Second Life

"Aren't you worried about, um, getting electrocuted?" she said.

"Just looking for now. Diagnostics means tracing a problem then eliminating candidates. This here is a hard problem, since you have two good candidates that I can't exclude. These breakers are corroded, like you caught some floodwater in here a few years back and your landlord didn't tell you about it. Those ballasts out there are the cheapest, uh, items that China can ship, so they may or may not be a locus of multiple failures. But for me, if this were my man-cave or whatever, I'd start here with these, since you'll want to replace them anyway someday."

He saw the look across her eyes: she was calculating. Balancing the cost against the monthly, versus how much business she was losing, versus (if he read her correctly) the risk of having a very literary fire break out. Then the face turned hard.

"OK, I'll take care of it," she said.

"You probably want to replace this whole box, which looks like it's from the Korean War era, but you can probably just swap out the breakers to save some money --"

"I said I'll take care of it," she said. "Thank you for your help, but as the business owner, I --"

"I'm not trying to white knight you here," said Travis quickly. "But I know a guy who can do this for less. He's just got a little alcohol problem, but --"

"You want me to trust my shop to a drunk?" she asked, eyes on fire. He was coming to like her eyes, which like the sign of the shop were a cornflower blue, but darkened when she was excited. Or angry, he reflected.

"Look, lady, I'm not trying to burn you here. He's got a little drink problem, so you want to get him here in the morning. He's a good electrician, and he'd cost five times as much if he were able to get through an afternoon without a couple of tall boys, but I've known him since he was little and his daddy died, and he's never been right since. I'll just write down his number on this bag."

She thanked him again, then handed him a flashlight. In the dim light, he used the circle of radiant energy to find a copy of Some Tame Gazelle, and took it to the register with a grin. "I've been looking for this," he said.

The eyes darkened again, but she was self-possessed enough to avoid a double-take. "For your wife?"

"No, she reads those deep novels, you know, characters who are flawed and struggling to accept themselves, then they move to Italy and start up a solar energy consortium or something. I just like stories, where people make good of a mixed bag."

Back at the office, he unpacked the white paper bag and took out the book. A card fell out: "Blue Bell Books, 'adventures in reading,' Agnes Schultze, proprietor." For reasons unknown to him, he stuck it in his wallet.

Thinking of books, he recalled the clue -- one of those isolated events that in a diagnostic sense, indicated something in motion which was out of the ordinary -- he had seen this morning. His wife left for work with the dawn, and always packed her bag the night before. Usually it had four teacher's guides for her four classes, but he noticed only three. The English, History, and Philosophy books were there, but not the Social Studies guide. Knowing that a single fact rarely told a whole story, he waited, and it remained the same the whole week.

He stopped by the school on his way downtown for a plat from the Office of Property Records. Maureen, the receptionist, greeted him with a smile. "Looking for Dana?"

"Yep," he said, grinning back. "Was going to see if she wanted to do lunch."

"Well, you just missed her."

"Isn't it early for lunch?" asked Travis.

"True that," said Maureen. "She didn't tell you? She's head of the department of English now, so she's no longer teaching social studies. She has a free period before lunch now, and after lunch, she takes departmental issues. That means she's only teaching three classes, lucky duck," she said, whispering the last part.

"I guess I'll catch her later," said Travis.

Suspicion did not enter his heart, but like all good engineers, which is a small subset of all engineers, Travis liked mysteries. He was the kid who would have pulled on the rope snaking out under the circus tent, mixed the unmarked chemicals in the basement, or oiled up his dirt bike so he could jump faster over the heap of clay behind the Buchanan house (old Tom retired out here after finding his wife, Daisy, cheating on him with some city slicker from Minnesota, and had a fierce temper and a more vicious backhand, so they feared him, but hated the thought of a bike jump like that going unchallenged even more). It was probably amazing that he had survived this long, but he shrugged that off with a grin when the thought rose effervescent to the front of his consciousness. He parked his truck around the corner, took out a baseball cap he won in a company lottery two seasons ago, and slouched while reading a "field guide" in the shadow of the doorway of a closed business across the road. After an hour and a half, his patience was rewarded when a white Volvo chattered into the parking lot, its battered sides and loose belt proclaiming virtuous poverty, and his wife and a man got out.

