Thankfully, acquiring the Weeble had proven to be easier than Milo had first imagined. He expected that he might need to purchase the toy from eBay or a similar collectible website but was surprised to find them still available in the local Toys “R” Us. But it took two days for Milo to get to the store after verifying their availability online, since he and Christine had been together for every second of the day. Even after purchasing the toy (and six others just like it in case one wasn’t enough), it took another half a day before Milo could place it in the crack between the basement door and the frame, since explaining these actions to his wife would be even more difficult than the actual purchase of the toy. In the end, he had waited until she was in the shower before fulfilling this demand, and thankfully, one Weeble proved to be more than enough.
The sense of relief had been extraordinary.
Milo had been keeping secrets like these from his wife for far too long, and though revealing his secrets to Christine was not in the realm of possibility, the vacation from the lies and half-truths that their separation had afforded had been better than expected.
Christine, however, had not reacted with a similar enthusiasm.
When he arrived home on a Friday night and announced that he had signed a lease, expecting to be greeted with ironic appreciation, Christine’s reaction couldn’t have been more unexpected. “I didn’t mean for you to get an apartment! I was thinking about a couple weeks at Andy’s house! What the hell are you thinking?”
Milo stood dumbstruck in the kitchen, still dripping from the downpour outside, unsure if his wife was even telling the truth. When a wife asks a husband for space, and when she asks for it as many times as Christine had, Milo thought that she could only be requesting a trial separation. “Are you serious?” he shot back. “Are you really serious?”
“Of course I am! I never told you to sign a lease. What in God’s name are you thinking?”
Milo knew quite well what he had been thinking. He had been thinking about the dozens of requests for space and time apart from a wife who barely made an effort to speak to him anymore. He had been thinking about all the ways that he had tried to change the subject, ignore the request, appease Christine and otherwise dodge the topic altogether. He had been thinking about the fear and pain and uncertainty that came with each of Christine’s requests for space and how he had finally come to terms with her appeal.
But in all honesty, he had also been thinking about a break from the secrecy and lies that his inexplicable demands demanded. A vacation from the constant vigilance and need for preparation in order to ensure that his demands and their satisfaction remained hidden from his wife. A little time alone, so he could live in peace with his oddities while simultaneously fulfilling the wishes of his angry wife.
Milo had also been thinking about the hours of walking that he and Christine had been doing, the four months of loops through their neighborhood that had started following Christine’s outburst on the corner of Beachwood and Partridge. Rather than ending their run and hitting the shower, the two had continued to walk side by side since that fateful day, through what Milo had begun to think of as the Valley of the Shadow of Death of the Relationship.
Though the walking initially seemed like an opportunity for them to reconnect, the extended time that the couple spent together circling the neighborhood only served to enhance and expand a rift in their relationship that had probably been opening for longer than Milo had ever suspected. He had sensed this almost immediately and felt the strain that these walks were putting on the marriage, but to quit them would have been impossible. It would have meant admitting that the two of them were incapable of sustaining half an hour of conversation.
Instead, Milo attempted to fill the void between him and Christine with as much conversation as possible, while at the same time Christine seemed intent on perpetuating the silence, exposing the problem like the festering sore that she saw it to be. Milo would ask Christine about her day, and her responses would be short, abrupt, and she would fail to reciprocate with a similar question. Milo would then attempt to summarize his day as best he could, despite the lack of prompting. Christine’s purposeful disinterest became so palpable that Milo began slowing his rate of speech, pretending to search for words or phrases in order to prolong his stories. He began to set goals for himself: I will find a way to keep talking about work at least until we reach the corner of Garfield and East Mill Street, and only then can I mention the plans for Mother’s Day.
This cat-and-mouse game went on for more than four months. Eventually Milo developed additional strategies to combat the situation. He began creating lists of possible conversation topics while at work and would review the list on the way home. When this failed, he told stories about his childhood, seeking out visual reminders in the neighborhood to make the impetus of the stories more feasible.
“Hey, check out that crab apple tree. Did I ever tell you about the rotten apple fights that my cousin and I would get into behind my grandfather’s garage?”
And though the story might go on for three or four solid minutes, Christine’s purposeful lack of interest would eventually cause even these childhood tales to peter out prematurely.
Finally, Milo turned to the neighborhood for inspiration, commenting on the landscaping and overall appearance of homes in the area. It was as if he and Christine were playing chicken, waiting for the other to blink.
When Christine finally did, it wasn’t pretty.
“I’m not sure what my plan with Christine is,” Milo finally said to Edith. “I’ve never been separated before. I guess I’m just waiting to hear what the therapist says. He’s the expert, right?” After a sip of tea, more welcome than usual, and another insistent conflagration (They’re getting real close now, he thought), Milo added, “Do you have any suggestions?”
