He was startled by his own voice, so he said it again. “Death.”
Trebuchet, the family dog, who had been napping in the office, looked up for a moment, and then, in a way typical of black Labs in their sunset years, put his head back down and heaved a heavy sigh of exhaustion.
Death is an anagram for hated, Jared thought. He realized the quiet room was, in fact, helping him think more clearly.
“I’m going to die,” he said aloud. That’s an anagram for goodie timing, he thought. Strange.
The more he thought about it, the less afraid Jared was of dying. He had bigger fish to fry. Like most state legislators, Jared needed a second job just to survive. Unlike most state legislators, Jared was not a lawyer; he was a graphic designer. The limited income provided by his two jobs, even with Deirdre’s salary, was going to leave his family in a bad financial state. He had life insurance, but it was only a $500,000 policy, purchased on a twenty-year term just after Jackie was born. The mortgage alone would eat through that amount of money like a worm through an apple, or a tumor through a brain, he thought. He stretched every corner of his mind looking for a way to fix the problem, but the harder he thought, the more his head hurt. He didn’t know if it was the tumor or the situation that was causing him distress, but it didn’t much matter.
“I need money,” he said aloud. Die enemy no, he thought. Jared wondered where all these anagrams were coming from. Wordplay wasn’t something he’d ever had an affinity for, or at least not that he could remember. Maybe it was a result of the tumor, maybe it was making parts of his brain more clever while it was killing him.
He thought of more anagrams as he “drifted off to sleep” (edited effort flops) among a sea of “words and letters” (trestle and sword).
***
Over the next few days, Jackie noticed her father keeping mostly to himself. She tried to talk to him, but each conversation was more baffling than the one that came before.
“Hi, Daddy,” Jackie said one day.
“Huh? Oh, hi, Peanut. I’m good, thanks.” And he walked away.
Not only was the length of the conversation uncharacteristic and troubling to Jackie, and not only had she not actually asked how he was, but “Peanut” was her dad’s nickname for Megan.
“Dad,” she asked on another occasion, “can you help me with my math homework?”
“Sure, Jax, but maybe later, after we watch Jericho.”
That would have been normal if Jericho hadn’t been canceled years earlier.
To be sure, not all their encounters were out of the ordinary—Jared still remembered to ask about school, and even managed to give the appearance of listening to Jackie’s answers—but there were enough signs for Jackie to wonder if something wasn’t right.
She tried asking her mom, but Deirdre was distracted in a different way, in the way that suburban moms are always distracted. They have too much to deal with to worry about anything that isn’t a three-alarm fire. And while Jared’s brain tumor was most certainly a three-alarm fire, it had yet to be phoned in.
Jackie figured her dad was just stressed about work or something and put it all out of her mind, unwittingly enjoying a last few days of blissful ignorance.
***
Jared kept the news of his brain tumor to himself for four days, spending most of that time lying on his office floor, trying to think. He came out just often enough to make sure his family wouldn’t suspect anything was amiss, going right back in once he was convinced they were thrown off the scent of trouble.
Jared tried hard to think of a way out of what he saw as his financial predicament. There was college to pay for soon. And cars and spring break vacations and whatever else kids needed money for. But mostly he was just trying to think. When he was bored with lying in the dark, he would turn on his computer and click from one cancer website to the next. The grim news he read about high-grade glioblastoma multiformes made his head hurt, and he found himself linking instead to news and entertainment sites.
That was how he happened on a strange article from a few months earlier:
Divorced Man Auctions His Life Online
March 14—Worldwide News Now
When Jens Schmidt realized he needed a fresh start, he auctioned his material possessions online. From an unused tube of toothpaste to a 2002 Toyota Camry, Schmidt put his entire life up for sale to the highest bidder.
The thirty-four-year-old Dutchman, a successful attorney who likes to hang glide and ski, seemed to have it all. But then his wife of seven years, an Italian woman named Anna Mazzucchi, filed for divorce, and Schmidt decided it was time to move on.
“I just didn’t want any reminder of my life before,” he said.
Schmidt’s listing includes his house, his hot tub, his clothes, his television, his cat, and his car. He also notes: “My friends are included in the package. If you win the auction, they promise they’ll be nice to you.”