Читать книгу Planet Reese - Cordelia Strube - Страница 9

Clara’s birth was difficult, different from the boy’s. Reese and Roberta had been holding hands when she’d had Derek. When they had the girl they’d been arguing about knives. Roberta wanted to buy a hundred-dollar knife, said that a kitchen without a good knife was useless. Reese had been carving chickens with Canadian Tire knives all his life and saw no need for a hundred-dollar knife. Her contractions started while they were testing blades. They went home, timed the contractions, and waited, barely speaking to each other because of the knife debate. He prepared spaghetti for Derek with a Canadian Tire knife because Roberta said she wasn’t hungry and was in too much discomfort. She didn’t call it pain because that would have sounded negative. He offered massage but she couldn’t keep still. “Why aren’t they speeding up?” she said re the contractions. “They should be speeding up.” She paced, squatted, breathed heavily. Derek watched in amazement and fear. Reese tickled him and offered to play horsey. The boy climbed onto his back but remained uncustomarily mute while Reese trotted around. Roberta, presumably also wanting to hide her torment from her son, continued her pacing in the backyard while Reese and Derek built Duplo spaceships. Still they could hear her gasping and blurting expletives.

“Is Mummy going to die?”

“Absolutely not, sweetpea.”

“Is it supposed to hurt?”

“Yes.” Reese pulled him onto his lap and kissed him, holding him tight because at that moment it felt as though Derek was all he had, that he must shield him from whatever lay ahead. Or die trying.

“Why?” Derek asked.

“Why what?”

“Why’s it hurt?”

“It’s just the way humans are built.”

Derek wriggled from his grasp to search for Play-Doh.

Their obstetrician, the one they’d carefully selected, was not on call. They were faced with a frizzy-haired, apparently bored tennis player fresh from tennis camp in Boca Raton who introduced himself as Dr. Cam Phibbs. The woman waiting for a baby in the other bed was also at the mercy of Dr. Phibbs. She won his favour by admitting that she was a financial planner and offering tips on the NASDAQ. Reese feared that the financial planner would take precedence over Roberta, that Roberta would be left with a fetus in distress while Cam Phibbs reviewed his portfolio. But Roberta, contrasting her behaviour at home, was acting with calm and fortitude, and it occurred to Reese that she was attracted to the sporty, tanned hairiness of Cam Phibbs and wanted, therefore, to impress him. The tennis player did at one point address her. “Yo, how’s it goin’?” he asked, to which she replied, smiling bravely, “Not bad.”

“It’s gonna come out,” Cam Phibbs said, “don’t you worry about it.”

“I’m not,” Roberta said, which was a lie. Reese could see that she was worried out of her mind, that she was imagining her baby dying inside her. He held her sweating hand but it felt forced. She pulled away to scratch her nose then did not reach for him again. He felt extraneous and found excuses to wander, purchasing water bottles and Trident sugarless gum. His terror of hospitals caused him to urinate frequently. He became familiar with the men’s room, and the other expectant fathers wearing baseball caps who appeared considerably less frightened than he was. It seemed to him that even the natal unit smelled of death. Behind a closed door a woman sobbed; Reese tried not to speculate about the cause of her grief.

Roberta began to vomit. Fortunately, the pain was also intensifying for the financial planner. Cam Phibbs located an anaesthetist to give her an epidural then suggested that Roberta have one too while they had her, the anaesthetist, in the room. By this time, Roberta was wailing in pain and had lost all interest in natural childbirth and the sporty, tanned hairiness of Cam Phibbs. Reese averted his eyes as they poked the large needle into her spine. He asked the financial planner’s husband, who’d just arrived off a plane, if he could turn down their portable CD player. Reese had been forced to listen to country western music for several hours and felt that at any moment he might terminate the box. The financial planner’s husband grudgingly reduced the volume by a fraction. Garth Brooks began belting out another tune. “Isn’t he screwing some hussy?” Reese inquired.

“I beg your pardon,” the financial planner’s husband said.

“All those songs about loving his wife, being faithful and all that, and there’s Garth out screwing some hussy.”

Roberta began gesturing frantically at Reese. “What is it?” he asked.

“Don’t cause a scene,” she whispered hoarsely.

“You want to hear this?”

“I don’t want a scene.”

