ROMEO & JULIET'S THIRD WHEEL
by Nathan Phillips (2005)

******

To be, or not to be; that is the question. I had never understood what that meant until the moment that I stood at the top of a skyscraper prepared to plunge to my death, only to suddenly decide that this spot simply wasn't good enough. I worried about the certainty of my demise, the possible injury or emotional damage to others in the crowded street below, and I even had a bit of vanity about the fact that this would be remembered as the place where I died. I mostly wanted to delay what now seemed inevitable, so my search for the ideal jump continued.

There had been no discernible goal to my journey following my decision a few days before to stand up and walk out, and during my wanderings along the streets, my face was constantly burning with embarrassment about what I'd done and where I was (or was not) headed. The city was a frightful place, full of mechanized groaning, sagging faces, eyes drained of all energy, and flashes of light that pounced furiously around me. I hadn't a clue where I was headed, and just about every notion of what might happen next terrified me.

I had decided finally that suicide was the only option.

After some hours were occupied with my appraisal of several buildings, I stared wistfully at the tallest one in town someplace in the distance, thinking how impressive and iconic it would be to die there, as oblivious to the rapidly-approaching suited, cell-phoning young hothead as he was to me.

I heard "LOOK OUT!" but it was already too late; he didn't quite lose his balance, but I careened toward the concrete, extremely displeased about the pending injury. The people around us stopped to stare for a few seconds then kept moving and chattering. My assailant was standing over me, his mouth wide open. "Uh... Darren?" he said into his phone. "I'll call you back."

The man knelt down beside me. I felt dizzy. "You're bleeding!" I ignored him and stood up, brushing myself off. "You're bleeding!" he repeated.

"Yes, I know," I said. He was still gaping; somewhere underneath all the hairspray and sunglasses, I thought, there was a disgusting, filthy primate trying to escape. I had to get away. I started to walk off, still eyeing that skyscraper.

He ran to catch up with me. "Listen, sir, I can't have this happening to me now. This is a rough season for me. How much do you want?"

I shrugged and looked everywhere but his direction, but I was not one to live on principle, so I did stop walking, curious about what would come next.

After a brief silence, he took the opportunity to introduce himself. "Larry," he said, holding out his right hand. "Larry Sandstrom."

We shook, but I refused to lift my head from the ground. "I'm Eric J. Hinez." Larry gave me a handkerchief for the tiny wound on my forehead, which I accepted sheepishly.

"So, Eric, what's your bidding? Money? Drugs? Or hey, would you like one of my cars?" He reached into his wallet and yanked out a set of keys. I didn't respond. "Well?"

I weighed my options and finally looked directly at the man. "Mr. Sandstrom, I need a job. I need a job and a place to live."

Larry smiled. "That's all? Wow!" We continued to walk and soon passed what appeared to be a homeless couple, to whom Larry tossed a pair of hundred dollar bills. "I know where we can find both."

We rounded a few corners and came to the behemoth of the city, the massive structure so impressive it made the rest of the metropolis seem faintly unfashionable, the place I had moments before designated as my grand finale. A gigantic sign atop it read "IRVING ENTERPRISES."

Prepared to accept anything handed my way, I was delighted when we entered. "The people around here are excellent in a most offbeat fashion," Larry told me. It was the first of many remarks that seemed to come from the pages of an office brochure. His vigorous promotion was frequently countered by interruptions such as "Hi there, sweetheart!" In this case, he was speaking to a fair blonde passing from a tiny front room to the main desk. She giggled and ducked out of our path.

After some additional salesmanship and flirtation, he turned to me. "So kid, what do you want to do? You want to operate the phones? You want to make the lunches? You want to sell vacations over the phone? You want to meet with clients? You want to sell kitchen sets over the phone? You want to maintain our website? You want to clean the bathrooms? You want to sell magazine subscriptions over the phone?" I shook my head to all these. Another beautiful woman interrupted our communications for a moment before he continued. "You want to counsel the depressed over the phone?"

I looked up at him, beaming. Yes, I wanted to counsel the depressed. I realized how right I had been to come here.

***

For the first year of my employment at Irving, that opinion did not change. I didn't exactly make a multitude of friends, but I was well-liked and was proud of my little occupation. I even decorated my one-room apartment on the top floor (I had the whole floor to myself but I stayed in the one room in case somebody else ever needed the space). I was never late, and I never called in sick.

I did, however, fail my clients frequently. Until I stepped into the gigantic phone room to see two hundred telephones buzzing desperately, I did not realize how many people in the world are depressed. From 9:00am to 6:00pm (lunch hour excluded) day after day, I did not stop taking calls, five, sometimes six, sometimes seven days a week.

Our "counseling" came largely from a script and while it often did seem to achieve something, invariably the same victims of betrayal or neglect or injustice or mere hormones would be back on the phone in a matter of days or even hours. Each time they called, "there, there" seemed to aid them less.

I was too comfortable to step away from my denial about the performance, and I continued to love my job. My only sore point was Larry Sandstrom.

Larry was perfect -- devastatingly handsome, so intelligent and witty as to be intimidating, so successful that everyone he knew either envied him or wanted to sleep with him. The more conscientious and kindly he was, the easier it was for me to loathe him. I entertained myself with thoughts of some dirty afternoon during which it would be revealed that he was the Devil, but I became less enthusiastic with the knowledge that he would be just as popular afterward.

Ten days ahead of my first anniversary, I received the most intense call that I could remember. A man had just lost his wife to bone cancer. The pistol was against his forehead.

I read from the prepared sentences frantically. "It's not the time to give up. It'll get better." There was no reaction, just heavy breathing. A few of my coworkers sensed the urgency in my voice and they began to watch with grave concern. "Sir," I continued, "you have so much to live for."

"Like what?" the man growled. I could hear glass shattering.

"Everything! You have your whole life ahead of you!"

He laughed disdainfully. "I'm seventy years old. There's nothing left."

"There's something left, sir. You dialed this line, so you must know there's something worth salvaging."

"I dialed this line because I thought you'd talk me out of it, kid, but so far I don't know what they're paying you for. How much do you make, son?"

I ignored the question. "Think of your children!"

"You know why I married my wife?" I was too dumbstruck to answer. "Because she didn't want kids! Too much responsibility." He sobbed in a most alarmingly unrestrained manner, and I panicked.

"Uh... uh... but sir! Suicide is illegal!" My associates all looked at me with wide eyes, stunned that I would say this when trying to comfort someone. I attempted to recover dignity. "Sir, you can fight this. You can." Still no answer. "What do you think killing yourself would prove?"

This got under his skin. "Prove? What on earth is wrong with you? My wife is a corpse. I don't know why I called this line..."

"No no! Don't hang up! I can save your life! I can! Don't give up! What is your name?"

"I'm not giving you my name. That's my private information."

"Okay, well... I'm going to call you... Jimbo. Jimbo, you have friends who love you."

"Jimbo!? What kind of a sorryass are you?"

I was in over my head. "Your friends don't want you to take... the easy way out."

"Easy way? Look, I had my wife. I have my --"

Somehow alerted of the situation, Larry came bounding into the room. I put myself into overdrive, determined to bring this man and myself both from the brink. "Life has so much to offer, Jim. You can't do this to yourself."

Before he could answer, Larry was at my terminal, snatching my headset. "It's okay, gent," he said. "I'll handle this one."

"Sir, are you there?... No, we're not running a zoo. Listen to me. Listen... Have you ever been to Paris? You have? Think about a bird. A bird that flies off La Tour Eifelle..." -- he pronounced this with perfect nuance -- "...and lands on a park bench, where a million people sit every day. Nearby, children are playing hopscotch and wild-west games. It's a cloudy day, and it's about to rain. The bird watches for a moment and then it flutters away." There was a long silence. "Do you still feel like killing yourself?" Suspense. "Good. Call us again if you have any trouble. Oh, no, don't thank me. Thank my years of civil service in Indonesia."

Larry handed me my headset and the room erupted with thunderous applause. He grinned modestly and slipped out invisibly before any questions could be asked.

Over a long, caffeinated, downtrodden weekend, I realized I was lonely. For a long time, I had enjoyed being alone, but when I dreaded going home at night because my strictly impersonal contact with coworkers would end, I knew something was wrong. I ran down the list of questions and reassurances from my little depression counseling script card. They didn't help.

***

I stayed home from work on Monday, achy and miserable. Over time my aimless doldrums came to bore me beyond all tolerance, so I became pouty and decided to telephone my mother.

She and I had spoken only three times since I'd abandoned college, and all three conversations had revolved around the comings and goings of my assertive and successful older brother, a businessman who always wanted to discuss "investment options" with me, and had become so fascinated with Irving Enterprises that he'd bought almost a third of its stock. I had been thrilled to escape him, but he was small change compared to Larry "USA for Africa" Sandstrom.

"What do you want?" my mom began, her interest clearly approximating that of someone who'd just been run over by a train.

"I don't know. I just... really need to talk, Mom. I feel so empty lately --"

"Eric, do you even have a car yet? Did you ever get your license?"

"Well, I..."

"You didn't, did you? Son, your life will change. You have to hurry up. That'll make you feel better. Did you know they won't give you your license after you turn 22?"

"Um, actually, I don't think that's true."

"Well, what are you going to do, walk the rest of your life? What are your plans, anyway? Are you still trying to be a detective?"

"Mom, I was ten years old when I went through that."

"It's still the only time I've ever seen you with any sort of goal. Here, your brother wants to talk to you."

There was some clicking, then the laid-back sound of Nicholas, who was always with my parents when I called. "Man, listen... Mom's right, you know. You gotta get out there in the world! Why aren't you back in school yet?"

"I just wanted to take some time to --"

"Education is the name of the game, Eric. Don't forget that. At the rate you're going, I'll be president of that company before you even move up to management."

I wrapped things up in the smallest number of milliseconds possible. "Yeah, Iseewhatyoumean, Igottago, bye."

This attempt at therapy had been such a disappointment that I decided to go to work after all. My coworkers populated the cafeteria; I considered sitting with them for a session of small talk, but they were exchanging dirty jokes and came off as a pack of sweaty, brutal mutts as they talked of tight pussy and shoveled fries into their mouths. I skipped lunch.

The first phone call after I sat down was an easy one. A girl had just been dumped. I told her to take it one day at a time. She hung up. The second took longer. There wasn't a lot of zest in my voice when I answered, but something about the voice on the other end caught my attention right away. "Hi, um... I shouldn't be doing this." She let out a nervous chuckle. "This is going to sound so stupid... I think I'm cracking up."

"Could I have your name? It'll make our discussion friendlier."

"Oh, yeah, I'm Heather."

"Go on, Heather," I said, genuinely interested.

"Well, I quit. I just... disappeared. It was my third year and I just couldn't do it anymore. I had a lot of obligations. I'm supposed to be presenting something for a drama course right now, and tonight I'm supposed to be coordinating a band concert. I ran off."

"Why exactly did you run off?"

"That's actually why I needed to talk to someone. Normally, I don't do anything like this. I mean, I'm really not an irrational person. In general I always know exactly what's going through my head and why, but lately..." She trailed off.

I consulted my obligatory script. "You know... it will be better tomorrow."

She said nothing for a while. My own reactions to my statement were mixed. I narrowed my eyes, gave myself a blank stare in the computer screen, and rapped my hand rather brutally with a sharp pencil. When Heather spoke at last, she was bluntly unmoved. "Um... it's funny, that really doesn't help at all."

I put my head in my hands and suddenly felt relief. "I know. I know it doesn't." She sighed. "I'm sorry," I said. I meant it.

"It sounds like you need help too."

I looked up at the ceiling, nearly forgetting I wasn't alone in the office. "I think maybe I do."

"That actually makes me feel a lot better." Not sure if she meant this, I smiled. "Did I get your name?"

We exchanged some vital statistics, and she asked me to meet her for coffee. She needed to be around someone "normal," she said. I had never been called "normal" before.

"Listen, you're in that Irving thing in the center of town, right?"

"Yeah, why?"

"See you at 6."

"Wait... where do you want to --" She was already gone.

This was too much mystery for my taste. Without a lot of self-doubt I decided I should just get upstairs as quickly as I could when work was over. Staying isolated was the only idea I could stand at the moment. The hell with coffee. I didn't even drink coffee.

When 6:00 came, before anyone else had even stood up, I had grabbed my coat and was heading for the hall, my ink pen -- office property -- still stuck in my mouth. Noticing this, I removed it and tossed it aside, much to the chagrin of the janior, Red. I threw open the door to see a woman standing in the center of the moving crowd like a statue of Death delicate enough for one to sense the risk of its instant deterioration. She wore glasses and ghostly red that vaguely hinted at the outline of her figure. Her large and pitch-black eyes met mine and narrowed.

I waited for her to speak. "Are you Eric?"

"Er... yes." I should have lied, I thought.

"Well, let's go!" Despite my best efforts to fight the impulse, soon we were off, down the elevator, through the doorway, into her car. Larry was standing near the exit and gave me a puzzled look followed by a thumbs-up sign. As we drove off, he was still repeating the gesture.

"I know this great place on Front Street," Heather said as she rounded a corner somewhat irrationally. "Wanna go there?"

"That's fine, but I should tell you... I don't really drink coffee." This was a mistake, I instantly thought, because it was going to make me seem difficult. I should have just accepted the coffee anyway.

"Yeah, coffee's great." Good, she hadn't heard me. "Well, listen, if you like coffee that much, why don't you pick where we go?" Damn.

"Actually," I said, trying to be gentle, "I really don't like coffee."

"Yeah!" she replied. We were both quiet for about three minutes. She was going around in circles on the road. "Yeah... huh?"

"I said, I don't like coffee." I was practically shouting.

"Oh! I'm sorry. I thought you said you loved it."

"Sorry, my mistake." The only way to salvage the conversation was to take all the blame for it.

"I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this! So you're just kind of a casual taster?"

"No, I don't drink it at all."

"Yeah, I like it too. So let's go to that place on Front Street."

By the time we reached our destination, I had managed to convince her that I did not like coffee at all but that I would be happy to sit inside with her. At first I concluded that she was rather dense, then she begged my forgiveness for her hearing problem; she only had one functioning ear, the one on the other end of the car. I felt more comfortable now.

Inside the coffee house -- Serious Coffee Action, it was called, or SCA -- she had four cups. Despite all the overzealous yelling in the car, she was soft-spoken, though rather talkative, timid and nervous enough to suggest that it had taken a lot of courage for her to call the hotline.

"So Eric, what's your story?" she asked tentatively. This question wracked my nerves, as I couldn't think of anything more distressingly vague she could have said.

"I don't really have one. It's more like a sentence or two." She laughed, and I sighed with relief.

"Well, what's wrong?"

Happy to have someone ask, I thought for a while about it, getting down to the very basics of what was bothering me, then discovered the truth. "I don't really know."

She nodded, removing her glasses and wiping them with her shirt. "Me either. Are you from here?"

"No," I told her, following it with a lowdown on my background, starting with the ill-fated teaching fellowship and ending with my being given a job by Larry Sandstrom.

"The guy with the sunglasses who was giving you the thumbs-up?"

I laughed. "Yeah, how'd you know?"

