In Heaven Everything is Fine

1.

It was June. He sat on the couch, bound firmly in his marriage, his fatherhood, his life. The dog sat next to him, or lay further down the couch on a small pillow. His youngest daughter dangled a small toy in front of the dog’s face, sort of mock-hypnotizing the dog with a growing excitement, a ferocity. No, not ferocity. It was simply a tiny bit more aggressive, and that was all.

He had yelled at the dog to stop eating different things, which he did at various times—as did the mother—throughout the day—and had become self-conscious about yelling at the dog. The mother was upstairs talking to somebody. There were several toys on the ground that the dog could eat, and chew, and play with all it wanted. There were others it could not. He often wondered about how impossible it must be for the dog to distinguish between toys it was allowed to play with and those it was not, but still he would yell and try to make it possible, to make it make sense.

A cup of coffee sat on his stomach, or the cup was there, but the coffee was now gone, and soon he would go into the kitchen to make another cup. He was intermittent fasting, so he drank more coffee than usual—this wasn’t entirely true, as he was largely incapable of ingesting caffeine without it becoming a fast addiction, something he felt compelled to push, and push. His ambition was to lose enough weight so that the several depressants he took could be more effective, which wasn’t a notion a physician had ever confirmed for him, though he found it sensible enough. He romanticized periods in his life when Effexor, the antidepressant he presently took primarily, with two other assistants and certain vitamins to increase their efficacy, had given him real purchase on happiness, and he was much fatter now than ever before.

He loved his dog very much, and felt pathetic when he would yell, or get frustrated, but that didn’t stop its happening, not completely.

All three of the kids were sitting, then, at the table, playing with their different toys. One of them played with slime, and with two pieces of a plastic egg, stretching the slime across the rounded points of the two pieces of egg, or lifting up one piece and coating it, kind of, with the slime. He could remember being young, and how such a thing would consume him completely, and how wonderful this felt. Now the plasticky things, the slimes, irked him slightly, though this in turn did make him feel pathetic and old. He was thirty-two.

Then he took the dog outside to use the bathroom, a phrasing he found wanting in basically every way, though he could not stop its automatic running across his consciousness. Here we are, he thought. The dog walked around the yard, and didn’t poop, and didn’t pee, and he thought then how nice it would be for his whole family to go out for lunch that day. It was Friday, and the sun was shining, and the sky was a nice bright blue, and the birds and the crickets were making lots of running humming sounds. They lived in Idaho, in a small university town, where they’d lived for eight years.

—❉—

Then he was sitting on a camping chair, near their chicken coop, and the larger chickens were being introduced to the three smaller chickens the family had purchased several months back. These smaller chickens were set up in the garage, in a small shelter the mother had made out of a kiddie pool and this enclosure, like a tent that wrapped pretty snugly around the pool. One of the chickens, named Mary, was bullying the three younger chickens, and so he tried to sort of rein in the bully chicken by talking to it, or using this windshield scraper to direct it towards another part of the coop. The mother had made the coop with her mother, when she’d visited a year or more ago. In things of this nature he wasn’t terribly adept, or even inclined, and yet perhaps more likely he was just lazy.

He could see the mother’s shadow in the door to their deck, so he waved at her, smiling. She waved back at him and blew him kisses.

It’s tempting to dwell on his ineptitude in domestic matters, to highlight the ways in which he felt and acted wrongly in response to his surrounding circumstances, but whether that’s worthwhile is difficult to say. Writing novels, he felt, was largely a negative enterprise, as it prides negativity, negating things, dwelling in the bad, or the opposing, rather than in any affirmation. He felt shame when something broke, or when he tried to do something around the house, and the mother would need to step in and rectify it, so he tried to do very little, or become more adept, though he still managed to break things or fail.

He’d watched a podcast on YouTube with two comedians, and one talked about how he would do things around the house. One comedian said he didn’t do things like that, and spoke in an envious way about the other comedian’s ability to do these things. This comedian said it was because he was a man. He felt connected to the lesser of the two comedians then, because he’d felt this before.