Twelve hours later, Reese was fastening the strings of surgical scrubs, tucking his hair into an elasticized cap, and slipping paper booties over his shoes. He was no longer of this world. Sleep deprivation and country western music had bludgeoned rational thought. As instructed he followed the nurse into a delivery room so harshly lit it seemed smoky. Roberta, as far as he could make out, had also lost contact with planet Earth. She had the glazed eyes of the dying and he feared he would soon be without her and the baby. He couldn’t imagine raising Derek on his own, the silent meals, the relentless void. “No,” he protested.

“No?” the nurse asked, bustling around trays of what looked like tools of death.

“Nothing.”

She didn’t give him a second glance, had no time for his emotional blurting. “Stand by her head,” she ordered.

By rote he urged his wife to breathe in, breathe out, push, as he’d been taught to do in Lamaze class, but he could see that he was only irritating her, that if she weren’t preoccupied with torturous pain she’d have told him to bite it. The nurse continued to reduce the anaesthetic. “You have to feel it to know when to push,” she advised. Within minutes Roberta was screaming. Reese could only watch as violent contortions gripped her. The tennis player, his frizzy hair stuffed into a bulbous surgical cap, became violent as well, crouching between Roberta’s legs and barking commands. In exasperation, it seemed, he lifted a pair of surgical forceps, thrust them into her, and began wrenching them back and forth. “She’s not a tennis ball!” Reese shouted, picturing an irate Phibbs on the court, slamming his racket into the ground. But then the forceps clanked to the floor and Phibbs stood up with a tiny, purple creature in his hands. Its hair and skin were smeared with fluid, its limbs and head hung lifeless. The neonatal team, shrouded in orange, whisked it away and suddenly it was just them again, Roberta and Reese not holding hands while Cam Phibbs stitched the tear from her rectum to her vagina. “It’s just a precaution,” he advised, regarding the abrupt departure of their baby. “It’s a girl. She’ll probably be fine.”

Roberta began crying, bereft of pain and baby. Reese tried to reach her across the equipment but it was awkward. And she didn’t want him, he could tell. She wouldn’t look at him, covered her eyes, forcing her tears to spill around her fingers. They wheeled her back to the room vacated by the financial planner and husband. Reese turned off the CD player and put his arms around his wife. She felt coiled, as though at any instant she could strike. “It’ll be alright,” he said. “It’s just a precaution.”

“Go fuck yourself,” she said and began to heave sobs he’d never heard before; sobs full of despair and longing that humbled him, that made him resolve to buy many hundred-dollar knives.

He was in the corridor finding ice for her hemorrhoids when the baby was returned. Clara, to his amazement, was no longer purple and knew what to do with her mother’s breast, unlike Derek who’d had to be coached. Roberta didn’t smile at Reese but she formed a peace sign with her fingers. Reese kissed her palm. All would be well. That’s what he thought.

He checks his messages again. Roberta still hasn’t returned his call.

“Testosterone gel,” Sterling says. “I’m telling you, you got to try this stuff, it’s like my cock don’t know how to quit.”

Sterling paces beside Reese, trying to brainstorm a new angle on yet another campaign for a childhood illness. “This one attacks the lungs, right?” he offers. “So why don’t we say something like with every breath they take, kind of tie it in with that Police song, you know the one ...?” He begins to sing the song. “My ex loved that one.” He eats more pizza-flavoured popcorn, tosses a kernel into the air then catches it. Reese’s office smells of pizza. “She wants me to loan her some money. I said, ‘Get serious.’ She says her dogs are freakin’ out because she has to keep the house clean for the realtors, says the dogs shit on the floor because it’s so clean, it stresses them out. Not my problem, I told her.”

Reese is trying to convince himself that Roberta is not ignoring him, that shortly she will call and apologize for her abrupt departure and insist that he take the kids for the weekend.

Sterling waves a newspaper at him. “This is some deal John Travolta’s got going, parking his jumbo jet outside his place. It’s like a small airport only it’s got a swimming pool plus eight bedrooms. What’s he need a jumbo for would be my question. Guess he gets off flying big jets.”

Reese has been offering free advice to an environmental group in Alberta who can’t afford a dialler and who are trying to prevent an oil corporation’s development of a wetlands for a relatively small amount of oil. The current government has amended the regulation that prohibited screwing with the wetlands — a unique area that covers less than 1 percent of the province. Once gone, there will be no more endangered plant species, no more migratory bird habitat, no more oxygen. But John Travolta will be flying big jets.

