Second Act

by Matthew Wood

He owed her money. This much was true. The amount wasn't discussed, but he owed.

He was sleeping on the couch and waking up late in the afternoon. He was drinking coffee in the middle of the day, watching crows assemble on barren branches. They yelled at one another. Sitting right next to each other, they yelled. They could have been quieter.

It was cold. The snow came and blanketed the yard. The sun was pitifully weak. He was tired at all hours. He experienced bouts of dizziness that made him seasick. Sometimes he went on the internet and looked around. Not at anything in particular, but just around.

She came home in the early evenings, just after dark. She was beginning to show her age. Mostly around the eyes but also in the hands. She did not look the same anymore. Her hands showed that she was old. They were bony and angular. He hustled himself up when she got home. He greeted her. If she had bags in her hands, he took them. Sometimes she had bags in her hands.

She said things like what a day, and I'm happy to be home. She exhaled softly, with a high-pitched groan.

They had started watching soap operas. She had no stomach for the true crime that he preferred. All that blood and gore. All those poor mothers weeping and looking into the lens. All those plaintive cries, those faces that broke, crumbled. She touched his arm when she said this. So he would understand. He nodded. And they watched soap operas instead. They gasped at sudden twists, they clicked their tongues, shook their heads. Poor Julio. He never saw it coming.

She had missed him. She had wanted him home. But she did not trust him. He had stolen from her before. TVs gone missing in the dark, still night. China, heirlooms, you name it. Hustled out of the house, never returned. He always came back repentant. His eyes baggy, darkly circled, his jaw setting and releasing. He smelled of cigarettes, his hair fell greasy over his forehead. He said he wanted help. No big show, no court mandate. He just wanted help. So for two months, he went away.

He had told her that he liked the routine. That he felt different. He felt different about things now. He did need to feed the black hole anymore. He did not feel chained to himself that way. Those were the words he used. They felt stilted to him, even then.

He had been here two weeks. He had felt the slow crawl of time. Something had to be done. But he could not call anyone. It was just him and her.

So he went to an agency. He wore a white oxford shirt and a loosely fastened black tie. He folded a leg over the other and waited in the lobby. A classical piece played lightly. He recognized it but could not name it. He knew the tune, but could not fix a title or composer or era to it in his head. A man called him out and he went.

The man asked questions like "can you type?" and "what's your highest level of education?" He could type. He had attended some college. He had received no terminal degree. What did he study? He studied electrical engineering. The tech boom had just started. He had hopes of making things. Electrical things. Engineering them, if you will. He was unable to finish.

There was a beat of silence before the man said we'll call you. They shook hands moistly. It was unclear who had produced the moisture, and they both knew it.

Three days later, the man called him up and said he might have a job for him. He asked how much of his electrical schooling he had finished. Not much, as it turned out. He said he'd call him back.

Another four days passed and he wondered if he was going to get that call back. He wondered about it while he sipped coffee and watched the crows. They yelled and he sipped, staring out at the cold, grey February morning. He watched for some time, the crows yelling and waddling along the branches, the sky stark against their forms, and it felt as if time was lunging forward ahead of him.

Then the phone rang, and the voice coming through the receiver said, "Hey, I've got something for you."

He took down the address in a broken scrawl. There was a realtor's face on the notepad—a friend of hers. He read it back over the phone and received affirmation.

When she got home, he told her about the phone call and the contents of the conversation. Her eyes became wet and she palmed her mouth, holding something back. They embraced and she said "this deserves ice cream" before braving the diagonal fall of snow and peeling out of the driveway.

But he was cold and wanted something warm. He appreciated the counterpoint between the cold outside and the warmth within.

Nonetheless, when she returned, they tucked into some rocky road and she fell asleep on the couch. He roused her with a light, loving shake on the shoulder, and she wiped drool from her mouth and muttered and walked off toward her bedroom.

He lay for a while in the dark. Forensic Files produced bedtime stories: fables of rats in the center console, blood mists, gunshot residue. He could not sleep. His thoughts were clouded and complex. When the sun rose, he felt shame. It looked different now, but it brought the same things with it. The same feelings. The same memory.

He showered, made himself presentable. She made coffee in the kitchen and served it to him in a large thermos. It had his late grandfather's name printed in decaying black text on the face of it.

"Careful, it's hot," she said.

She drove him to the site in the minivan that she had purchased when he was a child. The wheel-wells showed rust had gotten the better of it. He said he'd take the bus home. He wasn't embarrassed. This he made clear. He just wanted to take time to process these developments.