Once, at a friend’s house back in the Midwest, he’d been offered any drink he wanted from a fridge in the friend’s garage. He’d picked a flavored vitaminwater, because he enjoyed it. His friend laughed at him, picking simple water for himself. Prior to this, he’d felt really close to this person, and excited too to finally have what seemed to be a solid friend. Then, this happened, and he realized he could never be fully connected to this person, because this person now looked down on him for something that made his head work unnaturally, against its long-established tendency—his literal life.

So the mother had built the coop, and she’d done well at it, and thinking of this made him feel an endless warmth and fondness for the mother.

—❉—

Then they went to the Dollar Tree and he bought two large bottles of Coke Zero, two packs of Airheads gum, and a box of thirty envelopes. They stood, too, for a while, in the toy aisle, while the kids looked at different products. He put on a children’s ninja mask at one point and pretended he was a character in a video game he played with their eldest daughter. He saw a partially drunk bottle of Brisk Iced Tea in the aisle, and thought of all the times he’d seen things like this in different stores, and it felt terribly unrealistic how often he’d see the partly drunk trash of other people.

—❉—

Later on, he’d cut his hand while working in the chicken coop, and then walked down the alley behind their home, with the children, to look for snakes at this corner. There was a short wall of bricks, with a large white railing across its top, possibly to protect drivers from falling into this large dip behind it. In the summer, snakes moved between the bricks and they liked to try and spot them. The mother hated snakes. They were just these little garter snakes, and although the father knew there was a large part of him that feared the snakes too, he went on anyway. Since having children, he’d cultivated a kind of robotic mindset in certain situations, which meant he could do things he felt scared of bodily, physically, even if his brain didn’t want him to.

After watching several documentaries and listening to a podcast about the Golden State Killer, he’d felt terrified in their house, but one night when he thought he’d heard something downstairs he was still physically able to walk down and make loud sounds in case a murderer was there. Those kinds of domestic murderers got into his brain and he would walk around either very sad or very scared and uncomfortable, knowing these things. Often, after listening to hours of this material, or watching it, he’d say “Murder is wrong” to the mother, and try to let that be the end of it.

—❉—

He sat at the table with the kids while they ate Ritz crackers and goat cheese and tried to puzzle his way through something. It was hot outside so they went inside. Life up until this moment had been this very troublesome thing. How to get anywhere, how to put some money aside, how to really live, to really feel good, to really feel happy.

—❉—

His son picked up a balloon on a plastic stick he’d gotten at Red Robin when they were in Washington for his daughter’s appointment. They’d eaten quickly, and the restaurant had one of those screen modules you could use to pay for the food, so they got out of there quickly. The waitress had been nice. On the way out the kids would always grab the red balloons. In the car they’d swing them at each other until somebody said to stop it, and some of them inevitably made it home. His daughter drew a picture of one of his bottles of Coke Zero with a No sign drawn through it.

—❉—

“Not allowed!” she said.

“Why?” he said.

“I don’t like it,” she said, and although it made him anxious that she’d meant his drinking it at all—she did—he comforted himself that she meant she didn’t want to drink that stuff, and kept on working at his puzzling.

—❉—

He sat in one of the chairs they’d bought at the furniture store, drinking Coke Zero and thinking about vests, and wishing he were the kind of person who could wear certain clothes, like the clothes Michel Houellebecq sometimes wore. Everything was always outward for him. The way to dress was how someone else dressed. The way to write was how someone else wrote. The way to be was how someone on the internet seemed to be.

Their dog was chewing something on the floor. It sounded like it was made of plastic. It fell eventually from the dog’s mouth when it turned around, and he felt relieved to note it was only the dog’s chew stick. Not a stick so much as a bar. When it got small, it got scary—for him; the bar—like the dog might simply inhale it and choke. The mother knew how to soak the thing at that stage—the bar—then microwave it, and it puffed up like an airy off-brand Cheeto, though a nice brown, and the dog could pretty safely eat it then.

—❉—

He walked the dog around the yard in small circles, repeating “Go pee” after the dog had peed some inside, on a blanket. The dog mostly never peed inside, but that day it had, for some reason, so the mother had said to take the dog outside, which was more punitive, or educational, than anything else—the deed was already complete, the die already cast. He might’ve said “Go pee” to the dog in the tens of thousands of times, trying to get it to urinate quickly, so he might return to looking at his cellphone, though he also looked at his cellphone while walking the dog around the yard, so perhaps it was about control.

