deeper until he found himself buried alive—“surprise!”—like those kids and that actor, whose name now escaped him, on that scary old TV show. He wanted to be accepted by Joe as his true self, which was sincere and sensual and secretive and not the goofy boy Joe had known. He didn’t feel superior, felt no animosity, nothing negative—felt nothing at all in fact about Joe and his family and his life. New depths had been revealed to George, and Joe hid all his reactions to them beneath being “impressed,” which was neutral, neither positive nor negative.
Then he quickly locked the bathroom door and went into a Dopp kit designed for travel that sat in a wicker basket, not conspicuous yet not concealed, that he had intended would require a special amount of suspicion and an extra commitment to investigating for Michelle to open. From it, he took three small bottles of prescription pills, which he considered half-empty and not half-full given how much he depended on and needed them, which interacted unpredictably with alcohol, and which had blurred and distorted his perceptions all day, not to mention helped him to skid his car on the way home from the station.
Joe was on an anti-depressant, and to it he often added (in addition to large amounts of red wine) a pain killer he’d gotten after another father-and-son football game and a sleeping pill which, given his usual state of anxiety, served merely as a mild sedative and didn’t even begin to induce sleep. He’d become adept at re-filling prescriptions numerous times, using tools from Wite-Out and an old typewriter to the Internet, with its access to pharmacies as far away as Canada and New Zealand. He’d forgotten how many of any pills he’d already had today and so decided he’d had none and simply started his own self-determined daily dosages from scratch, and then doubled them.
The new pills mixed with the old ones already inside him, creating an even larger family of contrasting half-siblings, some amenable to teamwork in doing their job of easing or emptying his mind, others openly opposed. The back-and-forth effects caused Joe to dizzily hold onto the sides of the sink, staring at his own reflection, then seeing George when he closed his eyes, then himself with eyes open, then George, et cetera. Resisting a swoon and sitting on the closed toilet, he began to create a new interpretation of his friend’s behaviour and blurted-out confession that was more creative, comforting, and easy to accept.
How was it possible for someone to feel nothing about, well, about a way of life humans had willingly adopted—and not by instinct, but by
choice
—ever since they evolved from lower forms? They’d even picked lice off their loved ones when they were apes, right? Trying to stand, then deciding to delay that move until his sight of things stopped spinning, Joe leaned back more authoritatively on the closed commode, ignoring the scatter of glass as the back of his head hit and tipped over bottles of Michelle’s makeup on the shelf behind him as well as a paperback book which fled and fell, spread-eagled, onto the floor.
It wasn’t possible—to feel nothing, that is—about a little baby, a cute little baby, not if you yourself were human. It meant you had recused yourself from the human race, or had never been a member in the first place. To only feel affection or allegiance or whatever George had said he felt toward something abstract, like art or whatever, and not toward a little baby—and look at that cute little baby now, the one flying in the air by Joe right there in the bathroom, look at his little feet, and goodbye, baby, he waved, as the infant flew away on obvious strings and headed to someone else’s hallucination—well, it was unnatural and everything else that word implied.
When Joe thought more—squinting to do it, for it took an enormous effort to concentrate in this condition; he strained and looked like someone having specific
Then he quickly locked the bathroom door and went into a Dopp kit designed for travel that sat in a wicker basket, not conspicuous yet not concealed, that he had intended would require a special amount of suspicion and an extra commitment to investigating for Michelle to open. From it, he took three small bottles of prescription pills, which he considered half-empty and not half-full given how much he depended on and needed them, which interacted unpredictably with alcohol, and which had blurred and distorted his perceptions all day, not to mention helped him to skid his car on the way home from the station.
Joe was on an anti-depressant, and to it he often added (in addition to large amounts of red wine) a pain killer he’d gotten after another father-and-son football game and a sleeping pill which, given his usual state of anxiety, served merely as a mild sedative and didn’t even begin to induce sleep. He’d become adept at re-filling prescriptions numerous times, using tools from Wite-Out and an old typewriter to the Internet, with its access to pharmacies as far away as Canada and New Zealand. He’d forgotten how many of any pills he’d already had today and so decided he’d had none and simply started his own self-determined daily dosages from scratch, and then doubled them.
The new pills mixed with the old ones already inside him, creating an even larger family of contrasting half-siblings, some amenable to teamwork in doing their job of easing or emptying his mind, others openly opposed. The back-and-forth effects caused Joe to dizzily hold onto the sides of the sink, staring at his own reflection, then seeing George when he closed his eyes, then himself with eyes open, then George, et cetera. Resisting a swoon and sitting on the closed toilet, he began to create a new interpretation of his friend’s behaviour and blurted-out confession that was more creative, comforting, and easy to accept.
How was it possible for someone to feel nothing about, well, about a way of life humans had willingly adopted—and not by instinct, but by
choice
—ever since they evolved from lower forms? They’d even picked lice off their loved ones when they were apes, right? Trying to stand, then deciding to delay that move until his sight of things stopped spinning, Joe leaned back more authoritatively on the closed commode, ignoring the scatter of glass as the back of his head hit and tipped over bottles of Michelle’s makeup on the shelf behind him as well as a paperback book which fled and fell, spread-eagled, onto the floor.
It wasn’t possible—to feel nothing, that is—about a little baby, a cute little baby, not if you yourself were human. It meant you had recused yourself from the human race, or had never been a member in the first place. To only feel affection or allegiance or whatever George had said he felt toward something abstract, like art or whatever, and not toward a little baby—and look at that cute little baby now, the one flying in the air by Joe right there in the bathroom, look at his little feet, and goodbye, baby, he waved, as the infant flew away on obvious strings and headed to someone else’s hallucination—well, it was unnatural and everything else that word implied.
When Joe thought more—squinting to do it, for it took an enormous effort to concentrate in this condition; he strained and looked like someone having specific
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