"He looked like a Larry." Heather leaned down and sipped, looking directly at me in a wolf-like fashion. After considering my options, I asked her why she was sad. There was a lengthy pause before she replied. "I'm kind of scared because I left school. I haven't talked to my parents since and I don't really know how I can face them. I guess you know how that is."

"When I dropped out, I didn't talk to them again until I had a job."

"I have a job but I don't really want them to know about it. I'm working at Burger King."

"So? What's wrong with Burger King?"

"Nothing! Unless you're my parents." I understood and quietly studied the way she drank her coffee.

"What?" she said suddenly.

"Huh?"

"You've giving me this weird look like you're mentally undressing me or something."

"Oh... I'm sorry."

She grabbed my shoulders and pushed my head down to her lower level on the table. "Don't apologize. Please."

I tried to communicate my appreciation for her mercy in a bit of silent grinning, then I told her about all my former ambitions -- being an astronaut, for example -- and she told me about how awful an idea it was to major in psychology. By the time Heather's coffee was gone and the staffers at SCA were turning out the lights, I didn't want to leave. I voiced all the insecurities my mother didn't want to hear about, and Heather listened and encouraged.

We walked out to her car and continued to cheerfully discuss the wonderful world of not being in college all the way back to Irving, where she got out of the car and we had our first uncomfortable moment in almost two hours. We stood and watched one another like confused territorial animals for what felt like forever, and then she slapped my shoulder, smiled, stepped into her car and drove off.

That night, I indulged in a wretched fantasy, wishing for a way to make this fleeting and random, chaotic ecstasy a permanent arrangement, hoping that she might be doing something similar.

***

For the first two months of my friendship with Heather Andress, I hardly saw her. There were schedules to overcome, an overall hesitation on my part and presumably hers to be dealt with, and other obstacles, most prominently her late-night job at the fast food workplace. Finally, phone conversations begat short meetings that were enough of an outlet for me that I ended up acquiring my driver's license to increase my visits. I saw her only at Burger King, and I spent four hours a night there after a full shift of talking to the depressed one, then two, then three, then four and at last five nights a week.

Our SCA conversation continued. We discussed our problems, reassured one another, exchanged a few good jokes, then discussed additional problems we'd missed the first time around. Neither of us wanted to give up on adulthood and go home, but we both probably wished we could.

There was a dread instilled in Heather for this food-services work, and I took pity on her for it; she was not raised to expect that her career would not be an immediately gratifying one. On a night when I entered to find her struggling with an entire vat of fallen fryer grease, I called Larry -- he was working late, as always -- and asked if any positions were open. He said any friend of mine could have a job regardless.

I waited some time to break this news to Heather, who gave me a hug, whispering something in my ear about how much she appreciated what I'd done for her. I didn't reply.

***

Because Heather ended up working evenings at the Irving Enterprises Gift Shop, I entered a phase of welcome familiarity with her. Though it was little more than our common dread that united us, she was my closest friend and I was happy to see her every day the way a high schooler is glad to see a comrade walking the halls at an opportune time. No hint of my attraction to her seemed worthwhile.

I could not deny, however, that it was beginning to be a difficult thing to conceal. My coworkers saw me with Heather often enough that it was a shock to them to learn we were not dating, and I had taken to working late so that the two of us could leave simultaneously. It was only as a casual friend that Heather asked me on one such evening if I might accompany her to see her parents.

Her first communication with her family in months had been an invitation to dinner via a greeting card that had left her sobbing in a panic for an entire afternoon. Its complete text was "We'd love to hear from you. Please come by for dinner at 7:30 on the 23rd. - Mom & Dad."

I readily agreed to come along, positive that no one would see through my ploy. I was quite incorrect; hours before I was to meet Mr. and Mrs. Andress, I spied the reflection of Larry in my terminal screen, sipping cappucino and looking thoughtful.

"Hinez... your friend downstairs." Larry leaned on the chair next to mine, gazing out the window, looking reflective. "She's quite a vivacious character, don't you think?" I was afraid to give any reply. "I've begun to consider the matter of engaging her in an assignation. You won't be offended then?"

I would, of course, be very offended. "Assignation..." I repeated, my ears swelling with heat.

"You know, old boy, the promise to be in an agreed place at a specificed time." He sipped. "Usually for a particular purpose."

"I know... what an assignation is," I growled, although I really hadn't. "She's busy tonight, Larry," I said in a commendable deadpan.

He stopped the incessant tapping of the chair that had been a distinguishing feature of the last few minutes. "I see." He smirked. "I'll consult with you." With that he spun around and left.

In the car, I did my best to carefully plan all of my remarks so as not to rattle Heather, who wore a fake smile but whose shaking hands told of a person near the breaking point.

"You're gonna make it," I said as gently as possible while we rounded a dangerous curve.

"Oh, sure, no problem," she replied, rolling my window down.

I thought I should be entertaining. "Did you know that Larry Sandstrom is, like, in love with you?" I shouted over the air conditioner.

"Yeah," she said calmly. "He's told me several times." I was sure she'd actually misunderstood the question but I chose not to push it. When we reached a stoplight, the first in several miles, where she could hear more clearly, I asked her something that had been troubling me. "What exactly is it that worries you about tonight?"

Heather finally let go of the smile. "I don't want to see them. I wish I did. I think I just don't want to have to answer for anything I've done recently."

"You mean like quitting school?"

"Yeah, that, not making my car payments, skipping town and not telling them where I was..."

"They're family. They'll get over it."

Heather didn't answer for a long time, to the point that I assumed she missed my remark, but about ten minutes later she resumed the conversation. "Well... you haven't met my family." I assumed she was exaggerating. Shortly afterward, her house was in sight.

Clad in spotless and professionally pressed Sunday outfits, Heather's parents and brother stood like totem poles on the porch, perpetually narrow-eyed and disapproving. "Wait here," she told me.

After Heather bounced up to greet them, her father took a sheet of newspaper from his back pocket, held it directly in front of her face and crumpled it up, then ripped it to shreds. He then stormed into the house. This was followed by a series of off-the-handle screeches from her mother, who grabbed her arm viciously and began to drag her inside. The only words I could hear were "You can't hide from us." Heather's brother stared directly ahead all the while, unmoved by the proceedings.

I winced and threw open the door, then stepped onto the well-hewn soil of the Andress' front yard just in time to interrupt Heather and her mother's retreat into the house at the last possible second. "Hi there!" I shouted amiably, my voice surprising me by not cracking even slightly. Approaching the steps and the three dumfounded people on the porch, I grinned as widely as I could. "You must be Heather's mother." I threw my arms around her and winked at Heather, who had just enough time to flash me a genuine smile of grateful recognition before her dad came out to join us.

While Heather's parents appeared stunned and pleased that their daughter had not simply been living out her days in wandering decadence, her father second-guessed my every statement once we convinced the family through various strands of conversation that we were engaged to be married and had great jobs and a nice apartment. "Did you get my daughter pregnant?" No, Mr. Andress. "Are you a con artist?" No, Mr. Andress. "Are you one of those urban communists?" No, Mr. Andress. "Are you going to sell my daughter's sex on the streets?" No, no, and no.

Once I had sold him on my credentials as a future husband, we all sat down for a dinner of pleasantries. Heather looked woozy for the duration, her brother Matthew never said a word, I did my best to keep conversations moving, and Mrs. Andress concentrated on asking me everything about life in the city, more or less ignoring her daughter, something that would have concerned me if it didn't appear that it had relieved Heather so immensely.

She did address her finally, to ask in an oppressively saccharine fashion for her to go down to the wine cellar and grab the Vinuva in the purple bottle. Anxious for a chance to exchange mission briefings, I offered to join her.

On the walk to the tiny door into the cellar, Heather entertained me with a makeshift history of the room we were about to enter. Halfway down the dark stairwell, I was so blown away by the number of beverages stacked on the shelves that now surrounded me that I was completely taken offguard when Heather grabbed and kissed me passionately.

"I can't believe what you just did for me, Eric."

I did not take praise well, but the resulting euphoria got me through the trip back down to the cellar when we realized we forgot the wine, the mysterious soap in the bathroom, and the hours of political discussion with Mr. Andress in which I pretended to align myself with the exact opposites of every single one of my personal philosophies.

I drove home. Heather was alternately excited, thoughtful, and sleepy. She said just one thing -- "My parents love you, Eric" -- before looking out the window for a long time, turning to smile at me then drifting off to sleep.

In fact, she said very little for almost three days after the dinner date, and nothing directly to me. I was silent as well; there was a lot to think about. On Monday, her boss left the building sick, leaving her to order supplies and product for the gift shop. This meant a very late night. As always, I waited for her, pacing around the ground floor, surveying the intellectually vacant corporate exhibits.

I was standing outside the glass-enclosed office held by Heather's boss when she finished, and she looked directly at me while she strapped her purse on and turned out the light. When she came out the door, she put her hand on my left shoulder and let it slide down my arm. Before she walked down the hallway, out the front door and into the car, she said one thing to me: "333 Ambrose Chapell Rd., 1206, last one on the right." It took a few minutes for me to understand what that meant, an hour more for me to fully believe it.

I felt that it was the most significant event of my life thus far, and filled Heather's ears with all the hyperbole she would tolerate. Aside from that, we said very little.

***

For the first fifteen minutes of the day Heather Andress and I woke up officially a couple, we pretended that nothing had happened. We got up, talked about innocuous things, made breakfast, checked the weather, then something, some random phrase or mannerism from the television sparked us to look at one another and smile and laugh and congratulate ourselves.

During the weeks to follow we arranged dates that suited our personalities and schedules -- schlocky midnight movies, running errands at the laundromat and post office, wandering around an otherwise-deserted arcade that sold snowcones -- but it was not long before those dates turned into one continuous date, and we stayed at her apartment most of the time.

Work left us both feeling lethargic, so the lack of activity did not bother us. We were in a stage of tireless intimacy; Heather was the only thing I thought about. (I found it difficult to follow the stories in half-hour TV shows, because somehow she would return to my mind.) Despite this, we looked forward to the annual erection of rides on a fairground near Irving for a six-day fundraiser. Heather had not been within fifty miles of a ferris wheel since her single-digit years, and I liked cotton candy.

We had a nice time at the fair, but as soon as we entered the premises I found myself feeling strangely uneasy. I couldn't place the reason and Heather, in a thoroughly bright mood, didn't seem to notice. The monstrous blinking lights were creating a disturbance in my sinuses, which made me feel like I was being throttled around the area, but that didn't account for the odd dread in the pit of my stomach. We rode the spaceship ride and I couldn't shake it. We visited the shooting gallery and I couldn't even coordinate myself enough to put a quarter in the slot, much less fire the fake rifle. We loaded ourselves onto the ferris wheel and suddenly, during our voyage toward the sky, with Heather studying the stars and laughing somewhat inexplicably, I noticed a man on the ride's opposite end, coming down toward the ground, sitting backwards in his chair to face us. He was pudgy, bearded, bespectacled, stonefaced. I looked up to the sky and pretended not to notice the way he was staring.

Heather was at her most hyperactive when she stepped off the ride; I felt almost like her father. She wanted to ride again. I felt ill. Before I could settle the dispute by offering to sit on the bench while she returned to her fun, we were approached by the man with the beard. I was petrified, and instinctively grabbed Heather to shield her from him, causing her to drop her cotton candy into the mud. She, too, was transfixed by the man's calculated walk and icy stare. He came within a few feet of us and then stopped cold, his eyes fixed on Heather.

Before we could say anything to try and break the tension, he spoke in a high-pitched but somehow authoritative tone. "If I want gold, steal but a beggar's dog, and give it, Timon, why, the dog coins gold; If I would sell my horse, and buy twenty moe, better than he, why, give my horse to Timon." He recited this with such power that I hardly noticed that its bearing to our present situation was rather elusive.

"I'm sorry?" Heather said, seemingly less unsettled than I. In lieu of answering, the man smiled faintly and walked away.

"What the hell was that?" I whispered. Heather didn't answer, simply shaking her head. As we went to ride the centrifuge and watched the kids in the bumper cars, it felt unpleasant to even address the issue. There was no reason something so harmless, however offbeat it seemed, should leave me feeling so insecure and displaced, but there was a faint suggestion in the air that I was not in control.

He was nothing, I kept thinking, an insect. As we walked across the fairground toward the end of the evening, laughing politely and small-talking in a way that left me feeling more paralyzed, I felt a strong hand on my shoulder and was pushed away from Heather.

From the sidelines, dumbfounded, I watched as this hideous brute leaned down to face my girlfriend directly, far too close, and he spoke again, this time in an urgent whisper. "He wears cruel garters. Horses are tied by the neck, monkeys by the loins, and men by the legs; when a man's over-lusty at legs, then he wears wooden netherstocks."

The three of us stood like corpses for an eternity -- me glaring vacantly at the man and woman engaging in enraptured eye contact; Heather waiting to see what the man would do next and probably, I now concluded, wishing I would intervene; the mysterious bearded twentysomething with an intimidating build fishing for some kind of reaction. Not receiving it, he raised his voice and tried again. "How tame, when men and women are alone, a meacock wretch can make the curstest shrew." He reached down and grabbed Heather's hand, kissing it.

This time, Heather looked at him and bit her lip for a moment (in the exact same way she did just before she undressed in front of me for the first time), then exploded in violent, impulsive laughter. I nearly fell to my knees; every desperate strand of ambiguity I'd been knawing on for the last hour drained to nothing as my world seemed to rebuild itself in seconds. Heather looked over at me and laughed some more, and now I joined her.

The bearded man's face fell and his shoulders drifted downward; he stepped away slowly, his eyes to the ground. Heather and I couldn't stop laughing about it, and we didn't stop laughing about it for months. The ticket out of any disconcerting incident was to recite some randomly selected, decidedly unromantic line from Shakespeare and read it in a falsely expressive way suggesting not an iota of comprehension. Sometimes I remembered my wrenching panic during the fair and laughed at my own naivete. After that night, I knew I would spend my life with her, and not long afterward, we moved in together.

***

For the first several months we spent in our new home, I was fond of our mundane routines. Heather had wanted a backyard, but our price range was far from dynamic, so we ended up in an organized community that neither of us especially liked. There were a lot of kids in the neighborhood, huge glass windows all over the house -- with both of us far too lazy to buy curtains -- and a surprising number of cockroaches for such a spotless place, but we consoled ourselves by assuring one another that we would only stay here until we could afford something better.

Such plans disintegrated as we grew complacent. Early on, Heather and I kept going as before with our casual conversations. Then, the conversations turned into lengthy sessions of us exchanging platitudes, discussing how great our lives were and how we had nothing to worry about, then into lengthier sessions of watching television or smiling at each other.

This transition happened so gradually I only noticed the difference when I thought about it extensively. I did regret the change slightly, but I pushed that aside because I couldn't stand the thought of anything negative creeping into my marvelous existence with Heather. I had found someone who liked me, who hadn't stabbed me in the back yet. Thus, any negativity was thwarted.

Sitting in the living room and saying nothing became a scheduled event, until Heather's hours were transferred to a later shift so that generally I was awake when she was at work and she was awake when I was asleep. I was still secure and nothing really changed. Every night when she came home, we spent some time together. Ten or fifteen minutes.

