Nightmare Man (2 page)

“Jessie, I’d been asleep on that lumpy couch when you woke me up, throwing yourself around the room. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself. I didn’t stop outside the room and think through everything, because as far as I knew, you were about to injure yourself again. The point is, we can’t keep going like this. We need to sleep. I should be sleeping with you.”

She got me. Now I feel guilty, on top of everything else. “You want some coffee?”

“Hell no. I’m going back to bed after this.”

I shrug and take a sip. “We do sleep in the same bed.”

“I spend half the night on the couch.”

“You only need to spend a couple of hours on the couch. You could set an alarm.”

“I’m not going to set an alarm for midnight. I’d never get back to sleep. You know this.”

I do know this. I know all of this so well that I can see all the possible branches of the conversation exploding out like a schematic drawing. It’s like one of the choose-your-own-adventure books I read over and over again as a kid. I could take whatever path I wanted, make the story do whatever I wanted, as long as what I wanted was one of the options provided. The one thing I couldn’t do was create a new path. This argument has no new paths. We’ve discovered them all, then traversed them multiple times. Like those choose-your-own-adventure books, they share elements. Different lines converge at the same arguments, but then diverge again depending upon our responses.

I truly don’t understand why she made an effort to get up at 5:30 in the morning to have the same conversation we’ve had a hundred fucking times. I tend to only freak out for the first hour of sleep. Two at most. So I go to bed at around 10:00. Shannon only needs to stay awake until 11:00, and then if I’m sleeping okay, she can come to bed, too. But she never manages to stay awake that long. She always falls asleep watching the news, and then ends up spending half the night on the couch. Hell, sometimes she doesn’t make it to bed until 5:00, when I get her from the living room after waking up well-rested because she hasn’t spent the night crowding me and shoving the point of her elbow into my head.

I don’t mention that I prefer it when she sleeps on the couch. Instead I say, “So what do you suggest?” even though I know exactly what the next line in the script is.

“You need to talk to your doctor about your medication. We can’t go on like this.”

She’s been saying that for years, and yet we’d managed to go on.

“Clonazepam is the standard medication. There is no cure for night terrors, no treatment other than tranquilizers. Increasing the dose will just turn me into a benzo addict. My body will adjust and then one milligram will only manage to do what half a milligram was doing before, so then I’d take two, then three, then five, and the only difference would be that if I missed a dose, I’d have a seizure.”

“Then why are you taking anything? Because it’s not working.”

The paths diverge. I don’t know why I choose to take the worst, the rockiest, the most dangerous, the one ending with
You die. Try again.
I guess because I’m tired and angry, and I’m stuck in another feedback loop.

“We both know why it’s not working.”

“So change jobs! No one is stopping you.” The anger comes from guilt. I don’t care. She should feel guilty.

“I have a fucking fine arts—”

“Don’t curse at me.”

Deep breath.

“Shannon, I have a fine arts degree. I am qualified to illustrate. Or I was ten years ago. Nothing in that degree translates into any job that both pays well and isn’t horrible. I can have one or the other. I manage to get decent money because I work a job no one else wants to do, and we both know it. I didn’t flip out every night when I worked at ScanTech, but there’s only one way for me to get a lower-stress job, and that’s for money to come in from somewhere else.”

We both know she’s the potential “somewhere else.” The kids are finally both in school all day, and because we live in Colorado but I go into work at 6:00 in time to collect on the East Coast, I could pick up the kids after school and she could get a normal eight-to-five.

Her eyes, already red from sleep, get more red, then moist. In a moment, her shoulders will slump. Then the tears will overflow. Then I will get up and hug her and rub her back through her oversized Bugs Bunny T-shirt and feel terrible, and if she gets snot on my shirt, I’ll have to change it.

“I’m hungry!” Logan slides past her and sits at the table, facing me. I glance at the microwave clock. Who’s hungry at 5:45 in the morning?

Oh shit, 5:45.

