The Candy House(18)

He responded immediately: “Anything u want bro.”

“I meant u.”

“Grls? Prties? U tell me & Ill make it happen.”

“Tks,” I wrote. “Good to know.”

Apparently, it was hard to avoid a transactional relationship with one’s drug dealer.

Our neighbors were having a cocktail party that night. At one point, looking for the bathroom, I opened the door to one of the kids’ rooms by mistake. Janna, the hostess—Trudy’s friend—was snuggled in a chair with three of her four kids, reading Puff, the Magic Dragon. She grinned at me, embarrassed, and said softly, “They sleep better when I do this.” I closed the door and then stood in the hall with my forehead pressed against it, my eyes shut, listening to her husky voice.

… Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail…

I’m aware that, in the telling, my love affair with Janna is hopelessly clichéd—its components so familiar from life, or Lifetime TV, that it could be written out mathematically. How to explain the enthrallment of living it? My family and work—so long the crux of everything I did—became thin topsoil over a deep, bitter root system where my real life took place. Once I’d entered that system, it was all I cared about. As with Damon (whom I patronized on an accelerating schedule), there was no pretense with Janna, no restraint. The thing itself. Seven kids and two spouses between us were nothing against our mutual longing, and we fucked in bathrooms, on cold sand by the lake after dark, and in Janna’s basement rec room during the small hours when neither of us could sleep. I adored her with a heedlessness poor Trudy had never glimpsed in me; I’d never seen it in myself. I told Janna I would die for her, and I think I assumed I would have to; for all the fervor of our passion, it was death-infused from the start.

Four months into the affair, Trudy confronted me on our deck after the kids were asleep. Dry-eyed, she explained that she had tolerated my distraction and absence for years, believing it was all to the purpose of our shared domestic vision, but she’d mistaken my character. There was no room to negotiate; she had already filed for divorce and wanted me out of our house by the end of the week. As I listened, the pilot light of my terror roared into flame, and I was engulfed by a sensation of apocalypse. My hands shook too hard to hold a glass, so I shoved my head under the bathroom faucet and swallowed several Xanaxes to try to calm down. I texted Janna and waited outside her house in my car. It was October 16, 2014. With Janna beside me, I hurtled toward Chicago while trying to explain that the time had come for the two of us to run away together, but my speech was garbled and I was driving erratically and way too fast, which led to Janna pleading, then screaming, to be let out of the car and my refusing, all of which culminated in a single-car accident at ninety miles per hour on Lake Shore Drive. My car flipped, flew, and plunged into the shallow lagoon just south of Diversey Harbor. Mercifully, the water rose only to our chests and likely squelched the explosion of my nearly empty gas tank. But Janna’s left leg was partially severed and crushed beyond repair, and had to be amputated at the thigh.

I have a metal plate where part of my skull used to be. My whole head aches before a rainstorm, and a taste of metal fills my mouth and gives me gooseflesh.

I never tried to reenter my old life. In fact, with each year—fifteen before Timothy went to college—I grew more incredulous that I’d ever lived it. I would gaze up at the glass office buildings in the Loop in a state of wonder. Had I really gone inside one every day? Parked my car in an underground garage? Doled out Christmas checks to security guards? When I passed my former partners on the street, or associates I’d once hounded, I would duck and cower to avoid being recognized. But gradually, I found that, with my longer hair and civilian clothes, the baseball cap I always wore to hide my metal plate, I was invisible to my former colleagues. No one gave me a second look, as if I’d fallen through a trapdoor into a parallel world. There seemed no way to cross back over. It was Trudy who drove to the Loop each day for work and made partner in one of Chicago’s biggest tax firms. Trudy soon remarried, and I took over with our kids. She largely supported me while I slowly paid off my debts; although Janna hadn’t pressed criminal charges against me, she and her husband reunited and sued. I gave them everything, and more, in a negotiated settlement.

I worked as a counselor at a methadone clinic not far from where I used to make my drug buys from Damon. My studio apartment was nearby, and as I walked to work under those same shadowy overpasses where Damon and I used to roll down our windows, I often wondered what had become of him. I didn’t have to wonder, of course—thanks to Own Your UnconsciousTM, we can track down a person we’ve glimpsed just once in our lives. My dad was a big proponent of Own Your Unconscious when it first came out, in 2016; he’d gotten to know Bix Bouton, who invented it. I had no interest in externalizing my consciousness to a Mandala Cube and revisiting my memories, or—worse—filling in what I’d managed to forget. Still, my curiosity about Damon gradually wore away my scruples. Doesn’t it always? If my life has taught me anything, it’s that curiosity and expediency have a sneaky, inexorable power. Resisting them is easy for a minute—a hundred minutes—even a year. But not forever.

In the thirteen years since Own Your Unconscious had been released, one of its ancillary features—the Collective Consciousness—had gradually become central. By uploading all or part of your externalized memory to an online “collective,” you gained proportionate access to the anonymous thoughts and memories of everyone in the world, living or dead, who had done the same. Finally, I caved and bought Mandala’s Hey, What Ever Happened To…??. The process was frictionless, as promised: thirty minutes with electrodes attached to my head as I closed my eyes and pictured my interactions with Damon (thereby releasing those specific memories to the collective); then a twenty-minute wait while my “content” churned in the collective gyre, searching for facial matches. As I watched the wheel spin on the desktop computer in my studio apartment, I noticed I was gritting my teeth; I wanted Damon to have achieved something great! What that meant, I wasn’t sure: Stockbroker? Managing partner at my old law firm? Governor? (Illinois joke.)