"I feel so useless," she told me more than once. "I always have, but especially now. I don't think I'm accomplishing anything and it almost makes me wonder if Mom and Dad were right."

"You shouldn't be so hard on yourself," I would say automatically.

"It's like I'm stuck in a box, Eric. Don't you ever feel like that?"

"Well, maybe I can help. I'm a depression counselor, you know."

"Good night, Eric."

I felt guilty about her discontent, but she balked at my sudden offers for dinner and dancing and movies and Events, once passions so decried between us. I couldn't help noticing a difference in her. I assured myself that I had simply taught her to be honest with herself and not to hold back the darkest of information from me.

Sometimes at night, when I couldn't sleep and there really did seem to be dead ends surrounding me, I understood. At various times, with no provocation I could discern, I grew lonely again, unhappier than ever, but compounding that, this so disrupted my sense of well-being in my comfortable new world that I felt I had to pretend it wasn't there. It was a ponderous maze, and I knew Heather, sitting in the next room watching TV, afflicted with insomnia, was equally lost. To walk out there and connect with her on this basis, as I had so successfully before, was simply too painful. We were trapped.

***

I began, over time, to feel much younger than Heather, in the midst of her misplaced hostility. After seeing her put a happy face on everything for so long, I expected relief when she allowed herself to ooze anger, but the aggression was too constant to be tolerated as ventilation.

"I really hate my job," she said one day after being silent for several hours. "I want to leave but I know I can't. Who else would hire me?" I balked at this, but she was insistent that there was no way she would ever be able to gather in herself the ability to change her profession.

"I'm sorry," I said, not letting her finish her diatribe.

"So am I. You'd better get up, we have to go to the store."

I preferred to save this trip for the next day, but I got up and prepared anyway. It was the middle of the night, the only time we ever did any shopping thanks to our hatred of crowds. As I brushed my teeth, Heather unemotionally rattled off a list of essentials so long it made me ache with dread.

It was a blustery, cold evening and as we passed through each stoplight -- all of them blinking yellow because of the late hour -- I began to imagine I was flying above the street instead of dragging myself along it. After exchanging testy remarks about an indoor lamp that kept flashing on and off, we fought about whether we knew where we were going when we had to take a detour because of overnight roadwork. Despite this, we arrived quickly, though we were already exhausted before we entered the building.

Inside, with our cart, Heather clung to me and kept shifting uncomfortably. "Everyone is staring at us." It was true -- throngs of people eyeing us with exasperation, sometimes disgust. I had always had this feeling but hearing it stated upset me, and as we rolled through the aisles I felt anger building, unsure of where or to whom it was directed.

"I hate people," she said after one especially inconsiderate offender finished looking us over.

"Look," I sighed, "we'll be out soon."

"I know! I'm not looking for reassurance, I'm just saying... I hate people."

We snapped at one another after I dropped a glass bottle in an aisle, and many such altercations took place during our stay so that by the time we were rushing toward the registers, we had attracted the attention of seemingly all of the store's occupants.

The cashier never took her eyes from us, as if she expected us both to pull out handguns at the first opportunity. Heather didn't notice this; she was busy writing the check, her face flushed. Once that was finished, she returned to looking distraught, throwing her head around to look away from people when they began to watch her unwaveringly.

I became a bit concerned about the dramatic pause that had persisted since the check had been handed over. A line was forming well into the nearest aisle. "Ma'am," the woman said coldly, "we can't accept your check."

Heather's legs almost ended their support of her at that point; I tried to be calm walking over to see what the problem was. I wanted to die, and I wanted to panic even more, but everyone had their eyes on me. I didn't want to look back, but I scanned the crowd several times, enough to notice the presence of two coworkers and Shakespeare boy from the park. I suspected it was my imagination, since I also thought I saw my long-dead grandmother, but it made me feel worse anyway.

It turned out the issue was not financial, but that our check number was too low. I used my emergency credit card and we rushed out, away from the harsh judgment of the grocery aisles.

Sometimes I would congratulate myself on a trip to the store without a single fight, but invariably the achievement would be underscored by horrendous bickering on the ride home. Heather was fuming about what had occured, and I was irritated by her endless series of recaps every two minutes.

"I was there, Heather. I saw what happened. We can't do anything about it."

"What do you want me to say?" she yelped. "Why do we have to deal with this? It always has to happen to us. We'll never even establish credit, we'll never get out of this city, we'll never be able to make it."

"We'll be fine. It was just a low check number. Don't worry about it!"

During a quarrel, Heather always seemed prepared for whatever I said, and this was no exception. "Look! I'm sorry I worry about things, okay? I can't help it. I'm sorry if it bothers you." Nothing else was said on the matter; Heather asked me to take a shortcut home. It was a road I hated driving on, but I obliged eagerly.

For some time, this was normal. Battle erupted at every point when one of us did not take the trouble to practice denial about any slight deviation from complete, total, uncompromised, inconceivably boring devotion and happiness; we both enjoyed and missed independence, but neither of us was prepared to admit it. As soon as something happened, or as soon as some idea was touched, it was distressing to talk about it. We slowly developed an unspoken list of unapproachable topics, but a time came when there were no longer many topics that were not unapproachable. This was not a courtship, a love-in, or a marriage. It was one long series of excruciating miscommunications.

There was a new girl at work. Of her origin, name, nature I knew nothing. All the better, I thought, now wary of personalities and convinced I was not cut out for meaningful relationships.

We talked occasionally, over the Xerox machine or her daily lunch of a bottle of Sprite. On the subject of her recently broken-off engagement, she said "Let me give you some advice -- never share a bank account." I chose not to answer that I had already done just that. "Don't merge your CD collections." That too. "In fact, I don't think it's a good idea to live with someone to begin with." Well.

After a surprisingly long time, I learned that Janice was her name, and she always wrote it in big capital letters. She and I really had very little in common -- she often put shiny star-shaped stickers on her hands and face, something that mysteriously gave me a terrific urge to vomit -- but I was fond of long evening conversations with her, even though I usually had a strange throbbing headache afterward. She was an energy ball, and I had never been very close to one of those before.

The sheer oddity of our friendship and the frequency of my time alone led to a kind of embellishment. I came to enjoy dreaming of Janice in all peculiar and condemned fashions. I kept my face closer and closer to hers each night, while at home Heather looked increasingly puzzled and I assumed she must have been able to tell somehow what I was thinking and doing.

There were attitudes in me, promises and thoughts and sentiments that I had told myself and others would always be restricted to my attachment to Heather. And now here those attitudes came, bursting out like a geyser, in my new talks with Janice. Her experience was undoubtedly different. I could tell her all of the lecherous and horrific things in my head and her sole response would be -- with chin in hands and polite smile -- "Mm-hmm?" followed my some remark about her desperate need to get her nails done.

What I was doing felt necessary. I did not love Janice, but I was filling her ears with speeches about her great beauty and kindness, and I wanted her. Not even sexually, just for a casual date, then whatever experience might result. Heather and I weren't speaking much during this time, just kind of vaguely acknowledging one another, fainthearted and cordial; I came home with flowers once, balloons another time, to little avail. I told myself that if she did not go out of her way for me in the next week, I would attempt to drag Janice down with me. It was a ridiculous game, but I no longer had much regard for what was or was not ridiculous.

In the meantime, Janice talked and I listened. "I walked out of work one day and my car was gone. It was just gone. My boyfriend had taken it. I'd let him have my spare key, he'd taken a taxi over and he'd run out of state with the car. I tracked him down halfway down the coast, hated him, you know, wanted to kill him. His whole family -- they all loved me -- came down on him for it. They basically disowned him, and one night I was there to get some of my clothes. He was in his bedroom just crying, his head was in the pillow. I asked him what was wrong and he said 'Just hold me.'

"I told everybody how I knew I could trust him and he had just made one mistake, this one time. They all said 'you're the one who's making the mistake, he's shown you exactly who he is and you're going to just ignore it.' I started to hate them. And they were right. Two weeks went by, one morning I told him 'Be good,' I always told him that and he usually said 'I'm always good.' That day he said 'I'll try.' At 6:00 I walk out to the parking lot again, and the car's gone. They were fucking right."

"But," I said, "you had to be free to make your own mistakes. You're probably better off now than you were before."

"Not really. If he showed up right now I would let it happen again, no question. Part of me knows what's good for me and the other part doesn't care." I sipped my chocolate milk, said nothing. "Aren't you going to ask me why I would let somebody chew me up and spit me out like that? And tell me how stupid I am for doing it twice?"

I looked directly at her. "No, it's not my place to say any of that, and I can understand what you're going through anyway."

Janice looked thoughtful. "Why do you have to have someone already?" She gulped down some coffee.

Suddenly feeling bold, I bit my lip, leaning toward her, then I caught myself.

All around me, people -- people who knew Heather, people who were her best friends by then -- were watching with fascination, disgust, concern, great disapproval. They thought of how I was treating their friend who I was supposed to love and cherish and someday marry. I was now, irrevocably, a beast. At this point I finally went back to knowing and respecting the invisible fence around me, and quickly discerned that Janice was the one person in the room who'd managed not to notice the incompetent move I had made. "Are you okay?" she asked. No, I wasn't. "Yes, of course I am," I said. I wasn't okay for the rest of the week. Every single person eating lunch around us that day now was above me, and their expressions did not allow me to forget it.

I was also the worst depression counselor ever. I had come to hate my job, precisely because I now did nothing but read the words provided to me by my special new computer terminal, which included a database of the right things to say to each variety of depressed individual. Even when it helped them, I hated it, and I had managed to coordinate myself enough to process the calls and complete them without a great deal of consciousness. I wasn't even awake enough to know whether my airborne thought processes ever accidentally leaked into my counseling, and I was less than mortified by the possibility that they had.

Because I assumed that I was hanging onto my job by a thread, I was not surprised to see Larry Sandstrom by my desk one day just after hours with an ominous stack of flourescent pink papers. He was not carrying his omnipresent salt & vinegar potato chips, either, which furthered my instinct that I was about to be dropped. I was slightly excited by the idea.

"You know, Hinez..." -- I didn't look up, feeling that to give him any respect now would be a waste -- "...you're very fortunate. Heather is clever and pert and saucy. I don't know if you realize how fortunate you are."

I was only mildly confused. "Still looking for my permission, Larry?"}}

"Don't be such a gadabout. I'm not your foil. Every day I see her drift malignantly into the room during lunch with one of her little satchels. She sees you chatting with that loquacious little upstart -- who's not your type at all, might I add -- and she turns and lumbers away, thoroughly mum."

I was baffled by this new twist. "How long has this been going on?"

"Forever, Eric."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"To abet you both. I know Heather hasn't been pure bliss to live with, I've spoken with her about that too."

This eclipsed the rest of his lecture. "You've talked to her?"

"We talk often, Eric. No calamity, right?"

I shrugged and looked down. "Right."

"Be careful, my friend." He stood there and seemed ready to continue on some pressing topic for a time; somehow, even his silences felt like vast exaggerations. Then, after stressing his open-door policy, which did not comfort me a bit, he left the room, torn away perhaps by need of potato chips or his beloved cappucino.

I was so unsure of what to do next that I stayed half the night and cleaned the office from floor to ceiling. Red waltzed in at one point with a mop bucket, saw me and muttered something about unions, and waltzed back out. As I mopped the floor, which didn't really need mopping but it helped me think, I knew I had to write a letter.

Regardless of the discomfort I was enduring, I was reluctant to even think of dismissing Heather. I would explain all of this in a note to Janice. I would make her understand that I was very fond of her and would have liked very much to attempt something more with her, but that the time simply was not right, and I hoped she understood and would accept what was, in its fashion, love. As I came up with great ideas and turns of phrase and romantically abstract points, I jotted them down on receipts from my wallet.

The result was incoherent -- "you = me," "cleaning floor thinking about you," "our separate destinies," "beauty and charm," "difference between Heather and you" -- but I understood enough to write out a draft on a nearby computer terminal and study it proudly before printing it out and leaving.

I was startled upon arriving at home to note that all of the lights were on; this was so unusual that I thought a burglar or killer must have climbed in through the window. I crept through the living room feeling dizzy, trying to listen for anything odd. All at once, Heather burst out of the bedroom door, naked and clutching the telephone, and I was so unprepared for any such broad movement that I fell to my knees and yelped with fear.

As she calmed me down, she was so gentle that I began to feel somehow even worse, more depressed and significantly more frightened; I didn't know what was right.

"Heather --"

"Don't try to talk, it's okay. I'm sorry I scared you."

I had to tell her. "No. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about..." -- I struggled to sit up more respectfully -- "I'm sorry about flirting with that girl from my department. I know you saw me."

Heather smiled and stroked my arm. "Eric, don't let Saint Sandstrom push you around."

"How did you kn--"

"Come to bed, Eric."

I pretended to sleep for nearly an hour before fear got the best of me and I stood up to enter the bathroom, where I could get some light. There, I removed the letter to Janice from my pocket, read it, ripped it up, and threw it into the trash can amid the wadded-up tissue and Spiegel catalogs.

Morning came with the sound of various small crashes and Heather huffing around, crying. I was afraid to let on that I was awake even before I realized what had happened. She wouldn't tell me anything for a while, insisting that she was fine and that she merely wished she was dead. I glanced over to the bathroom floor and could see remnants of my letter. I didn't know whether or not she'd pieced it together, but I did know it was irrelevant. Even if she'd just noticed a tiny segment, she probably would have caught the right words -- "love," "leave," "Heather," "sexy," "beautiful," "bitch," whatever.

I stood up, nearly tripping on the cord for my bedside lamp and grabbing the wall for support. "Heather! Heather! I wasn't going to do anything. We never did anything." She didn't answer; I stood in the doorway watching her violently get ready for work. "I wasn't going to leave you."

She ignored my presence in the doorway, shoving her way past me. "I don't want to hear about it, Eric."

"We never --"

"I said, I don't want to hear about it." I had never seen anybody make toast as angrily as she did at that point. Even in my unenvious position, I felt great pity for the food on her plate, which resembled a murder scene that would drive a hardened officer to retirement.

"Look... it's not like I even sent the note anyway."

Finally, she threw down her knife and turned to look at me. "Do you think it matters, Eric? You think I can ignore everything because you didn't send the fucking letter? I don't want to talk to you right now."

I walked into the living room and sat down, hoping to calm her some. Instead I somehow found that everything I said was offensive. My mouth no longer felt connected to my brain. "Don't act so high and mighty, Heather. You did, after all, go through the trash can."

"Uh-huh. And you wouldn't have? I saw you last night, tearing a piece of paper up and very discreetly stuffing it in the bag. You would have been curious too." She threw her barely-eaten food to the floor -- I was surprised the plate remained in one piece -- and stormed to the bathroom sink.

"Wrong. I would have trusted you." I wanted desperately for Heather, just once, to be wrong or to do something wrong. This was perhaps the worst possible time for me to be so determined about something, but had I believed in prayer I would have prayed for it.

"That's bullshit, Eric!" she screamed with her mouth full of toothpaste. In happier times we would have laughed at the absurdity of this moment. She spit it out after struggling for a few more seconds. "I had so much invested in you, and I don't even want to be here anymore!"

"Well, where do you want to be?"