2.

Two weeks before, they’d been on vacation in Hawaii, which his mother paid for, as his semester had ended, and they didn’t see either of their families all that often. His family lived in the Midwest, for the most part, and hers on the East Coast, so they tried to arrange trips occasionally, to spend time together.

They’d stayed in a VRBO rental, in a condominium that belonged to a woman who thought of the rental as her “retirement plan.” They’d gone to Hawaii once before, when later-stage COVID opened up deals for travel, and things were passably healthy for a family to travel in masks with plenty of hand sanitizer and minimal-to-no human interaction. Costco had a deal they could afford, so they’d gone, and when a vacation was brought up with his mother they’d decided to return.

—❉—

He was bad on vacations, bad at the whole thing. Bad at shutting up the inner narration to simply be and enjoy something. Thankfully for him, the entire thing did not get organized around him, or his desires, or his interests, which meant he could more or less act the way he acted any place, but in paradise, and the moments wherein the children could enjoy themselves or the mother could breathe it all in became magnified. He liked to see himself how he perceived Norm, the fictional character in the film Fargo, who’s first shown groaning, rolling over in bed, and saying “I’ll fix you some eggs” to his tired, pregnant wife, and then goes walking, hawking up spit, to the kitchen—and later, too, when he brings her Arby’s, and later, still, when he achieves something through his art—these things matter to him.

—❉—

Being from the coast, her hopes in life seemed tied to the oceans, to water. They’d gone to Oregon during one recent summer and since then she’d felt this urge to move there, to get out of inland constancy and live someplace where time seemed changed. This longing could cause an agony. In her head these kinds of things, too, could keep her going, this thinking about something like that to pursue, to persist towards, a freedom, a way in which they all might feel comfortable and safe and free to walk into the water, or go searching for shells, or driving, or to curious little places to eat, or shop. These were sustaining, intermittently agonizing desires that people grow to hold onto when they start to settle down some—having children, getting a home, a mortgage, the desires become larger, and tend instead to loom, where in our previous lives the daily urges seemed to reign. The romanticism of youth gives way to more concrete, tangible things—we become humbled, we get humbled—which both the father and the mother can or could enjoy. Before this, they’d both been scattered, casting tendrils of want in every direction, hoping the thing that mattered might hold on and come back to guide them. Now they had certain things, or felt certain they were close, so scrolling through Zillow in her case, or looking at different sheds various writers had worked in on simple properties throughout history in his, became far more nourishing than the random, abstract dreams and urges they’d had before.

—❉—

In Hawaii they’d gone swimming with sea turtles, eaten all kinds of wonderful food, and spent the nights together on the balcony or exploring the area. He’d gotten pretty adept at parking the rented minivan in this tiny, cornered space in the garage they’d used, which made him proud. He’d felt like he was always waiting for something to arrive, this feeling. Usually his sense was it would be some bad thing, like life was going to present him with some horrific consequence for who he was. This made things hard, so on vacation when he really should’ve stopped to be present, he kept waiting, not for anything concrete and bad, but bad, and looming, just waiting, thinking something maybe was there, something had yet to happen—he wasn’t sure.

She, in her turn, was good at counterbalancing this, though through merely existing, offsetting somehow his presence and his general demeanor—he seldom smiled and unwittingly looked quite miserable often. She planned things, and she talked with his mother when he’d go quiet, and tried to ensure the kids were milking the vacation time for all they could, because she knew they’d be back home soon, back in Idaho, and they’d regret it if they didn’t even try to see what was out there. It made him feel pathetic to see these situations where a simple change in his demeanor could put the thing right. He’d try to do this and he didn’t fail every time. They enjoyed themselves, and it was only this occasional tension that could sour things, but he was aware of his and hence did act internally to overcome it, to move on, to change. He felt that whatever training one might receive in one’s early twenties for social life had been spent hiding in lonely rooms, watching TV. Now he was out in the world, and married, and a father, and a son, and the generosity it took to balance out his tendencies was something he tried to hold faster.

3.

