Devil Inside

He feared what he had seen many times before. People mistook the signal for the action, the map for the territory, the appearance for the reality, the gesture for the meaning, and what they were for who they were. The grass was always greener, he thought, because you knew the disadvantages of your present situation but only saw the advantages of changing to another. In the new grass, things started well, in his experience, but then ended catastrophically.

He redoubled his advances. He showed up at her job with flowers, and observed her secretary rolling her eyes. He wondered what she had been told about him. He called her twice a day without fail, and repeated his Saturday night moves. He had lost five pounds, so he increased his workouts, and soon could see muscle definition improve. In a Hail Mary pass, he bought her a necklace that she had commented on in the window of one of the jewelry shops. He felt the mistake coming like a distant storm but was powerless to stop it.

In each case, she expressed gratitude, stayed around for the minimum amount of time required to be polite, and then excused herself to do some work in preparation for the next work day.

"You've been rather distant lately," he told her one night. "What can I do to keep our marriage afloat?"

He looked at her with vacant eyes. He knew that there were two options here:

1. She admitted the problem, they worked on it, and life moved forward because they were in unison. This meant that she still have faith in him, respected him, and was on his team, working for the good of their mutual interest.
2. She denied the problem because she either did not think it could be solved or had no interest in doing so. This meant that she had, in her heart and mind, already left the marriage and saw it as something of no consequence.

"What do you mean?" Karen temporized.

"We don't go out anymore. We barely make love, and when we do, it's like you're waiting for a cab. We rarely talk. I haven't seen you smile at me without being prompted, or spend any time with me unless I demand it, since you took this job," said Richard. He knew where this was going, and to his surprise, it did not make him mad at all; it made him sick, ill, and restless. He saw everything that he wanted slipping away, like a candle melting and pouring down a drain.

Karen looked right at him. To him, this was a crisis; to her, this was a delicate situation that she had to defer, like putting off a supplier who wanted to be paid at her job. In her mind, she would eventually come back to the marriage that she now believed she had settled for. Right now, she had bigger opportunities, and the marriage was her backup plan for when she was done enjoying all that life could offer her.

"I haven't noticed a problem," she said lightly.

They went to bed that night in separate worlds. They might as well have been in isolated dimensions, on distant planets, or different species for all they had in common now. Richard wondered where he went wrong, then realized that Karen had always had a crusade in her life, with the downtrodden opposing the powerful. By being a good husband and provider, he became the powerful entity against which she rebelled and took delight in defeating.

He talked to his longtime friend, Sheriff Danville Harris, who had advised his father during the times of divorce.

"She's dancing with the Devil," the Sheriff said. "I never really took up with religion, other than generally believing that some benevolent force created this place and takes care of us, since we're basically suicidal morons most of the time."

He chuckled. "I always thought the Old Testament God must have had a giant bottle of Advil, watching His people go out there and do nothing but screw up non-stop because their egos got in the way. At the police academy, they taught us a little about Jung and Freud and the ego and id. Basically it goes like this."

The Sheriff lit up one of the Italian cigars he favored, having cut it in half through the bulge in the middle with his pocketknife. "The id makes the decisions, it's basically who we are in our guts and souls. The ego explains what happens in response to our decisions in such a way that we look good to ourselves and others, which is what we think of as 'what we are.' The id is basically a lot of conflicting impulses and the one that is least disruptive and most advantageous, at least in theory, wins out."

He smoked and continued. "At the academy they told us to explain things to the ego so that the id selects the path of least resistance. Make fight or flight impossible, offer some food, and you can get them into the system without violence, most times. Your wife is doing things backward: her ego is making the decisions, forcing the id to go along, which is why she's losing a sense of who she is."

"I guess the question to you," the Sheriff said, puffing lightly to reignite his flagging cigar as he spoke, "is whether you want to fix this. After, she has -- as the saying goes -- 'showed you her ass.' This is not just a surface blemish, but something that's gone wrong with her deep inside. Life is nothing but staircases. When you're going where you need to be going, it's a tough trudge up. When you are going someplace bad, it's a hop and skip down. She got on a down staircase somewhere and can't find the up one. Do you think she cheated on you?"

