Woke Up Lonely A Novel

ESME SAID, “Martin, just look at this.”

He looked. And what he saw sacked his self-esteem for the year. It had taken him months to perfect the anchoring system of her face. So much trial and error, but in the end, it held. She’d worn it nine times. It had even survived exposure to wafts of sweat and BO in a gym carnival. So why today? Her left cheekbone had mutinied. It was actually falling away from her face. And her nose—my God. It was released from the bridge and tilting floorward.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say: Esme, I am sorry. This will never happen again.” She began to laugh. “Can you imagine what Bruce must have thought? Good thing he was drunk. Good thing, for me—” She looked at Martin with reproach. “Get him home, okay?”

“I’ll do that now.”

“You’ll need the sleds. For them both, I think.”

Martin nodded and left, but at the door, Esme said, “Be careful.” It was cold out—the wind panned across the fields in great sheets—and Esme felt for Bruce and Rita. A couple expecting a child. She’d been part of such a couple once, and she remembered its pleasures. But also the ruination that came before and after and, in this arrangement of feeling: a reminder that nothing is ever as it seems.

On TV: the Great Hall. The meeting was long over, though the room was half-full. If she rewound tape of its highlights, she would have heard about weaponry and nation-states and living as one in a socialist community severed from the body elected. How was it Thurlow couldn’t prune from his ranks people who believed in stuff like this?

On another TV: Ida reading under the covers with a flashlight. Esme considered paying her a visit. She wouldn’t be home from school forever. Plus, no child should be up this late. Why was Ida still up? Esme frowned. Whatever the reason, it was, she feared, just the open eyes of anxiety atop a body of trauma nine years long.

She turned off the monitor. If she tried to comfort her daughter, she might end up exposing herself instead. Since Thurlow, she had not once turned on anyone with a look that might reveal the effluvia of her heart. Its overflow. The puffery of loss and guilt acquired in the span of her time on this earth. She worried now that for having waited so long she might turn that look on Ida, on her little child, and then what?

She just did not have a frame of reference for the happy stuff of intimacy, and it had been many years since she had tried. She’d been on her own since eighteen, though more properly thirteen, which was when her brother had an accident that left her emotionally abandoned and, in essence, without family. Though in the last couple of weeks, that phrase—without family—had succumbed her to variations of loss that shamed what she’d associated with the concept before.

Her brother had been a surfer, world-class, and had trained every day. Their parents drove them to the beach—mornings before school and on the weekends—because when there’s manifest talent condensed in only one child, you spend all your time and money on that child and hope the other one knows you love her anyway. They were only one year apart.

His friends were surfers, too, a little older, and one day the eldest, who was fifteen, got fresh with Esme behind a shed of garbage cans, she gathering fish bones for a spell she wanted to try that night—Spirit of distaff and fertility, make my breasts grow now!—and he asking if she wanted to see something and maybe to touch something, and, wouldn’t you know it, she kind of did. At first she was shy, but she cottoned to it pretty quick. So did he, since he ejaculated on her bathing suit in seconds. Next thing, she was back to the fish bones when her brother showed up, taking her by the wrist and saying, “Ez, don’t be stupid, we are a*sholes,” and her thinking he was jealous because his friend liked her more than him. Probably, she said as much. Probably, he was hurt.

An hour later, they were in the hospital. The kid who saw him go down said he didn’t know, just that Chris seemed distracted. Took a bad part of the wave, but still, there was no way to know there was a sheet of fiberglass down there and that Chris would crack his head. Or that he’d stay under for the extra seconds that are the difference between relief, brain damage, and coma. The doctors did not bullshit around. Chris was indeed in a coma and, barring a miracle, would never come out.

In the twenty-four years he slept, Esme saw him six times, all in the first six months. Her parents? Maybe they saw him once. Was she to blame for what had happened to him? In a word: yes.

