Because he no longer belonged to an organization, in the long, empty days he accumulated notebooks full of hearsay, collected situations. Lyle had a sense of time spreading out, looked for how whispered hunches became history. There were index cards limning city councilmen, things he heard in bars, on buses. Rumors jotted. On the wall, a city map stabbed with colored pushpins marked unsolved crimes, meeting places. He knew his precincts, seedy bars. He memorized the names of people too successful to be innocent.
Still, fists of crumpled paper accumulated by the waste bin. There were leads gone nowhere, notes that never added up. Words went uncorroborated. Situations didn’t become stories. The sweep of big ideas furnished him with hope, but he couldn’t make the granules build an arc. He abided rejection, exhausted more index cards. A headache formed from the construction below, a new bar being drilled and hammered where once was a pawn shop. He pushed at his temples, couldn’t think.
Except of course, without the constraints of a workday, he was thinking quite a bit. He was thinking of things he hadn’t had time to think of for some time. He thought, for example, of Ingrid, how when he’d met her over the dollar bin at the thrift store, her eyes were angry, which he had taken to mean intelligent. They had gone to a filthy place around the corner where half the jukebox songs wouldn’t play. They’d discovered they worried about child labor. They worried about the strife in countries other people forgot about. They knew other people forgot about everything that mattered. Death was new then to her, or rather to her father, and on her behalf he was angry that the insurance company had denied exactly who needed treatment, her father, the coverage he needed to live. As she kissed him, the Polaroid around her neck had hit his chest. Even through closed eyes, he could sense the white flash of light like how people described near-death.
“Cheese,” he’d said.
And she had said, “Or love.”
When, later, she’d asked for the annulment, she’d said that the marriage was an accident of grief, and he did not say that it wasn’t to him. He’d said he was, at least, good for something. Good riddance.
But there were other worries now.
And so, on his phone, Lyle looked at pictures of family and ex-girlfriends, former colleagues and people he’d met once at prestigious parties. To thumb through beautiful acquaintances on Cathexis, to see the sheer regularity of them, made him angry enough not to break down, sink.
Alexandra Chen, he noticed, stayed light in posts. He thought of how women like her were never disappointed. Success came to them like oxygen.
He could see it in the sheer volume of validation visible on her profile.