Twenty-one years before, a word like placebo would have already been careening throughout his brain, gaining volume and intensity without restraint. Part of the escalation, Milo had come to understand, was a result of his own fear that he would be unable to rid himself of the word. Anxiety and the strict secrecy that he maintained had fed the need, causing it to become more and more debilitating. But as Milo had found a means to alleviate each word, hundreds and perhaps thousands over the years, he had learned that the ability to remain confident and calm kept the demand temporarily at bay. Kept it manageable.
Loquacious had been anything but manageable.
By the end of the first day, loquacious was ruling Milo’s middle school life. He found it impossible to concentrate on anything else for any length of time, and even Dr. Who, his favorite television program of the time, could not provide an escape from its echoing call. His sleep that first night had been fitful and broken as his fear that the word might consume him grew exponentially. For a time, he considered speaking to his parents about the problem, but, having successfully hidden his other oddities from them for years, he wasn’t ready to let them in on this embarrassing secret.
His experience with Jimbo Powers and his mother had taught him better. There were parts of a person, of his person, at least, that were better left hidden, and from the moment that he had popped that red balloon up until loquacious entered his mind, he had managed to do so with surprising effectiveness. He wasn’t about to start embarrassing himself now by telling his parents about this word trapped in his head. No matter what, he would not give anyone else, especially his mother and father, the chance to view him as some kind of monster.
But by the third day, Milo was in a near panic. Though he knew it wouldn’t work, he had asked friends to repeat the word, not even bothering to create a backstory for the request. He had also written the word down on paper and asked Mrs. Allen to pronounce it for him, but still the word would not abate. He knew that the only way to rid himself of the word was to find a person who was speaking the word normally, as part of an unadulterated, uncontrived conversation, but that, he feared, might never happen.
Mr. Compopiano, Milo’s short, perpetually sarcastic English teacher, finally presented Milo with a possible solution.
On the third day of loquacious, Mr. Compo, who Milo had always liked and found amusing, had assigned his students the task of writing an essay about any member of their family. Though Milo loved writing and often achieved high marks in his English classes, he doubted that he could get fifty words down on paper before accidentally writing loquacious at least a dozen times. It had become that omnipresent in his mind. This thought had provided Milo with his solution. Or at least the possibility of a solution.
Milo immediately put pen to paper, writing about a make-believe uncle named Jeremiah who lived in the make-believe town of Creedance, Kentucky. Uncle Jeremiah was the pariah of the family (the rhyme not lost on Milo) because of his excessive need to talk, regardless of the circumstances.
Stifled by a mouth filled with peanut butter and jelly, Milo wrote, Jeremiah would still manage to squeeze in a word or two between each chew.
During a sermon on Christmas Eve, Jeremiah’s voice could be heard just beneath that of the minister.
Even while observing a moment of silence, Milo mused, Jeremiah would somehow find a way to get a few words in.
Throughout his essay, Milo did little more than describe Uncle Jeremiah’s obsessive need to talk, using the words chatty and talkative twenty-nine times in the first 250 words, twice separating the two adjectives by a single comma. Once he had filled the front and back of a lined sheet of notebook paper, he brought his unfinished draft to Mr. Compo for a critique.
As Mr. Compo had done for every previous writing conference, he read the entire piece through once before saying a word. “I must gauge the piece in its entirety,” he would tell his students, who would be asked to sit on a short stool beside his desk, waiting for the would-be editor to finish. After reading, he would then sit quietly for up to a minute before speaking. That day was no different.
“Well, Milo,” he finally began. “Your Uncle Jeremiah is quite an interesting guy.”
“Yup,” Milo agreed. “He talks a lot. Wicked chatty.”
“Yes, I certainly got that from your essay. But isn’t there more that you could say about your uncle? Other than his chattiness?”
“Yeah, and I still might, but that’s the one thing that makes him unique. He’s really talkative, Mr. Compo. And chatty too.”
“Sure,” Mr. Compo said. “But I think you might want to dig a little deeper for this essay. Show us other parts of his character. A man isn’t made from a single part. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yup,” Milo answered, feeling a surge of both anxiety and anticipation rise up in him. If his plan was to succeed, it would happen in any moment, and he could barely contain himself. He felt flush with excitement. His feet tapped involuntarily on the tiles beneath him, and his hands were folded tightly in his lap in order to minimize their trembling. If it was going to happen, it would happen now. Milo knew this in his heart.
“Now, as for the nitty-gritty …”
This is it, Milo had thought. My chance. Please. Please, let it be my chance. And at the same time, he wondered if the wait might have been worth it—if the enormous relief that he was about to experience was worth the three days of agonizing and distraction and worry. As foolish as it seemed, he thought it might be.
Mr. Compopiano was a fanatic when it came to increasing a student’s vocabulary and believed in passing new words on to his class at every opportunity. Each week he assigned his students twenty new vocabulary words, each more archaic and multisyllabic than the last. Students were required to memorize the spelling and definition of each word for a quiz on Friday. Milo would not have been surprised to discover that loquacious had been on one of those lists, though he didn’t remember ever studying it. “The greater your vocabulary,” Mr. Compo routinely said, “the greater your ability to communicate.”