A tear dribbled down her cheek and settled at the base of her throat. People liked to say the greatest distance on earth was between your head and heart. And say it as if this distance were a problem. What problem? Esme would have been glad not to know anything of what went on down there. Because once in a while, a feeling would cover the distance, usually while she was on the job and stretched thin on emotional resources, so that when she got home: there it was, a feeling on her mind. Nine times out of ten, this feeling was about Ida, and the feeling said: You are ruining her life. And then she could not breathe. And the feeling, in triumph for having made it this far, would parade about her head, crush what forces she deployed against it, and lord over the place until another job came in. Which meant that, while she liked to think she was saving lives, it was really the job that saved her.

And so: Do not think; work. This was not work but rescue.

Olgo Panjabi, 2315 hrs: Nodding off in an armchair. Palm concealing his face because only old men nodded off in their chairs. He did not want Kay to come home to a drooling, narcoleptic husband. It was after eleven, and she was out. He did not know where. She had not returned his calls. She had not left a note. Still, he refused to worry. If he worried, he would call Erin, and that was a no-no. On the other hand, if he worried, it meant he still thought there was a chance Kay had been abducted, hurt, lost, instead of on a date. If that was what one called such a thing at her age. Could one still date after fifty? Of course. Every night with her had felt like a date, down to the weakness in his knees when she’d come out of the bathroom wearing a low-cut dress or black sheer stockings. He had always loved her legs. Lean and beautiful, and willing to part for him, always. They had had a wondrously sensual life together. He could not swear his experience had been a cut above the rest, but he guessed as much, given what people said about marriage over time.

He had stopped nodding off. Instead, he was pacing and producing reasons why a wife suddenly took up with another man. Suddenly? He felt tonight’s ratatouille start to web in his stomach.

He heard a key in the lock and decided not to ask where she’d been. It was good to feign indifference and also to give space. He was not sure which tactic would help, but he was glad for one stone, two birds.

Only it wasn’t Kay at the door, but Erin and Tennessee.

Olgo stood. “What are you doing here? Is everything okay?”

Erin said, “Where’s Mom?” And she started to cry. Her high ponytail of yore was crestfallen, and the hair was ballooned in all directions. Tennessee, who had, from the looks of it, been crying for hours, crumpled to the floor to pound the linoleum with her fists. She did not want to sleep here. She wanted to go home.

Erin flopped into a second armchair. She was obviously forsaking her daughter to Olgo, who rushed to the kitchen to make hot chocolate with marshmallows. He set up Tennessee in the guest room with the TV on.

When he came back, Erin said, “Jim changed the locks on the apartment. We had a fight. He says it’s his place, he pays for it, and we can’t stay there. Says he’s got too much work to deal with us right now.”

“He threw you out? My God.”

“He’s an ass,” she said. “And I bet his girlfriend’s coming over. That trampy little hunchback.” She looked around. “Where’s Mom?”

“She went to the store.”

“At midnight?”

“It’s not midnight.” But Olgo would not check his watch. If it was midnight, there was the distinct possibility Kay had passed into a mind-set in which she did not intend to come home at all. Not until morning, in any case.

“Can we crash here for the night?” Erin said. She unlaced her boots. “Might be for a couple nights, actually.”

Olgo returned to the kitchen to make tea. Erin followed.

He said, “Since when is the Defense Department God? Last I heard, you could work for the government and still have time for your wife.” He said this with more heat than he would have liked, and quickly tended to the kettle.

They sat on either side of the counter, on bar stools.

“What’s Mom getting at the store? What could be so important?”

“Women stuff,” he said.

“Dad, what is going on? First you ask about Mom’s hair, and now she’s out past midnight on a Sunday. A Monday.”

“Let’s talk about Jim. We need to get him out of that house. You need to get a locksmith and do unto him and so on. So much for your mother’s little tête-à-tête today. She said it went well!”

Erin hooked her toes over a rung of the stool. “You don’t know where she is, do you.”

Olgo slammed his mug on the counter. It was empty; there was no effect. “No, okay? No. I think she is out with friends.”

“Friends?”

“Yes. Your mother has friends. And so do I. We do not have to do everything together. We do have separate lives. It’s what makes a marriage work.”

Erin was on her feet. “Are you saying I was too clingy with my husband? Are you saying this divorce is my fault? Because last I checked, he’s always off doing some secret something or other. And you know what else? I didn’t ask you.”