Serge Hollyduke shoves an envelope at him. “You’ve got to sign for this.”

“What is it?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“Did I not ask you not to use that word?” Sterling says.

“I don’t use it around the callers.”

“Don’t use it, period. Capisc?”

Reese signs the courier’s form and looks at the envelope’s letterhead. Babb & Hodge, Barristers and Solicitors.

“Somebody suing you?” Sterling asks, tossing a kernel into the air but failing to catch it. It lands on Reese’s desk, bounces into his glass of Evian, and begins to swell. “What’s up, boyo? Bad news?”

Reese has opened the letter and has tried to read beyond “your wife has retained us to act as her lawyer” but the words blur and breathing has become difficult.

“Easy, boyo. It’s the wife, isn’t it? What’d I tell ya? Take action, my man, or you’ll be out on the street.”

Reese leans over the letter, narrowing his eyes to improve focus, he must focus. Roberta has told Babb & Hodge that she is concerned because Clara has been acting “strangely,” has taken to turning her dolls over and “sticking things up their bottoms.” What is she talking about?! In their last meeting with the cat-obsessed mediator, Reese had carefully presented his prepared statement explaining the reasons why joint physical custody would be in his children’s best interests. Roberta did not object, sat there with a gherkin up her ass while his jaw flapped. Now, now she is rebutting his argument, with the help of Babb & Hodge, by implying a concern about molestation?! Without actually offering molestation as a direct objection to joint custody? Without accusing him, without so much as mentioning his name she is, by implication, branding him a child molester? This is madness.

“Get a grip, boyo.”

Reese tries to shake his head but it will move in neither direction. He tries to mouth words but is without voice.

Babb & Hodge have recommended that he have no further contact with the children until Clara is assessed by a child psychologist. They provide him with the name and number of the child psychologist should he have any questions directly related to the assessment. They advise him that they will proceed no further until they have received the psychologist’s report. Reese grabs the phone.

“No, you don’t,” Sterling says, covering the dial pad with his hand. “No angry calls, no cussing, she’ll record it, use it against you. You call Herman, tell him you’re a friend of mine.” He scrawls a number on a Post-it. “He ain’t cheap but you get what you pay for.”

Breathing in short gasps, Reese dials the number of the child psychologist. He leaves a message that he knows is too long, too afraid, too desperate.

“She’s got you right where she wants you, boyo. She’ll cut you off at the knees.”

He scurries off the bus and crouches behind a trash can. If he’s seen, he’ll be reported by the hostile mothers who will believe Roberta’s lies. It’s afternoon recess and the children appear to be playing, although he knows they’re rehearsing for adulthood; practising numbers on each other, abusing power, testing lies. Derek is ferociously playing soccer, jabbing his feet between players’ legs to get at the ball. Clara stands alone, waiting patiently for her turn on the monkey bars. The alpha kids ignore her. Reese sees no noticeable change in her. He longs to make himself visible, to see the shock of surprise as she runs towards him. Although would she run towards him? What has Roberta told her? What brainwashing has taken place? Better to stay behind the trash can than discover that his daughter is no longer overjoyed to see him.

He leaves another message from a phone booth. Although his body is vibrating, he manages to keep his voice even. He explains that he hasn’t witnessed Clara acting strangely, turning her dolls over and sticking things up their bottoms. If Roberta has, in fact, witnessed this behaviour, it can only mean that Clara’s school is not safe, nor the homes of her playmates. He suggests that there be no more sleepovers or play dates until the matter is cleared. Only at the end does he become pathetic. “Please, let’s talk about this. This makes no sense to me, I mean I ... I ... you’re killing me. Please, I mean, can’t we talk about this, us, can’t we talk ...?”

He loiters in the park. Soon Roberta will be dropping Clara off outside the church for Sparks. He must make a plan. Can’t think of a plan. A father is helping his small daughter fly a kite that is larger than she is. He pushes the kite into the wind and shouts, “Run away from it, Katie!” The kite, an exotic purple and red bird, surges upward as Katie runs. “Way to go!” her father shouts. “You got it, look how high it is!” Reese has flown kites with both of his children, enjoyed their wonder at their newly discovered power. He wants to fly kites with them again, when will he fly kites with them again? The purple and red bird falters. “Run away from it, Kate! Run!” She does, but the wind has died and the bird nose-dives to the ground. Katie watches, amazed. The father picks up the kite and jogs backwards, away from her, stretching the string, avoiding tangles. “You ready?” He pushes the bird into the wind again and Katie runs. It hurts to watch other people’s children. Reese watches anyway, in the same way he picks a scab. He will watch until he bleeds.

