I stared at the dank wooden planks on the ceiling. All different shades and lengths, some had big knots in them, some didn’t, and the mismatched colors and sizes looked cheap and amateurish. This was a pet peeve of mine back when I built houses: when the wood was chosen and installed with no thought to art or design. I used to hand select the boards so that the ceiling looked meticulous and streamlined, which took a lot of time and drove Bob insane, but the clients appreciated it.
I replayed the night in my head, looking for an answer to the question that had been bothering me. Namely, the performance had gone better than I could have imagined, so why had it left me so unsettled?
I thought on it long and hard, and when that yielded no explanations, I changed tactics. I dug inside my body instead of inside my head. I tried to feel instead of think the answer.
And then it hit me. And it was so obvious. The whole thing—the resignation, the imprisonment, the rage, the grief—it was about me. No, not about me, it was me. Sure, October was expressing the themes of the show, and the visual portion of the piece convinced the viewers of that. But where her performance was coming from, the motivation, the depth and truth she was expressing, was calculatedly directed at me.
I was the one in the cage.
I was the one whose walls were closing in on him.
And the most jarring point of all?
I’d built it myself.
When October said the piece belonged to me even more than to her, she wasn’t kidding. She had been talking to me all along, and what she had been saying was that the decisions I’d made in my life had locked me into a confining, diminishing, unbearable space from which I couldn’t escape without a key.
And what was the key?
I’d written it on her back.
It was the same thing Cal had tried to tell me over a decade earlier.
Everyone is always one decision away from a completely different life.
One decision.
Or, in my case, about fifteen yards.
I got up off the bed and paced around the room. My heart pounded. My breath fell short. I thought I was angry. I had an urge to kick a hole through the wall. Scream in October’s face about how my choices were none of her fucking business. And then I realized it wasn’t anger I was feeling, it was fear.
Something shook inside me. Shook me to the edge of a place I’d never been. I looked over that edge, and it was as dark as a pool of thick, black paint, and I couldn’t tell how far down it went, but I knew I had to step into it.
I felt as though the choice I had to make was between staying in a burning building or leaping out the window before the fire caught me. I would go up in flames if I didn’t jump, but if I did, there was a fifty-fifty chance I’d hit the ground and shatter to pieces.
I needed a nudge.
No, I needed a fucking shove.
“Sam.”
I sat back down on the bed, dropped my head into my hands, and asked my brother for help. And I swore I would listen this time, if he would just tell me what to do, if he would make it so obvious I couldn’t second-guess him even if I tried.
The book I was reading had fallen to the floor and I picked it up. A decades-old novel by a Portuguese writer, I’d checked it out of the library because the blurb on the inside flap said it was about the existential nature of loneliness and chance, and that sounded right up my alley.
I told Sam the plan: I was going to close my eyes and open the book to a random page, and I was going to point to a passage on that page, and then I was going to open my eyes and read the passage, and the passage was going to tell me what to do.
I took note of the page I was on and removed the receipt from Mill Valley Market that I was using as my bookmark. I closed my eyes and turned page after page until my gut told me to stop. I ran my finger up and down the paper, lifted my finger, put it back down and decided I was ready to look.