Everything Changes

phonetically in her thin, high voice while I bounce her on my knees. When I start to sing along with her, she says, “No Zap sing.”
    “Why not?”
    “Only Sophie.”
    “No fair,” I say, making a sad face.
    She laughs. “No fair,” she repeats gleefully. I can feel the laugh through her round belly, the way it spreads through her insides like running water, filling her.
    “I love you, Sophie,” I say.
    “No fair,” she says, and laughs again.

    I leave Sophie to her video and step back into the front hall. Tamara is sitting on the steps, wiping her nose with a tissue. “You going?” she says.
    “I guess so,” I say. “Can I still come by to see you guys?”
    She frowns. “No. Not for a while, I think.”
    “Well, can I call you?”
    “Zack, please,” she says, standing up. “I’m hanging on by a thread here. Don’t make it harder.”
    She steps forward and puts her arms around me, resting her head on my shoulder for a moment. It’s by far the saddest, lamest hug we’ve ever shared, a poor facsimile of a hug, at best. My fingers come up to disappear into her hair one last time. “I love you, Tamara,” I say. “Whatever that means to you, it means to you. But I know what it means to me.”
    For the briefest instant, her grip on me tightens, and then she stiffens again. When she pulls back, she’s crying again. “I’m sorry,” she says. She pulls my head down to kiss the center of my forehead. Then she whispers, “Now go.”

    That night, back in my apartment, I dream of the car crash again, of Rael hanging upside down as his life bleeds away, only this time I’m trapped as well, my unfeeling legs disappearing into the twisted wreckage of the engine. When I try to free myself, my legs twist off like torn licorice as I fall to the ground. The me in the dream seems to accept this horrifying development as a matter of fact, is poised and stoic, walking through the inverted car on my hands as if I’d been doing it for years. But at some point the dreaming me catches on and I wake up with a gasp, my hands falling instantly to my legs, confirming their solid presence beneath my covers, shaking perceptibly even as the dream recedes. I roll out of bed to walk around my bedroom, needing empirical evidence of nonmutilation, and wander downstairs to get a drink.

    This is what happens. You piss blood one day and it somehow makes you think that maybe your life isn’t taking shape the way it’s meant to and, at thirty-two years old, if you’re going to be making any changes, you had best make them quick. So you give it a whirl, and it’s like trying to make a ninety-degree turn in a speeding boat, and the whole thing just flips over, and you’re submerged in the frigid, churning waters, bobbing roughly in your own broken wake. And no matter which way you turn your desperate gaze, there’s absolutely no land in sight, which is strange, because you didn’t think you’d gone out that far to begin with.

Chapter 37
    A few days later, the sheer emptiness of my life is staggering, an emptiness that is not simply the absence of things but an actual, weighted thing all its own lodged somewhere behind my throat, where my spine meets my skull. There’s a certain type of person, a person with access to vast inner resources, who would view my situation as a grand opportunity, a chance to rebuild my life, bringing to bear all the wisdom from my past mistakes to create something vibrant and new, a streamlined life that will allow for only the most honest of relationships, the truest of motivations. I am not that guy. I’m more like the guy who makes it necessary to train lifeguards in the art of underwater self-defense, the guy who will thrash violently in his panic, unable to discern peril from salvation. I’ve got nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to see. I’ve become a cipher, and the only proof I have that I haven’t disappeared is that if I had, I probably wouldn’t be feeling this shitty.
    For the last three days, I’ve been alternately writing and deleting the opening pages of the screenplay that I am now pretty confident I will never write. I can see the movie in my head, the characters, the conflict, the story arc, and I can even construct funny and authentic dialogue, pages of it, actually. But I’m missing something vital, the binding ingredient that moves the story along, and my pages are like fully formed bones without the requisite sinew and tissue to hold them together,