Random Access

Chapter One
Push

Evan came home Thursday night at quarter past seven feeling drained. He was tired of trying to implement social programs that had inadequate funding.

As a public defender, he had railed against inadequate social services, and used to think unkind thoughts about the administrators of such programs. He had quit the public defense and taken this job as the Social Worker/Legal Administrator of a homeless resource center, sure he could engineer a tight system of distribution that would get people what they needed.

He thought that he would get referrals from old colloquies. There had been many professionals he met in the court house hallways who seemed dedicated to the thought of immortalizing themselves through philanthropy. He had devised a grand idea with a lot of support, but then he found that there was a predictable rhythm of abandonment of the cause from the idea stage to the end.

Evan knows that beginnings are easy.When an idea is young, the money flows and the referrals fly in. because everybody's conscience is on red alert. The rush of idealism juices them into action, pinning everyone’s throttle. The midlife of a program cruises, but never makes it more than twice around the track before the well-intentioned cross the fed up line and the party is over, the end. Conscience overwhelmed, shields up.

His life felt like a long middle. The container garden, a work in progress started when he moved into the apartment, was a confusing array of colors and shapes; big yellow puffs in an old spittoon sat next to tall purple spikes in a stainless steel watering can. Red hearts dangled alone in a terra cotta pot and looked pitiful to his eye, and the greenery along the trellis was out of control and so was his life.

There was the book he had been thinking about writing for years. He almost couldn’t recall the point of writing it. Even more disturbing was that he almost couldn’t recall the point of his marriage. The continuing drama made Mya seem as alien to him as the characters in his novel.
It had been so long since things felt right.

He stood in the middle of the dining room, keys in hand, trying to figure out what to do that didn’t involve heavy thinking. As soon as he stepped over the threshold, the energy that had moved him all day began seeping from his body, even while his brain continued to try and process his life. Soon, the neutral walls conspired with the light of a rotating, stained glass globe. It hypnotized him, like a disco ball.

Mya had picked it out, saying the gentle movement of rich color would help even out his. mood swings. His mood swings. Who was she trying to fool? He thought it might trigger a seizure, but kept it to himself. Mya was an artist and devotee of all things mystical. He never argued the merits of her pursuits in those areas.

As he stood lost in thought, the swirling collage of hues transported him into one of those blank moments, and he became fixated on a tall, clear glass vase rippling with curved cut edges. It held one yellow flower and the pedals sutle color gradiations seemed to dance between the angles.
The sound of Mya coming up the front stairs didn’t register, but her voice did. It came from behind him, seeming to enter his consciousness through the back of his skull. Mya, who he had once thought had the voice of an angel. Well, that was then and this is now, he thought, as the present began to ripple through his body.

"Hi, baby," Mya said. "How was your day?"

"The same," He said, without turning around. She tapped him on the shoulder.

"These might cheer you up," she said, rustling a bouquet of flowers by his ear.

He wondered why she always thought silence equaled depression.

"That’s great. Thanks." He said, but he couldn't seem to move.

"Evan, turn around. You can’t smell them unless you turn around." Mya coaxed, but he wouldn’t turn. He knew the lowers would smell like smoke and Mya’s breath would reek of alcohol.

"Ev, listen. I thought we could spend a quiet evening together. We have a lot of catching up to do. Don't you think? You’ve been distant lately." She came closer and put her arms around him, nuzzling and kissing his back.

"Let's crumble the sheets and drink some wine."
"That's an idea." He turned to face her. and caught her reflection in the wall mirror. She looked tired. Her eyes looked puffy, her skin looked dry and pallid, and her Auburn curls spireled limply around her shoulders.

"First, tell me about your day," she said.

“No,” he countered,” You first.”

"Alright, it was just an ordinary day. I started work on the mural on the First Bank building. I used a lot of sexy colors," she began to coo." My strokes were fluid, kind of like this," she said, running her hands along his body. He began to respond, but caught the bar smell and stepped back.

"Mya, I'd like to crumble the sheets. But I need some me time. Why don't I pour each of us a glass of wine. You take it easy, and I'll write for a while. When I'm done we can spend some time together. How does that sound?"

Mya stiffened.

"It sounds like a bunch of crap. What about my needs? What about us? Where do we fit in? I'll tell you where. We squeeze in between your precious work and your stunted writing. Well, that's not good enough for me."

"Come on. Don't be like that. You know how important you are to me, we are to me, but my work and writing are important too. They keep me sane. Maybe if you developed some interests other than work and whatever you do after work, you wouldn’t be so needy."

"Needy? Is that what I am, needy? Great, babe. I want a taste of my husband, and I’m too needy. Well, if you don't spend time with me tonight, I’m going to have my needs met elsewhere.”

They stood like partners watching for the cue to begin the first dance at the almost-divorced annual ball and banquet.

“Didn’t you stop and shop at a bar before you meandered home,” he asked.

“I went to Murphy’s. That’s no big deal. Look, I’m tired of this. I'm sure somebody out there would like a little romance." She backed away, and her reflection disappeared from the mirror.