"I don't know! Home, somewhere new, somewhere old, whatever. I can't spend the rest of my life doing this shit for a living."

"You're so much more than your job, though."

"What the hell does that even mean? I'm not like you. Being in a place where I don't want to kill myself doesn't satisfy me anymore. We grabbed on and wouldn't let go, and I'm grateful for that, but now it's all this, and it's over?"

"This always seems to happen to me. I --"

"It doesn't just happen, Eric. It's you. This isn't about everybody else coming down on you anymore. You don't even know how little you've had to fight against. If you did, maybe you'd see what a tiny piece of a letter can do."

I didn't respond. At least she was talking now. As she applied eyeliner -- which she never usually did because I hated makeup -- she continued, more quietly. "We're both adults and I'm sorry for how I feel, but I need you to please leave me alone for right now."

No matter how reasonable she was, I was still exasperated. "Do you want me to move out?"

"You do... whatever you want, Eric."

I went back into the bedroom. This was not what I wanted to do. I went to work. This was not what I wanted to do. I steered clear of Janice at lunch. This was not what I wanted to do. I came home. This was not what I wanted to do. I went to bed without speaking to Heather. This was not what I wanted to do.

I stopped fighting myself when I realized that I was doing the opposite of what Heather had told me to do and that what I wanted was for Janice to understand what had happened without judging Heather.

Janice did not look entertained by my sometimes vague retelling of events. "I didn't know what I was doing. I don't want to make things even worse for her. I hope you understand."

"Oh, yeah, that's cool. Hey, do you think that guy over there's related to Donald Trump?"

"Who?"

"That guy back toward the door. He has that same haircut!"

I didn't see the guy, but I did see Heather standing motionless a few feet behind us. She looked like a tattered, neglected doll; her eyes met mine for just a second, and I felt a chill just before she whirled around and left the room. I debated going after her, but ultimately didn't.

Heather didn't come home that night. I assumed she was staying in a hotel. I still elected to sleep on the floor.

Work was a refuge now. I hated it, dreaded it, but I dreaded leaving it a good deal more. After the blowup, I stopped speaking to Janice. I would have felt guilty over this, but she never seemed to notice and soon enough Larry was keeping her entertained and winking slyly at me. The idea of freedom did eventualy grow on me, but she was tied now to an unpleasant memory and I excluded her from my fantasies.

One afternoon, I walked down the hallway at work carrying some posterboard, always happy to run a quick errand for the staff upstairs. In front of me was a gorgeous woman who had the most remarkable walk. She was cute anyway, but the way she walked engrossed me as I walked behind and studied her discreetly. I needed a new roommate; maybe fate was calling out to me. On a whim, I walked faster so that I could join her and get a closer look, and Heather turned around to face me.

"Hi," she said, confused.

"Heather!" I was thrilled beyond words. I threw my arm around her. "Heather, you're beautiful!"

"What?"

"Do you know what this means? This means we're gonna be okay! It does! I love you!"

She narrowed her eyes, threw my arm off her shoulder and back at me, turned back around and began to walk more quickly, leaving me farther and farther behind.

I wasn't sure I understood her anymore.

***

She did return home that night, and over the next several months we lived in a state similar to what had come before. She was gone quite frequently, usually at the office, and I noticed Larry giving me strange looks, which suggested to me something I preferred not to admit could be happening. I ignored such pangs.

Slowly we attempted to ring in the return of old routines. We tried watching movies, but the same things never interested us anymore. We tried sitting and talking, but there was nothing to say. We even tried going back to the fair when it rolled around again, but this time I sat out all of the rides and Heather felt ill, and we weren't speaking on the ride home. Then there were the board games.

Our previous favorite, Twister, was no longer attempted because of the awkward situations it would create between us, and it had never been as exciting as we expected anyway. Playing Clue was much too easy since both of us knew the rules. Playing Scrabble was miserable for me because she enjoyed it so much and always won. Playing Mouse Trap satisfied only me, and only when I got to knock the cage down. Playing Stratego was impossible because there were pieces missing, mostly bombs. Playing Monopoly took far too long. We settled, then, on Sorry! -- simplistic, mindless, and superficial, just what we needed.

When we started, I got a few of my pieces out right away thanks to a 1 card and a 2 card right in a row. Heather got a 12 and a 3. In fact, Heather continued for some time to draw cards that were useless in actually getting herself started. I was slightly disappointed, as this left me no opportunity to use the many "Sorry!" cards I ended up with. Heather was a bit more disappointed, growing increasingly embittered about her plight. Three of my pieces had reached home before she had a single one on the playing field.

"Dammit, did you fix these cards or something?"

"No, I don't even know how to fix Sorry! cards."

"This is unbelievable." She got down on her stomach and gave the pile of cards a good bone-chilling glare as if that would somehow change the course of the situation. She got a 4. A 6. A 9. A 7. ("Can I split this between a 1 and a 6?" "No.") A 12 -- the higher numbers were somehow more insulting. A 12. Another 12.

"OH MY GOD," she screamed at her fifth 12 in a row before drawing a 10. After a tense pause and a grunt, she stood up and kicked the board across the room, almost hitting my face.

"What on earth is wrong with you, Heather? It's just a stupid game!"

"Did you just see that shit? It hates me! The game hates me!"

"We can just play again. We'll switch colors or something. You can be yellow this time."

"Leave me alone. I'm going to bed."

I sprinted to the kitchen to pick up the gamepieces I could find. "You don't have to act so pissy over this. We didn't have to play a game anyway."

"I didn't know, Eric" -- she pronounced this "eriKKKKK" -- "that the game had it in for me from the start." Now the crying began, and Heather never cried much, but now in particular it was rare. "I didn't know a game was going to be this stressful."

I kept getting madder. "Stress doesn't make a person kick the game board!"

"I never said you were gay!"

"I said, I'm not the one --"

"Stop yelling at me!" Her voice was shaking badly.

"I'M NOT YELLING. EVERY TIME I RAISE MY VOICE EVEN SLIGHTLY, YOU TELL ME I'M YELLING. I'M JUST TRYING TO HELP GET MY POINT ACROSS TO SOMEONE WHO ONLY HAS HALF OF HER FUCKING HEARING. DOES THAT MAKE SENSE!?"

I was yelling now, of course; she sobbed some more and sank down to the floor, then looked up at me with reluctant pity. "There's someone else, Eric."

That was not what I expected to come out of the situation at all. Now it was my turn to hit the floor. I thought of how strange it would be if we broke up over a board game. Then an alarm went off and I realized what was happening. My non-prayers had been answered. Heather had done something wrong. I swore I would understand. I did understand. I was furious.

Who was it? Larry. I just knew it was Larry. It was obvious. Long nights at the office, that look on his stupid rich face, his youthful voice, his limitless charm. Larry Sandstrom was courting, corrupting, probably fucking my girlfriend.

"Are you going to say something, Eric?" I didn't. "Please, come on. This is killing me. I'm sorry."

"I'm gonna have to quit."

"What? What are you talking about? Why?" She looked different; she looked the way she used to look.

"I can't see you two together. I can't stand that."

"Who?" She stood up to face me. "Who do you think I'm talking about?"

"I'm not an idiot."

"When did you see me with Frank?" Frank? Frank!? "What does that have to do with our jobs?"

"It's not Larry?"

She smiled nervously and shook her head. "I'm not even sure Larry would know what to do." She clutched both my hands as if this were some great romantic moment.

I broke out of the tranquility, my face suddenly falling. "Who's Frank?"

"I'm not sure you want to know. I love him, but I know you're going to hate him."

"You love hi-- Wait, what, do you want me to meet this guy or something?"

"Oh, you've already met."

With that, she began the story.

Once upon a time, Heather Andress got a job running the gift shop at Irving Enterprises. Her work area was adjacent to a small coffee bar at which top brass from the telemarketing divisions upstairs often spent their mornings. Beginning on her second day, they were usually accompanied by an aggressive and quite persistent young man in his late twenties, self-consciously spooky-looking, clad much of the time in a creepy trenchcoat, and not happy at all about the nightly calls he received from Irving employees asking him whether he preferred to vacation in the mountains or by the sea.

This man had taken the trouble to find out where these calls were coming from, who was in charge of the situation, and where in the building they ate their breakfast and lunch. The result of his moaning and shouting was little more than a series of smirks and quiet, knowing chuckles from businessmen buried in their newspapers, who not only didn't care what he had to say but were impressively adept at ignoring him except when one of his rants became unintentionally humorous.

Yet he still didn't give up. He was back every day, after yet another annoying phone call, for the same routine. During Heather's second week on the job, the man looked to his right for the first time ever and directly at her. Within a few days his arguments with executives had ended, but he still showed up, now just to stare at her and pretend unconvincingly that he wasn't. Heather was amused by this. She also liked it, in a way she was unable to explain to me.

"One day, he came and finally spoke to me. We talked for a few minutes and he was very insistent that I would be meeting him after I left work and we would go somewhere for a drink. I told him I didn't think my boyfriend would like that, but he just wouldn't leave it alone. Finally we made an agreement, because the fair was going on and it was right across the street. He said that if I was there the following Saturday night, he would know that I wanted him and he would keep pursing me, regardless.

"I laughed this off at first. I laugh off a lot of things at first. The more I thought about it, the more I started to get curious. It just seemed so adventurous and wrong that I started to feel like it was a very romantic proposal. I was feeling sort of dazed -- I'm sure you know the feeling -- like some possibility had just opened up unexpectedly. I was very guilty about this, so the next morning, after getting no sleep whatsoever, I made a pact with myself that when I went to work, if you walked in the gift shop first I would forget the whole thing. If he walked in first, I would go for it. He walked in first. Even if he hadn't, I probably would have broken the pact."

I was trying not to project how much this was disturbing me. "This is when we went to the fair?"

"Yes. I asked you if we could go that very night, and I didn't even really think about what I was doing. It was like I was barely in control, but I knew it was what I wanted."

"Heather, that's before we even moved here."

"I know! Look, it got very serious with both of you simultaneously and I didn't know what to do. I got really creeped at the park. I mean, sure enough, he was there, but he was making his presence very, very clear, even though I was with you. And when he came over and started talking to us, I thought I was going to just curl up on the ground and die."

For a second after this sank in, everything around me disappeared except Heather's face. "You're talking about Shakespeare boy."

"Yeah, that's him."

I felt dizzy, and something kept me from looking directly at Heather for a long time. "The guy we've made fun of all this time..."

"Well, I mean... he's a really nice guy! And he really, really loves me, and he's so much fun. It just happened, okay?"

"You just laughed. You acted like it was hilarious."

"It was hilarious. It was cute, too, though, you have to admit."

I admitted nothing of the sort. The most sickening part was next. That night at the fairground, as I keeled over, laughing, the instant I looked away, Heather glanced over at the Bard and winked. "All I knew," she said, "was that it felt right."

"It felt right," I repeated. "So there wasn't a voice somewhere telling you 'this is bad, this is wrong.' There wasn't a sense that --" I trailed off.

"We weren't that serious yet then, Eric. I didn't know how long I was going to last with either of you." She sighed. "God, I'm glad I told you finally. You came close to catching us so many times."

I looked at her, somewhat alarmed, and she elaborated. "The night at the store, with the low check number. He was in line. He told me he wished we'd had an actual problem so he could have saved the day. Constantly, he knocked on the door while you were asleep and I got very pissed at him but eventually I started letting him in. Larry saw us together at a restaurant and he's been giving me that fucking look ever since. He resents it." I did not want Larry to have front-row tickets to my relationship problems, and I wanted even less for the two of us to be fighting on the same side.

"He resents it," I said, "only because he wants to be next."

"Yes." Her succint reply surprised me, so I looked up again, but still not directly at her.

"Did you do anything with him?" I couldn't hide my disdain.

"No. I gave him some pictures."

"What!?"

"He begged me. I had to do something to keep him from telling you."

"Heather, why? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Well, because -- I thought -- I don't know, I had the impression that you were a little prudish."

I couldn't even fathom what this meant or how it was even remotely true, or even if she thought it was true and not merely an excuse. But here I was, Eric J. Hinez, the prudish twentysomething college dropout who wasn't erotically ambitious enough for Heather Andress.

Heather looked me over with a steely expression. "He was here every day when you weren't home. We had sex right here, right in this spot."

I closed my eyes, miserable. "Why are you telling me all this? I don't want to know."

"You will. Trust me."

Nothing was said for a while. Why challenge her? If she really didn't want this, I thought, she would stop it. My less tolerant insticts eventually got the better of me. "And you haven't had any doubts about this at all? Nothing?"

"Well, I knew it wasn't right, or that it wasn't supposed to be right. Sometimes I got scared. Mostly about what you would think. For a while I actually thought I could carry on forever without you knowing, but... You know, he scares me sometimes, the way he just shows up. He pursues me like a dog. I feel very... wanted, though. I haven't felt that before."

"With me?"

"With you, yes, but I don't think you ever really pursued me."

I started gathering up the Sorry! game pieces and putting them back in the box. Heather folded the board and touched my hand. I pulled away.

"What now, Eric? Am I kicked out?"

My eyes stayed with the floor, unable to even look at the Sorry! box or Heather's hands. "Of course not."

"I'll take the couch, then."

"No, you can have the bed. It's all right."

I began to walk toward the bedroom to gather up some things. "Eric?" she called quietly. I stopped. "This is it for us, isn't it?"

I nodded solemnly. "I think so."

An air of finality was hanging over us, so no other answer seemed plausible. I emerged from what used to be our room with a pillow and a blanket and I could easily have mistaken the look on Heather's face for genuine love and sympathy, but clearly that wasn't the case.

She retreated to the room, and suddenly I felt cold. I descended to the carpet once again; the couch was really too small. Sleep was impossible. Too much had happened in too little time. I felt much like I did after getting off the rides at the fairground.

I had to go someplace else, to be alone for a while. By force of habit from our old homely lifestyle, I stepped into the bedroom and informed Heather of this. She smiled and said she understood. I wished I could say the same.

For a time, I drove around in a daze but was unable to focus on my bad mood enough to facilitate cerebral analysis of my emotions. Outside, I was in a daze; back at the apartment, watching cheerful reruns of old sitcoms, I got angry.

This went on for a few days before I settled on a general feeling of superiority. Heather had done wrong. Why had she felt the license to toy with me in this manner, and for so long? She had gone very far, had done so much more than I would have allowed myself to do. She hadn't been able to control herself.

Larry found me in the breakroom one morning and sighed heavily, looking as though he hoped very much I would notice the way he was projecting his current emotions.

"You don't have to act like this anymore, Larry. I found out. Everything."

He looked startled at first, then he regained his footing. "Listen, buddy, if you ever need to discuss this, I'm here; I know how you feel." Larry had managed to provide this award-winning comfort of his with such smug disclipline that I wanted nothing more than to apply the nearest fork to his ungodly dimples.

"Larry, can I say something?" I felt an explosion of adrenaline. "Is it wrong of me to say that I wish you worked somewhere else?"

"You can say it again. You can say it fifty times, if that's what you want."

"Well, how about this? I don't think anyone in this building knows what you're really like."

"You're just depressed because you blew it. You don't know what you're saying."

"What? I'm not the one who blew it."

