May We Be Forgiven

says.
    “He was a patient?”
    “The medical director,” the lawyer says. As he’s speaking, the reception gets crackly, and then the connection crumbles out from under before becoming a void.
    “Hello?” I say. There is nothing. “Hello.”

    I t’s Monday, and I’m back at the house, the literal scene of the crime. I have this horrible sinking sensation; the house has some kind of force or electromagnetic charge, it’s an incredible weight taking me down.

    R eturning from the visit to George, as I approach the door, I lose power. I come in and cease to function. Like in Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, my bone marrow has turned to dust. I imagine being found days from now dead on the floor, my blood reduced to a fine green powder that pours on the floor like Lik-M-Aid when they inexplicably slit my wrist. Inexplicable because why would someone slit a person’s wrist? The cat will be sitting next to me, unfazed, cleaning herself, rubbing her eyes, licking. I imagine the men in the white suits trying to pick her up as a specimen of what survived.
    I am sitting on the floor weeping. What happened? What is happening now? I sit on the floor hating everything, hating myself most of all—that’s the truth of it, more than anything else I am so fucking disappointed in me . How’s that for the Me Generation coming to a crashing halt?
    It’s as though I’ve been waiting for my life to rev up and get going for years. Sometimes I thought I was making progress, getting closer; other times it was like I was simply waiting to be discovered—by who? Looking at myself, my half-spent life, I find it unbearable that this is where I have ended up. Is my life over? Did it ever begin?
    I have done nothing—or, more specifically, the one thing I have done, the one big thing of consequence, was essentially a crime that led to Jane’s murder. My accomplishment is as an adulterer, an accomplice to murder, like that’s something to be proud of. …
    My mind leaps to my theory about presidents—that there are two kinds, ones who have a lot of sex and the others who start wars. In short—and don’t quote me, because this is an incomplete expression of a more complex premise—I believe blow jobs prevent war.
    And I can’t help but wonder, did George want to kill me too? I have no doubt that the only thing that stopped him was narcissism—to kill me was also to kill some part of himself, which might also explain why Nate and Ashley survived.
    I urge myself to gather my green-and-blue Lik-M-Aid veins and leave the house and see what is outside. Things are only odd by comparison; in the absence of anything else, the odd can seem normal. My mind hops to John Ehrlichman, a Jew, a Christian Scientist, and the only figure from Watergate to serve jail time. Ehrlichman went to jail before his appeal process was completed. He offered himself up.
    Like a drunk who has stumbled into the wrong house, I go back outside, reminding myself that the prior weekend, Field Day with Nate, was good, it was filled with promise, hopes for the future—it was a thousand times better than the horrific visit with George.
    In the backyard, I open George’s garden cabinet and take out the trowel and split-fork weeder and get down on my hands and knees. It’s like a goddamned premature spring awakening. The yard is heavily planted, everything is thriving. I dig in the dirt. I think about my class this afternoon. I’ve told no one about being fired—who would I tell? What the hell kind of job could I get now? I’m digging, hurling clumps of weedy earth over my shoulder, and imagining the faces of my students, idiots who sit there waiting for me to spoon-feed it to them, waiting for me to inform them that there is such a thing as history and that it matters.

I crawl on my hands and knees, obsessively plucking errant growth, weed stumps, clover, various things that seed, blow, spread. I am diddling in the dirt looking like every other asshole who mucks in the backyard as though we can rekindle our ancient energy by sinking our hands into the soil.
    The pet minder appears at the edge of the yard. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Should you be bent over like that? Isn’t it too much pressure on your head?”
    “No one mentioned not bending.”
    “Might be too much,” the minder says. “My aunt had a stroke and they told her no forward bending.”
    I lift my head. “No longer bent,” I say.
    “Perhaps take a rest,” he says. “I