Travis gave the man a good look. He was tall but thin, with watery eyes and bright orange-blonde hair. His hands moved constantly as he talked. He carried a book, probably a novel by the size, and wore big outdoors shoes, faded jeans, and a threadbare-looking thin short-sleeve button-down shirt over a strikingly white undershirt. His hands sometimes paused to push his glasses back on his nose, and his hairline while slightly receding must have originally come low over his eyes. Travis, who was by nature inclined to accept everyone as they were and judge them on their works not appearance, saw what looked like the typical teacher here: a semi-martyr to his cause, relishing the goodwill that it got him, yet always aspiring for more, possibly through the writing of books like Dana liked, with lots of introspection that flowered into a symphony of self-expression.

So far, nothing unusual here; lunch with a coworker. But Travis was attentive to details. His wife seemed to be fully paying attention to everything the man said and then, just as Travis turned to leave, she put her hand on the back of the man's arm just below the shoulder. The afternoon grew cold then. He knew this gesture; she would touch him this way when they cuddled in bed, or at least used to, since that had not happened for some time. As often happens, the errant detail became the final piece of a puzzle, yet he could not see the puzzle right now. Travis knew that he would have to debug this situation further to figure out what was at hand.

He called the office, feigned a stomach flu, and took the afternoon off. The department secretary, Marcus, one of the most masculine men he had known despite a rumored preference for the romantic company of other masculine men, asked him bluntly if he needed a few days.

"Not... yet," Travis said.

"I can clear out the next few days if you need. I hope everything gets better, man," said Marcus, and signed off.

This led to him perching in the garage apartment of a family friend later that afternoon, looking into a condominium where he could clearly see his wife doing the nasty with the pasty little man from the school. Back at the house he shared with his wife and kids (Candace, six, and Robert, four) Travis sat through dinner, claimed to be working late, and then in the deepest shadow of the night began his forensic examination. Starting just inside the front door, he inspected every object no matter how familiar or insignificant, running his hands down the backs of furniture and looking in the spaces behind drawers. He felt ridiculous, since that was the kind of intrigue he expected from a spy novel, but he also wanted to -- as his mentor would have said -- cast an unbroken net, and catch anything and everything. It took him the rest of the afternoon, but he hit pay dirt.

• In the closet above the stove, behind the blenders and popcorn air popper and other appliances, he found an opened package of brown paper bags. Puzzled, he checked the bottom drawer next to the sink; the stack they used for lunches for the kids at daycare and school were still there, also opened, and only a quarter depleted. Why a second batch of bags? his mind asked. He chalked it up to the duality of the human mind: when you want to keep something secret, but not sully something innocent like a school lunch. He sighed and moved on.
• In the back of the hall closet where they kept sheets, blankets, and seasonal wear for the few weeks of winter that hit this close to the equator, he found an old-looking grocery bag. Normally, he would have passed this over, but the root of science is a systematic approach with testing, so he tested it by opening it. Out fell what women call lingerie, lacy panties, matching bras, slinky pantyhose, and some kind of choker, a necklace made of lace. The sinking feeling in his stomach gained some weight.
• In the cabinet by the back door, stuffed into a cannister that had once held rose fertilizer, a packet of birth control pills, several removed, and a few strips of packets of condoms. Oddly he had no reaction to this, having seen the outline of the puzzle in his mind; this piece merely fit in with the others, since they used the rhythm method during their ongoing debate about having another child, Travis in favor, Dana unwilling to state opposition but clearly unenthusiastic.
• In the back of the garage, at the back of the large plastic container market CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS, a cellular phone from an off-brand, obviously a "burner" or prepaid cellular phone, probably from one of the dubious little stores near South Central High School. This brought out another sigh, since at this point he expected not just the shape of the puzzle but the image it would reveal, and all was coming into focus.

