Only silence comes back at you from the darkness. The
condemning sound of no sound at all.

        You already knew.

        You already knew that she’d be gone.

        Still, it hurts so fucking bad. It hurts to feel the
truth of the matter. The difference between knowing
something and experiencing something is vast and terrible,
and now that you’re experiencing this, your wife’s
departure, the black hole of her absence, you don’t know
what to do. There hasn’t been a night in the last ten years
that you haven’t felt her body next to you. That you
haven’t slept hearing the quiet sound of her breathing,
feeling the gentle rising and falling of her chest.

        And now this.

        And now she’s gone.

        You kick off your shoes and stumble toward the
bedroom, which is dark. All the lights are turned off. You
walk to the nightstand, and you turn on the lamp that sits
on top of it. It’s a dim light, and it barely illuminates
the corner of the room in which you’re standing, but it’s
enough.

        Slowly, you slip out of your pants and your shirt.

        Then, in just your underwear, old and threadbare like

        The space beside you feels incredibly empty.

        There is a dent in the mattress.

        A wife-shaped dent.

        You stroke the dent gently, missing her, wishing that
things were different, wishing you were someone other than
a miserable American loser, wishing she was here and you
could treat her right.

        But you’ve ruined it now.

        You’ve proved to her and to yourself that you’re not
even worthy of love. Hers or anybody else’s.

        Maybe that’s why your mother left.

        Maybe that’s why they all left.

        All the women in your life.

        Maybe they all left because in the end they saw that
you weren’t worth staying around for.

        You’re in the middle of another thought when the
bathroom door swings open.

        You sit up and look.

        There’s your wife. Her eyes are red and her face is
red and wet and she’s wearing her bathrobe and hugging
herself, and she looks straight at you and she sniffles,
and then she says in a very quiet voice,

        “I want you to sleep on the couch.”

        “You didn’t leave?”

        “Where am I gonna go?” she says.

        “Is that the only reason you didn’t leave?”

        “I never planned on leaving.”

        “I heard you on the phone,” you say.

        “What are you talking about?”

        “With Sally. I heard you on the phone.”

        “When?”

        “When you told her you were thinking of leaving.”

        “Oh,” she says.

        “I’ve just been waiting for it,” you say.

        “People say things,” she says, “that they don’t really
mean. People say things that they’re feeling in one moment,
but that don’t really mean anything.”

        “But it does mean something. If it didn’t I wouldn’t
be sleeping on the fucking couch tonight.”

        She sighs.

        She wipes at the tears on her face.

        She bites at her lip.

        “This isn’t what I wanted,” she says. “I’m sorry but
it’s -- this just isn’t what I wanted. Not ever. I don’t
know how I got here.”

        “I’m sorry,” you say.

        Then you walk out to the couch, and you lay down on
the couch, and you stare at the ceiling. There is a spider-
web of cracks in the ceiling caused by a dozen little
earthquakes over the years.

        There are always little earthquakes.

        It has been a long and a miserable night.

        The next several days you spend in a fog. You only
vaguely know what you’re doing. Driving down to Echo Park.
Sitting on a bench in front of the water. Not moving for
almost eight hours.

        After the first two nights you grow accustomed to
sleeping on the couch.

        It’s almost calming to listen to your wife rolling
around in the bedroom.

        When you sleep, you sleep very hard.

        The color of your dreams is black.

        When Sunday comes around and the alarm goes off, you
listen to your wife get out of bed. You listen to the soft
sound of her footsteps on the hardwood bedroom floor. You
listen as she pads to the bathroom. You listen to the sound
of her pee splashing into the toilet.

        You listen to the toilet flushing.

        You listen to the sound of her padding back in your
direction.

        Standing in the doorway, she looks at you. She is
wearing your blue bathrobe and holding herself, hugging
herself, and leaning against the doorway.

        “Are you,” she says, “gonna come to church with me?”

        You sit up on the couch, your fat white fishbelly
poking out from the tiny blanket under which you slept, and
you rub your face and yawn.

        “Do you want me to?”

        She nods.

        “I think I do.”

        “I hate church,” you say.

        “I don’t even think any of that shit they talk about
is true,” you say.

        “None of it makes any sense,” you say.

        Your wife nods again.

        “I know. I like the ritual, though, and I’d like you
to come with me.”

        “Okay,” you say.

        So you do. You get out of bed -- off the couch -- and
you shower and you get dressed, and you throw a tie around
your neck, and you get in the Celica next to your wife, and
you look over at how beautiful she is, and you think about
how you betrayed her by spraying your come all over some
bar whore’s face, and you wish you were Catholic, a real
Catholic with faith and everything, because then you could
go to confession, and you could get all this off your
chest, and say thirty thousand hail Marys or whatever is
they say, and you could be forgiven.

        Driving to church, in the silence between you and your
wife, you think about why people do this on Sundays, why
people put their faith in what is so patently ridiculous,
why you do it yourself even though you know it’s ridiculous.

        And it is.

        Yet, part of you believes it.

        Or at least, part of you holds out judgment.

        Part of you wants there to be a god up there, doing
his thing, mastering the world like a great puppeteer,
because that would mean that everything happens for a
reason.

        It would mean everything makes sense.

        “Baby?”

        You turn to look at your wife. “Um?”

        “How did we get here?”

        “We made a left on Lankershim.”

        “That’s not what I mean,” she says.

        “I know,” you say, “I know it’s not what you meant,
but I don’t have an answer. I just don’t know.”

        “Me neither,” she says.

        That’s all she says.

        That’s all she has to say.

        You punch the radio on, and some song from the Cure
comes on 103.1, and you listen to it, and it brings back a
time when you and your wife were happy, when you were young
and thin and happy and hopeful.