"No," said Richard. "Not... physically, yet. But in her mind, she is ready, and now that I know that, I can never enjoy her again. My faith in her is shattered, and so is my respect, following her own rejection of me. She just threw away my love, trust, affection, and hope."

"That is surely true," the Sheriff said. "When you choose another man, you have told the first one that he isn't good enough for you, and that leads to just two paths. Either you take him back but resent him or you reject him so that you do not resent yourself for having settled. Once they make up their mind, in my experience, they may not be right out the door quite yet, but they're heading there."

"Yep," said Richard darkly. "Well, thanks, Sheriff. I'll figure something out."

When he next saw Karen, on a night when she was not working late, he gently suggested that they spend more time together to keep the marriage healthy. Then he tried to invite her out to ballroom dancing lessons, but she begged off using her workload as an excuse. He invested hours in foot rubs, conversation, and a better grade of wine. No dice; in each case he felt her scorn, realized how little he was in her eyes, and sensed the weight in his gut gaining another few tons of dark hopelessness and grey misery.

Finally he simply asked.

"Do you want a divorce?" said Richard.

"What?" said Karen. "Why do you ask that?"

"I'd like an answer first, yes or no."

Karen turned back to her reading. "No, I don't think so."

"Why?"

"Well, it wouldn't be prudent, would it? We have kids. We have a house. We both have careers where we benefit from having spouses. And--"

"And...?" said Richard slowly, drawing out the syllable.

"And, uh, I love you," said Karen, her eyes now turned toward the floor. "We're going to grow old together. We'll have grandkids. We can get that house on the lake that we always talked about, and spend our golden years there."

Richard looked at her, his eyes clear. She could not see the tragedy there. Back when they loved each other, she would have told him he was a big silly idiot and smothered him in kisses. Now, she treated him like one of her subordinates at work, or maybe an intractable supplier, and had basically admonished him into silence. What about meeting him halfway, supporting him and making him feel the love? Nope, that was as dead as their sex life.

Robert, age fourteen, gave him the next piece of the puzzle, since all of life is mystery, and the first stage in solving a mystery is to identify all of the pieces in play. "You know that girl I was going to go to the fall dance with? She bailed on me to go on a camping trip with Owen Rogers and his weird family."

"The one you gave the necklace to?" asked Richard.

"Yeah, just a week ago," said Robert. "Oh well, you know, alpha bucks and beta fucks. Girls want a stable guy to provide the cash, and a stud for the sex." He blushed slightly at the language.

"You're a nerd, but also a stud," said Richard, tousling his hair. "It's going to take a few years to show though, but some girl is going to see you're a catch someday. Want to hit the gym with me? We can bulk you up a bit."

"Yeah," said Robert. "That'd be great. I saw that you've been building up some muscle too."

Four miles away, a frustratingly close distance separated by the social convention that men do not just show up at their wives' place of employment, Jeb was having a similar conversation with Karen.

"He's a good guy, a good solid husband," said Jeb. "But you and me here, we're doing something big. This is going to be the first ad firm in history to merge good deeds and big profits. We'll go down in history. So I need you... all in, if you know what I mean."

Karen looked up, her eyes focusing dryly. They both knew what he was saying.

Back at the house, Richard had fed the kids, read to Suzanne, helped Kaya with geometry, and called Daniel who was at the state university on full scholarship. He resolved to stop spending time on his wife and to instead enjoy his children more. When Karen got home and went straight into the shower, taking her phone with her, he flinched in the bed. His gut began its torturus twisting and a cold sweat broke out above his eyes. Little sleep came his way that night, although Karen snored gently like a purring cat.

When he looked in the mirror in the morning, he saw the dead-level set of his eyes and the lack of glow in their, their normal bright blue reduced to a dimensionless cobalt. He did not recognize the expression first, but then remembered it from his high school project volunteering at the VA, where he met men who had seen too much of war. These were the eyes of someone trying to hold in his agony, uncertain if at any moment the devil might spill from inside and leave a ravaged bloody wasteland in his path.