“I gotta go, hun.” Her face is no longer twisting up like a wet rag set on dripping. I give her a kiss on the forehead to avoid the morning breath, then hand her my cup of coffee. It’s still half-full. “I guess you’re not going back to bed.”

I manage to get my back turned to her before a smile splits my face.

I’m putting on my jacket when she says, “I’m making an appointment for you.”

“Okay, sure.” If it makes her happy, and a doctor’s appointment means paid time away from work.

I step out into the brisk morning feeling vulnerable. It’s hard to explain, but I need my quiet time in the morning to put on my armor. I yawn. It’s going to be a very long day.

* * *

“Mr. Jones, do you like having someone else take care of your family? Don’t you want to man up and do the right thing? You need to pay your bills. Otherwise, those might as well be my kids. If this goes to court, it’ll ruin your credit. You won’t be able to send your kids to college. You won’t be able to buy them cars—”

“Okay, stop right there. What was your name again?”

“Carlton.”

“Carlton, you messed up this time. Last time, you people talked to my wife. She’s easily intimidated. But I know the law, and I just recorded you insulting me and threatening me, and now you’re not going to see a dime of that money, because if you call me again, I’m going to sue you.
Carlton
. Now, let me talk to your supervisor.”

I don’t get upset as I mute my headset and press the button that turns my light on. There’s no point. I just lean back in my chair and wait.

When Scott, the floor supervisor, comes around, I say, “He recorded me.”

“Shit. Okay, let me talk to him.”

Scott pulls up a second chair and jacks into my phone. I have to stay jacked in, but I don’t really listen. I’ve been at this way too long to learn anything from a floor supervisor. Hell, I’ve worked collections for twice as long as Scott. I’ve been offered the floor supervisor position a number of times. I don’t take it because it pays less and there’s no quarterly performance-based bonus. Almost every job in the company pays less, even if they’re technically higher up the ladder, because doing the actual collecting is so unpleasant they have to pay really well to keep anyone on the phones, the most necessary component of collecting.

“Well, we can write him off. Only a few hundred bucks, no biggie, but Jessie, you should have known you couldn’t push him around.”

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“He sounded smart. Like, educated. You want to take a break?”

We’re allowed a ten-minute break after a bad call, at the floor supervisor’s discretion.

“Yeah, I could use one. Thanks.”

Cubicles sprawl for a hundred yards in every direction. Not everyone works for Kirkland Collections—quite a few companies lease space in the call center—but everyone is working on the phone. That’s a lot of people hating their lives crammed into one lightless place. It could be Hell.

I make quite a few twists and turns before I see daylight. I have to put my shoulder into the side door to get it open, and then slip out before the wind manages to slam it shut on me. My dash to the smoking shelter is made easier by air pressing me along like a strong hand. In fact, if I hadn’t cut so sharply to the side, it would have been happy to carry me off. For a moment I stare in the direction it would have taken me. I look up into the gray sky and imagine tumbling away, so far and fast I can’t find my way back, and for a moment I can interpret the racing of my heart as excitement.

My nervous system refuses to acknowledge that I don’t care about any of the assholes from whom I collect. I don’t care what happens to them when I manage to wring the money from their bank accounts. I don’t care that it was probably a fifty-dollar charge they didn’t even remember, on some old credit card that didn’t get the word that they’d moved, so the bills stopped coming. One that collected interest until it was hundreds, and then was sold to my company just before expiring and being doubled in the transfer. My nerves still send my heart rate through the roof and my lungs gasping as if I’m a normal person who prefers that people not hate me, who doesn’t want to respond to a pleasant “Hello” with an attack, the telephonic equivalent of a dog hitting the fence when you’re strolling along a sidewalk enjoying the sun on your face. My nerves do not believe me when I say I’m made for this and offer my collection rate—one of the highest in the company—as proof. My heart still pounds in my neck so hard it hurts, and I still sip at the air shallowly as if a fat man sits on my chest holding a straw to my lips.

Instead of practicing my breathing techniques, I light a cigarette and stick it where the straw should be, naturally slowing my breathing into long, deep inhalations.