Larry started out the door without answering; at the last step he turned back and smiled. "As you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set me free." He slipped out like an apparition. I picked up the fork on the table, studied it wistfully, and threw it toward the sink before returning to work.

That night, I finally felt comfortable returning home at a time when I knew Heather would still be awake. When I stepped inside, she was on the phone again, and turned her head, startled, looking alarmed at first, then somewhat pacified by my expression. I went to the kitchen to make some eggs; my intention was to live and let live until our lease ran out.

I expected it to take some time to ease back into being cordial, recovering from our days of silence, the big explosion, and the year of romance beforehand, but seconds after she hung up the telephone she got down to business. "Eric, why didn't you blow up on me the other night?" I asked her to repeat herself. "Why haven't you been angry with me?"

I put the food aside for a moment and went to sit down beside her, clutching my orange juice. "Well, it's your life."

"What does that mean?"

"You had it in you. If I told you to stop or something --"

"Well, I wouldn't have stopped."

"But think about it. It wouldn't really be you anymore."

"That's really impressive of you." She finally let her guard down and really smiled, resting her head on my shoulder. "I hate it."

I laughed and stood up again. "That's healthy."

"I guess I deserve it." She fidgeted. Although she hadn't asked, I handed her my glass, assuming that we still were beyond the threshold of caring about germ transference.

In ensuing weeks, we talked about everything except our now practically forgotten time as a couple. We were much as we had been in the beginning, except mildly smarter. Every night, I would come home after Frank was gone for the day to work his graveyard shift. We went to restaurants, saw legitimate movies, took walks, and stayed out all night, things we had never done before. We also, eventually, addressed the creature whose name could never be mentioned. I never really thought about him, because it made me feel strange and off-balance when I did. Sensitive to this, Heather never really approached it until one night when I got curious.

"How was your day?" I asked as we walked along the waterfront with our ice cream cones.

"Oh, you know, same paperwork and customers and --"

"No, I mean... with your boyfriend."

"Oh." She paused and looked at me suspiciously. "Oh."

We were both quiet for a full minute, quite a change. I prodded her. "Well?"

"Let's go in here." We entered the poorly-maintained arcade, she popped a quarter into the Defender machine, and looked exasperated as she shot down some UFOs and saved civilians.

"I know it's none of my business," I offered.

"Did you just call me a monster?"

"No, I said, it's not really my business." I was careful to raise my voice without sounding angry.

She laughed. "No, no. I'm just a little tired, that's all. All I ever hear from him all day is this shit about his computer and how he's going to rearrange his MP3 playlist by song title in order to facilitate great change in his lifestyle."

This was so much information so suddenly I had a bit of trouble digesting it. "You're talking about this Frank kid?"

"Yeah. Basically it's a speech about why the music in Myst is so brilliant then something about what a goddess I am. I can't get a word in." She sighed. "And you know what he does? He goes around pretending like he's crashing into things and falling. He thinks it's funny. I mean, he thinks it's seriously, like, hysterical. You never did things like that."

I didn't know what to say, so I moved the conversation to more innocuous topics.

I witnessed firsthand the morbidly bizarre behavior of my successor when I entered our apartment a few nights later. I was startled to have the door yanked open before the key was fully in the slot and a large figure looming over me in the doorway. "Hey, boy! Get outta my house! Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!" he shouted, his greasy face broadcasting clownish perversion. Ah, I thought. Frank. I slipped past him and into the bedroom before I had to hear anything else from him.

It wasn't long before a knock on the bedroom door disrupted my half-hearted attempt at sleep. "Eric? Can I come in?" It was Heather. I grunted my approval. She didn't hear it, so I had to grunt again. On the third grunt, she got the point and entered. "I'm sorry he did that," she said, kneeling down beside the bed which they had undoubtedly occupied recently; I didn't tell her that his obnoxious greeting hadn't especially bothered me. "You don't have to hide in here, you can come out."

I thought this was insane. "Why the hell would I want to do that?"

"Sure! Come on." Not wanting to hurt her feelings, I grudgingly followed her before the chimes of doom were sounded by her next whisper: "I'm really surprised! I didn't think you'd be interested in that." Oh, god. "Frank, why don't you -- Frank, what's wrong?" A sobbing Frank had his face buried in the arm of the couch. "Listen, Eric wants to see your artwork! Isn't that nice of him?" Frank just sobbed some more.

Heather was getting tired; she went over and sat next to them and they exchanged intense whispers. I could only hear her final words: "Uh-huh. I love you. Show Eric your drawings, honey." He corrected her "drawings" comment by referring to them as "paintings in progress," then stood up, still a bit teary-eyed, and obliged, taking me to a dark corner of the living room where he'd thrown his belongings.

There were several large pieces of posterboard, and without a word, he displayed for me three of the pictures contained therein: a black and white sketch of a dragon burning a village, a black and white sketch of a dragon eating some peasants, and a black and white sketch of a dragon battling another dragon. All the while, he continued to wipe away tears.

"Yeah," he said, managing to sound incredibly cocky despite his emotional state, "it'll probably be a while before any of this is appreciated. I don't think the general public would get it anyway, do you?"

I grunted, not really sure what I meant this time. Heather looked much more amused than either of us; Frank and I stood there looking at everything but each other for a few minutes before he broke the ice once again. "So... you like cartoons? You ever watch 'Yar Fighters 2000?'" I shook my head. "You should see this show, it comes on at 9:30, it's about this skull overlord who wants to take all the spirits of electronic objects in the world hostage so all our machines and inventions and shit will be, like, against us."

"Huh."

"Oh, man, it's awesome. Actually... I'd better get home and watch it. See you guys!" He popped out the door and ran down the stairs.

I looked over at the stack of pictures. One of the dragons, somewhat ambitiously formed but not particularly menacing, was staring directly at me. "He left his stuff."

"Yeah... the show's pretty important to him. So how are you doing?"

"I think I'm all right." I really did, although I wasn't absolutely certain what had just happened or why. "What about you?"

She had already been sitting down, but she stood up briefly just to plop back down on the couch dramatically. "Exhausted."

I wanted to be careful before asking my next question, but instead of thinking of a better way to phrase it I just let some time lapse before I served her with it. "Why do you put up with it?"

"Well, he's a lot of fun, most of the time. I guess he's... a little possessive." She recapped Frank's obnoxious behavior of the day, which included a fight over semantics involving just how sincere Heather sounded when she said she loved him.

"Did I ever do things like that?"

Even though I knew I had, she shook her head. "No." She did not, however, elaborate.

"So you're too tired to do much tonight?"

"Yeah, I'm afraid so. I couldn't help it after..." She trailed off.

"What?"

"Well, I doubt you want to hear about that sort of thing."

I smirked. "Come on, you can't shock me anymore."

"I was wearing those shorts you liked. He wanted to find some unusual new way of doing it." She paused after this and each sentence, watching me, apparently to see if I would get up and leave. "First we tried it with me sitting on the counter and him standing in front of me. Then he held me up -- he's very strong -- and we did it that way. It was fun but it was... very tiring." I didn't really know what to say, so she broke the silence. "Was that too much information?"

"No, no. I just wonder why... you and I..."

"I'm sorry. I guess we just didn't know how to talk about those things."

"Yeah."

"Well, what do you think about that? What we did. Does it disgust you?"

"Not at all, no."

"Do you like hearing about it?"

I looked at the floor, then my eyes wavered nervously all around the room.

"You do, don't you?" She tried to study my expression. "He was just pounding into me a little while ago. What do you think of that?" I still wouldn't answer. "Do you ever think about us when you're alone? Frank and me?"

I looked up finally and her frozen, menacing countenance made it difficult for me to avoid the question or to lie. "All the time," I croaked before returning to the comforts of the floor.

She began to touch me, and to approach my lap at an agonizing pace, and whispered into my ear the extra details she had neglected from our previous conversations. I could not attain the confidence to respond, in kind or otherwise.

In a few minutes, we had unraveled, and after I entered her she told me more, in language she never used when we were together, amplified by movements she never attempted when we were together. There was no time to think of what was happening, though I entertained a fantasy about killing Frank and taking his place in brief flashes. When I finished, I watched Heather's face and saw, for a reason I couldn't determine, a look of boredom or perhaps hatred, but afterward she returned to her seductive manner.

Not much else happened for the remainder of the evening. She attempted to put a normal face on everything but occasionally smiled suggestively. I still slept on the floor.

***

The next morning, contemplating the bumpy night, as I walked absently into the depths of the building I heard Heather's name, not once or twice but at least five times, usually lightly if clumsily whispered. I inevitably entered the radius of an involved conversation in the elevator.

"It's that man who used to harass the National Parks people, and he doesn't seem like he's changed at all. She's with him everywhere. I saw them all over town last week. She's taking her vacation with him next month, you know. Five days in the valley, no interruptions."

"But I thought she had something going with that guy up on 13."

"Shhh!" This reaction to loudmouthed Steve Dawkins was in vain, as both Dawkins and the shusher became at this point keenly aware of my presence, and the remainder of the ride to 13 was immeasurably awkward.

My entrance did not stop the gossipping, which was all the more intense among my own compatriots in the counseling center; the office was abuzz with rumors about Heather and Frank, what they'd been seen doing around town, how much time they spent together, what they would be doing on their vacation, what I thought of the whole thing, and the densely layered past of the seemingly infamous Frank Reinhout, or Louis, or Lennon, or Zlickertezestein. Frank was nicknamed "Cap'n Crunch," Frank had single-handedly facilitated the ban of smoking in local restaurants, Frank had slept with sixteen girls in one night as a stunt for an afternoon talk show, Frank had put three local zoos out of business in the name of animal liberation, and Frank was the great-grandson of film legend Erich Von Stroheim.

Worse yet, the murmurs and inquiries and endless conversations into which I was never invited, my presence never even acknowledged, grew in volume and intensity over the next few days until it was pure infinite static to me, noise that tied my head in knots. Before the week was out, I was spending most of my time at my desk typing Frank's name on the computer hundreds of times, printing out the sheets, and ripping them up. No one seemed to notice this. In order to do it properly, I finally had to phone Heather downstairs and ask her for Frank's real surname, which she was unwilling to give me for a time due to my lack of a good reason until she finally sighed and confessed that it was Wheeler. Frank Wheeler.

While I had her on the line, I had to ask. "Are you hearing all this shit?"

"Yeah, I'm afraid so. It's sad, huh?"

"Very. Guess people are really clamoring for entertainment."

"You hit the nail on the head. I can hardly stand it down here."

"Uh-huh." I paused, and Heather sighed impatiently. "How much of it is true?"

"What did you say? 'Am I you'?"

The ambience of the office was disrupting our conversation, and evidently she had the phone up to the wrong ear anyway. I raised my voice some. "How much of it is true?"

"What? 'Am I you'? What does that mean?"

I emphasized each word very carefully. "How. Much. Of. The. Stuff. Being. Said. Is. True?"

Heather gave the aural equivalent of a blank stare. "I'm sorry, I really don't understand this 'am I you?' thing."

"HOW MUCH OF THE GOSSIP SPREAD AROUND ABOUT YOU AND FRANK IS TRUE?" This question was shouted by a voice I wasn't aware I had, and by the time it was finished the eyes of all office occupants were on me and Heather was murmuring a terse "Fuck you" and hanging up. I ignored the cheers and heckling and "Way to go, Hinez!" catcalls from my coworkers and began to run downstairs to try to correct my mistake.

As I hit the steps -- the elevator was taking too long -- my blood was boiling and all I saw or heard was Frank's overgrown-teenager face, his still-lives-at-mom's-house demeanor and his I-know-more-than-you voice. I was as oblivious to Larry Sandstrom, rapidly advancing toward me on the opposite side of the staircase, as he was to me.

I heard "LOOK OUT!" once again, and once again it was too late; this time we both fell to the floor in between two flights of stairs where we had accidentally intersected. I felt inconceivably stupid; from just the smell of his cologne I should have been able to detect Larry's presence, to say nothing of his loud, grating speech patterns as he rambled into his cell phone. "I'll call you back," he said to his phantom caller. I was not surprised when he followed this with "You need to watch where you're going, partner," once again unable to fumble for eloquence in a time of near-crisis. I was surprised when he then stood up, brushed himself off, and told me in a tone far from casual or ambivalent that "We need to talk."

Larry led me to his office, a sad and unexpected detour on my mission, and sighed a lot. He sighed eight or nine times in the space of five otherwise still minutes, and each progressing one felt more like the parting of the Red Sea. Finally, Larry knocked on his desk rhythmically for reasons I couldn't gather and said "Eric, you need to get back to work."

"Right now?" What a pointless meeting this had been.

Larry sighed again, then rolled backward in his chair until he hit the wall, clasping his hands and studying me suspiciously. "What I mean is," he began, sounding prematurely exasperated, "I'm tired of this brooding and I don't want any more of this little name-typing game of yours. You may not be aware of this, but I do see everything that goes on in this building and --"

Having been given this lecture before, I zoned out at this point and settled on an attempt at figuring out what made this guy tick. Was his illustrious history of sexual conquests as impressive as advertised, or was it mere urban legend? What kind of sex would this guy be into, anyway? Maybe Heather would know. Dammit. I couldn't believe she'd allowed so much to happen. The hell with Frank, what kind of respect for me or for our serious long-term relationship did Heather have, considering that she was possessed to go through with all this? Was the pseudo-liaison she mentioned with Larry the whole story, or the only story?

I was angry and extremely curious. Once Larry finally dismissed me after I assured him I would try to be a more devoted team player, I cancelled my trip downstairs, returned to "work" and planned my evening. I wanted to know exactly what went on in Heather's life and how she could possibly be happy with this joke of a human being and what it was they did together. Now, I finally knew what to do next.

Buried in the back of the closet in our apartment was my detective kit from childhood. The materials were the result of a few years of collecting, and since they were toys, they were cheaply made and unprofessional but still functional. A periscope, a tape recorder, a magnifying glass, a cool hat, and my Fischer Price camcorder.

It was Frank's night off, and my night for the bedroom. I had come home early to beat the happy couple and prepare for an evening of sleuthing. I positioned the wireless microphone for the tape recorder underneath the couch; I would stay in the bedroom and find out everything I possibly could from my limited standpoint about what was happening in the rest of the apartment.

With Frank and Heather in the premises, their murmuring audible in the bed where I sat toying with the magnifying glass, studying my surroundings upside-down, I engaged my headphones. I could hear everything.

I had missed some of the beginning of the session but quickly gathered that Heather had wanted to play a board game but Frank had decided they would watch TV, and he sat on the couch while Heather prepared some food. The first distinct voice I heard, Weather Channel announcers aside, was Frank's.

"Hey, come over here with me."

"I can't!" It was a bit more difficult to hear Heather, but I was able to make out most of her words despite the distortion in the kitchen. "I'm making noodles."

"Please come over here with me?"

"I will in a minute, honey, I'm busy!"

"Come onnnnnn!" Frank carried the "N" almost symphonically.

She did not find this as adorable as it was intended to be. "I'm trying to do something, for god's sake!"

Now Frank took a new tone, of brute force laying down the law. "Please come over here right now!" She ignored him.