“I’m talking about your mother and her friend. This has nothing to do with you.”

“What friend?”

“Friends. She has many. I am speaking in general.”

“No, I’m pretty sure you said friend. As in one.”

“I’m going to check on Tennessee.” But Erin stopped him.

“You know, Dad, people change sometimes. They need new things. They get involved with new things.”

“Erin, really. It’s late. We can talk about the birds and the bees tomorrow.”

“Has it occurred to you,” she said, “that Mom might be in trouble? Not out with her friends, but in trouble?”

“Don’t be silly. She’s not in trouble.”

“How do you know? You asked if I’ve noticed anything weird about her, and the truth is, I have.”

“Your mother is a capable, intelligent woman. She’s fine. Don’t worry.”

“Dad, I’m trying to tell you something.”

He began to pay attention. His glasses had slipped down the bridge of his nose; the pads were greasy. “What sort of trouble?”

“Well, you know how Mom’s gotten all therapy lately—”

“No, I don’t know that.”

“Yeah, okay, so you know how Mom’s gotten all expressive lately? I think she’s met some people. Or someone. And I think that someone has ideas about some things and that maybe those ideas are exciting for a person who’s gotten all hippie a little late in life and missed out on all the sixties stuff. I mean, what, Mom was just a wife or whatever, hardly an exciting experience if you’ve got a passion for the hurt of people’s lives.”

“Since when do you talk like this?”

Erin poured herself more tea. “I might have been at a meeting or two with Mom.”

“Please don’t say it’s the Helix. And how many is one or two?”

“Me, two. Her, twelve.”

“Twelve? Erin, the Helix is for wackos!”

“Could be thirteen.”

“Erin. What are you talking about? Your mother has never been interested in community work, hippyism, whatever you want to call it. And, okay, we haven’t seen so much of each other since I started my new job, but I have not heard a peep out of her about it.”

“I think she figured maybe you wouldn’t have the patience.”

“She got that right.”

“Or maybe”—and here she began to pulp her words, which was what people did when they wanted you to hear but not hear what they were saying—“maybe it’s just that you’re part of the problem.”

“I’m the thing she’s going to the Helix to solve?”

“Dad, how much do you really know about the Helix?”

“Nothing.” This was not true, but he was feeling so petulant and infantilized by this hint of how much bigger the world was than him that he’d reverted to the best juvenilia there was. No, no, no.

“Just keep your ears open, that’s all I’m saying. Tomorrow I’ll try to reach my lawyer and deal with the apartment. It’s going be hard. Jim seems to have everyone in his pocket.”

“What a shit,” Olgo said. “And what do you mean That’s all I’m saying? If you know something about your mother that I don’t, you have to tell me.”

“Don’t raise your voice. I just think if no one knows where she is, maybe she’s with this person she met and maybe they joined the Helix for real.”

“What the hell does that mean? Is this a spiritual thing? A quest? Your mother is soul searching?” He did not have any idea what Erin was talking about, only that she’d conceded some kind of poverty in his marriage such that Kay had gone off to find her bounty elsewhere. “Never mind,” he said. “I’ve heard enough. Really. So your mother’s run off to join the circus. I’m going to bed. I expect she’ll be back in the morning. You need anything? There’s more blankets in the closet.”

He headed for the bedroom and closed the door. Waited for Erin to join Tennessee and then said a short prayer. Please let her come home. He had gone to bed without his wife only once in thirty-five years, and then only because she had left on short notice to see her father. He stared at the closet and bureau. Pressed his elbows into the mattress because he was on his knees. Opened doors and drawers. All items belonging to Olgo? In place. All items belonging to Kay? Gone.

Esme closed his file. She had known Kay was about to split for the Helix but could not have known it would happen this fast. Perfect timing. She looked at a map of Helix communities and confirmed that Pack 7, Richmond, was the closest to his house. Kay was probably there by now. So, would Olgo go out to Cincinnati and do whatever it took to shut down the Helix? Absolutely. Would he bother questioning why him and not some Navy Seal trained for this purpose? Not at all.

It was after one in the morning, and Esme was spent. She nearly called it a day, because why bother with Bruce? He was proving the easiest of the four. Still, she got in bed and watched him from there.