Milo also suspected that Mr. Compo enjoyed using large and unusual words, and that he took great pride in hearing his students use them as well. As he finished critiquing a story or essay, he would routinely affix a Post-it note to the piece and begin a list of editing suggestions. Though this process often included suggestions related to punctuation and sentence structure, it invariably included a list of new vocabulary that the writer might consider adding to his or her piece.
Sometimes a writer would leave Mr. Compo’s desk with a dozen Post-it notes covering his or her paper. If only Milo could be so lucky this time.
As many times as he used them, Milo had no doubt that Mr. Compo would provide alternatives for chatty and talkative. He just hoped that loquacious would be one of them.
“Obviously you didn’t reread your piece, Milo,” Mr. Compo began. “Or else you would’ve noticed that you used words like talkative quite a bit. I mean, they’re all over the page.”
“Yeah, I was so anxious to have you read the piece that I didn’t really do any editing yet.”
“Well, you could start by limiting the repetition in the piece and making some better word choices.”
And then it happened. Like a thousand juice boxes punctured at once, loquacious burst forth from the lips of Marvin Compopiano, three syllables spoken at an ordinary volume but echoing vociferously in Milo’s head. In that moment, all the tension and pressure of three days of agony were released. Milo’s muscles instantly relaxed, his jaw, which he hadn’t even realized was clenched, went slack, and his mind suddenly felt open, clear, and uncluttered for the first time in days. Most of the relief was the result of the actual word, but Milo also felt a small degree of pleasure and satisfaction with his plan coming together.
“Loquacious might be an excellent word choice for this piece, Milo. Have you ever heard it before?” Mr. Compo said, and in Milo’s mind, angels sang.
There was no telling how l
ong Milo sat beside his teacher, silent and unmoving, reveling in the moment, before Mr. Compo finally broke the silence.
“Milo? Are you all right?”
He was.
In fact, Milo was great. Better than he had been in days. Though there would be many words after loquacious, and for years, each of these words would carry a burden of anxiety and pressure that would weigh greatly on him, Milo could always look back on that first word and the challenges that it had presented and know that relief was possible.
After years of facing the challenge of words like loquacious, Milo had learned to manage their demands well. Though they were still accompanied by pressure, distraction, pain, and occasional anxiety depending on the difficulty of the word, he was usually able to remain composed and focused in the face of their monotonous calls.
And Milo was now beginning to understand how this ability to maintain a secret life might have doomed his marriage from the start. In many ways, he had lived through his three years of marriage on the edge, fearful that the wrong decision might cause him to lose Christine forever. For much of his life, beginning years ago with his teenage resignation to prostitutes in Chinatown, Milo had assumed that his future would be a solitary one. His inexplicable, indescribable demands, coupled with his nervousness around women and his garden-variety oddities, made the possibility of a long-term girlfriend, let alone a wife, incomprehensible. So when Christine, a fledgling attorney at a large practice in downtown Hartford, continued to show interest in him after three dates, Milo could hardly believe his good fortune, and so he did everything in his power to foster the relationship: flowers once a week, candlelit dinners at the finest restaurants in town, and the concealment of every quirk and idiosyncrasy in his formidable arsenal. He hid the bowling, the jelly jars, the ice cubes, the karaoke, and every other demand that his inner submariner placed upon him, rapidly building coping strategies to accommodate the new person in his life.
And thanks to Christine’s presence, these coping strategies became more refined and easier to employ over the years. Simply put, her presence had required him to establish a life of subterfuge and quasi independence. By setting his own schedule, he could easily find thirty minutes in a day to sing karaoke, bowl a strike, or smash a Weeble. And when new demands arouse, these were also more easily managed. For example, Milo recently found himself needing to peel off half a dozen price tags from books at Borders Books and Music, a surprisingly persistent demand that had begun after finding several books during his move with the price tags still affixed. The removal of those tags from the books he already owned had been unexpectedly satisfying, the adhesive peeling off cleanly and with relative ease, but the need to remove more tags three days later had caught Milo off guard. Initially he considered purchasing books in order to satisfy the demand but realized upon entering the store that he could simply find a section unoccupied by customers and peel off as many price tags as he wanted. During his first visit, he found himself in the religion section, relieving fourteen King James Bibles of their $119.95 price tags.
Even though he wasn’t a religious man, charging that much for Bibles seemed ludicrous to Milo. And rather than removing the tags from the store or stuffing them in a shelf, he layered them, one atop another, onto a fifteenth Bible, trying to limit his negative impact on the store.
This had taken place on a Tuesday afternoon, something that would have been impossible had he still been working at the hospital. As a result of his career shift and newfound scheduling freedom, the levels of stress and tension in Milo’s life had reduced dramatically. Living with Christine had also taught him the value of preparedness and forethought, since his ability to leave the home at any hour without explanation was impossible once he and Christine decided to cohabitate.
