Something Happened

"Freeze."

None of them moves. All of them sit like stuffed dolls. And I can perceive:

"This is how I am when I was then."

And:

"That was how I will feel when."

Now they can move.

I think I know how it must feel for my wife to be married to a philandering executive like me to whom she can no longer make much difference unless she gets cancer or commits adultery. (Suicide won't do.) It must feel cold. Shifting my eyes left or right, I can transfer myself into my mother's, brother's, sister's past to see my present and my future. I shift my glance into the future of my children and can see my past. I am what I have been. I incorporate already what I am going to become. They inform me like highway markers. And here is another dream I imagine as I see myself hunched over the smoking, roasted turkey with my bone-handled carving knife, poised for severing, after separating the second joints, that first dramatic slice of white meat from the breast while they all watch and wait silently in high-backed chairs like skeptical shadows, unbreathing: they're mine. I own them. They belong to me. I'm in command (and hope the white meat will be toothsome and the dark meat juicy). Now we are frozen again and do not move. (Get the picture?) We ca

It's more fun for both of us now if we sting at least a little. I wonder if I'm the only middle-aged man in the whole world who still contains within himself his distant childhood fear of homosexual rape? Is that why that man invades my dreams?

"Get out!" I order clearly.

But what comes out are croaking grunts of pain that alarm my wife.

"What's the matter?"

"It's okay."

"You were screaming."

"What?"

"I don't know. Sounds."

"I was only groaning. I'm all right now."

My wife and children are never in danger then. They aren't even home. There's only me. He's coming after me. I've got no one I can ask about this but my family religious adviser or my psychiatrist. My psychiatrist enlightens me on this question by replying:

"Why do you ask that?"

"Because —»

"You bite your fingernails," he guesses.

"— I'm afraid. I have dreams and thoughts that trouble me, even when they're pleasant. I get headaches. I'm dissatisfied. I believe I suffer from thought disorders. I don't hear voices —»

"Ah," he observes in a long sigh.

"— and I never have hallucinations."

"What would you call this?"

"I smell excrement often."

"Ah?"

"But there is always dog shit on my shoe."

"You will have to learn," he says, "to walk more carefully."

I don't have a psychiatrist (the company takes a disapproving view of executives who are not happy) and my family religious adviser belongs to my wife. (He takes a disapproving view of people who are.)

I know I will have to stop biting my fingernails soon if I ever want to go much higher in the company than Kagle's job or grow up to be President of the United States of America someday when the job falls vacant and no one else wants it. I know I was sorry when John F. Ke