"Is everything OK?" Sue asked him halfway through the morning. They were struggling with a new contract that was going to cramp their schedules and possibly be a money loser.

"Uh, not much sleep," he said. "That's all. I'll get another coffee and get it together."

She looked at him with concern. "I'll get the coffee. Don't get used to this."

He ended up smiling despite himself, and by the end of the day he had pushed everything into place, renegotiated for additional fees, and come up with a six-month schedule that he could bend around existing clients. He said his goodbyes and began the drive home, letting his mind unfocus and relax as he had learned long ago in his Vipassana training. Then it hit him on two levels: a marriage was a love partnership, a family, and a business. He needed to address his problem in a businesslike manner, and then use business logic to fix it.

Over the past few days he had done some research on cheating spouses. Most of them, it seems, were simply bored and felt insignificant. It usually happened at the job, which was a substitute for the sense of well-being conferred by family. When self-pity and lust coincided, the urge became strong. Most affairs went unnoticed, although in his experience that usually meant the marriage was a zombie, a once-living thing now dead but re-animated without a soul. Very few lasted long, although once someone had cheated once, they were more likely to do it again, he noticed.

He also read stories on the internet sites which told of such tragedies. He found them unbelievable. He could not imagine wanting to harm his wife, nor having rage. He had pain instead. A deep ache resonated through his body, pulsing through his eyes and fingertips with every breath. It was just that: a tragedy. An insoluble tragedy. He found the reconciliation stories to be also unrealistic and over-emotional. What had been was broken and could not be repaired.

"Daddy!" Kaya greeted him at the door. He looked up and saw the three sets of eyes of his children watching him carefully. They knew, he realized. They always do, he thought, recalling how he had felt an inner pain and roiled gut when his mother came home late, and when he looked up and caught his father's eyes, seeing that same dullness and inflexibility there. People in pain see life in terms of reduced options, he realized, so his first step was not to do that. His second was to care for his kids.

When Karen came home late, she entered a spotless house. Two large pizza boxes were in the recycling bin, the homework was done, and the kids were in bed. She couldn't find her husband, at least until she looked out at the backyard. There he was, by the light of a Coleman lantern, sanding down that old boat. She turned on the kitchen light, knowing she would be backlit in the floor-to-ceiling windows. He looked up, but did not wave. She went to bed.

Friday morning, he came padding up the walk, sweat-drenched from his run. Karen was just preparing to leave.

"Uh, Richard," she said, as if the impulse suddenly hit her. He felt the air ionize between them. "I forgot to tell you, I'm off on a business trip this weekend," she said.

He nodded. There was no point telling her not to do it; she had already done it in her intellect and her heart. He knew from his reading that the actual act of cheating occurred the instant the cheater psychologically downgraded their spouse to the level of being someone who needed to be deceived, manipulated, and misdirected. Almost all of them saw it as somehow their due, or a compensation for past wounds, and so they did not simply use their spouses; on some level, they hated them, even if they could not admit it.

Richard believed society had two levels, corresponding to ego and id. The id consisted of its suppressed desires left over from nature, but the ego was how it explained them to itself as something good instead of bad. When he heard someone say, "we are all equal," his mind translated it into "me first." When they talked about patriotism or free markets, it meant "and others serve me." When they spoke of the sanctity of marriage, they meant neutering the man with rules that made him serve the woman.

He had thought Karen was different. He had loved the shy, sensitive, and insightful girl he first met at that church mixer since their first date. He did not mention it to her for some time, sticking to the code of "fair play" that he and his father shared, since he didn't want to put her on the spot or make her feel manipulated. He wondered if he had always been wrong, or if something had finally caught up with her and driven her over the edge.

"Is there anything I should know?" he asked gently.

"No, Richard, nothing," she said, looking annoyed, then got in her car and drove off.