Two women with Starbucks cups in hand and two children each take over the bench beside him and discuss wine tours and weight-loss products while their children wander — too far in Reese’s opinion. “It’s a protein bar,” the one in capris says re something that resembles a chocolate bar, which she’s shoving into her mouth. “Rick and I are trimming. He’s got all these weights.” She discards the wrapper, allowing the wind to whisk it across the grass.

“I’ve got to start working out,” the other says, sucking on her Starbucks cup.

“Me too, once I get organized. We’re doing these mini meals all day long. He makes this protein shake in the morning and takes it to work with him.”

“I eat those power bars.”

Both women wear slip-on sandals, which they slap against their heels. They are in another world, galaxies away.

“You’ve got to make sure there’s fat in them as well as protein,” the one married to Rick advises. A piece of newspaper blows against Reese’s leg. He tries to shake it off but it clings to him. Pulling it loose, he’s halted by a photo of Pamela Anderson, the woman famous for her breasts, who refers to them as “props.” He reads that she contracted Hepatitis C from sharing a tattoo needle with her former husband who belted her outside their Malibu home. The husband pleaded no contest to a charge of spousal abuse and was sentenced to six months in jail and three years’ probation. Pamela Anderson has won full custody of their children because of the abuse. Full custody.

Reese fears he might belt Roberta if she persists with these lies. Or if he discovers her in the sack with the art student. He almost hit her once, when he couldn’t make himself understood and words were choking him. Then he remembered the pigeon, its slippery blood on his hands, the crack of its skull against the rock. He is not a violent man. He must communicate this to the child psychologist, explain that even though he has killed a man and a pigeon, he is in truth quite shy and docile. Maybe he won’t tell her about the pigeon.

Or the rat. Although Roberta was an accomplice in the rat murder, helped him corner it then squash it with the two-by-four. It took too long, they had to press harder and harder to make the squirming stop. They had pet rats that crawled over their children, eliciting giggles. But the black rat, the intruder, was brutally killed. Reese has never quite recovered from this, can still see the rat’s terror, its bulging eyes. He shovelled its remains into a garbage bag that he deposited in a waste receptacle belonging to the local McDonald’s. He presumed that dead rats were not uncommon there.

Below Pamela Anderson’s props Reese reads that a Ugandan woman bit off her husband’s penis and testicles after he slapped her. Another man in Uganda died after his wife, angered by his inability to provide for her and their two children, cut off his testicles. These acts of aggression are considered to be in response to an increase in domestic violence against women in Uganda. Interesting that, though abused, the women retain access to their husbands’ genitals. Soon a multi-national will be marketing Sleep-Eezy Ball-Guards.

The women drain their lattes and leave the cups, plastic lids intact, on the bench for the wind to toss into the grass. “More landfill!” a shrill voice in Reese’s head scolds. Startled, he can’t place the voice although it is unsettlingly familiar.

“It’s your brain that gets you through,” the mother who is married to Rick the weightlifter says.

“You’ve got to have smarts,” the other agrees. The coffee cups somersault into tulip beds.

“Go ’head,” the shrill voice snaps in Reese’s head. “Choke the planet with your trash!” Reese realizes that the voice belongs to his grade three teacher, Mrs. Ranty — a troll of a woman — who’d told him he was so stupid he’d have to piggyback her his entire life so she could tell him the times tables. She’s on his back now, digging the heels of her old lady shoes into his kidneys.

“Have you tried that new Thai place?” the mother married to Rick asks. “We keep wanting to go but, I mean, what are we supposed to do with the kids? Once you pay the babysitter you’re out a hundred bucks. I said to Rick, ‘On our anniversary, we’re splurging on a spa.’ No kids.”

“What bliss,” the other says. Reese has lost sight of their children.

When he sees the car that was once his park in front of the church, he scrambles from the bench and crouches behind a minivan. Roberta steps out and opens the side door. Clara hops onto the sidewalk in her pink Sparks T-shirt. He notes that mother and daughter don’t kiss or embrace on parting. Roberta has never been demonstrative. They exchange quiet words before Roberta pats Clara’s head and says, “See you later, kiddo.” Clara doesn’t appear forlorn as she skips into the church. Reese sees no indication that she is desperately missing him. He has this horrible suspicion that his longing is much greater than hers, that with time she will adapt to a fatherless life, that with time she will be galaxies away.