He took the phone upstairs and connected it to his computer; he could read the entire contents of its chip like a hard drive. From experience, he knew where to find the files that contained the databases that held her email, social media, and text messages. Databases are logical constructions; in a file, they look like gibberish until broken out into records, and he was able to write up a couple of quick Python scripts to extract text and email messages. Social media was an unknown format, but he was able to extract a name and look up her alternate profile, "Linda Carter," who seemed to be quite a partier. The text messages held no surprises, nor did the emails.

Linda: today?

T-dog: fourth period

Linda: wear something special?

T-dog: peach set, no rings

A normal man would have barfed. He would have raged, called his wife a fucking whore, threatened to beat her lover, possibly even wired the 6V output of his Volvo breaklights to a solar ignitor inserted where the gas tank met the gasoline feed. He would have cried, gotten drunk, lived in a motel, urinated on her dainties, maybe even taken a huge peanut butter dump on her desk with a little flag that says CHEATER stuck into it. However, Travis was not a normal man, mainly because he had lived large, and been acquainted with tragedy. His parents divorcing, a good friend who suicided, a girl he had been infatuated with who died in a single-car alcohol-related accident, a few coworkers crushed or maimed by large equipment. For Travis, life was about what we could do with despite its flaws, not the darkness that crept in everywhere eventually, and this had blinded him to his wife's weakness. For her, life was about tragedy and trying to stem the tide, not rise above it. And fall she had, he reflected.

From: Linda Carter

To: Timothy Flannigan

Subject: Wednesday

There will be an awards ceremony for the students who are most improved this semester. It is important to me that you be there. Most of these kids come from the most "at risk" homes in our area, and have with some tutoring been able to raise themselves to passing averages or above. I need you to tell others to come as well. It is at lunch in the gymnasium, and our local sponsor Heartmake Hotel will be providing catering and awards.

Thursday of course is teacher in-service, but we have nothing planned for the afternoon. Want to make our usual rendezvous? My socially-designated owner is on another one of his trips to make money for large corporations who exploit their third-world labor forces. Your socially-designed owner will be halfway through a box of rosé. I'll wear the matching set you like, the one with the patriarchal lace.

Most men would have cried out to the deities they hoped rather than believed were watching over them, guzzled Jack Daniels (a terrible whiskey, the liquor equivalent of soda pop) until they vomited, then punched walls and blamed their wives. To Travis, however, what was unfolding before his eyes was merely a system disintegrating. Somehow the parts were not working. This could be temporal, like too little oil or too much grit in the substrate, or permanent, such as incompatible parts or metal fatigue. He needed to find out what went wrong and how. Until then, he needed to keep the system stable as long as possible, if for nothing else to maximize his options going forward.

The next day the children went from school to daycare to home at a half-hour after he got off work, and since he was usually home first, he made dinner, which was usually simple -- sketty, hamburgers, boiled chicken salad, tacos, pitas, chicken melts -- and got everyone settled down to amuse themselves before bed. They usually took a walk together to "look at things," which meant they took a slightly different path every day for a half hour, and he would ask the children what they saw.

"It's a new house," said Candace.

"Uh-huh," said Travis. "How do you know?"

"Boards," said Robert. "A skeleton!"

Candace rolled her eyes. "That's a framework," she said, triumphantly.

"New word," said Travis. "Good. Skeleton works too. What does this tell us?"

"Someone new moving in!" said Robert.

"The old house is gone," said Candace. "Why?"

"I don't know," said Travis. "Could be they are just making a new better one. What do you see in that tree?"

"Nothing," said Robert.

"Nest!" said Candance. She took Robert's little finger and pointed it to a dark spot in the crux of a branch.

"Let's see if we can see the bird," said Travis. They waited until a robin appeared, carrying something icky, and then went home after it settled in.