Nothing. That was the sensation that dropped over his soul: an eternal and infinite emptiness where nothing mattered except the sensation of the moment. He wanted to become one with the emptiness, to clear his mind of everything, and exist only in that crystalline structure of logic where every detail got filed in the right place, forming lattices of knowledge, each level dependent on the one below. He wanted to separate himself from emotion, sensation, desire, and most of all, awareness of who he was and the situation he was in.

"Daddy?" Suzanne asked, looking into his eyes.

Richard came back to consciousness; work was over and he had made it through somehow, and now he was home with his children. The clarity of his inner world, mated to the wider world beyond his immediate concerns, had been a great refuge. The emotions came back to him quickly: trepidation, a sense of observing a travesty from afar, and a sodden, blood-scented sensation of deep loss. This too will pass, he reminded himself, and he turned toward his daughter.

"Are you okay?" she asked in her thin, wavering child's voice.

"Now that you're here, I'm great," said Richard. He had gone to work. He had done well; he had been brilliant, inspired even. He had given all of his nervous energy and growing sense of despair into the job, and results had been good. Now he had to take care of his little people, having had an hour or so after work to clear his mind. Then he looked at his watch. It had been three hours.

"And I'm late for dinner," he said. "It's pizza time again kids."

Cheers resounded, and they settled down for a few rounds of some hopelessly violent video game for the boys while Kaya read and Suzanne watched (again) an animated movie about a duck that saved the world with a chainsaw. Or something like that; Richard was a bit distracted. The local pizza guy was getting to know them well, mainly because Richard tipped well in exchange for an absence of small talk, and after a riotous pizza party, he got everyone into bed. Homework would wait until Sunday afternoon.

The next morning they took a trip to the zoo. Robert, a bit old for it, waded through politely and lingered in the Reptile House. Kaya was enraptured by the birds, and they circled the outdoor cages three times (at least). Suzanne did her best to see all the lions, tigers, bears, and otters, her favorite, but then became fidgety and after being placated with cotton candy, rode her sugar high straight into a deep sleep in his arms, sending her father's shoulder also into deep sleep.

Then it was time for backyard games, tossing around an old foam rubber football and horseplaying until the twilight settled on the land like a warm blanket. Richard dug back into college memory and whipped up a dinner of (organic) hot dogs, bell peppers, spaghetti, cilantro, and pasta sauce with some sour cream whipped in to make it alfredo-ish. Then they read or played video games around the fire he set up in the pit in the backyard while Richard resumed sanding his boat.

He looked out over the long backyard, stretching down to the water of the fourth-rate canal on which they lived. In a city permeated by waterways, he could see the value in having one the fancy homes in the big name subdivisions on the lake, but he knew that everything came at a cost. Here they could have a normal life, know other normal people, and be both aware of their own unique abilities and simultaneously humble in enjoying others and their own contributions. He knew that everything he was doing, he did for the kids, and if it killed him, he would not have them live the life he had lived.

Richard never saw himself as a victim. He saw challenges thrown in his way, and would go into his meditative state (something he learned, oddly enough, from his Methodist pastor growing up) and figure out what was actually going on. How did the situation work? Once he understood the structure, the mechanism, and process formed of the relationships between action and consequence at every level, he could work around it or make it work for him. He sighed, feeling mature and possibly, older than he had been that morning.

College Richard -- a boy with a shock of hair, larger muscles, and a zest for life -- would have looked at this sedate existence and laughed, then crushed a few more Milwaukee's Best cans and gone off to raise some hell. Or maybe not; somewhere, Richard knew that he had always wanted this. He distrusted "greatness" and preferred an ordinary life, one in which his mind was clear, so that if he did find opportunity for some kind of great invention or moment of history, he could seize the day without mental confusion.

Sunday they went to church. Richard knew from his gut that he believed in God, even if he distrusted any book written by a human, because he understood cause-effect relationships. The sky is dark at night; however, a dark sky could also come from weather, a solar eclipse, or even the final battle at Har-Megiddo between the forces of order and fire. However, if the world was good as a whole, only one thing could cause that, and in the recesses of his heart Richard had long ago found God and loved him, even if he hated organized religion as much as he detested politics and social media.