BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Anhedonia plagued him at the oddest times. Often, and especially, on Sundays.
As Oliver stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him with a twist of the expensive lacquered doorknob, he realized that not a single person had asked him a question about himself in sixty-eight days. One more day and a grim numeric milestone would be reached. And there would be nothing funny about it.
Besides... even if (or "when?" he thought hopefully) someone ever asked him a personal question again... "Hey Oliver, how ya doing?"...
...What the fuck would he even say?
What conversational balancing-act between veracity and brevity could possibly allow Oliver to reply to a question like that without lying? How could he even begin to convey the vast banality of his daily existence and the world-shrinking decimation of his emotional palette during the decade he had spent married to Rhonda? The million little deaths he died every day? The threadbare windswept cobwebs left neglected to multiply inside his heart of hearts?
What was the word he was searching for? "Anhedonic" was accurate, and "numb" was too, but neither truly captured the existential state of Oliver's life condition. What was the word?
"Hurry up in there!" Rhonda's shrill screams pierced the oiled redwood of the bathroom door and made Oliver wince.
"Okay, Honey!" he whimpered in response.
He looked in the mirror and attempted to summon a sigh, which arrived in the form of a shudder. What was the word?
He reached his left hand forward and grasped the girthy gleaming handle atop the marbled porcelain sink, scraping his oversized and tarnished wedding band against it with a startling "squeak!" He squeezed his hand tightly around the engraved "C" on the handle and hot water gushed forcefully from the tip of the faucet, a jet of white liquid spraying into the gaping hole below with a level of water pressure that only the oldest of money could even consider prioritizing. What was the word?
The "C" on the silver handle did not mean "Cold." The "C" represented the French word "Chaud," which meant "hot," because Rhonda and her entire family and all the appliances in their house were French. He numbly pulled the imported handle forward.
Even as he pitied his pleasureless pilgrimage of a boilerplate life —
No one had asked him how he was doing in sixty-eight fucking days! — he nurtured a simultaneous and masochistic gratitude that no one (no one!) seemed to give a fuck. The truth was that he wouldn't have had any answers anyway. Oliver's life had become hard to describe. If anyone had asked, the answer wouldn't have come! The answer would have tap-danced mischievously on the fleshy dripping tip of his meaty tongue, remaining just out of reach of his probing and inarticulate consciousness. What was the word he was searching for? What was the word?
"How many fragrances does one woman need?" Oliver wondered, his interior dialogue robotic, monotonous, rhetorical, inquisitive. He swept a half-dozen bottles of perfume onto one side of the shelf below the spotless bronze-framed bathroom mirror. Then he placed his heavy silver safety razor into the modestly-sized void he had created for himself. What the hell was the word?
If someone asked him how he had been doing lately, what would be his reply? What was the word?
As he cupped his hands under the powerful running faucet and splashed hot water onto his face, he realized that the word was "Claustrophobic." Life with Rhonda was claustrophobic. A constant struggle for space.
The next time someone asked him how he was doing, he'd be honest and reply: "Claustrophobic." He sprayed shaving cream onto an open palm. Radical honesty felt radically possible.
"Hurry the fuck up, Mister Sloth King! The service is going to start!"
He splashed water on his face again. He did not reply. A dim realization flickered to life between quivering cells of his most closely-guarded anxiety matrices: Rhonda needed so many perfumes because she knew that her husband didn't like the way she smelled. And she was beginning to realize that no matter what she did, that would never change.
He picked up his safety razor and dragged it gingerly against his throat. Stubble was for grad students and the downwardly mobile. All the Harvard Professors he looked up to shaved daily. Throughout history, even.
"HURRY UP HURRY UP HURRY UP—"
"I'm sorry, pumpkin!"
He looked at the mirror, pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, straightened his back, twisted his torso diagonal to his reflection, and for a moment his jawline was taut and angular as it was in those rarest of dreams devoid of his frequent defeatism. He mouthed the words:
"I'm not sorry for a damn thing, you fucking bitch. I'm leaving you. And I'm GAY!"
And all was silent for a minute but for razor scraping off stubble.
Anhedonia plagued him at the oddest times. Often on Sundays. Often in the bathroom, when he shaved. And the word that best described his life was "Claustrophobic." They were all now late for Sunday Mass. He absentmindedly remembered that today was his birthday. He was thirty four.
THIRTY MINUTES LATER
On a honking four-lane freeway on the brisk sub-thirty-two morning, Oliver's regal chrome Mercedes Benz was swiftly castrated by potent murmurs of multicolor morning traffic.
Rhonda scanned satellite channels and landed on an inappropriately enthusiastic radio host informing their subwoofers of a grisly five-car pileup ahead. Then she dramatically turned the radio off before the host got to finish a sentence.
"Jesus, this reminds me of the opening scene in La La Land where everyone gets out of their car and sings," she remarked with a snort.
"I want to see that!" cried Oliver Jr. from the back seat. Rhonda glared back at her son.
"Too bad, because you can't!"
"That's not fair!" Oliver Jr. cried back.
"When you're older we'll watch it together," Oliver interjected into the argument.
"KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD, DAD!" shouted his son and wife in unison.
"Yeesh!" Oliver kvetched as he obeyed reluctantly. "We're going zero miles an hour!" This fact was undeniably true.
"And it still isn't fair!" Oliver Jr's cracking voice chimed in.
BAM!
All of a sudden, their Benz was violently impacted by a powerful force from the rear!
Oliver always wore a seatbelt, so he escaped the collision without injury, but his wife and son had defiantly removed their own seatbelts even after he had diligently ensured their use as a precondition of ignition. The unsecured forms of Rhonda and Oliver Jr. had thus been flung forward onto the airbags in front of them and then back into their seats with such force that both were knocked out cold — Rhonda in the passenger seat with a lit cigarette now extinguished on the mane of her synthetic chinchilla overcoat, and Junior in the back looking more like he had drifted off into a peaceful slumber than been rendered unconscious by impact.
Who the fuck had hit them? Oliver's interior monologue had curled upwards from monotonous capybara moaning to the snarling unapologetic space-taking of an undefeated king cobra!
Through the rear window, a black Tesla Model S with illegally-dark windows and a seemingly beefed-up and spiked front bumper conspicuously lacked a visible license plate. Its driver was completely obscured by the dark windshield.
Oliver wanted to go fight the other driver that very moment, but his better nature prevailed: First, he checked the pulses of both of his unconscious family members to make sure they were alive. Thank Goddess, they were.
Then he opened the door to his car and stepped out onto the frigid highway. He was wearing a synthetic blazer that hadn't been designed for this freezing temperature. Fortunately, the guy getting out of the Tesla wasn't either. In fact, the other driver was only wearing slacks and a dress shirt, which must have been custom-ordered because he was
Gigantic.. And colossal. And ripped. And he must have stood seven feet tall. And most of all... he was somehow familiar! The man was massive, yes, and thickly bearded, yes, but those unmistakeable cheekbones... those eyes... yes, yes, yes...