Then something smacks the Plexiglas behind me so hard I almost inhale the cigarette entirely. Spinning fast enough to stumble over my own feet, I see a young woman pressed to the glass by the gusting wind. Her face is turned sideways and smashed into flat planes, her lips smooshed away to the side. Her eye rolls and finds mine and her smooshed lips pull into a smile.

Leslie steps around the corner, and her hair and clothing suddenly fall limp like their puppeteer is taking a smoke break, too.

“Windy out there,” she says as she fishes in her bag for a cigarette. She slips it between her lips and I light it for her.

“Same thing happened to me. I thought about letting it take me.”

“Then who would I smoke and bitch with? Don’t let the wind blow you away until my design business takes off. Then you can go to Oz.”

“Deal. So, you have a bad call, too?” Leslie cold-calls people about changing their mobile phone service.

“Yeah. Oh, you didn’t mean bad like every single call is bad, but outstandingly bad? No, then. I just saw you out here and decided to take my break.”

“How the hell did you manage to get a cube by a window?”

“One of the perks of being an executive.” She isn’t an executive. “Put in your time, and you’ll get your patch of glass. Then you can stare outside and meditate every single minute on the fact that you’d rather be anywhere other than where you are.”

“Instead I’m dying of vitamin D deficiency. If I’d tried that stunt”—I gesture to the Plexiglas, where a phantom face still lingers in grease and makeup—“I’d have broken every bone in my body. Rickets.”

“Osteoporosis isn’t just a woman’s problem, once you get up there in years.” She smiles, and I return it, but that’s the one joke that stings. I can go on all day about how bad life sucks, but the fact that I’m running out of time to change it kills me. I hold a fake smile for as long as I can, like pulling at the corners of my mouth with string, but then I let it drop.

Leslie is only twenty-four. She’s been on the phones for less than two years as she’s tried to build up a clientele for her online graphic design business. That computer stuff was still optional when I was in school. A decade later and a visual artist can’t make it without computer skills. I only just decided to get email a few years ago.

“Did you see
Art 21
last night?” Leslie asks.
Art 21
is a PBS show about art in the twenty-first century.

“No, but I recorded it. The kids, you know. Philistines.”

“It’s a good one. You’ll have to tell me what you think. The theme was light and shadow. There was some cool-but-predictable fiber-optic art, but then this woman, Margot something-or-other, she works with shadows. Like, she had sculptures that looked like one thing, but then cast a shadow as something else. Like this one angel that threw the shadow of a devil. Real cool shit. I can’t even get my head around it. All her work is real technical. They showed her coding at a computer. And then she had this other art she called deep shadows. You know, it’s like, yeah, the light and shadow thing is a cool dynamic, the way they play off each other. The way they’re intertwined, but it’s been pretty thoroughly explored. This shadow-in-shadow thing she does, though, is intense. And these shadow holograms. I’d love to see her work in person. Apparently you can’t get the full effect on video, but it still looked pretty damn cool, these images coalescing in the blackness.”

I listen to her talk, really more to the lilt of her voice and infectious enthusiasm, and I watch her face, not totally beautiful in a traditional way, with her Roman nose, but it works for her.

But the shadow art brings her words out of the fog and into sharp, stereophonic fidelity. Because shadow-on-shadow brings back the nightmare man, from last night, from back as far as I can remember. The nightmare man has always been with me.

“How did she do it?”

“Well, she has different mediums. Literal shadow on shadow. Water. Smoke. Glass. Some sort of liquids. One has something to do with magnetic fields. She’s pretty secretive about her methods, though I don’t think I could have understood half of it if she’d explained it. I mean, holograms out of shadow? Still, I’m always surprised about how open the artists on the show usually are about the techniques they innovate to achieve their effects. I don’t know if they figure that knowing the craft isn’t the same as creating the art, or if they figure the worth of the art is in its novelty, so no one will bother stealing their techniques, and if they do, it won’t do them any good anyway, but…”