past a century? Time will tell. Nothing matters except that which endures, and this means that it takes decades, centuries, and even millennia to see what was important. Only in their afterlife do things reveal their true value.” Since his marriage was definitely in its afterlife, he could see what it was: two beautiful children, some good years, and then Dana giving up on their enduring future in order to seize the moment and feel better about what he thought was a momentary bump in the road. Still, he was glad to know now, instead of a decade from now.

On a rainy morning he hauled himself into his attorney’s office. “Allen,” he said — they had worked together for years — “tell me something: can I file an in rem suit against a DNA profile?”

Stewart considered it. “That’s pushing the legal envelope a little, but we can try it,” he said after a few moments. “I think it’s slightly more likely than not that the courts will entertain it, if nothing else, the novelty. What gives?”

Travis slid a piece of paper across the wide oak desk. “I’d like to sue this DNA profile for loss of the comforts of marriage, which we can estimate based on this price schedule,” he said, sliding three gaudy brochures across the desk.

“Let’s see… an au pair, an escort service, and an instant friend chat hotline.”

“Yes, because thanks to this guy, I’m not getting full enjoyment of my wife. She’s having an affair, so her affections are elsewhere. I take care of the kids, the sex has become objectionable, and I no longer have any companionship to speak of. Those brochures tell us the going market rates for a wife, if you add them up. A couple hours of conversation a day, sex twice a week, and the au pair for a couple hours every evening and on the weekends.”

Allen knew his friend well enough to roll with it. “I’ll file this, and send you a bill,” he said. “The court will either dismiss the lawsuit or not. If they do not dismiss, you have to find out who this person is.”

“Thanks, pal,” said Travis, shaking his hand warmly.

Life settled into a pattern. Travis reflected that marriage was like a partnership. You signed a contract, but even more, had a meeting of the minds. When one party betrays that, it means that their goal has changed and no longer includes the partnership. That means that to them, the partnership is a means to the end of whatever else they want to do. For that reason, they will keep up the appearance of the partnership for its value while subverting it privately. You can beg or threaten a partner to come back into the fold, but then they are simply acting out their role, and like most acting, this will be fake. Unless they have a desire to make the partnership work in their hearts, they cannot be trusted. They will just be acting so they get the social reward that comes from the partnership.

With that in mind, he re-adjusted his view of the affair. The problem was not that she was sleeping with, being in love with, and spending time with another man to the neglect of him and her family; it was that she had decided to do this, and in doing so, had revealed how she felt about the family for who knows how long. To her, it was a possession, like a car or new television, that gave her a certain status in the community, but she did not intend to honor it. That meant that she was not his loving wife. As his mother said: “no one who loves you tries to hurt you; someone who says they love you, but hurts you, is an abuser, not someone you can afford to love.”

Travis did a little research and realized that goods and services came in a few categories. Some had liquid value, meaning that they could be converted instantly to cash, like stocks, gold, or even guns. Others were consumable, meaning that their value decreased radically after being used or went away entirely, like a fine steak dinner. They could not be re-sold. Others had intangible value, which meant that their actual value was immeasurable, like goodwill in the community or expertise. He was trying to convert marriage to an estimated value by measuring it as a service; in the meantime, it made sense to convert his wealth to consumables.

A few weeks later, he went into the bookstore again and came out with an armload of books.

“You’re not doing this because you pity me?” asked Agnes.

“No, and you’re not my type,” said Travis. “I don’t ‘do’ pity, generally. It’s a nasty form of condescension. This is my favorite bookstore, and if you don’t mind me being here, I’m going to haunt it. I have a little more free time now, and I’ve always wanted to read more.”

Something in the color of his face changed with the words “free time,” and Agnes found herself moved to empathy. “You are always welcome. You’re not my type either, but I like knowing that these books go to good homes. And I would never pity anyone, since it is a way of suggesting that they cannot rise again.”

Travis nodded, but she was already digging in a pile of books. “Here’s another, on the house.”

“Steppenwolf? Like the band?” he asked.

“Other way around, by my guess. It’s a book about — well, maybe you’ll like it.”

He thanked her profusely and left. He drove by the office, then visited a work site out in the hill country. His days now consisted of work, reading in his office, sleeping in his office, and spending the weekends at a cabin a friend owned in the hill country that he rented for cash-in-hand. It was not cheap, but it got him and the children away from the house for a couple days, since the place had a bad air about it. It reeked of neglect and disinterest. His friend had hinted that he would sell the cabin, which would go fairly cheap, for cash as well, and even help with financing. He couldn’t justify buying a place so far away, but it put an idea into his head.

Months passed. Dana never mentioned the condoms, but looked slightly unnerved. Travis reflected that men who sleep with other men’s wives knowingly got something out of it that was more than sex and a guilty pleasure. They got the satisfaction of having destroyed something better than themselves. Most humans have a desire to subvert stronger things because this is easier than making oneself strong. Making oneself strong requires knowing oneself, and that means looking into all the things for which we might pity ourselves. Travis felt the pressure of time, because sooner or later, Timothy would tire of his new plaything. He visited Allen again and left with a single document.

The next morning, he planted the seed: “Hon, I’m going to be visiting a friend tonight. She just found out that her husband was cheating on her for the past year, and it’s going to be ugly, so I want to be there for her.”

Dana just looked at him over her coffee cup, seeming more annoyed than anything else.

At this point, Travis resembled the average American more than ever before. Trusting in social security, he spent whatever he got, most of it on things that lost value: trucks, boats, books, clothes, and time up at the cabin. Of course, he returned or resold a large number of those things, effectively laundering money from credit into cash, which he stored in the bank account of a dead partnership he bought off one of his field workers. Originally designed to sell oilfield services, it now sold scented candles online and never posted a profit. However, its bank account swelled.

Two days later he came home and headed up to his office, only to see his wife on the stairs. Someone cleared his throat in the living room.

“Let me guess… we have to talk?” he said to his wife. They sat down in the living room. Timothy looked pale and slightly sweaty, giving his skin an oleaginous sheen. The kids were playing upstairs, and outside, someone was mowing a lawn. Travis felt connected to these sounds more than what was about to play out before him. He held the folder next to him more tightly than he wanted.

Travis rose up and got everyone a beer from the fridge in the kitchen. Dana could not remember him stocking beer there, nor buying a brand as high-brow as Warsteiner.

“So…” he began, and she cut him off, as he knew she would.

“Travis, do you love me?” she asked.

“Of course I did,” he said, softening the last syllable.

“Then you want what is best for me?” asked Dana.

“Of course, dear wife,” said Travis, slurping the delicious pale lager. It was more real to him than these words, he realized. To be alive, to have a moment of full appreciation for what it was to live, even in something so mundane as a delicious lager.

“Then, what will you do for me if I need it?” she ventured, more slowly.

“Oh, anything,” said Travis, looking out the window. It was the right answer, both socially when speaking to a group of people he wanted to like him, and in theory, on paper.

“I haven’t been fulfilled for some time,” she said. “I have needed experiences that I missed out on before our marriage.” They had married during his graduate schooling while she had worked on her own degree, after having known each other mostly from their time together at a volunteer group on campus. He remembered having a lot of hope, but wondered if it had been all in his own head.

She continued: “For some time, I have realized that I need to experience other men in order to fully realize my love for you.”

Travis said nothing, gazing at her with open emotionless blue eyes. Timothy cleared his throat again.