never taken Zoloft.”
“It says here in your file that you do.”
“Well, that’s probably a mistake. I’ve never taken any psychiatric medication in my life.”
“So you don’t take Zoloft?” Her eyebrows rise incredulously and she types into my file: “Denies taking Zoloft.”
It’s interesting how someone will believe a document more than they’ll believe a human being—even though the words didn’t get on the document by themselves. For the rest of my life and even after it, whenever people dig through my records, they’ll think I have a chemical mood imbalance because of this hack.
She closes my file, then calls up another document. I look over her shoulder. The bold print at the top of the screen freezes my heart: CELIBACY/ABSTINENCE CONTRACT.
Evidently I’m about to become a priest.
She reads it sternly.
I WILL REFRAIN FROM THE FOLLOWING:
| ■ | Masturbation |
| ■ | Implicit or explicit pornographic material |
| ■ | Flirtatious, seductive, romantic, or suggestive comments or behavior |
| ■ | Seductive attire |
| ■ | Sexually overt or covert contact with another person or myself |
| ■ | Secretive sexual fantasizing: I will report objectifying, fantasizing, or obsessing to appropriate staff members |
| ■ | And cross-dressing. |
“This contract is effective for twelve weeks,” she informs me.
“But I’m only supposed to be here for four weeks.”
She fixes her eyes on mine. Her pupils are brown and glassy, with as much empathy as a snail shell. “This is for your own benefit. It takes three months for your brain to return to normal after all the imbalances caused by the constant high of sex.”
“So I can’t even have sex when I go home?”
“Not if you want to recover.”
I sign the contract. Like a good cheater.
“Thank you,” she says dryly, waving me out of the room.
Check-in: the feeling your balls get when you jump in a really cold lake.
San Francisco, One Month Earlier
I’m standing at the baggage claim in San Francisco when the call comes. I’ve just pulled my roller bag off the carousel.
“I got an email from Juliet,” Ingrid says.
The blood drains out of my face and my bones feel hollow. Something in me has just been cut loose. It is fear. It is panic. It is sadness. It is guilt. It is pain. It is every bad emotion at once. I’m as light as cotton, yet I don’t have the strength to move.
“Is there anything you need to tell me?” she asks. I can hear the hurt in her voice, the shock, the disbelief. Her world has just come apart at the seams. What she thought was golden thread has turned out to be polyester. She needs me to say it’s not true. And, more than anything, I want to give her one more soothing lie to keep the fabric of our reality stitched together.
I open my mouth to speak and nothing comes out. I can’t compound the injury with one more deception. But I can’t bring myself to admit the truth either. I have only one other option.
“Can I call you back?” If truth is not on my side, at least time can be. “My plane was delayed and I’m late to my talk.”
I’m speaking at a big tech company about my books. And right now, it seems so fucking unimportant, all this writing, all this time spent hunched over a glowing screen, all this convincing myself that any of it matters. People are what matter, not things.
And I have destroyed the person who matters most to me.
Just the night before, Ingrid texted me a photograph. She was on stage in a bar, holding an immense trophy aloft, a huge silly grin on her face as a crowd applauded her. Somehow, she’d won an annual rock-paper-scissors championship against a hundred other people, even though she’d barely played the game before. Looking at that image, I felt as excited as if she’d won an Oscar. That’s my girlfriend. She’s a champion. She can figure anything out and crush it.
Well, now she’s figured me out.
As I’m driving to the lecture, my heart pounding and mind racing, Ingrid forwards the message she received from Juliet. I glance at it, see “we had sex in his car, in my bed, and in my shower,” and can’t read anymore. All I can imagine is how Ingrid must have felt when she read those words.
This pause, this procrastination of the inevitable, is like the fuse on a bomb. I see it burning and I’m scrambling to find a way to extinguish it before it reaches the detonator. But there’s too much evidence Juliet can provide: dates, times, texts, techniques. I don’t know what made me believe I could get away with it or why I even put myself and Ingrid in this position. The first time I did it out of desire. The second time I did it out of guilt. The third time I did it out of fear: She’d threatened to tell Ingrid. Then I didn’t do it the fourth time.
And that’s when the gates of hell opened.
At a generic office building, a generic man in a generic shirt leads me to a generic room filled with more than a hundred generic employees. I take a deep breath and spend the next hour telling them to enjoy their lives and be their best selves, while in my chest I feel my life caving in.
When I get to my hotel room, I plug my dying cell phone into the wall. The cord is short, so I have to lie on the floor beneath the desk.
“I just got off the phone with Juliet,” Ingrid says when she answers. “She told me about your birthmark.” My birthmark is a splotch of raised red bumps, kind of like the six on a die, on the left side of my ass. When I was ten, I read the book The Omen and became convinced that my birthmark was the mark of the Antichrist. Ingrid had a more positive interpretation: She once took a thin black marker and connected the bumps like islands on a pirate treasure map, with an X at the end.
“I also talked to Luke,” she says. Luke is a friend of ours. Juliet is his ex-girlfriend. “He’s really upset.”
“I know, I know, I can explain,” I weakly protest.
“Neil, I am so hurt and in shock. I’m leaving. And I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want to talk to you again. That’s it.”
Then she hangs up and I collapse crying on the floor. Just sobbing out loud. Tears drip out of my eyes and my stomach heaves. I fucking blew it. I blew it. I blew it.
And then the texts come: Luke says he’s going to punch me in the face when I get home. Ingrid’s girlfriends want me dead. And I’m worried that her stepbrothers are going to beat the shit out of me.
Not that I don’t deserve to be disfigured. At least my outside can match how I feel inside. It’s not just the pain of losing Ingrid, it’s the pain of knowing I’ve hurt her. In this life, we don’t meet many people who truly love us, who accept us for who we are, who put us before themselves. Maybe a parent or two if we’re lucky, perhaps a couple of previous partners. So what kind of person rewards someone’s love with lies, betrayal, and pain?
A selfish person. A coldhearted person. A thoughtless person. An asshole. A liar. A cheater. A guy who thinks with his dick. Me.
As soon as I regain a semblance of control over my motor functions, the next call I make is to Rick to ask for the name of the program he recommended.
As I walk through a drab yellow hallway to the cafeteria, I feel a pain in my groin, a psychologically induced ache. I’ve signed my soul to Joan and turned