She wrote: All quiet on the surveillance front except for Bruce Bollinger, who by 0149 hrs had vomited so many times, there was a crescent dented into his forehead from the toilet seat. He sat on the tile, legs splayed, wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. He said: Benny, Jack, Lothar, Nick. They had not settled on a name for his son, their son, though earlier today Rita had said, Che, how about Che? to which Bruce had said, Yeah? How about Santa. It’ll give him a leg up come winter. And so another fight, more tears, and a foreboding sense that already they were bad parents because probably the baby could hear them, was being exposed early to this soundtrack of wrath, and would, years later in therapy, hold these notes responsible for some of his blues.

Bruce looked at his reflection in the toilet bowl. His throat burned; his nose ran. He wrung a tube of Aquafresh, rubbed the paste on his teeth, and made for the couch. As part of the downsizing of their lives from comfortable to poor, they had disconnected their cable service. This meant, in general, two things: One, in the hour it would take Bruce to stream thirty seconds of porn using dial-up, the urge to touch himself would have long since passed, so that he had not experienced anything close to pleasure in this department for nearly five months. Two: since what cable they did have was pirated, you never knew what channels were going to come in, which taxied Bruce into new areas of entertainment, among them, City Drive Live, which aired a traffic feed from locations all over D.C. During the day: blah. But at night: my God. A camera trained on the GW Parkway southbound, the footage gritty and dark, the cars speeding by, but staggered, because how many cars sped down the GW at 2 a.m.? Watching this stuff was like pawning the feel and hue and smell of your life for scenes of the forlorn. Bruce loved it.

From the bedroom, his wife was calling. He had his thoughts. Was an alcoholic blackout advisable under the circumstances? You couldn’t be blamed for negligence if you were blacked out. He draped a blanket over his shoulders. It was possible Rita had stopped paying the heating bill.

“What is it, honey?” He stood inside the doorway to their room. The longer he slept on the couch, the more he felt the trespass of his return.

“Just thinking,” she said. “Couldn’t sleep.”

He approached the bed slowly. Among the blankets and throw pillows, hers was still the most prominent stuffing there.

“You been sick?” she said.

He nodded, though she still faced the wall. This gave him the chance to step in further. Closer, one toe at a time. Could he really see his own breath? He shivered and looked at his wife, could almost feel her breasts and stomach, the pack of her thighs. Under those covers was a pound of flesh. And so, though the timing was awful, his blood began to jazz like seltzer. Neurons firing, he came to life.

He sidled along the wall undetected. The flap of his pajama bottoms turned him loose. He closed in on the edge of the bed but stepped on a comb that skidded across the carpet. He froze, heart stopped. She lifted her head, nose in the air. The draft in the apartment put him at a disadvantage, upwind. Desire has a whiff; if she caught on, forget it. She lowered her head. Snuggled.

He scanned the terrain of blankets for a point of entry and settled on a tiered approach, peeling back one layer of blanket at a time.

“Get me my lotion?” Rita said, and he all but reared as the nape of the duvet fell from his hand. Lotion? She said lotion! And like that, he was fifteen years old. Wanting to get over on his wife and wresting from language in one context arousal in another. Could he assist in the application of this slippery, thick, jerk-off lotion?

He watched her cream her palms and forearms, and he waited. She might say: I can’t reach this spot, can you help? Or: I need some here and here. And if in the process he dragged the tip of his penis down her spine—an accident, he’d swear—it would be enough to get him off later, dial-up be damned.

He waited and watched, but still no orders, and so he was all but resigned when she said, “Baby, come here,” followed by the unthinkable gesture of her turning over to look at him. He was backlit; there was no way she wouldn’t see his condition, and yet he still tried to hide it. She patted the mattress. What were the odds? So, no, he would not be stupid about this. Would not mistake come hither for meow, would instead sit on the bed and regard the impudence of his erection with pity.

She touched his hand and said, “You’re freezing!”