This went on for a while without a lot of variation, which was convenient because I had apparently forgotten to check the batteries on my tape recorder, and was forced to bolt over to the opposite end of the room and press my ear against the wall. Heather sat with him when her dinner was finished, Frank moped for a few minutes about the amount of time it took for her to do this, Heather voiced her frustration at his behavior, Frank moped some more, and finally they made up. I could hear them kissing. Heather used the voice she'd used when we first met, and she became engrossed in a performance of the Nutcracker suite on TV.

Shortly after the Dance of the Flowers commenced, Frank spoke in his whiniest voice again, this time rather quietly, though I still had no trouble hearing him. "Hey, can we mess around?" I couldn't make out her reply. "Come on!"

The next thing I heard from Heather was a soft, seductive laugh. "You know, sweetie, I --"

Right at this remarkably innopportune moment, our air conditioner began to blast. It masked every other sound in the apartment and I couldn't hear a thing except some bumblebee-like voices in the distance. I stood motionless for a minute. About the time I began to seriously consider the positives and negatives of just walking out to see what they were doing, the door flew open, slamming me in the ass and smashing me against the wall.

"Oh, my god!" exclaimed Heather. "Are you all right? I am so sorry!"

"Yeah," I said, my voice cracking. "Can we turn off the AC?"

"Um... if you want, I guess, but it's eighty-eight degrees out."

"Well, yeah, but... I'm freezing!" I realized it was necessary to back this up with what would hopefully resemble hard data. "I don't know what it is, at work today I had to change seats to get away from the vent. I just can't get warm, no matter what I do."

Heather looked confused. "Then why are you in shorts?"

"Well, um... wishful thinking, I guess. I thought maybe if I pretended I was warm, I would... you know... get warm."

"Oh." She grabbed something from a shoebox in the corner and slipped it in her pocket before I could manage to get a look at it. "Well, sure, we can turn it off, but I may have to put it back on for a while later, so why don't you grab some extra blankets or something?"

"Yeah, thank you." I followed her out of the room and flipped the switch on my way to snatching eight blankets from the linen closet, trying to fully sell the idea of how cold I was, sensing all the while that both Heather and Frank were giving me the blankest stare in the annals of history.

Heather's point about the climate was a valid one, as I found myself almost unbearably hot soon after my retreat back into the bedroom. I removed all of my clothes, briefly and perversely wondering if she and Frank had done the same, willing to do anything in order to avoid missing a second of the action outside, although at the moment there wasn't an audible peep. My imagination ran wild. I wondered what they were doing now. I wondered what they had done. I wondered if he had ever come on her face. I wondered if she had swallowed his cum. As soon as faint speech -- so faint I couldn't make any of it out -- resumed, Heather found an excuse to check on me (I faked sleep, under all eight blistering covers) and turned the A.C. back on full blast. It was probably for reasons of comfort, but I couldn't help wondering if she had caught on to my tactics and was doing it to mask their scandalous speech.

But it couldn't be that bad, of course. Not as bad as all those losers at work wanted it to be. What they wanted was a great story, and I just wanted the truth. Short of this current method, short of jinxing my dishonesty up to now, short of exposing my true reasons for sticking around on Frank night instead of splitting to pick up chicks or play cards, how could I find this elusive truth?

The answer hit me very suddenly as my eyes fluttered around the dark room. The shoebox in the corner, such an unnoticed constant for so very long, now filled to the brim with potential discovery. I crawled across the bed and grabbed it, delved into its volumnious contents, handwritten on notebook paper, and as I began to shake violently, my teeth rattling, I stood there naked, reading all of their secrets.

"Undress" was the first word that caught my eye, "pussy" the second. It was exactly what I didn't dare imagine it would be. Morbidly dramatic romance I was prepared for, but not this. Something like an utter lack of interest, surprisingly enough, kept me from even unfolding Frank's replies. All I wanted were the words that came out of Heather. "Right now maybe you're imagining how I'll feel," she wrote, "when your cock's ramming into my mouth."

The degree to which this was none of my business was titilating. I planned initially to confront Heather, then it dawned on me that I was no longer Heather's boyfriend and that in essence she had done nothing wrong.

Reeling, I pulled out my "Heather calendar" from under the bed. Since we had broken up I had marked the dates of our nights together. Good nights, meaning most of them until after the ballet, were circled. Bad ones were squared, mediocre ones were triangles, and diamonds had a meaning I never planned to reveal to anyone. Around this night I drew a hexagon, then studied the previous month solemnly. Our nightly meetings had become biweekly meetings, and now were growing even more scarce. I was scared of asking her when the next one would be. I was disappearing from her life at last, and in the next room in the throes of whatever she was doing I was certain to be the last thing on her mind.

Subsequent days of work defined drudgery. I was exhausted despite the fact that I no longer accomplished anything of merit with even one hour of the day. My achievement for the week was an infiltration of Heather's professional e-mail account at work. In the end, I was less repelled by the notes in the shoebox than simply engrossed and charged by them, and I wanted more to the point that I greeted the news that Frank sent her mesages at work (against the rules) with something like enthusiasm. Unfortunately, all of them began with sentences like "I never thought I'd say this, but I think the 20 GB iPod might not be big enough" and went downhill from there. Moreover, I discovered not one new addition to the shoebox in the ensuing days, and indeed never noticed any thereafter.

My thinking was that I had gone too far, and this was largely a biological reflex. Every time I found something, some shred of Heather's life, that I even thought might be remotely significant, I shook -- not in an idle fashion; at the end of each spell I felt as though I had just run the mile in high school all over again. The grave consequence came, again, from Larry, who saw me shaking and reprimanded me in front of the full staff for allowing my performance to slip yet again. "If I see you without your headphones on again," he said, "you're fired." It was surprising how little that motivated me.

Word of this clash spread down twelve levels to the gift shop through the reliable channels of the loose-lipped Irving Enterprises staff, and Heather took great pity on me, making my week by running all the way up to my terminal and offering to take me out to dinner.

I had a pleasant enough time at Fitzgerald's with my ex-girlfriend, but I could not look at her. When she entered my vision, I had to bite my lip to stop myself from blurting everything out and hoping that she would understand.

"Eric," she said, munching on a potato wedge, "why don't you try to go out and meet some girl?"

I looked at the lamp above us. "Well, I just don't know if I'm ready for that yet."

"Oh, bullshit." She chuckled. "I never took you for that kind of guy."

"What kind?"

"The kind who 'isn't ready.'" I looked at the TV monitor at the other end of the restaurant. ESPN2 was showing some Japanese women playing pool. Heather, probably sensing that I was aloof, continued. "I know this girl from the shop, I'm sure you'd go for her, and she's really sweet. Pretty adventurous, and she's probably better for you than I ever was anyway." Even if I hadn't been avoiding her eyes I would have looked away at that point. "And what about the girl you were --"

"Janice," I said, before she could finish. It had been a rather long time since I'd thought of Janice, but her name and features returned immediately.

Heather laughed. "Yeah. I know I totally overreacted. I'm sorry. Immature, I guess."

Our main courses came and we sat politely and quietly chewing the night away, surely her wishing she could run far, far away as much as I was, both dreading our retreat to the same apartment after this nightmare was over.

Out of sheer boredom at the pool game, I forgot my convictions for a moment and looked directly at Heather, just as she was preparing to sneeze into a paper napkin. Just as expected, my dark recesses spewed out. "How's the sex?"

Her sneeze was aborted. "Huh?"

"The sex!" I had to repeat this enough times for the stodgy old ladies at the next table to begin giving us their well-worn look of disapproval.

Heather's trust of me lingered too much for her to avoid replying. "Well, to be honest, it's not that different from the way it was with us, just a lot more frequent."

"Good?"

"Well, yeah, good. It was good with you too."

"Why more frequent, then?"

"Uh... to start with, I don't always feel like I have to initiate with Frank."

"What? I wanted to give you space!"

"That's enough, Eric!"

"Okay, okay." And we did, until we walked out of Fitzgerald's and started down toward the street corner. I couldn't stop myself. "Does he eat you out?"

"What kind of stupid fucking question is that?" We kept walking, and Heather still tried to put a positive cap on the night. "So we didn't even address your job all night. How's --"

"Do you come when he --?" I trailed off, expecting her to start running off screaming and never enter my life again. Instead, she just lowered her shoulders in frustration.

"Eric, what's all this? You took the whole thing so beautifully. I dragged you through the mud and you were a prince. Why suddenly now?"

"It was hard work being the bigger man."

"Enough about your penis, Eric!"

"A year of this buildup," I muttered, ignoring the misnomer or lack thereof, "and all of these little things, and they really were little things, and I'm sure I did the same thing to you." I picked up some pebbles from the concrete and gave a visual demonstration. "They stack up and they stack up and they stack up, no great injustice, just a lot of little annoying things. At some point, though, you have so many those that just one more little thing is all you need for the whole foundation to crumble." My hand, now full of pebbles, flew open. "Then you lose your footing, and the options you have shrink down to nothing."

Heather rolled her eyes. "Very nice demonstration. Did you read that somewhere?"

"My brother said it to me once."

"God bless your brother, Eric, but this has nothing to do with any foundation crumbling. You asked me about my orgasms. Why is this important to you?"

"I don't really know."

"You know you're scaring me? All this detail and persistence, I don't know if you've noticed, but it's very creepy. Please try and accept what's happened. I can't tell you how sorry I am for putting you through this, but that's all over now." We rounded the corner without stopping. I struggled to keep up the pace while Heather looked unusually desperate. "I don't want you out of my life, but I cannot --"

"It's just that I thought there was something there," I interjected.

"Wake up, Eric! We did have something!" We stopped in our tracks. People continued to walk by for a bit longer before they started deliberately avoiding us. "Nobody's saying we didn't. Nobody's saying we wasted our time!"

We started walking again, briskly. "Then why... is there this great need of yours to make things so much more complicated than they need to be?"

With that, we stopped again, and I could tell something had happened in Heather. She turned toward me and I could no longer look away from her eyes as she spoke.

"Let's be honest for just a second. I am not a beauty queen or a genius and I never will be. But here's the thing. I went to college, I did all the right stuff, but I'm doomed, Eric. It's not mediocrity. Mediocrity would be easy. I'm the girl who's slightly above average. I'm around the regular people and they'll always be telling me I'm amazing, wondering why I haven't gone on to bigger, better things. If I try to do that, it will suddenly become clear that I'm not so special at all. That's the way it is, and I don't like it, and I don't want it to end there. That's why, Eric. Happy now?"

"You're not that person, Heather! That's the kind of shit Larry's always throwing around about his race of corporate supermen. You're a nice person, Heather. You're a great person."

"There's no time to stand around compromising, Eric. You've got to do what you've got to do, and so do I."

I watched her continue her walk away without me alongside her and wanted to add a million things to my argument, specifically the point that mediocrity, in fact, is not easy, but all I did for the rest of that long night was run.

In the comforts of home, I returned to denial. Heather was right. She did not deserve my blame. My ever-widening backlog of aggression was now exclusively the property of Frank Wheeler. When he was in the house, I slammed every door, I wore a constant grimace, my every word was tinged with bitterness, and I played the one heavy-metal CD I owned, accidentally grabbed from my roommate's collection in my hasty departure from the dorm, at top volume. I was so focused on making an impression now that I was doing things I would have laughed at in happier days.

Heather, wisely, ignored me for the first few weeks, and the night at Fitzgerald's remained our last contact for a time until one night as I kicked the wall repeatedly she burst into the bedroom to scream something about how I was costing us the security deposit on the apartment, then told me rather sarcastically how moved she was by my latest attempt to win her heart but that she simply wasn't interested. "Please find some other game to play!" she said.

I wasn't strong enough to go that far, but I did find a new way of playing the game, realizing once again how right I was to aspire to be a private eye. I made maps of the area and of Heather's favorite hangouts, plus a researched schedule to figure out best guesses on Frank and Heather's destinations the following weekend. My plan was to follow and study them. I now admitted to myself that there was no great method to this madness except to simply see what they did in public. I was just too curious and bitter and lovelorn to let the final weeks of Heather's presence in my life -- the end of our lease was imminent -- simply sputter out to no avail.

A massive part of the project was the working out of methods to avoid being seen, so I visited every conceivable destination on the map and found a reasonably secluded place to observe where I was unlikely to be noticed by anyone, much less Heather and Frank.

Their Saturday afternoon plans were rained out, much to my disappointment, as their plans for Sunday -- a visit to the drug store then an afternoon of "Seinfeld" reruns -- did not tantalize me. Nonetheless, I dutifully followed them in my supposedly inconspicuous trenchcoat, the ninety-degree weather and confused looks reminding me of my various reservations about diving headfirst into the investigation field.

Just like I'd read I should, I waited around outside the drug store for three minutes, constantly pretending to be walking with a purpose to avoid loitering charges, then I went in, hovering back at the pharmacy, my face covered, Heather was not immediately visible. I snuck around the aisles watching Frank's remarkable behavior and noticing for the first time just why the hushed conversations about them spread so quickly. Frank was bounding through the aisles, greeting every attractive woman he ran into and making some sort of bizarre proclamation to them that inevitably led them to grimace and step away immediately. Heather, clutching a box of condoms just like the one she'd recovered from the shoebox that night, rounded the corner of the greeting card aisle as Frank began hopping around and chanting "Hallmark! Hallmark!" and ordered him to pipe down. This resulted in some dramatic fury; Heather seemed unmoved and was prepared to leave before Frank announced his intentions to check out the candy aisle.

The odd position of this area and my correct prediction that they would be there for some time resulted in some shuffling around as I struggled to keep them visible. Proud of my eventual viewpoint, I looked around casually to ensure no one was getting curious about my actions when I nearly fell over with shock to see, directly behind me in the adjacent aisle, Larry Sandstrom staring at Heather and Frank just as intently as me, tiptoeing around to avoid being noticed just like me, wearing a trenchcoat just like me, investigating the activities of this couple just like me, and one-upping me by jotting notes down on a little pad.

Our eyes met for one horrible moment, his wide and frozen in an expression I'd never have expected to splash over his face, mine crushed as I struggled to understand what he was doing here and how and why he'd really been involved in Heather's life.

Something about the way Larry was watching her and what he must know about her chilled me, and more than ever before I began to doubt that I had ever really known Heather Andress at all.

***

I resembled a legitimate detective a few minutes later, when I actually told a cab driver to "follow that car," that car being Larry's. I had quickly discerned that he was following Frank and Heather none-too-subtly; clearly he hadn't read any of the rulebooks. I wasn't certain that they hadn't noticed him already and weren't just politely ignoring him so as not to spoil his fun.

We were led to a movie theater, where some spontanenous date had been scheduled in an effort to not spend Sunday afternoon wasting away in the apartment "bothering Eric." Once there I had to do my usual waiting outside so I had to ask the cashier for a ticket to "whatever the other guy in the trenchcoat was seeing," and I never did find out the name of the movie.

Of much more interest was the drama that awaited me when I stepped discreetly into auditorium #10, occupied solely by Frank, Heather, and Larry, who was no longer even trying to stay hidden and was in fact having a conversation with Heather. The lights hadn't gone down yet. Mercifully, only Larry noticed my entrance.

The first snatch of the conversation I was able to catch consisted of words from Heather that made me grin smugly. "... Just a lot of little annoying things. At some point, though, you have so many those that just one more little thing is all you need for the whole foundation to crumble."