        Those days left like train, and now you can barely see them in the distance of your past.

        When you glance over at your wife, she looks sad, too.

        You turn off the radio with the push of a button and
let the silence seep in through the cracks in the car, and
you drive in silence the rest of the way to church.

        When you get there, you park, and your wife gets out,
and she walks toward the chipped-paint white building with
its creaking stairs and rotting cross on top, and you stand
back and watch her go.

        What you’re thinking about is not church or god or
religion at all, not anything spiritual; not about the
guilt you feel about what you did with that nameless (S or
B or K or T ) bar whore; suddenly, what you’re thinking
about is the way your wife looks as she’s walking away, and
whether she will look the same when she walks away for the
last time, or will she look somehow different, if only
because of the different circumstances?

        You sigh.

        She disappears into the church and the white door
closes silently shut behind her.

        You trudge toward the building, across the parking lot.

        “You got another one of them Chesterfields?”

        You smile without even turning around, reach into the
inside pocket of your jacket, and say,

        “Hi, Frank.”

        “Howdy.”

        And a couple beats later, the two of you are sitting
on the front steps, side by side, smoking, and Frank is
saying,

        “So how’d you handle it?”

        “Badly.”

        “Couldn’t have been too badly. You’re both here.”

        “No, we’re not.”

        “Oh. One of those.”

        “Yeah.”

        “Sorry to hear it.”

        “Sorry to be living it.”

        “It’s not as bad as you think,” Frank says.

        “No?”

        “You just have to win her back.”

        “I’ve been trying.”

        “That’s your problem,” Frank says.

        “How do you mean?”

        “To win her back you can’t try to win her back,” Frank
says. “That kinda stuff never works. Women feel manipulated
when you put obvious effort into such a goal.”

        “So what should I do?”

        “Try to make her happy,” Frank says.

        “I don’t know how.”

        “You did it once,” Frank says. “You can do it again.”

        You shrug.

        You take a drag off your cigarette.

        You sigh.

        Frank puts a hand on your shoulder, does a little man-
squeeze, and says,

        “You know the way to a woman’s heart?”

        “No,” you say.

        “The way to a woman’s heart,” Frank says, “is through
her chest.”

        You think,

        Maybe with a hatchet.

        But it’s just a passing thought.

        You are thirty-six years old. You are overweight. You
have never considered suicide, though now, at this stage in
your life, you’re not sure why. You like Johnny Cash’s
music. You were upset by his death.

        You wish you were somebody important, like Johnny.

        You wish people you had never met knew your name.

        You wish you had a nice body.

        You wish you had a good smile.

        You wish women thought you were attractive.

        You wish men thought you were attractive, as well;
though, you have never had the urge to be with a man.

        You wish you had been killed in a war, and were a
hero.

        You wish you’d had the chance to save someone’s life
at some point; though, you fear that had you been given
that chance you would have backed away from it and let him
die.

        You wish you could take beautiful photographs.

        You wish you had the nerve to kill a president, or at
least a famous politician. The man who killed George would
be a fucking hero. Maybe not, maybe the chaos created by
any famous politician’s assassination is too big a negative
for the thing as a whole to be good, even if the politician
is a shit, but still, but still…

        “Watch out!”

        You look up and a car is heading toward you and you
swerve to the right and hit a metal guard rail and your
Celica starts to drive right up it, and only two wheels are
on the asphalt, but then you manage to straighten out and
you ride right back down the guard-rail and you slam the
brakes and the Celica screeches to a stop.

        Your heart is pounding.

        You look over at your wife and she is pale.

        A dark spot is forming in her pants.

        “I’m sorry,” you say.

        “Fuck.”

        “I’m sorry.”

        “What the hell were you doing?”

        “I’m sorry.”

        “What’s the matter with you?”

        The way to a woman’s heart is through her chest.

        Maybe with a hatchet.

        You could keep her forever that way. Forever and ever and ever.
She would never go away. She would never walk away for the last time.

        If you paid a taxidermist enough, you could probably be
sure he would never contact the police. You’d have to do
some serious research, but it could be done.

        You’re sure it could be done.

        You rub your head.

        You can feel your heartbeat pounding in your temples.

        Looking over at your wife, you say, as sincerely as
possible, for the third time,

        “I’m sorry.”

        And you are.

        You’ve been sorry for a long fucking time.

        “I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. I just lost my
head, I guess.”

        “Just drive me home.”

        She doesn’t look at you when she says this.

        It makes you feel miserable. This moment, a microcosm
of your entire relationship.

        You’re too big a fuck up to do anything right.

        Maybe you should turn that hatchet on yourself.

        Maybe you will.

        After all, Tuesday is the day after tomorrow and you
haven’t even looked for a job.

        The truth is, you haven’t looked because you don’t
want a new job.

        You spent years at your last job and you were
miserable and your misery infected your wife like some
hideous virus.

        The thing to do is to use that hatchet properly. Chop
off the gangrenous, rotting deadweight that is your misery
and leave its bleeding corpse in the gutter by the side of
the road of life.

        If only you knew just where to chop.

        You love the woman sitting beside you, and you want
her happiness, but you know good and goddamn well that
she’ll never be happy if she stays with you and you’re not
happy. You know too that you can never be happy if she
leaves you. If she leaves you alone, your life is over.

        Look at what just the thought of her leaving has done
to you. Just the fucking thought.

        You need to cut off all this shit.

        That’s what you need to do.

        You need to cut off all the bullshit that is clinging
to you, pulling you down, and find the weightlessness of
your youth again.

        It’s the only way.

        If you can’t do that, someone might as well put a
bullet in your fucking head and slam your spongy brains
against a wall.

        That, too, you suppose, would end your misery.

        But you’d like to find a better way.