"Screw you, Mya. You really piss me off when you start talking like this."

"Well, that sucks for you. I’m going back out to get some fresh air." She turned and left the way she had come in.

“Fine, go have a drink on me. In fact, have two,” he called after her. "You’ve got a problem, Mya. You can’t keep running away from it."

He didn’t expect an answer, but he hoped for one. When his expectations were satisfied, he turned off the light and went to his study.

He sat for an hour, pencil poised to write, but nothing would come. He always wrote with a pencil and a fresh eraser, because he couldn't stand cross outs and the tiny replacement words and phrases that hovered above his mistakes. And he couldn't tolerate his mind's inertia glaring at him from an almost empty page. He tried to get into the zone, but it wouldn't happen. He threw his pencil down shattering the point. His imagination fell into the darkness with his discarded thoughts, sucked into a veiled, uninspired graveyard. The clatter of falling debris rattled him, and he began to get a headache.

He went into the living room where he imagined he could taste cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes. I'm tired of her shit, he thought. He fanned their collection of magazines across the mosaic coffee table, and kicked Mya’s kitty slippers across the room. It felt good, so he dropped her new copy of Rolling Stone into the trash basket, under the table that separated the moss colored his and hers recliners. The color did not soothe him. He felt like crying, but he wouldn’t allow her to beat him that way. He tried to compose himself, as he ran his fingers through his unkempt hair. He briefly thought that he needed a haircut, and then a feeling of aloneness washed over him, and the screaming silence of the apartment, punctuated by the distant voices of the people that gathered in the parking lot after dark, broke him down. His tears flowed as easily as his muse had abandoned him, but he only allowed the eruption of emotion a few moments of life.

He then decided the thing to do was to review the case reports he had brought home. Work was always his salvation. He had been bringing work home ever since he started at Safe Place. He accepted long workdays and short pay as his contribution to a more equitable future for the underserved. Mya didn’t share his enthusiasm for the cause. She missed the big pay checks from his public defense work.

On one level Mya’s complaints triggered his guilt. He had chosen job satisfaction over family finances, but he reminded himself that she hadn’t been bothered about long hours when she could spend relentlessly, and his quilt simmered down. He knew he was a workaholic, but it was because his work was never the type he could leisurely sip. In order to be effective, he had to drink it in until he was drunk. He had to care. He was trying to save people's lives, goddamn it. Why couldn't she understand that?

He made his way to the dining room table where his box of files sat. He needed to review 5 case reports of regular visitors to the center, and pick three to participate in the pay-for-work program, which was designed to help the homeless supplement their lifestyle with pocket money, and give them a chance to move up to a full-time minimum wage job. He felt it would be a difficult program to implement, because few of the homeless he encountered seemed interested in working. They seemed resigned, seemed to choose life on the streets, on the edge. He immersed himself and stayed up late, finishing the last report at 1:30. Mya still wasn't home, so he decided to go to bed.
He lay in bed feeling slug headed, but not sleepy. Mya's words kept playing in his mind.

"I bet someone would like a little romance."

I'm sure a lot of guys would, Evan thought, because they don't know you. Then he envisioned her smile, and he heard the charming, demure complements that they would hear. His chest heaved. Oh God, he thought, they won't care about anything except her offer for sex without strings. He tried to force the thoughts out of his mind by focusing on work again.

A man named Allen rammed through the roadblock that thoughts of Mya created, and stood free in his mind's eye.

Allen volunteered for trash duty, was always volunteering for something. He was a good candidate for the project. Evan mentally moved him from the maybe pile to the definite pile. He was off on Friday. Saturday would be Allen's day to receive the offer to join the program. Out of the five people, only Allen seemed to be an appropriate candidate. He would have to look at more files.

He began to do a mental review of Allen's incomplete life history, but the anticipation of escape into sleep finally became more compelling. His mind began to slow, his eyelids fluttered, and he began to relax at last, taking slow even breaths. He closed his eyes, and then heard a ping on the bedroom window, and thought a pebble must have taken flight. That was as far as his mind could go in the present. His imagination had disentangled itself from his frenzied thoughts and it was calling him into a dream. He went without a struggle when he felt the pull, and slept like the dead.

He awoke at 7 AM to the sound of ocean surf accompanying a message recorded by Mya telling him not to be late. He wished he had remembered to turn off the alarm the night before. He pushed snooze out of habit, which gave him ten extra minutes to lie there trying not to notice Mya's absence. Ten minutes to pretend he didn't care. He felt as though her spirit were watching from the alarm clock. He hoped she could see that her bullshit control games didn't work on him. As far as he was concerned, she could stay gone for good. He would do much better on his own, he thought.
He knew there was no going back to sleep. Once he was awake, he was up until he fell down again. He got up and turned on the shower. He examined himself in the full-length door mirror, running his fingers lightly over the bruise that was the last evidence of the bite Mya had given him during their most recent lovemaking session, a week earlier. She's a freaking animal, he thought, stepping into the shower.