They lived where they did in Idaho because of work. He’d received a master’s degree in Idaho, and worked nearby in Washington State thereafter. He taught writing at a university, and his master’s degree was in writing. He was thus similar to a great many people of his generation, who’d continued on in school, and who found themselves in the humanities, suddenly constantly justifying the work they seemed to be doing, and wanted too to do, both internally and externally, even though they questioned it themselves constantly—and he was in debt, and she was in debt.

Before that change in his life, he’d lived in his father’s basement while going to school. In this he felt ashamed, but never enough to leave and get a job and become something less shameful. He got his bachelor’s degree when he was twenty-four years old. This made him feel ashamed too, however he also felt proud to finish it, and by the end he’d realized that life within academia was somehow ideal for him, as he’d come to love it quite fully. He studied English and wanted to be a writer. He didn’t know exactly what that meant, or would mean, and what shape it might take. He loved writers, and artists, and watching films, and going to shows, and reading the things he really enjoyed. He loved, too, writing, and sending his writing places, and trying, and finishing manuscripts, and trying to share his work, and trying to grow, and taking courses where they read and discussed complicated things, and feeling as though he might understand something, and listening constantly to a wide range of music he perceived as complicated, as artful, as intellectual, and thinking about these things, and being angry, and being full. When he lived in Wisconsin, at his father’s place, he thought it might be over, though, after finishing his bachelor’s, and so near the end, he looked deeper into what this might be. No work anywhere, nothing much to do with a BA in English. He got hopeless and looked around for options. He had written some things, and published some small things here and there, things which now made his skin crawl.

—❉—

Universities established master’s programs in creative writing because people wanted to figure it out, to try something more seriously. Probably too the money. Probably too the anxiety, the American anxiety, and the Russians, but also simply probably because of inquiry, somewhere, and realizing it could work. He applied to a few of them with hope, because he was a hopeful person in reaction to the oppressing feeling of life. He applied late at night, getting more hopeful, getting excited. Sometimes he walked from this apartment he’d lived in occasionally with his mother, carrying his bag, which held a manuscript for a novel, and his computer, and he’d go to the library late at night, and work on it for hours, listening to music, and applying, and trying, and feeling real. He thought this was it, something was happening. This was going to be it, finally. He was really going to change his life. A writer then called him, a kind woman, a brilliant writer called him, and she told him he’d been admitted, and he walked around his father’s driveway in the sun, excited, excited, and told his father, and he felt real, like he did exist—and so he moved out to Idaho.

—❉—

Before he moved, in the summer, he’d met the mother. They worked at a camp for people with severe disabilities, through AmeriCorps, him just after finishing undergrad in December, and her nearly finished. He can’t remember how it all happened exactly, moment by moment, though the memories seem to clarify each day—he’d felt drawn to the mother. His romantic relationships prior to meeting the mother had been catastrophic, almost entirely because of his own tendency toward self-destruction, sabotage, and whatever else. When he’d met the mother, there seemed to be a clarity there too, like this was someone to keep close to him, and there was a real purity to their connection, though the early months and years of their relationship were still muddled by the ugliness he brought into most any interaction in his life, and he was still recovering each day.

She’d later say that she couldn’t believe someone so old was working there with them, that he’d looked like someone’s father. She was twenty-one, and he was twenty-four, and he looked much older than that, and always had. She found him funny, she said, and she liked him quickly, she said, and imagined marrying him very early on. Sometimes the endurance of a difficult circumstance can serve to clarify a connection that people seem to feel for one another. This is how it seemed to him. Though they were not working in a warzone, they were, each week, working with patients of a wide range of abilities and extremes, and sometimes this work was hellish, as their employers were not great at supporting them, and they were not amply trained for this situation, and thus the moments they were together seemed amplified by this, such that after even the first month of the summer, they were in love, and by the end of it, they were prepared to spend their lives together, they felt.

—❉—

He remembered lying in these kind-of-military beds they slept in during training, at camp, late at night, texting her, not knowing what this would become, that she would become his wife, but feeling excited about his life. He’d finished school, which had never been a guarantee, and had been accepted to a master’s program, and a kind of peace started to settle in all around him, which at times he recoiled against aggressively, hitting himself in the leg or being dumb or violent or angry or saying impulsive things. Something in her did seem to say to him, This is it, you need to not screw this up, as you’ve screwed up everything else, and this is it. He made a decision one day to trust this feeling, and told her how he felt, and she felt the same, and for the rest of that summer they were evading notice from their superiors—largely unsuccessfully—and attempting to do this impossible work, caring for young and old men and women, giving relief to caregivers who’d anxiously drop them off and come back variously tanned or sunburnt or tired a week later, like the whole world was returning, back to work.

