There’s this: the morning after the hurricane doesn’t hit. Doesn’t happen. Like no sandbags outside the treasury office or rain or falling over signs. Something else goes wrong instead. Yeah. Yes. See, my wife is sitting on the edge of the end of the bed and waiting for me when I wake up. And I do. I awake. And because she’s been waiting for a while, she’s no longer crying, but her eyes are still red and shaky and the skin at the corner of her cheeks is still blotched and splayed, so, basically her face is a souvenir from when she was crying some twenty minutes beforehand. She starts talking all small. Like maybe her mouth is hurting. Or, like her words are sore. She gets onto her knees and sets her chin on the corner of the bed. The dog moves somewhere behind her because it’s his breakfast time too. She ignores the dog and welds her hands together in front of her face the way someone does when they need God the most. It strikes me in the moment that this is the most contrite pose I’ve ever seen her in, and I respond by sitting up in bed like I’m ready to listen. She bites her lip. She bites her upper lip. She says she’s sorry if this sounds weird. Or, if it sounds strange. She says she isn’t even sure she should tell me--she really isn’t, but, that trust between us is paramount, so she needs to. And then she explains that she had a very real-type dream that one of the Jonas Brothers had seduced her, and that she feels really incredibly bad about it.

“Awful,” she says. “It was awful; I never even really cared for them.”

“Okay,” I offer, because the sun is coming in on me and I want to move off the bed.

“Do you ever have dreams like that?” she asks.

“Sometimes,” I lie, wondering if it was Kevin or Joe or Nick that had walked over and tricked my girl on the lonely side of the dream bar into one last Lemongrass Collins, before moving their hands over hers and then down onto her hips, like handles, as to guide her up the grand stairs of the Bowery and right into the dream suite, with its terrace, its candles, its lattice orchid boxes and yellow champagne on ice. It couldn’t have been, Kevin. No. With his strange body? Almost certainly not. It was Joe or Nick, out there, loosening their termite suits, unlatching their Balenciagas, smiling, probably at the outstretched view of my lovely wife’s adoring and well dreamt, sleep city.

_

Because, at times, I can be a small and merciless person. And because I only dream of hooligans on credit card scooters coming down the alley behind me. (And because there are some things that I just cannot let go of.) I watch a YouTube video on sleep projection, and the following night: I force myself into a dream where I am having sex with all the Jonas Brothers. At first. In the first part of the dream, I am having sex with them one at a time. But then the siren at the top of the flagpole rings and it becomes all of us together in a pile of unremitting pleasure. While, like, their manager or dad or the state governor or something tries to swim across the pond to stop us.

_

I tell my wife we’re equal.

“Even-steven,” I say.

And she says we’re not, and that she dreams unclean often, and then she says that it’s not a me problem, and that it’s probably because of something really terrible that happened to her once, and that she would love, love, love to tell me about it sometime, that, in fact, she’s never told anyone the full story about that Thanksgiving, but right now she’s late for work and that we’ll talk about it soon or later or sometime between those two times, and that I need to get dressed right now, also, or I too risk falling behind.

_

I take sleep medicine the next night.

And dream Princess Diana is on top of me, except we were in the tunnel and the French photographers are hot on our tail, so I have to finish quickly or––

“You must hurry darling,” says The Peoples’ Princess.

And then, just as the metal starts sparking against the guardrail, and the tunnel wall collapses into the mouth of the limo.

I wake up. 

_

I drink more sleep medicine.

A Sleep-Aid, it’s called.

And I get back to the sour and disconcerting work of revenge.

_

Over the next year: I have sex with all the members of 98 Degrees, the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, and most of the people who have won American Idol. I have sex with rock bands, too: Pearl Jam, The Cranberries, The Highwaymen, then just Johnny Cash alone. Some of the roadies for Metallica bend me over an amplifier, then they fuck me in the doldrums above the jumbotron.

At some point I spill over into movies.

It becomes more actors and ingénues than historical figures and mellowed rockstars.  

Sly Stallone.

Alicia Silverstone and the clown from the It reboot.

Martin Lawrence holds my hand.

I have sex with Ed Harris’ character from Enemy at the Gates on the banks of the Volga River.

And there is orange mortar fire and horseless carriages and dead bodies all around us.

I tell him he doesn’t need to shoot anybody anymore.

And he tells me it’s the only thing he’s ever been really good at.

“Shooting from a mile out,” he says, lighting a cigarette, kicking his feet up onto his rucksack. “You know they’re dead before they do. But there’s a moment in there––one little moment, after the pop but before the bang––when you both know. Which is a real trip. A real trip.”

And I say nothing back to him.

Because I have nothing to say back to him.

Nothing.

No.

I just wake up.

And go to work.

And don’t feed the dog.

And no one has fed the dog since this all started.

Nobody.

Because my wife is busy in that funny running group.

Or texting with Osha.

Or texting with Rachel.  

Or getting her teeth cleaned by the dentist.

Who is tall.

Which I know.

‘Cause I saw the picture on her phone.

Of them holding her No Cavity sign beside the fish tank.

And she’s smiling.

With him. So.

They’re smiling together. 

And he has a plain and simple name on his nametag.

Which I forget.

Which I cannot remember.

Which hurts more.

Somehow.

I can’t really explain it.

But I think about it all the time when I am driving the long way home