He let his body take in the heat, allowing the water to saturate him from muscle to mind. When he was clean and relaxed, he turned the hot water off, and took in the cold spray. He did this every morning. Each time the cold hit, he had the thought that the neighbors were going to hear all of his pores slapping shut at once and come to investigate. He gave himself a short blast, just enough to set his systems on alert.

He had always fought procrastination, even as a child. It was his reaction to stress. But childhood, even puberty, had been less stressful than now. And he had been a cerebral jock as a teen. No, Mya had it all over puberty when it came to jumbling thoughts and feelings, until he felt like he was insane with loathing and lust all at the same time. He thought it was crazy to relate the two periods in his life, but there it was. He couldn’t deny it. Being with Mya was like living with a terminal case of pubescent insecurity.
He padded into the living room and drew back the curtains on the sliding glass doors, happy to see the sun. He checked the thermometer encased in a pink glass teardrop. It hung on fishing line from a blue circular plant hangar that Mya purchased after reading a book entitled, ‘Decorating with Feng Shui’, while she was home sick one time. He watched the first light of morning bring out the different shades of pink in the glass, and for a moment he remembered why he loved Mya., But the memory was knocked off course by thoughts of Allen, and his imagination was sulking in the background, impatient after the previous nights freefall.

He settled at the dining room table sipping coffee and browsing through Allen's file. There wasn't much identifying information. There was his first name, but no last. There were no relatives, friends, or emergency contacts. He was going to need more information to get Allen into the program, and he suspected he would have a problem getting it. He knew that anonymous people generally liked to stay that way.

He needed a social and medical history too, but unless he could get Allen to talk, there was little hope of getting one. He wondered who had gotten him to give his real first name, if it was his real first name. He would have to call his contacts in the community the first thing on Monday morning. Maybe somebody knew something about Allen from one of the walk-in clinics, or the court house. Maybe his friend Doug from the Bar Advocacy Program would have a line on him.
Of all his old buddies from the court house, Doug had remained truest to the cause.

Doug, who had once been seduced by Mya and had succumbed; who he supposed wasn't really a friend at all when you came right down to it. He thought about how Doug told him he needed therapy. Doug had said that nobody in his right mind would work with the desperately downtrodden six days a week, and then get the duplicated home files tidied up on his day off. Doug said that was not a life; it was a prison sentence. That's what Doug always said, every time Evan saw him, which was a couple of times a month down at Murphy's Pub, unless Evan called sooner looking for a favor. It struck him that he could be sure to find Doug at Murphy's any night of the week, at any time of the year except the first week of August, when he was on the vineyard drinking at some yuppie palace. That's a life? Evan didn't think so.

Mya did though, and he supposed that had gotten her interested in Doug. And he supposed Mya and Doug were right to a point. He hadn’t been making an effort to carve time out of his schedule for fun. She needed fun in her life.

She also wanted children, but there was no way he was going to bring a child into the world to live in the city. He knew it too well. He knew about all the edgy sorts that dwelled in its alleys and slept in its shadows, waiting for an opportunity to take what they didn't have; including children. There was a bad element roaming the streets. Bad to the bone. He had seen the climate change for the worse over the years. He quit the public defense because he couldn’t stand watching the endless parade of troubled people he was assigned to defend. Most were victims of life; they lived in terminal poverty, or with drug addiction, or had survived abuse of various kinds. But some, he knew, were just evil for no reason that he could see. Maybe they had the extra Y chromosome, or the serotonin imbalace the latest theories science had to offer as explanation. He didn’t know, but those were the ones he worried about on some of his sleepless nights. He would not have a child in the city. But, he thought that maybe things would get better between him and Mya if they moved to the country, and she had a couple of babies to keep her busy. He was trying to get his mind around the idea of such a major change in lifestyle, when the front door opened and Mya came in.

"Back so soon?" he asked.

"Evan, I'm sorry. I really am."

He jumped right into the fray.

"Things have to change in our relationship, Mya, and I don't think it's going to happen here." Not with the damned bars so close. These words stayed in his mind, and he was grateful.

"I agree. What do you think the answer is?"

“That’s it, you agree? No arguments?”

“None,” she answered quietly.

"How'd you like to move to the country and have a couple of babies?" he blurted out.

"What? Are you kidding?"

"No, I'm not. We can talk about it."

Mya came from behind Evan and put her arms around his neck.

"I think moving to the country is the best idea you've had in a long time. And you know I'd like to make a baby. I'm sorry I got so angry. I'm sorry I went out. Let's start over. Let's start making a baby now," she whispered in his ear. "Love me now, Evan."

Evan relented, allowing himself to be seduced, to forget that Mya had probably spent the night in someone else's arms. As they moved together in a lover's knot towards the bedroom, his subconscious began convincing him that his wife probably had stayed with a girlfriend. By the time they fell onto the bed, the wish had turned into a prayer, and a chorus of hallelujahs soon followed.