That meeting could’ve been viewed as something insignificant, but there was something happening, which often enough was a sensation he’d try to run from. It’s easy to look at the events in one’s life and to trivialize them, very easy. He mostly trivialized things, possibly because of habit, or a tendency towards depression—either the chemical inability to process feelings in exactly the appropriate way excepting feelings that made him feel bad, or the ways in which this informed his general outlook, though both of these were so ongoing for so long in his life that they were now blurred. He tried to focus and to not trivialize this, however, because it seemed to be the time, and perhaps it even felt as though it were too late, like he were clawing his way back to something, an internal choice, that even if it were too late, he would now accept it, and would try to return to the living, to her, and continue to try to every day.

4.

In bed at night the two of them would either watch something together—which happened less—or look at different things on their phones until around midnight, when he’d go let the dog out one last time, and then they’d go to bed. This was an odd form of intimacy, of trust, that wasn’t really discussed anywhere ever. Sharing a bed with somebody and simply settling in, maybe working a bit, trying to get something done, and then the both of you falling asleep; and probably there had been times in their relationship when this was fretful, concerning, but lately things had slid into a kind of minor register, a hum, which had its benefits. It frustrated him sometimes that he couldn’t entirely understand, or hope to understand, how she felt about all of it, and possibly too it frustrated her that she couldn’t entirely understand how she felt about all of it, and somewhere too in this agreement, this misunderstanding, a version of comfort did offer itself that neither of them had experienced in other contexts. Marriage is many differing things every single day and night. Sometimes there would be laughter, either mild or the uncontrollable kind that erased the hardness at the edges of their lives. That night in particular it was simply a kind of settling, and nice, with her watching TV about religious cults or fantastical kinds of violence, and him idly working at something while watching these YouTube videos where people argued back and forth over and over again.

—❉—

Both of them struggled with elements of spirituality in their lives and in the lives of their children. They were homeschooling their children, which started with the pandemic, and had kept up because she’d found she’d really liked it. Before their oldest child had gone to school, he’d pushed for homeschooling in reaction to another person walking into an elementary school and murdering a lot of children, but practicality had reclaimed their conversations until the pandemic; and perhaps even a bit before that they’d been realizing the traditional model of schooling didn’t feel just right. It was more than this, for her. It had proven to be something deeply fulfilling, and when they both talked about their experiences growing up, and the world such as it was, it seemed to make more and more sense. Neither of them could recall much of anything from their public school educations, least of all moments of great happiness or comfort.

The internet was filled with people saying positive and negative things about every single thing in life, and parenting especially. People on the internet could make anything seem entirely insane, with little effort, and homeschooling was a fairly easy thing to dramatize and to make seem insane. They’d talk, though, about the people who talked about this time with their children flying by. You have children, and some events really register and mean a great deal, and then you’re filled with regret. What seemed clear to them was that part of this sensation, of life slipping by, of children aging too quickly, seemed tied to the contemporary approach to schooling and its varied ramifications. For eight or nine hours, for five days a week, the kids were off somewhere else. It seemed clear to them. So they didn’t need or seek any sort of ideological thing to compel them, it just seemed to make sense. And the social lives of their children, they figured, could be supported in other ways. They joined a group of homeschoolers, and did various forms of athletics, and things were going well.

The spiritual question came because they lived in a small place in Idaho, and thus resources for homeschoolers were often tethered to some kind of church. The community they lived in had also seen recent flare-ups with a larger church, which seemed unhealthy, so they’d go to various churches and hear murmurings about things, or he’d hear them in his work at the university, and neither of them felt particularly religious or anti-religious at this point in their lives, but they wanted to find something that could give community and support to their kids, to their family, without embroiling them in any kind of indoctrination that ran counter to their interior sense of the world.