The day brought little actual work. He met the foreman, wore a hardhat, and watched as the electrician explained the general layout of the house's wiring. He had most of his teeth but not all of them. This made an impression on him. This was a commonality of sorts. He was a fellow owl-eyed monster. He, too, had seen the sun come up, dragging shame close behind. At the end of the day, the electrician asked him to join for a drink.

He shook his head no. "I can't. Recovery," he said.

The electrician nodded. "Yeah, me too. I don't have a problem with alcohol, though."

He nodded. "That makes sense."

Then there was a moment where they just looked at each other.

"So seven tomorrow?"

The electrician nodded. "You're going to be alright."

As he walked to the bus stop, he felt the cold in his ribs. He had drunk all of the coffee. He shivered for a long time. The bus came and wheezed its doors open, and he ran up the striated stairs and nearly forgot to pay the fare. It was warm in here—he felt the warmth of everyone there in the bus with him.

He sat near the front, behind the driver. He clasped his hands in his lap and thought about what it was like to be here with everyone. There were only a few people on the bus, and they were all spread out. They took up different spaces in the bus. The drive was quiet, and through the windows he watched the grey, dull landscape.

And that's how it went for a few weeks, until the spring began to thaw out the snow. It remained in shaded patches, uneven, murky, dirty. He kept getting up, and going to the jobsite. He drank coffee and stared out the window at the black night. And all the while, he waited to feel different.

It had always seemed to him that his laziness, his unreliability, his malaise, that they were all related to it. That he was a bad character because he was burning holes in his brain like they were ants in a field of grass, and he was standing there giving in to impulse with the magnifying glass. But he was no better now. Fundamentally, he was exactly the same. He felt tired all the time. He had held on to a distant mental image of himself as a child where he felt different. Maybe he was different then because he was a child. Or maybe the holes in his brain somehow contribute to the way he felt now. He always thought that it'd be a snap-change. Like a gear slamming back into alignment. That he'd wake with a start and say "my god, what a horrible dream." But he didn't wake. It was more of the cliché where he woke from a dream only to find he was somehow in another, equally disturbing dream. Sometimes, he felt he was swimming out to sea and every time he was about to get past the breaking waves, another crested and sent him hurtling back to shore deep in the currents.

He thought about this often. He found new metaphors to employ to understand the thing, to really try to get to the bottom of it. Sometimes, if he woke early enough, he caught the crows in the morning, and they reminded him of this. They didn't yell anymore. They just stood on the branches, slowly getting edged out as the leaves began to grow in again.

When he had enough money saved up, he found a studio apartment nearby, in case his mother needed help with things. She was not young anymore. He went there for dinner twice a week. They drank coffee at the kitchen table. If she wasn't too tired, they caught up on the soaps. He woke her when she fell asleep, and she put a delicate, bony hand on his face and said "Lenny."

Then he couldn't get ahold of her. She wasn't answering the phone. He had to rush over to her home, where he found her unconscious on the kitchen floor, a congealed wound on her forehead. The ambulance came and they rushed her out on a gurney. It was hard to see her that way.

He spent weeks going back and forth to the hospital. She let him borrow the minivan. He sat by her bedside and smiled at her, and she smiled at him. She had an autoimmune disorder. She would get dizzy from time to time. She would have to take care.

She complained about the hospital food. She called Jell-O an abomination, but she always ate it. Sometimes, she squished it through her teeth to elicit a response from him. She made a sound like vomiting.

They watched soaps together, there in the stark white room, for a few days while they watched her. Eventually, they wheeled her out in a chair, to the curb, and he helped her into the minivan. They went through a drive-thru and ate in the car. She omitted groans.

Then she stopped and looked at him. She had a gauze patch above her right eyebrow still.

"Do you ever miss it?" she said, lowering her hands.

"Miss what?"

"The…lifestyle."

He shook his head no.

"I don't know what drove you there."

"I don't know."

"I did my best for you. You know that. That I did my best."

"You did your best."

"Things weren't always easy."

"No, things weren't always easy."

"I'm so happy you're better."

"Me too."

He stayed at her house for a few weeks. Just to be sure. Occasionally, he went back to the apartment and stood in the doorway, looking at things. Just to be sure. He hated to admit it, but he liked being around her. The apartment was an achievement, but it was also lonely. It made him think about things he didn't want to think about. He didn’t like to think about things that he didn’t like to think about.

But as she got better, he spent less time at the house. He took the bus back and forth and read outdated textbooks from the library. He picked up terminology, best practices, knowledge. When he had saved a little more, he'd go back to school, join an apprentice program. He didn't know what would happen.

