The young father is not so young anymore. His son had lived and is tenish. Goddammit, he isn’t sure if his son is ten or eleven. I am going to hell for such things, he thinks. He is trying to watch the game. His wife hates him. He can tell. And he deserves it. He no longer loves her. When he had detached from his son, he had detached from everything. Until her. The other woman. But he could not be with her. It isn’t right. Just wasn’t done. So this is what he does. He puts on the game, which signals to his wife and boy that he is not to be bothered, and in that quiet, he journeys into his own mind, deeper and deeper. Where she is waiting for him, where she is. And together in that space, they will make love and build a house and have other children. And those children will grow according to the laws of fantasy and his imagination. But she will never get older. How could she stay young and beautiful forever? Why not? It was his world, endless and inviolate. It took him some time and peace and quiet to get there, but he was getting there, and each time the world was more substantial. He projects his world onto the TV screen like a little god. He isn’t watching baseball, he is watching himself. It had been see-through at first, the new world, paper thin, but now it had more weight, more substance, depth. He could see a horizon. He could touch things. He could touch her.
There she is. He walks toward her. His wife slams a door, she senses another woman. His wife breaks a dish, his boy says something silly—all these are calls to leave, eviction notices, and he will heed them halfheartedly, an always irritable paterfamilias. Walking hand in hand with her on a pristine Caribbean beach. A seagull looks at him, and says, “Dad?” That’s his son. There is his son again by proxy, using the seagull as his mouthpiece, in the way that children play with hand puppets, dropping shit on his shoulder. “Dad? Dad?” There was no denying the bleed-through. Another name for bleed-through is sanity. Heeding the call of this world is a duty, too, after all. He would leave the world of his head and return to the actual. But he had laid a good foundation time and time again. This world of his was also real and was not going anywhere. He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t live in it, but he could be there anytime because it was his. He would be alone in one world so he would not be alone in another. It is his and hers. It is his.