V.
“Jack, listen, this madness has to stop.”
VI.
Gretchen: oh, Gretchen, they have brought Gretchen in. Beautiful Gretchen: my brother’s trophy wife, a wife fitting for an astronaut: tall, blonde, chiseled features, perfect teeth, perfect breasts, long legs. Smith College, former teenage beauty queen, law degree.
We are in the cold empty room together, sitting at the metal table. We’re alone but I know they are watching and listening.
“I tried to talk to him,” I say.
“Me too.”
“They…?”
“…had us both trying to reach him,” she says, “and who knows whom else.”
“What do you think?”
“Think?” she says. “What am I supposed to think? I don’t have any thoughts on this. I don’t have an opinion. I’m nobody, we both are, nobodies in this big game. Who are we? Nobodies.”
“They know,” I say.
“Of course,” Gretchen says.
“Jack knows.”
“I told him.”
Pause.
“Why?”
She says: “I had to come clean.”
“Jesus Christ.”
She says: “Do you know what he said?”
“I don’t.”
She says: “‘I don’t care.’ That’s what he said. ‘At least you kept it in the family,’ he said.”
I laugh.
She asks: “You find that funny?”
“How else am I supposed to ‘find’ it?” I say. “How am I supposed to react to something like that?” I ask.
She laughs too. We both have a good laugh. We hope that those who are listening and watching also laugh.
VII.
The bed they provide is stiff and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I need sleep; I have been up nearly twenty hours. In have slept on harder surfaces in the past: the ground, the street.
The clock is ticking.
Every three hours my brother transmits a message: “Forty-two hours left.” “Thirty-nine hours left.” “Thirty-six.” “Thirty-three,” he says, “a pivotal year for any man, the most significant year of Jesus. Thirty hours left,” etc.
Sleep and dream: sex with Gretchen and the sex is as good as I remember it was between us. Gretchen enjoys the rough treatment: slap across the face, biting the nipples, smack on the ass, leaving a handprint embedded into white creamy flesh. “Jack has always fucked like a pussy,” she says in the dream (like she said in real life), “but you fuck like a caveman and that’s what I like. Pull my hair, punch me, stick it my ass.…”
I wake up. I have a hard-on, what they call a “quality erection” for men my age who have problems with tumescence without pharmaceutical aid. A dark figure stands by my bed. It moves near me. It’s Jack. He holds his space helmet in his hand, but he’s naked. He gets into bed with me and grabs my cock and takes it in his mouth—
I wake up. A dream within a dream. I still have an erection. Why would I dream of such a thing about my brother? A dark figure stands by my bed. It moves near me. It’s Gretchen. She’s not naked. She wears the same clothes. She gets into bed with me but she does not grab my cock. She snuggles next to me.
“They let me in here,” she whispers; “they wanted me to come in here for some reason.”
“I’m dreaming.”
“We’re all dreaming.”
“Don’t get philosophical on me, you bitch,” I say, “you goddamn bitch, this is my dream and you won’t talk shit to me.”
Shocked: “What did you say?”
“Bitch.”
“You’re half-asleep,” she says, “you don’t mean that.”
“I mean it, bitch,” I say, “you cheating bitch, sleeping with me all that time and then calling it off because you felt ‘guilty.’ Fuck your guilt.”
“Fuck it all,” she says, closing her eyes.
I get on top of her.
“Go ahead and slam me,” she says, “fuck it, go ahead, just fuck it.”
VIII.
A dark figure stands by my bed, looking down at me. I expect it to be Gretchen. It is my wife, Janice, my second wife. “How could you,” she says, “how could you with your sister-in-law? Isn’t that incest?”
IX.
“Twelve hours left for your answer,” Colonel Jack Kornbluth announces.
X.
“Fuck it,” Gretchen says, “just say fuck it at times like these. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I say.
I know I’m still dreaming. She gets up and goes into the bathroom. When she comes out, she has changed. She’s a man. At first I think it is my brother. This man is naked. He does not have a helmet. The naked man is I. I get into bed with myself. “Time to fuck,” he/I say(s). This is interesting, I think, as this doppelgänger buggers me. What would Freud or Lacan make of such a dream?
XI.
“Listen, Jack,” I say into the microphone, “listen to me: this madness has to stop.”
He replies, finally: “I agree.”
“Fuck it,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. “Fuck me, why not.”
I reflect on the dream.
“That’s it,” I say, “that’s what it’s all about.”
“What?”
“Do it,” I say.
XII.
Eleven hours later, he presses the button. “Fuck it,” he says, and that’s the last words the world hears from Colonel Jack Kornbluth.
XIII.
Gretchen holds me close. I’m still inside her. “We did it,” she whispers into my ear, nibbling on the lobe; “we showed the bastards. We did it. Everything worked as planned.…”
XIV.
“You tricked us,” the psychologist says, coming into the room with several armed soldiers. One takes the microphone from me. “Goddamn you,” he says, “you tricked us.”
“Fuck me,” I say, before the world burns.
XV.
I remove the simulation goggles and sit up. From the look on the NASA psychologist’s face, I know I have flunked this portion of the test. Badly. I’ll never make it as an astronaut. “You tricked us,” the psychologist says, “and that will never work, not for this mission,” My wife, Gretchen, is going to be disappointed. So will my whole family, especially my younger brother, who has always looked up to me. I love my brother; I even forgave him for what he did.
—September, 2009
San Diego
MORE ALLISONS THAN I KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH
I.
I didn’t intend to murder Allison Benning twice; she was having a flashback of something that happened in Afghanistan or Iraq and she went crazy on me; it was