He got under the covers, actively trying to leach the excitement from his body. He knew Rita; she’d be appalled. She was pregnant and bedridden and no part of her was unfurling to accommodate his needs. Not tonight, not any night soon, not even for weeks or months after the baby was born. And anyone who thought otherwise was not just insensitive but sadistic, because this arousal did not affirm his wife’s hotness blazed through the more immediate evidence that she’d lost her sex appeal so much as furnish her sense—her fear—that she’d married an a*shole.

He stared at the rice-paper shade overhead and considered what disposable savings he and Rita would need to justify purchase of a replacement shade, something stained glass or Tiffany-like, and how they might never accede to this position of wealth, and where normally such thoughts deflated his courage to live, never mind a hard-on, tonight they roused him up the gallows. He was on his back with his arms fastened to his side. Entombed. Safe. Do. Not. Move.

“Honey,” she said, and she scooted for him so that her kneecaps pressed into his upper thigh and her hand fell atop his chest. “Honey, I was thinking—”

Oh, to hell with it: he reverted to strategies that had groped at him through high school. He sat up to scratch his foot so that her hand rappelled down his chest and landed in the flesh well between his hip and navel. Maybe the landscaping of their bodies would give her ideas where before she had none.

She laughed. “Feels like a war in your belly,” she said, and she pinched the mini-donuts tubed about his waist.

“Thanks,” he said, but thought: A little to the left. Just a little!

“So, anyway, I was thinking,” she said. “About the baby? What if we named him after someone I kind of admire?”

She was breathing on his shoulder, and the heat collected in his armpits. Her finger traced a halo around his belly button. “Someone he can be proud of his whole life.”

Bruce tried not to move—his fists were tight—and yet there it was, his pelvis thrusting for her, gently and without commitment, but thrusting all the same while he watched in horror and waited for the tirade that was, instead, his wife vouchsafing her thighs, lathered in cream. He fit himself between them and smiled like an ape.

“Are you listening?” she said.

He was, he was! He was even going to climax with this name on her lips, their boy’s name, Bruce Jr., because all his life, secretly, he’d wanted to have his own father’s name—Henry—and felt this keenly and always in the presence of his younger brother, the doctor brother, the most renowned hematologist in the country brother, Dr. Henry Bollinger II. And Rita knew this—in the courtship phase of releasing secrets you’d never told anyone else, he had told her—and now, suddenly, his beloved wife was making good on what she knew. Bruce Jr.! His baby boy. And this despite everything he had done. She was a marvel, he was a cad, and from this incoherence grew the tension that stormed out of his body and all over her legs, the sheets, and the duvet.

He was panting so loud, he didn’t hear her at first. “The Helix,” she said. “They’re amazing. And the guy who started it?” She reached for a tissue and plucked the semen off her quad. “He’s a genius. So that’s what I want. They say he’s nicknamed Lo. I think it’s cute. So it’s settled, okay?”

“What?” Bruce said, though he was laughing. “Are you kidding?” And he laughed harder. “The Helix?”

“Stop laughing!” she said.

“What? I can’t hear you.” He was laughing so hard, the piss romped through his pipes and the brandy lees down his colon, so that unless he got to the bathroom now, the rain of his ejaculate would be but prelude to something much worse. And so he got up not having said yea or nay, so that Rita began to holler after him: “Thurlow! I want to name the baby after THURLOW DAN!” at which point, Esme, who had fallen asleep on the job, woke up with a start, certain she’d been wandering the world in dream and calling his name. Thurlow, where are you? Thurlow, I miss you. Wait for me, I’m trying.





Team ARDOR: Ready, willing, able.

A municipal building two miles from the Capitol. A conference room with window, wall, and two-way mirror. Around a table, four Department of the Interior employees who’d been summoned from their place of work and given roast beef sandwiches with extra mayo. Standing up: some guy who seemed distantly familiar to Ned and Bruce, but not enough to distract from the oddity and thrill of what he was offering, which was, in the main: hope.