But then there was an accident. Steve Doheny had been talking to someone and fell through an unfinished stairwell. He fell three stories and broke both his ankles. Lenny had been standing on the other side of the hole and watched it happen. He just went right down. He was there, and then he wasn't. Like a cartoon. But Steve Doheny was consistently unpleasant, so he didn’t feel so bad. Steve Doheny made off-color remarks and sneered.

Then they shut down the jobsite, and Lenny was screwed again. He sat at the kitchen table in his studio apartment and looked for jobs. He drank coffee still. There were no trees there, but there were open dirt patches where nothing would grow. They were barren and dead, and Lenny spent a lot of time looking at them. He found himself looking at the rafters. Then he'd snap out of it and shake his head no.

He called the guy from the agency again. But the guy didn't answer, so he called again. He left a message that was something like: "Hi, this is Lenny…you got me an electrical job. It was off-book I think. I need another job. Call me back, please."

He didn't get a call back.

And a few weeks passed, and he began to get nervous. He didn't want to lose the studio apartment and the dead, barren dirt fields. He had worked for these things. He had come to appreciate them. He could not live with his mother again. They drank different brands of coffee, and this was an important distinction. They were incommodious.

But then he got another call.

"Hey, Lenny," the voice on the phone said.

"Yeah?" said Lenny, who recognized the voice on the phone.

"It's Drew."

"I know."

This took Drew aback, so he said, "I'm sober now."

"That's good," said Lenny, "Me too."

"I heard you were doing electrical for Red Thompson."

"I was. Steve Doheny fell through a hole."

"That's a shame."

"Shattered both his ankles."

"He was a prick in high school."

"He's still unpleasant."

"And Leslie married him."

"Anyway."

"Since it seems like you're a bit fucked, I thought you might want a gig."

"Electrical?"

"Yeah. It's under the table, though."

"Mhm. Where at?"

"Vegas."

"Vegas." He could hear Drew's breath in the receiver.

"Yeah. I got a friend out there. He needs workers, doesn't even give a shit who they are."

"My mother isn't well."

"Bring her with."

"She won't leave that house."

"I'm leaving next week."

He put the receiver down and sat for a moment. Then he brewed one-third of a pot of coffee.

Vegas. The land of second chances.

She made a casserole that night. They ate silently, save for the sound of silverware against the plates. She looked long at him.

"You're quiet tonight," she said.

"I'm troubled."

"What troubles you?"

"Did you ever want a change? From this?"

She paused, rolled this around in her head. "Why would I need a change? You're young. Young people always want change. Change is not always better. Change is just different. You'll still be you. You go somewhere else, you bring yourself to the new place, trailing behind you. But you always catch up with you."

He nodded. This was good advice. This seemed true. He understood her meaning. And when she fell asleep during one of the soaps a little while later, he woke her, and she mumbled and went off to bed. But as he walked home in the darkness spread still across the plains, he remained troubled.

In the program, they said things like "you're best thinking got you here" and encouraged him to find a higher power. He kept expecting to. He thought some long-dormant spark would flicker up again. Maybe he'd speak in tongues. He didn't really want to, but maybe he would.

And it was when he was deep in these thoughts that he first felt the wind pass by his ear. It felt out of place to him, but he didn't think much of it. It was a strange breeze. But then it came again, and he felt the sudden, sharp pain on his scalp. There was moisture suddenly, and all he saw where their silhouettes in the dark. It was an acute pain in the center of his scalp, and he swung his hand out, unsure of what he was trying to hit. His hand grazed it, or them, and it felt slick to him. He wiped fluid from his eyes and started to run. But they remained close, and so he ran faster, swinging his arms all around him.

As he neared the apartment, they seemed to dissipate back. His ears were ringing. His breath was way up in his chest, and he wondered if something had actually happened. In a fluorescent light outside the complex, he wiped the moisture from his brow and saw that it was blood. It took him a moment to recognize that it was his blood, and he had been attacked. The notion seemed foreign. This could happen to others, but not to him.

But it had happened to him. The nature of this thought was upsetting. This thing had happened to him, his life was now differentiated from the lives of others. His path had forked off from the paths that others usually take. Now his eyes were wet, and he was struck by the possibility that he may never find a way back onto the path. He'd stay here forever, walking home from his mother's in the dark. He had destroyed his path. What would happen if he went to Vegas? He'd collapse and find himself kicking up the same dust as before, but somewhere else. It made him sick.

So he stood outside his apartment for a long time, his hand resting on the door knob. Then he went in for the last and final time.