He hangs his head over the edge of his daughter’s bed, feeling his bones being compressed by rigid muscles. He lifts his head then lets it drop back and listens while his connective tissues crackle. It unnerves him that his bones, under his skin, look like everybody else’s. Even Clara’s bones, were she dead, would look like everybody else’s. He wouldn’t recognize them. He clings tightly to her pillow.

Amir Kassam had a wife and children. Reese saw them on the news; the wife and daughter had burkas over their faces, but the boy looked vengeful, taut, as though he’d never forget, as though when he reached manhood he would track down and eviscerate his father’s killer. Although there was no killer. Only a sick heart that had already been subjected to triple-bypass surgery, “Courtesy of Canada’s health care system!” a rabid journalist commented.

Clara’s bed feels good, although a bit narrow. He pulls up the fitted sheet to locate a brand name. He can’t remember when they bought it, if it cost five thousand dollars. The chicken pot sits on the floor beside him. He only came for the pot, had not intended to doze on his daughter’s bed. But the familiar surroundings of her room have soothed him — the stuffies, the books he’s read to her, the untidy doll’s house that belonged to Roberta when she was a girl. What if Elena is watching him on his daughter’s bed, thinking he’s perverted, pathetic? “Don’t get pathetic on me,” she’d say when he resorted to begging. Killed by a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, Dendekker wrote, adding that she didn’t suffer. How could he possibly know? Didn’t Amir Kassam suffer? Didn’t he feel his heart exploding, his world ending? Don’t we know when we’re about to die?

Reese must leave before his family returns from karate. If he is found here, Roberta will call the police, change the locks, terrorize their children with her fury.

Sterling demonstrated his usual lack of discretion by announcing to one of the childhood disease clients that Reese was going through a “ball-busting divorce.”

“Been there, done that,” the client said. He was very thin with jutting hip bones.

“No, kiddin’, Wes?” Sterling said. “So we’ve all got something in common.”

Wes rested a hand on one of his jutting hip bones. “I never see my son anymore.”

“Never?” Reese asked.

“I go to his baseball games,” Wes said.

“You mean you take him?” Reese asked.

“No. I go so I can see him. We wave to each other.”

Reese knows that he cannot live sneaking into his daughter’s dance recitals and his son’s soccer games. He knows that if Roberta reduces his access to waving in public places, he will have no choice but to take an axe to her head. Acting strangely and sticking things up dolls’ bottoms. What is she talking about?! Wouldn’t he have noticed this — Clara, in pain — there’s no way he could not have noticed this. He releases the pillow, now damp with his tears. He turns it over and finds one of Clara’s fuzzy ponytail elastics. He thinks of baby teeth under pillows, that panicked groping in the dark while the child sleeps peacefully. It is not possible that this is no longer part of his life. Not possible. He sniffs the ponytail elastic then slips it on his wrist.

“Belly dancing is an art form,” the futon salesgirl says. Her midriff is exposed, her belly button pierced. Reese tries out several futons, considering that perhaps he is a futon man after all.

“My boyfriend gives me grief about it,” the salesgirl says. “He thinks it’s exploitive, like, he just doesn’t get it.”

Reese thinks of lying on futons with the belly dancer, how much energy would be required. A girl Clara’s age somersaults on futons while her parents prod and squeeze them. Reese fears but also hopes that the child will fall and split her head. He imagines that his pain might lessen in the face of someone else’s tragedy.

He bought a chicken for the pot. It’s warming in a plastic bag beside him, breeding salmonella. He will not cook it, he knows. The Babb & Hodge letter has rid him of any desire to eat well or live long. When Sterling asked him, over his Krispy Kreme, “What exactly are your priorities anyway?” Reese replied, “Don’t have any.”

“Don’t get crunchy granola on me,” Sterling said.

Why fight it? Any of it? He’s scaring his children. They stopped playing in the yard when he stopped watering the lawn. The city had pleaded with its citizens to water sparingly due to low water levels. Reese appeared to be the only citizen on his block who’d heeded the plea. “The neighbours think our grass is ugly, Daddy,” Clara said. “Please, can’t we water it just a little?”