Most important, in living with and marrying Christine, Milo had developed a degree of control over his demands that had not existed when he was younger. A year before meeting Christine, the idea of waiting twenty-four hours or more to visit the bowling alley after the demand for a strike lit up in his mind would have been unthinkable. But being forced to put these demands off for a time, even if doing so caused their intensity to increase, had allowed Milo to build the stamina required to hold back their surge. He could now go to sleep in a hotel room in Maryland with a word like placebo still ringing in his head, knowing that the next twenty-four hours would be difficult if he found no way to relieve himself of the word, but they would not be unbearable.
Thanks to Christine, Milo was now able to drive to North Carolina without much trepidation, knowing that his preparedness, his coping strategies, and his stamina would allow him to survive.
And it was this ability to better deal with his demands that had allowed him to move out in the first place, evacuating the insulating cushion of his home and routines when the opportunity had presented itself. The Milo of three years ago would have never responded to Christine’s demands for space. Reliant on routine, comfortable in a passionless but convenient marriage, and secure in the sanctity of his secrets, Milo would have fought like a dog to remain in his home and would have likely made greater efforts to meet Christine’s needs. But as he became better able to manage the demands placed on him, his need for Christine had waned.
Perhaps, Milo thought, he had been confusing need with love. As he lay in his hotel bed under the intermittent glow of passing headlights, Milo considered this for the first time and was surprised by the resonance of truth in the idea.
Had he loved Christine, or had he simply needed her? Needed someone to steady him, stabilize his life, and force him to adjust to the demands that had ruled his existence since that day with Jimbo Powers’s red balloon.
But there had been love, Milo knew. He had loved the idea of the marriage and all that it brought to his life, and he still did. It was this love that had him trying to resurrect his relationship with Christine, or perhaps, more accurately, to establish a relationship based on more than just need and dependence. Milo had needed Christine in order to feel normal and safe, but now he found himself in a hotel room, alone, with placebo blazing away in his mind like the crimson Vacancy sign outside the hotel. At any moment, the need to crush a Weeble or pop a straw into a juice box or peel a price tag could strike, and yet he was relatively relaxed.
At ease, even.
This would all soon change.
chapter 21
In the film My Cousin Vinny, Vincent Gambini and Mona Lisa Vito arrive in Beechum County, Alabama, to find the town set around a main square, with the courthouse, hotel, diner, and the rest of the town’s businesses all essentially positioned within view of one another, a slightly updated or seriously downgraded version of the town square in the Back to the Future films (depending on the film and Marty’s position on the space-time continuum). Though there are undoubtedly other parts of Beechum County that remain unseen in the film, a visitor to this fictitious town could conceivably park his car in the town square and walk for the duration of his stay. This is how Milo had envisioned Chisholm, North Carolina, population 4,833: a small southern town with a centralized square. But as it had with his road trip playlists, the real-life version of Milo’s cinematic imagination had proven to be quite different.
Though Chisholm had a Main Street populated with many of the town’s businesses, this street stretched for more than five miles from end to end, making a walk from the Kroger’s grocery store on the south end of town to the post office on the north end a lengthy trip. The entire town was larger and more spread out than Milo could have ever imagined, with more than a dozen restaurants, fast food joints, and diners along Main Street and its immediate vicinity. Milo’s vision of walking into the town’s only diner, chatting it up with the busty, redheaded waitress who knew everyone in the place by his or her first name, and determining the location of Tess Bryson with a couple of cleverly framed questions had all but disappeared.
Adding to the difficulty of the situation was time. Though he had hoped to arrive in Chisholm by noon, se
veral barriers had been placed in his way. The first had been Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Rising with the sun, Milo had moved quickly, hoping to get an early start. He showered, dressed, and packed his clothing and toiletries, all while listening to Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer juggle the incongruence of an interview with the secretary of defense alongside a story about a cat that had supposedly befriended a mouse in a West Virginia medical laboratory.
After a complimentary continental breakfast in the hotel lobby, he was on his way out the door, just after seven A.M., when he passed by a video rental kiosk near the hotel’s entrance. Displayed at eye level were six films, one of which was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a movie that held the same allure for Milo as episode 3 of the Star Wars prequels. It was the story of two bank robbers and their rise and fall from grace after seeming to tempt fate one too many times. Milo had seen the movie dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times, at first simply because he loved the film, despite its utterly bizarre musical sequence featuring B. J. Thomas singing “Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head.” But later on, Milo had found himself needing to watch the film, one of those insatiable demands linked to a hope, an expectation, that the end of the film, in which Butch and Sundance are gunned down by Bolivian law enforcement officials, might somehow change if he watched it often enough. Though Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had fallen off in terms of cinematic demands of late, replaced by films like episode 3 (Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith), Saving Private Ryan, Jaws, and Titanic (Climb on the goddamn door, Jack!), Milo was not surprised that his chance encounter with the DVD had reignited the demand.