There’s this one guy I see on TV now and then when I’m channel surfing, and for some reason I always lay the remote down when I see him and listen for a while. He’s not a preacher but he sounds like one, though without all the fake healing and hallelujahs. And the gist of his sermon is always the same thing: God wants us to be prosperous. He keeps putting opportunities for prosperity in front of us, but it’s up to us to seize those opportunities. And I don’t know, but I sit there and listen to him sometimes and I wonder, when am I going to get that opportunity?
And then there was this kid who worked washing dishes in the DFAC in Mahmudiya, an Egyptian boy named Musa something or other, you remember him? We all called him Moose. He was what, maybe fourteen or so, and he was always making deals everywhere he could, trading bootleg movies for porn DVDs, then trading the porn for a case of cheap Swadeshi whiskey that cost five bucks a bottle in Dahuk, then selling the whiskey to soldiers in Bagdad for five or six times as much. One of our own Bible thumpers would ask him, “What would Allah say about you cheating our new guys like that, Moose?” And Moose had two verses from the Koran he’d come back with: “Wealth and children are the ornament of this life.” Or else this one: “Whatever the Apostle gives you, accept it; and whatever he forbids you, abstain from it.”
So that night in bed with Cindy, while she’s sleeping and I’m lying there awake trying to choose between Plans A, B and C, I have three advisors chattering in my head. I have that TV prosperity guy, I have Moose quoting the Koran, and I have Gee reminding me it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of Heaven.
And the only voice I try to argue with is Gee’s.
The past few days have weighed on me like a sixty-pound rucksack, I swear. At night I can’t sleep because of every little noise, and during the day at home I keep seeing shadows go past a window, which makes me jump up and start peeking outside, and of course there’s nobody there. If a car follows me too long I pull over and let it go past and I check out the driver to see if he’s going to pull over or, I don’t know, do whatever a pissed-off druggie who’s been robbed would do. I’m just paranoid as hell. Can’t even stop to get gas without getting all twitchy if somebody looks my way.
Doesn’t help being at work either. All we have to do at the plant is fill a couple of last orders, then start boxing up all the records and other documents. By Wednesday all the trucks were going out, with nothing coming in for processing. Jake spends a lot of time sitting at his desk and staring out the window at the piles of unprocessed rock.
I keep scanning the newspapers online and adding my name to any new job search engine I can find. I already posted my résumé online, so it gets shot off to any job I’m remotely qualified for. Financial Analyst I, Supply Chain Specialist, Accounts Receivable Processor, Purchasing Manager, Quality Control . . .
And, just like the week before, nobody calls me for an interview. Either my business administration degree from a nowhere college is worthless, or I’m putting out so much negative energy that my résumé reeks of failure.
And after feeling like a worthless human being all day, I have to walk back into my house with a phony smile on my face.
Thursday night, Dani complained that her throat hurt. Cindy checked her temperature, 101.6. We gave her a dose of Children’s Tylenol and put her to bed. In our own bedroom a few minutes later, Cindy said, “If she’s not better in the morning, I’m going to take her to the doctor. Her tonsils look inflamed to me. It’s probably time she had them taken out.”
I didn’t answer because I couldn’t. My heart was beating like a wild duck in that moment it explodes off the water, trying like crazy to get airborne. Because all I could think about was that our medical coverage will end in a few days. After that, the first time Cindy hands our medical card to a pharmacist or the doctor’s secretary, she’s going to find out how I let the family down. She’ll see me in all my naked deception and failure. I don’t think I have any option but to tell her about my job. Not that telling her will change anything. The only thing it might accomplish is to preserve my integrity. That little bit of it I still have left.
Anyway, come morning, Dani’s forehead was hotter than ever, and when she swallowed some more of the medicine she moaned and screwed up her mouth. I saw that look in Cindy’s face that told me she was going to start worrying at double speed now, going to let every little worry bang through her like a train going off its tracks.
“Tell you what,” I said. “You get ready for work. I’ll get the girls dressed and after we drop you at the bank we’ll drive over to the Med Express. If the doctor won’t clear Dani for daycare, and he probably won’t, I’ll bring the girls back home and play dolls with them all day.”
“Jake will let you do that?” she asked.
I thought about telling her then. But I couldn’t. I don’t know why; I just couldn’t.
“We’re between orders,” I told her. “Days when that happens, we sit around and look at each other. I’ll go in for a while tomorrow to do the end-of-week reports.”
Two hours later I’m building a tent with blankets in the living room. I let the girls get back into their pj’s so they can spend the day in the tent, watching cartoons out through the front flap. I stay in there with them for an hour or so, but I keep catching myself looking at Dani every couple of minutes and thinking, get better fast, please get better fast. Dr. Sherry at the Med Express said she was going to call the hospital and see when they could schedule Dani for a tonsillectomy, and she’d let us know but to expect mid-September sometime. I said, “Can’t she have them taken out now? Like, today?” But she had to do a ten-day treatment of antibiotics first. My insurance would run out before the meds did. So all morning long my body’s feeling like it’s on fire inside, because my own train of worries has not only run off its tracks but careened over a mountainside and is crashing, car over car, toward the bottom.
It’s funny how when bad things start happening in a series, it almost seems as if they’re all related somehow, as if each one is causing the next. I remember you talking about that one time, about what you called your Domino Catastrophe Theory. You said the universe is filled to the brim with bad things waiting to happen, not only the universe of everything but also each one of our own personal universes too. “There’s a 50–50 chance that one fuckup, no matter how small, is going to trigger another one,” you said. “And if that happens, there’s a 70–30 chance that the second one will trigger a total clusterfuck.”
Remember Hetrick? He always struck me as a fairly pleasant guy except that he wouldn’t believe anything he hadn’t personally experienced. If you told him the sky is blue, he’d look up and check it out before he’d tell you, “I guess it is.”