DAY 13

Paris is attacked by terrorists. And bombs of unwarranted opinions explode all over Twitter and Facebook and television news channels. Previous to this shocking event, my wife reveals the results she receives from her mammogram test. There is “something there,” she says. Her doctor schedules an appointment with a surgeon a week later. We have to wait. We watch the news. And talk.

“I can’t believe this is happening again.”

I don’t know what she refers to. Does she mean the terrorist attack? Or is she alluding to another obstacle to overcome in our relationship. We’ve been through so many already. My painful divorce. Two virtual miscarriages. A son born with Down syndrome. All of the odds ranging in the one in a billion range.

“There is violence everywhere, even in a place like Paris.”

“I suppose that is the point,” she says. “Shed blood in a place of love.”

“What will the surgeon do?” I ask.

“Review my tests, maybe a needle biopsy.”

I don’t tell her I’ve been researching all of the possibilities. Maybe I am testing her honesty to see if she is trying to spare me the uncertainty of her worry.

“How do you feel?”

“Scared, what else?”

I am too, but I don’t know what to say, who to be. A rock, or a split branch for her to grab onto?

“We will see what he says,” she assures me. She understands how sensitive I am to my own imagination. She knows me well. She knows I will think of it until every detail destroys me. I try to numb myself to the stories of those you hear almost every day. A worker’s sister, the guy who used to work for my brother, the child of a girl I went to kindergarten with, only twelve years old. The Terry Fox Run scene. How my five-year-old son locked a stare on a prosthetic limb there, thinking it a trick or a funny bone pulled expertly out of an electrified hole in The Operation Game. Like me, he doesn’t sleep well when he becomes sensitive to a fear.

Since that walk, he asks questions unbecoming of a five-year-old boy, or rather, becoming his ignorance.

“You won’t die,” he asks his mother before she tucks him into bed after a requested cuddle. He doesn’t know a thing, but the fear speaks for itself. It also speaks for me. We love her the same, I think to myself, or fear the loss of her in our lives, the same way. I feel like one of her children and maybe this is the excuse for our similar panic. Losing the mother in her we so desperately need as men afraid of every threatening domestic detail we are not designed to accomplish with the same grace.

The Man from my walk-in closet sits between my wife and me on the couch as we watch the stories from the terrorist attack. Two gunmen enter a Parisian café and start shooting. As random as a video game, as horrifying as one of his off-the-wall ideas. Another bomb-clad individual tries to enter the soccer stadium only to be refused by a security guard, who pushes him far enough not to hurt anyone else but himself. The invasion by random gunman of a heavy metal concert in a theatre. Again, what seems like an unfamiliar event in the city of love. Open fire on an audience facing the stage. Suspension of disbelief destroyed by an unsuspecting bullet in the back.

The reported, contextual details are eerily similar. Smoke. Shattered glass. Red lights and wandering bystanders left bleeding as they sit on the curb in the embrace of a stranger in uniform.

My wife is frozen. I try to feel sorry for those who passed away so suddenly, but like The Messenger, I am comparing deaths. I can’t help myself. It is morbid thinking, or so The Man tries to mediate the space between us. My wife disappears for a moment to start the air popper in the kitchen.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing?”

“She needs to hear reassurance and all you can think about is that stupid messenger of yours. Who do you feel more sorry for? He is alive, for God’s sake. You spared him. But you can’t spare her, only a doctor can do that. You are powerless, like your doctor/murderer said when he gloated to The Messenger.”

“Whatever I say will explode between us, perhaps killing you too,” I say.

“You are selfish,” he says.

He is right, to so many degrees. It is hard to admit how much you depend upon someone to fulfill your life. How she fills in the spaces while life happens, so that life can happen.

“I don’t know what to say, right now. Everything is suspended. We are waiting.”

“She is suffering, while you wait.”

I never assumed The Man carried any sensitivity. I stereotyped him, I suppose, not realizing that, as his creator, I could do such a thing.

“Killers have hearts too, you know,” he says.

“You care about my wife?”

I am still skeptical as I have always seen him as someone who is beyond the weakness of care. The Man, or in my design of him, is immune to the circumstances that make us human. Like an insane man, or my father in the step down unit, or Kashif, whom my reader is about to meet for the first time in this book. The Man is a self-emptying shell that is always looking for a temporary fill, not realizing he leaks from the inside out.

“That is harsh. Is that what you really think of me?”

Once again, I am annoyed by his skill of reading my mind.

“Are you ready to re-enter the story?” I ask him. I am trying to change the subject. I can hear my wife shuffling popcorn into a separate bowl.

“I never liked Lebanon. I will find my way back into the story, in due time.”

“No, you won’t. I will write you in when I see fit,” I promise him, disguising a threat.

“As you say, master, writer.”

He laughs to himself a little when my wife returns. The news is almost all red now. Reports appear with the Eiffel Tower in the background. They are geographically situating terrorism, promoting their stories against the appropriate backdrop. It is theatre and the stage is reset by the world’s association with Paris again, except this time there are no lights. Only red, emergency lights and blankets sprawled over dead bodies on the street.

“How can you stop this from happening?” I ask my wife. She is folding laundry now. She removed her contacts and is wearing her glasses.

“Some things happen for no apparent reason but to be,” she stops herself.

Another news reporter interrupts our fragmented conversation. The Man has disappeared. I think I see him on the television screen, walking by a crime scene. I blink my eyes and when I do so, I don’t see him anymore. I am hallucinating. Invisible stress is occupying me, I consider. I need to see a doctor but I don’t want to suggest it to my wife. I believe this could be a trigger for the argument we haven’t had. That even in her potential life threatening sickness, I need the help of an outside source to straighten my mind out.

“Do you remember Cape Cod?” I ask her.

The thought of it brings an automatic smile to her face.

“I miss Cape Cod. Remember the day we arrived. We were early and they wouldn’t let us into the room, so we stripped down and jumped into the ocean because the waves were high.”

“Yeah, it was so much fun.”

“I have never had so much fun, in all of my life.”

“You wore that white bikini.”

“You liked that white bikini.”

“I loved it. I loved that time. I love you,” I say to her.

She stares at me and then stops folding the laundry.

I can feel her tears seeping through my shirt and to my shoulder when I have her in my arms.