"That's why you won't talk to me anymore?" Larry said, guffawing between words. "It's lurid, I'll give you that."

"Hey, man," said Frank, "we're just here to watch a movie, okay?"

"Right," Larry replied in a tone suggesting that he hated Frank even more than I did, "and you're all for minding your own business, huh? I know all about you, kid. I've read every volume."

This was like a dream, and even if I had wanted to move a muscle I was too nervous.

"Heather, you know what comes next. Drop this cretin and come romp in my castle, for an eternity."

"You could live in a hole in the wall for all I care, I don't want you to touch me, ever."

Larry paced around for a second, evidently having exhausted his archive of flowery speech and requiring a moment to throw together more. "What you have here is dandy for you, I'm sure. It can't last forever, Heather. You have no right to dance away your existence like --"

"Okay, Larry, fine. Let's say I dump Frank tomorrow."

"Hey!" This didn't sit well with her date.

"Hypothetically, Frank." This didn't help. "Why would I come to you, Larry? Why would I come to anyone at all, much less you?"

"Who else? Me or that counselor. He's nowhere, Heather. How can you look at the two of us and prefer him to me? It's absurd. How do you make that choice?"

Heather sighed. "Well, I don't know, you're both soooo fascinating." I wanted to react to this but could not. "Anyway, what is this obsession of yours with Eric Hinez? Why do you want to draw some triangle here with him?"

"Well, maybe because I know something about him you don't."

For the first time, Heather looked surprised. "Oh?"

Larry just laughed and began to walk up the aisle. Sweat poured down my face. I was certain, beyond all doubt, that he was poised to come grab me and reveal my lecherous nature to the others. He did not. He took his seat at the opposite end just as the lights dimmed, as if they had been programmed to suit his needs.

In the dark, I could sense very little about Frank and Heather's interactions, but in this situation I did not attempt to get a closer look. To start with, the theater was empty, and my major interest at the moment was Larry, whose steely, unblinking eyes were nobly fixed on the screen.

I couldn't get involved in the movie and was so annoyed by Frank's ceaseless commentary ("Oh my god! This movie sucks ass! We got raped up the ass, Heather!") that I would have complained to management under different circumstances. When I jumped out of my chair upon looking to my left and suddenly noticing that Larry had moved to the seat beside me, I was almost happy to have a new distraction.

"We gotta talk, kid," he whispered dryly, his scholarly accent and tone missing. "You need to get out of this picture. We both know who's next in line."

"Next in line. You're not serious."

"I don't think you really understand me here, Hinez. If you had known the virtue of the ring, or half her worthiness that gave the ring, or your own honor to contain the ring, you would not then have parted with the ring. I was not prepared to have to hurt your feelings, but this is your cue to scram."

I looked at the screen for a while, then simply shook my head.

"Then you're coming with me." Larry was strong. Very strong. He grabbed me by the collar of my trenchcoat and literally dragged me to the aisle. Frank and Heather, arms entwined, glanced back for a moment with mild, fleeting curiosity, then turned away. "Want me to go show her what her pal Eric Hinez is like?"

"Oh, god, Larry, please let's just --"

"Did you hear what she said? It's not like she seems to have much esteem for you anyway! But rest assured, kid, she does want you as a friend. As a nice, casual, brotherly-love friend. Isn't that pleasant? Isn't this a beautiful world? What've you got to lose, kid? Let's go show 'em. For kicks!"

I broke free as he chortled, seemingly performing for a crowd, and scampered out to the parking lot. Thinking the ordeal was over, I paused to catch my breath and jumped once again as a result of the discovery that Larry had never been more than a few inches behind me.

"I assume, Hinez, that you know why we're here. We're here because we know a thing or two about life. I've been around, kid, and I must say I admire the fact that you're as clear on certain things about this shabby planet as I am. But you don't play fair, you know? You just don't. Play. Fair." With each of these last few words he thumped my chest brutally and I had to emit a series of violent coughs, to the great entertainment of some hockey-playing grade schoolers nearby.

Larry noticed them too. "You kids know what it means to play fair, right?" He grabbed one of their hockey sticks. "It means you don't do this!" He slammed my shin with it. It was plastic, but still painful. "Or this!" He shoved me to the ground and hit me a few more times. "And you never, ever kick somebody when they're down!" His demonstration on this point was particularly effective. "You kids see what I'm saying, right? You're hip to that?" They nodded and clapped, and one of them asked if Larry would sign the hockey stick.

Once they had settled back into normalcy, Larry bent down to my level. "The finer things in life don't last forever, you see. Maybe you're too young to have noticed. I don't expect to marry Heather or have kids with her, although you've gotta tell the women that stuff, as I'm sure you do know. We both figured out quickly that like all the rest of us, this new game of hers has got some skeleton lying around someplace, and we both know we can find it. The difference is, you had your chance already, which means you're moving in on MY" -- another kick -- "TERRITORY NOW. You're a long way from home, telephone boy. Time to give it up."

He walked away whistling. I was only motivated to get off the concrete by the kids heckling in the distance and the fact that I didn't want Heather to see the aftermath. (I snapped at her every time she asked me what had happened to my face in the following days.)

I shocked myself at how long I took Larry's advice -- over 48 hours. Sunday had not been a new entry on my lifelong list of pleasant experiences, so I really did try to forget the whole thing, but then I saw Larry at work on Wednesday (after one of his enigmatic two-day disappearances), grinning and in sunglasses as always. He and I, of course, did not mention the incident from the weekend. His smug, indistinct nods toward me rebuilt my determination. Beating him became as important as beating Frank. I too could be morally decrepit, and I, unlike Larry, had the experience to initiate an investigation that could not be ignored.

Once the chance arrived, my first destination was our desktop computer. I could no longer be certain that I knew anything personal about Heather that Larry didn't, but I knew he didn't live in our apartment, and thus, I had access to information he could only salivate over. I checked every directory, every file, the internet cache, her home email accounts, and everything I could dig up. I then checked a mysterious stack of 8mm videotapes sitting behind a bookcase on our camcorder. I found some film of Heather's in a box in the closet and had it developed at the nearest one-hour photo outlet. I checked every page of Heather's many notebooks, even the one from her 12th grade Spanish class. I searched the contents of her bedside table numerous times. While she was home and asleep, I emptied her purse.

The result of all this was that I found absolutely nothing; not only nothing revealing about Heather and/or Frank, but nothing that even acknowledged Frank's existence or suggested that he had ever lived.

It would have been a reasonably good idea to simply follow Frank when he was alone, but on this point our ambitions had risen too late, as this was now a rare occurence. Frank let go of Heather so rarely I would have been willing to consider a theory that they had been surgically attached. When they were together, as we had learned the hard way, there were no signs of a "skeleton." We were now a day away from Heather's two-week leave of absence and no new stone had been turned.

Today was what Frank called his "media day," which he explained to anyone who would listen was the day on which he purchased "three kinds of media: a videogame, a movie, and a CD." At the electronics store he felt that he was among the understanding, so he drifted around the large aisles dancing and wailing with even less containment than usual. I felt for Heather, who never took this sort of thing very well; she had always shushed me when I whispered private insults to people around us, constantly worried they would hear.

I never noticed Larry at these places but I knew he was lurking, and probably could see me. It hardly mattered. Keeping myself hidden from the view of Heather and Frank was simple. I'd had only one close call, when I stumbled into Frank and lowered my hat and glasses with lightning speed before he could even recover from the mild collision.

Now, it was an art, and I had ways of witnessing just about everything that went on, even when the happy couple were at opposite ends of a building. Today Frank was insistent on keeping Heather at his side while he spent hours browsing seemingly every item in the store, grabbing them by the handful, then methodically putting them back in a tortuous process of elimination.

In the back of the store, studying the movie section, he opined, "I am thouroughly convinced that Satan invented VHS. What a horrible piece of technology."

A nearby store drone was not enchanted by Frank's wisdom. "You know, there was a time when VHS was pretty much --"

"Oh, I don't want to hear it, buddy!"

"Frank, settle down!" Heather whipped her head between the two men nervously.

"That's why I've supported DVD ever since 1998. VHS is designed to fail, you know."

"Frank, let's go."

"But it's media day!" he whined.

"Media day's cancelled. Come on."

Frank called over his shoulder, "You wouldn't defend Satan, would you!?" I waited a moment then followed them outside and found Heather already in the midst of a lecture.

"Someday, you're going to say the wrong thing and you're gonna be a mutilated pile of flesh on the concrete somewhere."

"You really think that guy was going to 'mutilate' me? I'm insulted, Heather. What the hell are we doing, anyway?"

"You're taking me out to eat."

"You know I hate that kind of thing! I'm already going on a big trip with you next week, isn't that enough?"

"Yeah. And I'm paying for it. Frank, pretend for a second we're a normal couple and we support each other and we compromise once in a while and are willing to go really far for each other."

"You don't think we are?"

"Well, let's find out! Come on!"

The destination was, again, Heather's favorite restaurant, Fitzgerald's, and I was amazed to discover from what I could hear at the booth just behind theirs that he had never gone there with her before, then I remembered that we never went out to eat until after our breakup. I was close enough to them that I took care to disguise my voice when ordering my tiny just-for-show meal. After I ordered, Heather muttered, "Wow, that guy must be spreading it thin this week."

I didn't hear much from them for a while, but after their food arrived Heather finally spoke again. "Why are you covering your face like that?"

"You know I don't want to be here, Heather!"

"Yeah. Yeah, and I've never gone anywhere I didn't like for you, right?"

"You win, okay? Heather Andress wins again! What a gigantic surprise."

Heather laughed anyway. "Glad you're having fun. Eat."

Frank sighed. "I'm sorry for being a cad, I just --"

"Be a cad, Frank! It's fine. I'm happy." I could tell that she was not lying.

My waitress brought my miminalist plate and was so loud I had trouble hearing the next words from Heather. "Here, have a bite." More laughter. "Remember how we met?"

"Yeah, of course."

"Well, let's discuss it."

"Why?"

"I want to! It's my night as much as yours. Let's do it."

"Oh, god, I'd forgotten all about that, I'm sorry."

"It's okay! Just tell me what you remember."

Frank finally loosened up some and laughed. "I took them up on one of their stupid offers once. One, and it was only because the girl on the phone sounded really cute. I know telemarketers like that get commission and I wanted her to get a big one, so I made sure to show up and do everything I had to do just short of signing the last papers. I guess that's more than most people do."

"Oh, god, yes. Over there a good customer is one who listens to your first three sentences, I think."

"Just one sale, that one time, and it wasn't even finalized, but once I went that far with them they must have put me in the 'sucker' file" -- it was not until this very moment that I remembered the 20th floor of Irving Enterprises was the Telemarketing Records Archive containing extensive, privacy-laws-defying information on every one of our customers on file, undoubtedly including Frank -- "because the calls didn't stop for a single day, and usually there were several in a day. I was going to do all this crazy shit like report them to the Bureau, I was recording calls, I was writing letters of complaint, you name it. I did some detective work and found out who was making all the calls and then drove down there, and there you were."

"What did you think when you saw me?" She was torturing him.

"I thought that I was going to do whatever was necessary to turn us into a couple, and that's exactly what I did. Happy?"

Heather laughed. "Yeah, I feel pretty good about that, actually. Thank you for telling me."

There was a lot of affection between them for the rest of their dinner, eccentric but infectious and the glow spread to me. I was proud of her; she was really happy and it couldn't possibly be denied or missed. As she and Frank walked out, arm in arm, I felt that ultimately I loved her too much to attempt to interfere anymore.

Just in front of me, as I finally began to eat, a beautiful girl -- shapely, fair-skinned, with a kind face -- sat at a table and ordered a single slice of pizza. "You and this guy over here should talk!" the waitress said as I smiled politely. The girl didn't seem to know or care about the meaning of this small-talk gag. I watched her discreetly as I finished, and remained seated, ordering any number of refills, to keep an eye on her, or rather employ an eye once every few minutes for a quick glimpse.

Maybe I should walk over there and just ask her how she's doing, I thought. Just ask her. Maybe she'll respond and we'll talk all night, or maybe she'll decline and I'll just walk away and not worry about it. Maybe we could be friends or good listeners. Maybe we could even have something serious someday. Maybe someday the two of us could sit down with Heather while Frank played videogames somewhere and all laugh about the strangeness of fate.

I was just about ready to set things in motion, slowly standing up to go and address her directly when her cell phone rang. "Hello?" she said in a voice devoid of nuance. "Yeah, I know, we have to get those new cheers ready for the game Friday.... Yeah, I have to leave milk & cookies in the dugout, some kind of tradition... I don't care who told you I'm not in town, I'm right here at the restaurant... So get over here, I don't have time to sit here and wait!" The future blackened all at once, and Heather was no longer in sight, and wouldn't be for two weeks.

I wanted to erase sex and everything related from the world. It had bound me to certain behaviors and I hated them, and it had barred me from a person I thought could only exist when I closed my eyes at night. I had been certain that if she could be real, she would never be in any kind of convenient proximity to me. Here she was. I had brought her here, nurtured a year of her life, and her fortress at that table, surrounded by a great wall of tits and orgasms and birth control and inane practicality, was completely impenetrable. Because I had been physically absorbed by her, because of my woozy depravities, we couldn't speak.

I congratulated myself on what I felt was some excellent and enjoyably bleak insight, then decided it too was a failure. Even our scattered moments of joyful comfort were enough for me not to wish so much away. The frustration was not my lack of restraint or wisdom to date, it was the fact that with another opportunity I could do it all exactly right. I knew so much more now. For the millionth time in my life and the hundred thousandth in relation to Heather I wanted to start over.

Within a few minutes I realized that I actually meant this. I would start over. There was no one else for me. Heather and I would return to the beginning. Drastic measures would have to be taken. Already she was just about gone forever. We were down to the wire.

***

The wire was fucking here. Heather's vacation had come, and shortly after its closure our lease was expiring and there was little knowledge of where she might then end up. The climax of my two months of private-eye frenzy was no idle hobbyist's game. It required extensive planning, and actual legitimate lawbreaking.

The Irving Enterprises record room was the stuff of local legend, and a favorite target of populist op-ed columnists. Inside this room were computer terminals, thirty-four of them, storing a massive database of everyone on Irving's caller list. Just about everyone in the United States who has ever been hounded by a telemarketer is in this database, even the ones who believe they have been exiled from such lists. For every individual, there are dozens of pages of information about purchase habits, domestic life, travel preferences, financial conditions, pets, hobbies, criminal records, credit histories, and plenty of things I didn't even understand.

Needless to say, the record room was filled to the brim with sensitive information just barely protected by American law. Small wonder that it was heavily guarded by the three most viciously mean Irving employees: Kirby Terrier, Patrick Valdez, and Jimmy Pacifico. All three men had offices that resembled cathedrals; you walked in and felt that you had entered an epic film about the Mafia and would soon be riddled with bullets. I had seen those offices during various errands, but had never wandered past the steel doors of the record room. I wanted to, as I have always had little resistance to curiosity, but if one stepped past a certain point, alarms sounded, lights flashed, and whichever of the three Mob men was on duty came out to throw you back from whence you came.

Terrier worked 7am to 3pm, Valdez 3 to 11, Pacifico 11 to 7. None of them had ever called in sick. None of them had ever been sick. Pacifico had fallen from the 19th floor and survived without a scratch, Valdez had been shot four times, and no one would even tell me what had happened to Terrier in Vietnam. Each man wouldn't leave until the next man arrived. They were never late. They did no wrong, to the point that none of my information suggested that a backup plan had ever been designed, which was where I came in.

I had bribed Red to show me the well-hidden elevator controls and was amazed to find that they were located on the 21st floor, where I used to live, in a compartment above my old closet! I had managed to learn exactly how to control the only elevator that was capable of stopping at the 20th floor. I could override the controls by moving it up, moving it down, or leaving it stationary -- even between floors.

For an entire week I studied the driving habits of the most orderly of the triad, Kirby Terrier, a bespectacled but well-built giant whose purple Daewoo was easily recognizable. Terrier always took the same shortcut, along Floral Parkway, and always drove into the exit farthest from the front door between 6:50am and 6:53am. I had no record of him actually being later than 6:51, but I noted 6:53 as the latest possible time just in case.

When Irving was a smaller company, ID was required for entrance, so once upon a time booths had been set up with rails and tire spikes to block unauthorized vehicles from entering. The booths were somewhat deteriorated, but they still stood and their now completely unused controls still functioned properly. I knew the right combination to bring up those spikes to essentially destroy the tires at any given moment.

Every window in the Irving Enterprises building was rigged with an alarm system that would detect any radical changes in heat or air quality, and of course would also fire off a siren if a window was broken. The damaged window's location would be checked using computer terminals on the third floor, then whichever of the three strong men was on duty would visit that floor and ensure that no suspicious activity was involved.

The door to the record room could only be unlocked using a key hidden in a fake Bible on the top shelf of Patrick Valdez's office bookcase. There were ten Bibles on the shelf; the third from the right was the fake. The same key opened a door in the main entrance hall which could access a hidden room that led back to the building's main staircase. The door to this office could only be unlocked by two people: Patrick Valdez, and Red, who sometimes accidentally left it unlocked. The night before my investigation would be one such occasion.

The record room was full of motion alarms, but they were easily enough avoided if their presence and placement was known. It was, thanks to drafting plans I obtained, amusingly enough, from the Department of Public Records. All of the detectors were vertical except one, so all that was needed was to walk in a straight line at the correct point from the entrance, but one horizontal detector was positioned on the wall halfway down the room; you either had to jump or crawl. At the end of the room sat the gigantic main terminal. The password was "Darren," the name of Larry Sandstrom's 13 year-old brother; I learned this when I met Darren at the office once, and he bragged about how his brother had made him the most important password in the building. There was always a chance that the password had been changed, but I had nothing more to go on.

All this information and planning required a week and a half of no sleep, many candy bars, and no room for doubt. Monday morning, coincidentally the morning of Heather's return from vacation, was the target date. Everything was set.

At 6:44am, I was on the seventeenth story of Irving Enterprises. I had absolutely no reason to be on the otherwise-deserted floor, which was exactly why I went there and grabbed the nearest heavy object -- a computer chair -- and flung it at the wall of windows, breaking three of them. The siren was deafening. I ran to the elevator at light speed and was on the ground at 6:47am right about the time Pacifico would be riding to the third floor on the special elevator to check the computer.

At 6:49am, I was inside the booth, the third from the left, which Kirby Terrier passed through every morning. His car appeared at 6:50; at 6:52 I keyed in the combination and flattened his tires, then blended in with the other occupants of the parking lot as I rushed back inside.

The siren was still blaring as I flew to the special elevator and headed for the 21st floor. The noise stopped just after I hit the button, and as expected, at the third floor the door opened and Jimmy Pacifico entered, as unfriendly as ever, and we continued to move on. As planned, Pacifico got off at the 17th floor to check out the problem with the window, and once on the top floor I raced to the elevator controls to check when he re-entered. It took longer than I expected, but sure enough, the tiny number moved up to an 18 and I floored its brakes. It would be a close call, but I managed to keep Pacifico stuck halfway between the 19th and 20th floors. It was foolproof; if anything was questioned, a power surge was a surefire explanation, something I backed up by manipulating the other two elevators a bit, which in turn used enough power to cause the lights to flicker once or twice. A nice touch, I thought. I then used the controls to force open all the doors to the special elevator shaft.

I raced over to the door down the hall, finding that the scheme had so far worked perfectly, and, holding my breath, leapt down to find myself on top of the elevator in which Jimmy was stuck. I heard him grunting and yelled, disguising my voice as I had at Fitzgerald's, "We'll have you out in a jiffy, Mr. Pacifico!" The top of the elevator was perfectly level with the entrance to the 20th floor, and with overwhelming fear but the pressing knowledge that I could now do nothing but continue, I stepped inside... and found Patrick Valdez's office door locked.

Goddammit, Red... and now I was stuck, my plan shot, sure to be caught and sent to whatever the modern equivalent to Alcatraz is.

No way. This couldn't be the end. I kicked the door, half-expecting it to fly open, but no dice. I looked around desperately and wondered if either of the other men, contrary to everything I'd been able to find out, held the same key. I was running out of time. Any second now Terrier would make it into the building and wonder what was going on. I was pacing around, searching for a way to hide, considering jumping out a window, considering hiding above the ceiling tiles, considering praying for the first time in my life. Finally I looked over at the steel door to the record room, thinking of perhaps banging my head into it until it split open (my head, or the door), and saw glistening in the flourescent light the key, just sitting in the lock.

Letting out all kinds of embarrassing girlish giggles, I opened the impossibly heavy doors and stepped into the record room, carefully finding my correct tragectory and walking in a straight line until I came fifteen feet from the door, at which point I rolled underneath the horizontal detector and continued my straight line, all the way over to the computer terminal.

This was the all-time moment. I gulped -- I really did -- and typed in "darren." It didn't take. I felt crushed, then almost as a lark, I typed in "Darren." It worked. The Irving Enterprises logo appeared on the enormous screen (bigger than I'd pictured) and below it sat a search field, into which I typed "WHEELER, FRANK" and began breathing heavily, shaking again, just plain scared of what I'd gotten myself into here. I was running out of time, and it took far too long for the next page to load for my tastes. When it did, it was all standard stuff -- social security number, stock options (none), general interests, address information, family members...

Wait. Family members.

Family fucking members. Wife: Karen. Children: Celeste, Bryan.

Frank Wheeler, right town and right state, right telephone number (judging from the many times I'd studied his listing in the phone book), right interests and age and purhcase habits, was married. With two children.

Nothing could stop me now, not even Larry Sandstrom. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

***

It was a fulfilling way to start the morning. I spun around and felt sure that somehow I would ruin it on my way back down, trip one of the alarms or not remember to put the key back after I got to the staircase or something, but no, everything went exactly as planned, and in fact, better than planned, because just after I finished running down the stairs with an unheard-of amount of energy, skipping three or four of them at a time, I hit the ground floor to see Heather facing my direction, noticing me immediately and greeting me with outstretched arms.

I ran to her. Containment wasn't mine; I could not balance my emotions with my sensitivity for her. Between gasps for breath, I managed to spew out "He's married."

"Huh? Who's Jerry?" Heather's mood was bright; the vacation had been good for her.

I looked up at her and glared into her eyes, coming close enough to discern every graceful detail of them. "Frank is married, Heather," I said, my voice reaching a full tone of the sort one acquires when it is felt that something of great magnitude is finally ending.

She didn't speak. In the next wrenching minutes I came to believe that she would never speak again, then something told me I should do it. "I'm sorry," I said.

I was no longer looking at her face now, which was turned down to face the floor. I had seen Heather cry only twice before and it still startled me to see the way her face seemed to shake with misery. I wanted to find Frank, murder him, do anything to make him pay for what he had done to this girl.

"Don't apologize to me, I understand everything now," she said, surprisingly very clear between her quiet sobs. "You're just like Larry after all, aren't you?"

Nothing in my brain could point to a guess of what she meant. "I don't understand, Heather. What --"

"Well, I don't expect you to, Eric." She sounded as if she were speaking to me for the first time, and the last.

"Wait," I said, "what did I do?"

"The same thing he did." She tried to conceal her tears. "He got to me first, see. But goddammit, Eric. Why you? I didn't want to hate you."

"Wait! Wait! I don't understand. What can I do? How can I fix this?"

She gazed up at me again, gritting her teeth. "You can't fix it."

"Listen," I said, holding out my arms in a gesture of futility, "let's forget this. I'm glad you're back. I won't --"

"Not anymore, Eric. I can't -- " She couldn't finish her sentence and never did, throwing up her arms in frustration and turning away, leaving me in a bitter, choking darkness, completely imagined.

It was not with a dumbfounded feeling or confused optimism that I stood there in the lobby after she walked out, nor was it anything like acceptance. It was a new feeling, a feeling that no good would come of it all. Nothing could move me that day or for some time after, but I did not cry then or ever. I never escaped a feeling that some part of me, some tiny but deeply significant part buried in the back of my skull, disintegrated at the moment that Heather began to weep the last time I saw her.

Throughout the next three months, I heard from time to time about Heather, who had already decided to quit her job and move away before we spoke. No one could ever figure out whether or not Frank accompanied her on her next adventure. She left a vague sadness in her wake in seemingly everyone, even the twentieth-floor muscles who once found time to flirt harmlessly with her.

My thoughts always lingered on the same question. What had I really done to her that last day? I had pushed her foundation out, finally. I had sacrificed my last chance for an embrace from Heather in favor of informing her that her life without me was irrevocably fucked. It hurt still more that I had experienced nothing like the depth of Heather's pain at seeing the world around her for what it truly was. I knew I was not the only one at fault but knew with equal conviction that she had expected more from me.

Reminders of her left me ill for days. I receieved a letter one day from her parents, who wrote "Sorry to hear about you and Heather - Friends forever! God bless." I was torn between hanging it on my wall and ripping it into a thousand pieces. Each time I looked at it, a different emotion came, almost mechanically. I never fully understood why I received it.

Larry and I no longer spoke. It was felt that nothing we could say would be adequate or responsible or, certainly, pleasant. When I turned in my two weeks notice, I spoke to the bigwigs above him rather than contact him directly.

The oxygen in Irving Enterprises somehow no longer seemed valid or worthwhile to me, and I had been doing my job long enough to know that my lone option was to find something new to occupy my life. I was in a new apartment, alone, and settled somewhat halfheartedly into what I hoped would be a new personality, perhaps the final gift Heather unwittingly offered when she parted.

My last day at work arrived and even though I now loathed my job, I felt myself growing upset at the prospect of leaving forever. I was especially careful to leave a good impression for all my callers. I tried to make them laugh or at least pretend to laugh. I no longer cared if their only reason for cheering up was their realization of how many significantly more pathetic people there were in the world. As long as they momentarily recovered somewhat, I felt like I had occupied a few seconds in their lives that mattered.

At 4:56pm, I stood up and threw my headphones toward the window, half-hoping they would crack it and set off the alarm for old times' sake. After I cursed about my disappointment and tried to ignore the ambiguity of my emotions on leaving my terminal for the last time, I walked out into the hall and saw Janice, staring off into space.

"Hey, is anything wrong?" I asked, not really expecting much of an answer.

"I just found out he's in jail."

"What's that?"

"My ex, he's in jail. He stole some other chick's car. Did the same exact thing to her. Turns out he's a scam artist and he's done it to a lot of women."

My eyes widened. "For how long?"

"God only knows." We walked together in silence up to the halfway point of my eternal journey to the door. "You know what I want?" she said. "It sounds stupid, but I want a Marine. A serious relationship with a Marine. I used to think Marines were only good for sleeping with, but hey, first time for everything."

"It doesn't sound stupid, but why a Marine?"

"I just want to get completely away, you know?"

"Yeah, I know."

It was good to be attentive, but she had to run. The door loomed in front of me; I was not ready to leave just yet. I wandered into the lunchroom to give my long-standing haunts one last good look.

People were scattered, mingling as they tended to on Friday afternoons, and in the middle of them all sat Larry Sandstrom, setting up a chess board. He noticed me before I could get away, and I was not positive that I had any desire to do so. "Hey! Surely you weren't going to disappear without having one more delightful conversation with me!" I smiled and agreed that it wouldn't seem right. "Wanna play?" he asked.

It had been many years since I had played chess, but I promised to do my best and he assured me that he would let me win "this time. Just to boost your ego." While he made his first move I noticed that, looming large behind him, one of Frank's dragon sketches was hanging -- crooked -- on the wall.

"Who put that up there?"

"Oh," Larry said without looking up, "Heather did that right before she left. I convinced them to let her do it, because I knew she really wanted to. I gotta say, Frank's a nice guy, but he's a pretty shitty artist. I'll probably take it down soon."

"You really think he's a nice guy?"

"Well, yeah, nicer than me."

I laughed. "And me." It was impossible for me to fail to address the past. "Where do you think Frank's family is?"

"Good question. I'm not even sure he really has one. Could be outdated information, could be a mistake, could be true, could be anything. Maybe he's a serial murderer."

"I guess we'll never know."

Larry gave me an odd look. "Well, maybe you won't, but I plan to get to the bottom of it." He paused to move a knight, which seemed to require a special amount of concentration. "We should collaborate."

"Do we even know if they're still together?"

"No, I'm working on that."

"Wow. No, I think I'll pass."

"Come on! You're just gonna give up that easily? After all the work you did?"

"I wish I could just find a way to tell Heather I'm sorry."

"Why? You were doing the right thing."

"I was just trying to serve my own needs."

"Why wouldn't you?"

"I think I was just confused about what I needed."

Larry shrugged. "Thought is free," he muttered. I got his queen and he perked up again.

"Why did you become a depression counselor, Hinez?"

"I just like listening to people, I guess. you?"

He laughed and muttered. "Could do better, man. Bet you get that all the time, huh? That you could aim higher."

"Yeah, but when I try people just tell me I should aim lower."

"You'll never get anywhere just giving people whatever they need. I tell you, kid, you've gotta take some time away, figure yourself out."

"I'm trying to." What the hell? It was my last day. "Maybe you should take your own advice."

"Eric, I've been trying to do that for ten years." After waiting to see if I would reply, he added more quietly, "Does that answer your question about why I'm here?"

"I guess we're doomed, aren't we?"

"Checkmate." He grinned wickedly as I looked down at the board to confirm his claim. It had been the fastest chess game ever. I was stuck. "Wanna go again?"

I smiled. "That's okay, I should really get out of here."

"Ah, well, come visit sometime."

Yeah, right. "Oh, absolutely."

Conversing with Larry was enough to make even the most enlightened person feel as though all possible insights were burdened and obvious. Nothing new here, I thought, but halfway across the room something did happen. Larry called out my name.

"You ever want to come up to my place and play another game, just give me a call. You know how to reach me."

I nodded. Although we both knew it was an empty proposal, I honestly appreciated it.

Right after that I left the building for good, and the last image of my life at Irving Enterprises was my fading view of Larry Sandstrom looking around hopefully for someone else to beat in a game of chess. How bitter a thing it is, I thought, to look into happiness through another man's eyes. Or so I'm told.

******