“Sweetapple,” Reese said, “if everybody waters ‘just a little’ that adds up to a whole lot of water, which means there won’t be enough for everybody.”

Mike, the chief complainant and water waster, was hosing down his SUV. “Your weeds blow seeds onto my lawn.” Clara ran into the house.

In retaliation, Reese stopped weeding altogether and witnessed nature’s reclaiming of his patch of dirt. In addition to the rampant dandelions at least three different species of thistle flourished, and orange-limbed creepers. A thin intricate spreading vine smothered the grass. Clusters of clover grew, and even mushrooms. They did not demand watering. Mike stopped speaking to him. His children were ashamed.

He is scaring them. And Clara is acting strangely and sticking things up dolls’ bottoms.

He rolls onto his side on a foam-filled futon to watch the somersaulting girl and the belly dancer. There can’t be many years between them. Clara will soon want to belly dance and have her belly button pierced. Clara will soon squeeze her breasts and thighs into tight-fitting clothes and allow herself to be fondled by boys wearing pants falling off their asses, allow them to push their penises into her orifices. Reese shoves his face into a rice-filled pillow, which the belly dancer has assured him is awesome for neck tension.

There is always kidnapping.

At the Bay, he tries to watch a movie in the electronics department. The store is quieter than his basement apartment and he hopes that a movie will take his mind off his children. Unfortunately, there are children in it, and a husband and wife who enjoy getting it on. Reese can’t recall ever witnessing a real live couple, with children, feeling each other up while packing their minivan. He senses that a tornado is pending in the movie, but the couple go on Frenching while their children squabble. Sex has been destroyed by its public existence, Reese believes. Too many articles about orgasms. Too much instruction about foreplay and positioning. Too many movies in which actors move seamlessly through fornication, climaxing in unison. Too many print ads of mouths on mouths and naked body parts. An excess of misrepresentation of what should be the most private of acts. He has always imagined that he would try to explain this to his children at the appropriate time. He has always imagined that he would be there.

The garbage piled on the lawn outside his basement apartment has pushed his “War is Not the Path to Peace” sign to the ground. A municipal strike has halted pickup but the singing-and-dancing tenants don’t appear to have absorbed this information. One of them, the female, sits scantily clad on a plastic Adirondack chair, reading Variety. Reese yanks his peace sign from under the garbage and jabs it into the lawn closer to the house. The upstairs tenant’s overabundance of flesh embarrasses him. A dragon tattoo spans her thigh. She ignores him. He has no presence in her mind, he is but a subterranean creature to be trod upon. Her witless arrogance astounds Reese. The world is overrun by such doughy cretins, unable to see beyond their own greed and consumption. He did remind her that he had acquired additional recycling bins — which he had placed in the hallway in front of her apartment — for recycling pop cans and light beer bottles. She has not used them.

In his burrow he studies the printout of Elena. She gazes wistfully at the parakeet, as though she were alone in a deeply contemplative moment rather than inches from a camera lens.

Neither Roberta nor the child psychologist has returned his calls. The cat-obsessed mediator has left a clipped message explaining that it is out of her hands, that he should refer all his questions to Babb & Hodge.

Avril Leblanc appears in his mind, sucking on oranges. Forced to monitor callers who fail to meet the response goal of 5 percent, he’d listened in on her. He learned that she believes in meditation and being with what is. “Just be with it,” she advises potential donors who offer the usual excuses of financial hardship or previous commitments to other charities. “I gave so much to the tsunami,” they tell her. Provided with any kind of opening pertaining to stress-related issues, Avril Leblanc recommends herbal remedies and vitamin supplements. The potential donors do not pledge gifts but do thank her for calling. Serge Hollyduke continually trails Avril Leblanc and, at her suggestion, has begun to wear Birkenstocks.

Reese must sleep, try to sleep. He hears hums. He closes his window but still hears hums. Earlier, the transformer on the concrete pole outside the house was humming. Now it is reverberating through his futon. He tries to picture his children sleeping: Clara with one leg thrown across the bed as though running in dreams; Derek curled tightly into a fetal position. Reese tries to visualize their faces, the shapes of their heads, the curve of their necks. To his horror, the images are fading. He wraps the ponytail elastic around his finger and lies, wired, knowing that sleep will not visit him; that he must endure the hum; that life is full of tests which he has mostly failed; that he has come to expect defeat and that this in turn defeats him.