He’d experienced draws toward a kind of spirituality, resulting maybe from joining AA at a young age, and changing. He went into the Catholic Church on campus once, in his hometown, this place he’d gone as a child—the same room, its pebbled floors and cold, slate walls—and seeing nobody there, he’d knelt, and touched his forehead to the floor, feeling the stone, and prayed, overwhelmed. Then, in his late teens and early twenties, he’d replaced drinking and drugs with sex and relationship addiction, and television especially, and had denounced AA and religiosity in its varied forms, and had spent much time alone, and miserable, and angry, and wondering ardently why this was so, and staying up late to wander or drive around the slow Midwestern night, howling or moaning or idly walking through the grocery store. He still struggled with aspects of his addictive nature, but had mentally reached a place of relative comfort, with religious thinking especially, or at the least spirituality. It seemed foolish to him, now, to act as if one could be certain of any one thing, perhaps especially the workings of the universe, and what’s more, he’d realized, he no longer cared to know large things. The idea of an event like the Big Bang seemed sort of silly, moronic, when he really thought about it, and he’d found in the place of the certainty authority figures seemed to have when he was young a kind of shrug, which solidified his disinterest like a dome enclosing a small cloud. Beyond this, the actual logical truth started to matter less to him, to her, as much as terms like “actual,” “logical,” and “truth” had lost their luster—things were constantly being proven, disproven, they’d observed, so if there happened to be people who found solace in prayer, in ritual, in some small sense of there being something greater than them, beyond them, in life, it seemed entirely reasonable to embrace this, perhaps even to pursue it. He thought, too, in his heart or his mind, that Søren Kierkegaard was significantly smarter than he could ever hope to be, and that Kierkegaard—not to mention Dostoevsky, Spinoza—worked at being faithful in their manner all their lives—he fixated on figures like this in finding his own reasoning—so it seemed reasonable to follow in their steps. AA, too, gave sense to this—I don’t know what God is, but I know it’s not me—and this comforted him.

She’d grown up attending church functions and the like, but not entirely being indoctrinated into anything—both of their fathers seemed to experience waves of occasional interest in religion, particularly Catholicism, and often around its notable holidays, but seldom extending much beyond these fragments of time. Both she and he believed naturally in a kind of fate at work in things, and their marriage seemed to support this idea. She’d spent time being angry, or anxious, or terribly sad about many aspects of life; when she was younger she remembered extreme discomfort when her family got sick, and praying alone in her room that she’d get sick instead. Having children brought out intense fears about all kinds of things, such that neither of them related to media the same anymore, and stories often could make them so uncomfortable they’d have to stop. Often the notion of prayer, or God, or the embrace of one’s history, or tradition, provided a context for this thinking, this spiraling tendency of mind, and reduced the sense of simply floating through the universe in perpetual chaos, which wasn’t the reality either of them had come to accept as “reality.” There were also benefits for the kids, they knew. She saw them playing, socializing with these other kids, and the benefits seemed obvious, the costs negligible in comparison with the countless other choices they might make. Perhaps if this were different it wouldn’t even be a conversation—they often talked about highly structured societies and cultures with vague fondness. If they did see their kids being warped by religion, and having their spirit zapped from them, as it might be in a conventional school context, then perhaps, but as it was they needed to try.

5.

They went to the farmers market in the small town in Idaho, and walked among the people they didn’t know, and some they did. The market ran from May to the end of October, and every Saturday it was filled with people. This is life, they thought. This is the entirety of life. The sun was out, the world in glorious blue, everyone moving, the street closed to cars, everything warm and exuding warmth. Young couples buying bread, buying things to cook up for dinner later in groups. The college students, the graduate students, the professors, the engineers, everyone. Buying little trinkets, or pictures, or various kinds of meat from local farms. Everybody converging on this place and this feeling like the day would last forever, and the slight tinge of stress that accompanied most journeys out into the world when you had children. It lessened with time, but then, say, he’d watch a video about a kidnapping, or she watched something about abusive parents, and their stress gave way to depression, frustration, paranoia, confusion. But they were safe that Saturday, so they observed the people, a woman playing the violin on the street corner, a woman playing music by rubbing the edges of bowls on the ground with watery fingertips. He wrapped an arm around her and held her, and she said, “Hello.”