Though he sincerely desired Edith’s advice, conflagration made it almost impossible to focus on his client. The words were less than twenty seconds apart now, and he felt like his skin was beginning to crawl. Antsy is how his mother might have described the sensation racing through his body, but Milo thought that this word didn’t come close to the degree of restlessness and distraction and genuine pain that he was now feeling. It had begun as a headache, the feeling that his skull was being squeezed in a vise, but now it felt as if acupuncture needles were being inserted into his brain. Before long, his entire body would be drenched in sweat. Beads of perspiration were already forming on his forehead, and he could barely remain still. It took all his mental effort to remain seated in front of Edith, awaiting her response to his question, and even then he wondered how long he could maintain his composure.
Edith smiled. “Listen, Milo, I don’t know how this is going to turn out for you, but I know that you’re young enough to survive whatever happens. You’re still a young man. My husband, Ed Marchand, used to advise our son, and that’s just how he would say it. I advise you, Tony …”
Edith paused for a moment, longer than she was probably aware, and Milo knew by the look in her eyes that Edith was recalling something specific from her past, a treasured moment between a husband now dead and a son now absent.
“Anyway,” she finally said, “Ed would advise Tony to make all his mistakes before the age of thirty, because after that, they really start to mean something. So just think of this as a bump in a long road, my dear. You’re still young. You’ll be fine.”
Milo didn’t have the heart to tell his elderly friend that he had turned thirty-three in February.
chapter 3
When Milo pulled his moped into the driveway of Arthur Friedman, an ever-so-slight sense of relief washed over him. The ride to his client’s house had been a difficult one, and he was happy to still be in one piece. It had required all of his concentration just to keep the moped on the road. But if his plan worked, conflagration would soon be ousted from his head. The demand would at last be satisfied.
Arthur Friedman was one of Milo’s longest-standing clients, a
seventy-eight-year old Jewish lifelong bachelor whom Milo had met while working as a nurse in a nearby rehab hospital. He was also the only client who paid for Milo’s services without the assistance of a family member, hiring him just prior to Milo’s departure from the hospital, and for that reason, Milo was grateful to have him as a client.
There was no pretense with Arthur Friedman.
Milo chained his moped to a lamppost on the edge of the driveway and removed a small white paper bag from a nylon pouch behind the seat. Though he owned a car, he loved to take his moped out on days when his appointments were local enough to keep him off the highways, even in the middle of winter. He found the ride in the open air exhilarating and refreshing, despite Christine’s opinion on the matter. Ever since he had bought the machine at a garage sale three years ago, she had been coaxing him to get rid of it. “It’s dangerous,” she would complain, and for a while, Milo found her concern touching, until last year when she suggested that the couple use their tax refund to purchase Milo “a real motorcycle.”
“But how is that safer than my moped?” he had asked, genuinely confused.
“I dunno,” she said. “It’s bigger. It just seems safer.”
It took Milo a moment to put the pieces together, but he soon realized that his wife’s concern over his moped had nothing to do with safety. Christine was a woman who sent out thank-you cards the day that she received a gift, judged others on the promptness of their thank-you cards, and spent almost an hour each morning in front of the mirror. To her, image was important, and Milo tried not to begrudge her this sentiment. Image was also important to him, though he had never managed to master the right wardrobe, hairstyle, or mode of transportation. Instead, his focus remained on concealing those oddities that made him different from others, the demands that ruled his life, and for that reason, he didn’t see himself as being very different than his image-conscious wife.
But still, the idea that his moped might be undesirable or embarrassing did not sit well with him. Concern over demands like the one that conflagration was currently imposing on him was one thing. Unease about the image that a moped projected seemed entirely different.
Milo knocked on Arthur Friedman’s front door, waited for the man to shout “Come in!” and then walked through an entry-way that led to the kitchen.
Conflagration.
It was becoming even more insistent now, as if the traitorous corner of his brain from which these commands were issued knew how close Milo was to finally answering its call. This wasn’t the first time that the demands had grown more adamant and painful as the hour of reckoning drew near, but it never failed to unnerve him.
Though he knew that these demands emanated from somewhere in his own mind—he had been living with the condition since childhood—he couldn’t help but attribute them to some other force, one he often imagined as a German U-boat captain, on duty somewhere in his brain, gray uniform adorned with gold epaulets, standing ramrod straight, eyes pressed into a periscope, capable of watching Milo’s every move, just waiting to twist the valves and raise the levers that would increase the pressure of the demand at the appropriate moment.
It was difficult for Milo to pinpoint a single event in his past that might have initiated the odd requirements to which he was subjected. Even in elementary school, he had experienced the pressure, the pain, and the subsequent relief that he now felt as an adult, though the requirements had been different. The tying and untying of his shoelaces, the opening and closing of the latch on his Trapper Keeper, and the puncturing of a juice box with a straw at lunchtime (a demand that still struck him from time to time). And he could still remember the anxiety and stress associated with the days in which his mother had forgotten to pack a juice box or, worse, had packed a Capri-Sun drink bag in its place (a painfully inferior product in terms of straw-popping relief). He guessed that these inexplicable demands had been with him since birth to one degree or another, adapting and evolving as he grew older, but he did remember the first time they had created problems for him.
