All Our Wrong Todays(60)

I forgot to write tonight. Penny suggested that I jot down recollections of my life, a few minutes every evening before we go to bed, a daily routine as a way to hold on to the truth. So I’ve been doing that, typing on John’s laptop, a little bit each night. But the world feels too big and the words feel too small, and turning the slushy tangle of memories into clean lines of text makes them feel less real, more fictive and faraway.

And what do those memories really get me? Was I happy there? No.

Lying here with Penny, I feel happy. Curled up with her in the bed that feels like home to me, I realize that for the first time I’m intentionally letting Tom go. John is slipping under the door like fingers of smoke from a basement fire, wonderfully calming compared to Tom’s constant anxious clamoring. Everyone I care about will be happier when I’m gone. Even Penny. Tom makes everything so hard, so messy, so complicated.

John wouldn’t still be awake. He’d realize his whole life had been slightly out of focus and now it’s finally in crisp relief—he had an undiagnosed mental illness that quietly cohered in the damp corners of his mind and, when his defenses were temporarily lowered, it tried to seize control. But its moment has passed. The virus that is Tom has no plan of action, just a list of demands. It wanted to be in charge but, like so many aspiring despots, it hadn’t projected beyond the coup to the day-to-day grind of running the show. Anyone can overthrow a government. It’s ruling that’s hard.

Penny shifts in her sleep, turning onto her side. She presses her underwear-clad ass against my hip, pulls the covers up under her chin. I twist onto my side too and she pushes into me. Her hair smells of lemon and rosemary and something else, a scent I’m still trying to place when I fall asleep.





94


I wake up feeling clean. No, cleaned out. Hollowed out maybe, but in a good way. Like a fat tumor was removed while I slept in Penny’s bed.

Tom is gone. That whining, miserable, damaged jerk-off is gone. Good riddance.

He haunted me like a ghoul my whole goddamn life. I thought it would be a relief to let him out of his cage but he turned out to be a yawn. All that pointless regret.

I’ll give him one thing, he found Penny. Laid her out for me on a silver platter. No effort required. Just lying there next to me, ready for whatever I want. So I kiss her neck until she starts to wake up and then I tug down those panties. She keeps trying to turn around and look at me but I don’t let her. Maybe I’m too rough, hard to say sometimes with women, the ways they like to be treated that they can’t admit out loud.

After, she’s quiet. Asks what’s wrong with me and I say I’ve never felt better. And it’s true. My mind has never been so clear. She starts to cry. Asks what happened to Tom. I tell her he’s gone and she cries some more.

I grab a shower. Water pressure’s crap. Whoever built this dump got ripped off by the plumbing contractor. Shower doesn’t even have a rain head. She comes in, naked, staring me in the eye, hard and soft at the same time, hot water spraying down on us, and asks if I’m still in there. I say what does that even mean and she says I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to him. Tom.

I think about pretending to be him for long enough to have her again but I don’t even want her anymore. Not worth the hassle.

So I just smile and say Tom’s not here anymore and he’s never coming back and I leave her in there to cry some more. Hot water was starting to run out anyway. My condo’s got one of those tankless heating systems that never runs cold.

I put on the shitty clothes Tom’s been choosing for me and head to the office. Can’t believe how much he let everything slide. Hiding, running away, apologizing, too scared to make a decision in case it’s wrong. I sign a bunch of shit that needs approval.

The concert hall in Chicago is a nice gig. Fat budget, central location, civic pride, all that pressure means they need someone to tell them what to do. Big payday. Need to block out some ideas. I glance at the specs they sent and go to my drafting table.

But not much comes. The way it’s supposed to work is I look at pictures of the site and think about buildings I’ve seen in my dreams and the basic form and scale and texture of the thing floods into me. Not this time.

Makes sense, though. Tom infected me long before he took over. Been inside my head for my whole life. His voice always whispering like an itch in a place I couldn’t reach. But now it’s gone. Maybe that means all my good ideas are gone too. Whatever, my reputation is set. I can coast off what I got from him for the rest of my life. Make more money doing less fussy versions of this shit anyway. Keep it simple, don’t push the limits, let the clients feel edgier than they are, and take them for as much as they’re dumb enough to pay. Let someone else change the way the world looks. Or better yet keep it the way it is. Only whiners like Tom think they need to make a difference. The world doesn’t care about how you think it should look. The world’s only goal is to kill you as fast as possible and use your corpse for fuel.

I did Mom a favor and hired an intern from the Architecture Department at her school and this girl has an incredible ass. Her face is fine but that ass. I should design the concert hall to look like that ass. Tom and his goddamn whorls. Other than me, she’s the only one in the office right now, doing who knows what, filing or something. Through the glass walls I can see her at the blueprint cabinet. She knows I’m here, but is she being demure? Or is she bending over at the waist sticking her ass in the air right where I can see it? Don’t tell me she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She knows.