—❉—

They left in time, and saw a helicopter up above, too close. It was landing nearby. They followed it to a parking lot by Safeway, unintentionally, and in staggered steps, first walking to their minivan, a gray Honda Odyssey they’d bought with insurance money after his father died, then driving slowly in its trail, toward their home. There was a small fair there devoted to safety. The helicopter landed in the lot. The paramedics and the fire department and the police were there to educate people and give away various things. Their youngest daughter got a bike helmet. The mother said it was always difficult to find helmets that fit because her head had a unique shape and size. The father’s head never fit in anything either. They walked around and the father and the mother started to sort of get angry at one another at some point, over nothing, over parking. Eventually she started to tickle his armpit and they made up.

—❉—

In the evening, as the air cooled, he made hot dogs on their grill on the back patio for dinner, and as he watched over them cook, he held his iPhone with headphones plugged into it and half-watched a documentary about Jeffrey Epstein. She stood at the counter and cut up strawberries to make jam the next day, and surprised him by cutting up onions for the hot dogs, which only he mainly liked. She got the plates ready for the kids, who played outside, and at one point in all of this she fixed a dessert to take down the street to this older couple who were already eating a dinner she’d made for them—they were sweet, and walked up and down their alley day to day, and the older woman taught their eldest daughter piano then.

They ate on the front lawn on this plasticky blanket with a fabric pattern on one side, and talked, or didn’t talk very much, and the father was quieter and a little bit frustrated without reason, and was looking forward to the “end” of the day, as this time didn’t feel quite like the end of the day for him. They kept their dog in its crate while they ate, and each had a piece of strawberry angel food cake for dessert, and their oldest started playing a game afterward on her Nintendo Switch, and everyone else slowly or quickly changed modes into the evening, when the mother would shower, and the kids would watch PBS Kids until it was time to rest.

—❉—

The father’s phone wasn’t charged, so he brought a book into the bathroom. He brought a collection of short stories by Scott Bradfield called Dream of the Wolf to read while he tried to use the bathroom. He didn’t much like to read collections of short stories, and had never had good luck reading anything but Scott Bradfield’s essays on other writers—in particular, those on Richard Stark, i.e., Donald Westlake—and unfortunately this book was no different. He hadn’t really noted how terrible his life in terms of using the bathroom had been, but being married and having children highlighted everything starkly. He took Metamucil when he remembered to, and this helped. He felt like an old man, which he liked very much. He’d smelled bad that day, and the mother had noted it, and he’d griped briefly like a child, and then decided it made sense to just shower. He’d read Bradfield’s essays and there might’ve been some indicator that this story collection could’ve been edited by Gordon Lish at Alfred A. Knopf, and these contributing factors made it seem like it might be perfect. The first story featured an epigraph, and this made the father think of stories he’d written where he’d used epigraphs, and it made him think of what he saw as the “pathetic experimental streak” his recent books had taken on, and it really put him off of the whole thing.

—❉—

That night the father read something about a podcaster being a Wellbutrin success story, and it got him thinking about his own medication and his weight and how he wanted to finally rectify these things. He was around 253 pounds. He was 6’2. He was a type one diabetic and 32 years old. He was obese, perhaps morbidly so. He took the maximum dose of Effexor, a lower dose of Amitriptyline, and several other medications, one of which was supposed to protect against the damage being done to his kidneys by his being unhealthy and diabetic—Lisinopril. He’d also recently been recommended a medication after taking a test that supposedly could help his antidepressant medication be more effective—it was a vitamin, L-methylfolate.

—❉—

In the father’s mind, losing the weight would mean that each of these medications could reach the height of their efficacy. It seemed sound enough. If you put chemicals into a ten-ounce cup of juice and the same amount of chemicals into a twenty-ounce cup of juice, the chemicals would surely be more dilute and stretched, or cut, in the latter than they would be in the former. So, presently, this was his motivation for trying intermittent fasting. Because he liked to eat a certain way, and it seemed like it wasn’t yet time for him to become a more reasonable, adult person, and eat healthy consistently, so if he did things this way he could optimize his body’s fat burning periods, and eat slightly stupidly, while hopefully losing weight, which in turn should increase the efficacy of the medications, he’d hoped—and all of this was based in what seemed the clear reality that the father wasn’t totally happy, and could be far happier, and could be more grateful, and could enjoy his life more.