Back at the house, he started up on the deck again while trying to shake exhaustion from his head, having a couple hours until darkness. He had planned for a platform the length of the house, starting unreasonably high but descending in tiers, so that the top level would be invisible to the neighbors, but the bottom two would be an inviting area for the children and their friends to play. He had sunk the posts and was building out the frame while the boards he had scavenged from the torn-down house his children had seen were aging in the sun under several layers of lemon oil and tea tree oil. In another couple weeks, they would be ready; he already had them measured and cut.

Thinking in the back of his mind as he sanded and prepped posts for their coats of primer, paint, and sealant, Travis came to a few realizations:

1. His position could not get any worse. Based on the emails and texts, his wife was leading a double life. She could repeat the act, sure, but the messages went back over a year. Come to think of it, she had not had any teacher in-service days that he knew about then, and she had stopped calling him for lunch when she knew he was in town. He could have whacked himself with a board, but having a full life often means not noticing the everyday when it changes a little bit.
2. She had no idea that he knew. This was perhaps the advantage in not confronting her, drinking to oblivion, or punching out walls. He was now the person in power because he was the leading force making decisions to which she had to respond. Or at least, he could be, and get out of the position of passively adjusting to the new reality.
3. He loved her but it did not matter. As his mother said, "it takes two to love." His feelings could now be described as "infatuation," since she clearly did not love him, as her actions (and words) demonstrated. She had left the family, whether she knew it or not, because in her heart or mind or soul or wherever people make choices, she had decided that she needed something else more than she was afraid of losing what she had. This brought about a heavy sigh, but then the cold feeling dissipated as he realized that this was something that had occurred in the past. No point struggling against what is now part of the world and out of his control.
4. He believed in God. This took him by surprise. "What the fuck?" uttered Travis. But since he was searching his heart, he found something there: a sustaining, nurturing, and encouraging force that always wanted the good to rise. Some think God is blind, he reflected, but really, God has no time for those who like in the Garden of Eden choose a path away from the good. They have become like old fads, ground down under the wheel of time, and now we look back on acid-washed jeans, teased hair, and jelly shoes and think, again, "What the fuck?" In all of his engineering, he had seen the beauty and genius of God. He would never want to join a church like the one that his parents had attended, nor could he ever believe that words written by man were literal truth. But in his deepest heart, he was sure of the beauty of life and God, and he wanted to reach for that, past the sadness of her doomed affair.
5. Her affair was doomed. Love grows with familiarity, but that means the everyday events like changing diapers, buying furniture, cooking meals, and listening to the fears of your partner or children even if they seem trivial and removed from your world. Flannigan fit a type that Travis recognized from college: clearly intelligent, but a critic of his world, not someone who would master it and push it toward goodness. Men like that had a substitute goodness, the symbolic act of "doing good" that substituted for having a good heart, sane mind, healthy soul, and a desire to improve oneself. Guys like Flannigan thought they were perfect, little gods among men, and turned their criticism outward, as well as their hopes. So did Dana. Over time, these hopes would be ground down by familiarity.
6. She would never know. Her attention was elsewhere, barely even on the kids at this point. He could sleep on the sofa in his office, claim he was working late, and most of all, stop being a husband to her. Any energy he expended on anything but deceiving her was at this point wasted energy. He did not want to hurt her, or drink yucky cough syrup tasting drivel like Jack Daniels, but she had made her choice and in his final act of love, he would honor it. She could not have both, and that was her error. He needed to give her the mushroom treatment -- keep her in the dark and feed her warm cowshit -- while he decided what he needed to do for his future and most importantly, that of his children.

Travis had built his mind around being too analytical to believe that his wife had been hit by a Martian Zombie Slut Ray that had turned her into some alien being. Rather, like oil under pressure in the layers of rock below his feet, she was being revealed and formed at the same time. Akin to most humans, she had been a bundle of potentials, and she chose some over the others, at which point those came to dominate her. She had chosen self-pity and self-worship, which are one and the same, since the first justifies the second, and instead of making her strengths grow, she had nurtured her weakeness: her misery, her anger, her frustration, her selfishness. He did not think that this was genetic; rather, it came from moral choices, and some make good ones and some bad, according to the whims of nature, science, or God, he supposed.