Ned stared out the window, looked up at the sky. In 1986, the USSR seeded the clouds above Chernobyl so that they would deposit their radioactive load on the peasants of Belarus instead of on the cognoscenti of Moscow. And it worked. The Soviets had engineered the weather to kill people. The Chinese, too, were obsessed with the weather. With rainmaking to forfend drought. But in all cases, for good or evil, these people were frosting the sky and changing the world. It was science at its most heretical. Do it right, and you could conjure a storm that was godlike in its rage, steeped in the punitive grammar of the Bible. Do it right, and you could show the heavens who was boss. And this mattered to Ned, since his fear of powerlessness had always aspirated whatever went sloshing about his heart, so that he couldn’t date the same woman more than a few weeks, couldn’t acquire any real friends, couldn’t lock down a single feeling and make it last. But not for long. Cloud seeding and weather modification. It was why he’d been hired, or so he’d been told, and though studying cloud cover in Cincinnati seemed like a dubious application of his talent, it was still a chance to prove he could impose his will on the big things. Find his sister and be happy. Cincinnati, tallyho.

The guy in charge handed out envelopes. He said, “In each you’ll find a key to one of four lockers at the Greyhound bus station. In those lockers, you’ll find coveralls, badges, and clipboards. Anne-Janet, in your locker you will also find keys to the van, which will be parked on Court Street. Now, are you okay to drive the van, or do you want someone else to do it?”

Anne-Janet was startled. She’d been staring at Ned’s shoes under the table. Brown lace-up gum shoes that were popular among the preppies at her school circa 1993. Did that mean he’d been a preppy and was hanging on to the glory days via his shoes? Or did he just shop secondhand?

One of the fluorescents overhead began to strobe. The effect was to slow time in the room and to repulse its occupants even further into themselves.

“I can drive,” Olgo said, and he nearly stood up. Would have stood up, if not for his reflection in the mirror, which showed a man without purpose. Yes, he was working the Indian land claims, but no, he really wasn’t. So maybe he’d started moping around the house. Maybe, for feeling so aimless, he’d stopped managing his looks, such as they were. For instance, his shirt, muddied with raspberry ganache from his birthday cake. But was that any reason to leave your husband? Not that Kay had left. She was just out to graze. Kay Panjabi was grazing. “I can drive us from here, if you want. Right now. Anyone object to leaving right now?”

“That won’t be necessary,” said the man. “But your enthusiasm is noted.”

Bruce lifted his arm in the way kids do when they want to look like they’ve volunteered but don’t want to be called on. Today was payday. If he did as told and allotted his income responsibly, he’d have enough money left to buy his wife and unborn a six-pack of Jell-O pudding snacks for dinner.

“You have a question, Bruce?”

“Yes. Can I keep whatever footage I shoot at the Helix House? Can I get the rights and use it for whatever I want?”

The man touched the hearing device lodged in his ear and said, “After it’s been cleared.”

“I’m ready to leave now,” Olgo said. “Drive right to that man’s door and blow the place up if I have to.”

“What?” Ned said. “When are we going?”

“Whenever you’re going,” Anne-Janet said.

Esme stood. She’d been watching them through the two-way, but she’d seen enough. She patched in to Martin and told him to wrap it up.

She slung her purse over her shoulder but stopped at the door to answer her phone, and then not to answer, because it was Jim Bach. He’d want to know about her progress. He’d ask to meet the team. She let it go to voicemail, and when she listened two minutes later, it was as she suspected.

He said: Esme, the stakes have never been so high. Imperialist pretensions abroad are kid stuff in comparison. Are you sure you know what this means? She stopped listening there. Of course she was sure. And here was why: Some people hear voices and the voices are bad. They say: You’re going to die alone. And: You suck. Sometimes, when these voices come to you via satellite because it is your job to listen, it is your career as a sleuthing mercenary, sometimes they say the last thing you want to hear: Thurlow Dan accepting money from North Korea. Thurlow Dan giving presents to a hooker. Thurlow Dan weeping into his pillow at five in the afternoon, knowing that if his muscles have failed to rouse him from bed, it is because they are instruments of depressing notice that he does not want to live. She had heard it all, and so when Jim asked, for the millionth time, if she understood what was at stake, the answer was easy: Yes, I understand, I understand better than you. Though if he asked for more, she wouldn’t tell him. She could barely tell herself. Time heals all wounds? Ha, ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha.