Chapter 4

Poker and women sounded like a good idea.
Poker and women sounded like a fantastic idea.
Poker and women translated to money and sex.
One would think.
I should have been fantastic at poker. I should have been able to read everyone at the table perfectly. Even though I knew virtually nothing about cards.
I should have been fantastic with picking up a girl. I should have been able to read her like a book and say exactly the right thing. Even though I knew virtually nothing about women.
Here’s how the evening went:
I hit the casino. I figured I’d start at a low stakes table.
I was utterly useless. The whole point was that I’d be able to read the players to figure out what they had. Unforutnately, these guys weren’t taking the game seriously at all and so I could read, say, the fact that they were worried that they were going to have a fight with their spouse, or that they should get going home because they had to be up early for work. But I couldn’t tell what cards they had.
I lost a lot of money.
Then I figured that a higher stakes game would work out better.
I tried that.
For a while, things went very well. For all their abilities to hide their body language, I could see exactly what they had each and every hand.
That’s a great skill for poker.
After a while, I started to lose money.
Not a lot.
Just slowly but surely.
It took me a while to figure it out, but I’m pretty sure that, as accurately as I was reading them, they were reading me. Plus, they knew the odds at the table. They knew how likely it was that they’d get a better hand than me, how likely it was that, by the end of the hand, they’d have mine beaten.
It would appear that, in cards, I am a sprinter, not cross country.
That was unfortunate, but OK.
I had my backup scheme.
I had women.
I was almost giddy with anticipation.
I went to the bar.
A reasonably nice bar, but not a great bar.
I found a reasonably nice girl, but not a great girl.
I learned something about bars and girls.
The whole point of meeting a girl at a bar, the whole point of one of these mindless, passing, one-night encounters is the illusion.
The illusion that someone is something they aren’t, that they are something you want. A wonderful lie you can believe for a while.
But me…I can’t find the lie. Its completely not there for me. When I was talking with the girl, trying to get myself into the situation, and completely succeeding at getting her into the situation, I discovered my problem. I kept picking up every bit of truth. At first it was that she wasn’t hugely interested in talking with me, then that she had to get home, and then she started to buy into my banter, but by that point I had learned that we had less than nothing in common, and that we’d probably kill each other in different circumstances. And it just kept coming at me.
I couldn’t find a lie to believe.
So poker and women turned into me coming home broke and alone.
Not that this was anything new.

“How did it go, Martin?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Do you see my new car in the driveway?”
Interestingly, he actually looked out the window.
“No.”
“Hm. That’s strange. I was pretty sure I had sex in that car with some girl I met.’
“Hm. That’s very odd.”
“Oh, wait, I remember now. I lost all my money at poker so I couldn’t but a new car and that’s OK cause I couldn’t find a girl worth having sex with.”
“Hm. Unfortunate.”
“Yes.”
I explained how the evening went.
“I apologize. I should have thought it through better before suggesting it.”
“It’s OK. I should have known better. I’ve never been much good at turning negatives into positives.”
“Well, that’s simply untrue. You turned your bizarre love-affair with schlock TV into a career.”
“Well, I can’t deny that. Anyhow, I’m now back where I started. And I’ve got a migraine. Not even from the ‘noise’. Its from the effort of keeping it out.”
“Hows that working out for you?”
“Not so well.”
“I understand. I’ve had some experience with this sort of thing.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me sleep on it.”
“OK.”
“Try not to pass out on the stairs.”
“No promises.”
“OK.”
There was a long silence.
“I could tell you a joke.”
“Do I look like I’m in the mood to joke around?”
“No.”
“Then lets assume I’m not.”
“OK, I’m going to bed.”
“Night.”
Night. It was going to be a long one of those.
I could hear the crickets and they told me what the weather was going to be. I could hear the traffic and knew that someone was having a baby. I could hear a car very quietly pulling into a driveway and knew what that meant, though his sleeping wife didn’t, and the closing of the deli next door that was almost certainly going to be robbed.
Yeah. I didn’t think I would be sleeping anytime in the foreseeable future.
Fuck.
The morning wouldn’t come soon enough.
Then again, it was all going to get worse then.
More people.
More activity.
More noise.
TV wouldn’t be any escape. The characters gave off almost as much noise as the actors who played them. On top of that, I got echos from the writers and directors and producers.
And the commercials were even worse.
I was beginning to wonder what was going to happen to me.
I could only withdraw but so much from the sensory world.
Sensory.
Sensory deprivation.
I wondered.
Could I live in one of those tanks?
How long could someone stay in there.
And how much did they cost?
I could get a feeding tube.
Could I piss in the water?
Maybe.
I’d be willing to wear a catheter.
OK, maybe I was getting a little too extreme.
I suppose all I really needed was a room with some soundproofing.
And maybe a little sliding door though which food could be passed. Like prisoners in solitary confinement.
That would be very OK.
Megan’s work was generating more and more every day. I’d still be part owner of the company. I’d still get checks whether or not I showed up. In fact, I could probably get Dennis to throw his back into it and double the revenue. Which, really, would get me a bigger paycheck than I was getting now.
And then I could sit alone.
Maybe I could read then.
I hadn’t tried reading. I didn’t know what would happen.
And right then, I wasn’t up for experimenting.
I just wanted to shut it all out.
To sit quietly.