When Milo was eight years old, he had made the mistake of asking his friend Jimbo Powers if he could pop a few of the balloons at the end of Jimbo’s birthday party. The other children had already left, and Milo was waiting for his perpetually tardy mother to pick him up. The two had been playing Breakout on Jimbo’s brand-new Atari 5200 when Milo noticed the balloons in the corner and asked to pop them.
“Huh?” Jimbo had said, staring at them with obvious affection.
“I need to pop those balloons, Jimbo. You know. Pop them. Can I?”
When Jimbo said no, Milo persisted, telling his friend that they needed to be popped, that allowing them to slowly deflate would be unacceptable, and that only he, Milo Slade, could pop them and set things right. Reflecting back on the moment, Milo thought that he probably sounded a little feverish and manic in his request, because that was exactly how he had felt when contemplating the prospect of half a dozen balloons slowly deflating on their own.
Jimbo refused again, obviously confused, and perhaps a little frightened by Milo’s rationale and demeanor. “They’re my balloons, Milo. And it’s my birthday. I get to do whatever I want with them. My mom bought them for me.”
“I know,” said Milo, becoming inexplicably worried. “But I need to pop them. Maybe just one will be fine, but I need to. Okay?”
“No,” Jimbo said, rising from the sofa and taking up a position between Milo and the balloons. “Leave them alone.”
Jimbo’s mother had apparently heard snippets of their conversation. Seconds after Jimbo had taken his defensive stance, she had entered the living room and told Jimbo to give Milo one of his balloons. “You have plenty, honey. Let Milo take one home.”
Unaware of Milo’s intentions, Mrs. Powers was shocked to watch as Milo removed a red balloon from the bunch along the far wall, pulled it down to eye level by its ribbon, and pressed it against a three-foot-tall cactus plant beside the television. The cactus’s spikes pierced the balloon immediately, causing a loud pop, and though it had been satisfying, Milo instantly found himself in need of another.
“Why did you do that, Milo?” Jimbo’s mother asked. The confused, slightly alarmed look on her face was all that Milo needed to see to realize that what he had done was not normal. It was a slack-jawed, wide-eyed stare that made Milo no longer feel like an eight-year-old boy. In Mrs. Powers’s eyes, Milo had suddenly become something else, something slightly scarier, and he instantly wanted nothing more than to immediately return to his innocent eight-year-old boyhood status.
In that moment, as Jimbo and his mother stared in utter bewilderment, Milo felt like a monster.
This incident was followed by a noticeable absence of invitations to Jimbo’s home for the duration of the summer and eventually an end to their friendship as school resumed in the fall. In the classroom, on the playground, and in the cafeteria, Jimbo avoided all contact with his old friend, and within two weeks, Milo had gotten the message and stopped trying. And though Milo was certain that it was Jimbo’s decision to end the friendship, he was also certain that Jimbo’s mother wanted her son to keep as far away from Milo as possible. The look on her face that day, the expression of utter incomprehension, had stuck with Milo for all his life. It was this look that had first told Milo that he was not at all normal, and it had convinced Milo to keep his inexplicable needs to himself.
Milo found Arthur Friedman sitting at a small table, eating oatmeal and watching the local news. He turned down the volume on the television as Milo entered the room. “Did you bring them?” he barked.
“Of course,” Milo said, removing a prescription bottle from the paper bag. “But you’re going to wait until I leave before you use them.”
“Then get the hell out right now,” the old man barked again. Barking out orders was Arthur Friedman’s primary form of communication.
“Why? You got a date?” Milo asked, removing his helmet and placing it on the countertop. He knew that his client
was kidding, but he enjoyed playing along.
“That’s not funny, Milo. Not funny one bit. Making fun of an old guy who helps to pay your bills ain’t smart. And besides, look who’s talking. You don’t exactly have anything keeping you warm at night either.”
“Yeah, but at least I can still get it up.”
“So can I,” Arthur Friedman countered. “I just need a little help from my little blue friends.” Friedman gestured to the bottle that Milo had already placed alongside the platoon of prescriptions lining the backsplash of the sink.
When Milo had first filled Arthur Friedman’s Viagra prescription more than a year ago, he had tried to avoid discussing the medication with his client, delivering the bottle as nonchalantly as he did every other prescription. But he had known that the old guy would not permit the subject to go unexplored. Making Milo squirm was one of Arthur Friedman’s greatest sources of amusement.
“So I guess you’re wondering why an old guy like me might want Viagra?” he had finally asked, waiting just long enough for Milo to think that he might escape the visit without broaching the subject.
“Viagra? I hadn’t even noticed,” Milo lied.
“Bullshit, young man. You noticed. And I know you noticed. So don’t you want to know what’s up?” Arthur Friedman smiled, letting Milo know that the pun had not been unintended.