Quiet.
It felt like I’d never have quiet again.
It was all seeping in.
A couple hours of Jack Daniels closed all doors.

I can’t tell you how sick I was getting of that damn duck.
This time he was staring at me.
He was very still.
Very still.
Creepily still.
Stuffed animal still.
I reached out and went knock-knock on its bill.
He snapped at me with a quack.
And so we stared at each other.
Like he was waiting for me to do something.
To say something.
But even in dreams I don’t speak waterfowl.
And I wasn’t sure what I would say anyhow.
And I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear my own voice.
Here it was quiet.
Here, with the duck, it was quiet.
Here, with the duck, it was safe.
The duck went ‘quack’
And that’s all it was. All I heard was ‘quack’.

Then I woke up with a hangover that I could only assume was the first sign of the coming apocalypse. Either that or I had a whole lot of jews in bondage and really ought to set them free.
“Andrew, please, free the Jews!”
I rolled over and fell out onto a rather harder than I remembered floor.
“Martin…we have no Jews. I could go round some up, if you like.”
I whimpered with pain.
“No, that’s OK. Jews hate being rounded up. Historically, that’s the first sign of things going horribly wrong.”
“Might I remind you of something?”
“Please do.”
“You’re jewish.”
“Ah. Yes.”
“How are you this morning?”
“Dying. But the sheer, metallic pain in my skull is keeping everything else out of it.”
“It got that bad last night?”
“Yes. Maybe worse. Its getting worse.”
“Go to work. I’ll see if there’s anything I can come up with.”
“I don’t want to go to work.”
“The noise?”
“The noise.”
“This noise you’ll understand. You’re used to it.”
“I guess so. Hey, why don’t you make any?”
“Cause I always say what I mean. I have no subtext.”
“Liar.”
“Yes, but its close enough.”
He left. I got dressed without showering. I took a couple more drinks and called a cab. There was no way I could handle driving or taking mass transit.
*
I could barely look at Megan as I walked by. Everything about her screamed that she needed to get laid, and that, deep down inside, she had never gotten over her parents’ divorce. Or her Daddy’s eventual suicide. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to take care of her or fire her just to get her out of the office.
The art we’d hung in the reception area spoke of cheap wine and desperation and bad grades. I tried to remember if I’d painted any of them. I was pretty sure I hadn’t and I was pretty annoyed I was finally identifying with them.
“Whats up, Martin? Meet the geek?”
“Yeah, said it would take a week.”
“Well, you’ll probably still be blacking out and hearing voices.”
“Thanks Megan. Now back to whoring it up.”
”Hey!”
“That’ll learn ya.”
“Ass.”
I went into the workspace.
“Martin.”
“Dennis.”
“Nice of you to make it to work. Its been a couple days, dontcha know.”
“Do we have money coming in?”
“Yes.”
“Do we have lots of money coming in, especially with Megan the webporn queen?”
“Yes. But don’t call her that.”
“Sorry. Regardless, we have plenty of cash. I took a couple days off. Whats the issue?”
“Nothing. Whatever. Can we do something productive or must we bicker like we’re married.”
“Sorry, no, really, I am. Its been really rough our there.”
“Its OK. Is there anything I can do to help? Do you need a medical leave?”
“Do we have medical leave?”
“We do if you need it.”
“Nah. It wouldn’t help anyhow.”
“HHow about installing a bar?”
“Nah.”
“Then lets do some work.”
We went through the letter. Dennis came up with questions.
It went for hours.
I Hated it.
More than that, I hated that I hated it. I loved my job. Loved the freaks who wrote us.
The last time I loved my work was when I read that letter from the exx-dead guy.
It hit me.
Hard.
I almost threw up.
“Dennis, something just occurred to me. All of this started with the ex-deadguy.”
“Yeah, I know. Didn’t you notice?”
“Yeah, for a while,, I think. But I completely forgot. I mean, that’s when I started having my blackouts, but so much has been coming at me I must have lost the connection.”
“Easy there, killer. I can’t deny the coincidence is there, but I don’t see how there really could be a connection. You never even found him.”
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember most of that day or the next.”
“Which only implies you were out drinking.”
“Look, I gotta go.”
“Martin, wait!”
I was already out the door.
Megan said nothing on my way out.
By the time I hit the ground floor, I’d already decided this was a bad idea.
But at least I was out of work.
Andrew was waiting on the sofa when I got home.
“Long day.”
“Shut up.”
“Dennis called. He was fairly upset. He seems to think you are supposed to, you know, work.”
“I can’t work. There’s too much to do.”
“Like what?”
“Like carving my eyes and ears out.”
“Indeed.”
I went up to my room.
Even through the windows I could hear everything.
Here I was again.
I turned on the TV onto a dead channel. Static. Nothing more.
I drank most of the bottle and passed out again.
When I woke, it was 2am. It was almost quiet. Not completely, but almost.
I went out to walk around. The room was echoing too much.
I could hear someone else walking a couple hundred feet away, with guilt in his mind. I could hear a baby crying and a mother worried about the teething. I listened to a girl laughing with her boyfriend and heard just a little bit of love.
There’s been worse nights.
I was going under a bridge when I saw a large cardboard box. Through a small tear I could see a homeless guy with a bottle. I couldn’t help but think that that would be the solution to all my problems. A box under the bridge and a bottle. It would be perfect. Solitude, no one talking, unconscious as much as I possibly could be.