\u201cWhat\u2019s it like?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTo know everything<\/em>,\u201d I said, half-serious.<\/p>\n \u201cHa!\u201d he spit. \u201cI have a universe of information and a flyspeck of knowledge. I hear everything they\u2019re thinking, everyone around us, all the time. But that\u2019s not knowledge. It\u2019s excuses and resentment and the lies they tell themselves to avoid whatever they\u2019re afraid to think about.\u201d<\/p>\n He pointed to our left. \u201cThe man over here traveled three hundred miles to a specialist; he\u2019s getting the results tomorrow morning. He has cancer\u2014I can feel it in him. I can visualize the tumor, though I don\u2019t know the name of the organ that\u2019s hosting it.\u201d And as he talked, it was like the wall dissolved away and I saw the guy lounging on the bed in the next room, eerie content, leafing through some sales brochures like nothing was wrong in the world. \u201cWhat is he thinking about\u2014Cancer? No. Living a better life? No. He\u2019s thinking: Plasma or LCD? Plasma can burn-in<\/em>; that really concerns him. He\u2019s dwelling on it. He won\u2019t live long enough to pay the thing off.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhich isn\u2019t a bad reason to buy one,\u201d I said. \u201cHe\u2019s scared.\u201d<\/p>\n He turned in the other direction and that wall faded away, leaving a mousy blonde in a negligee and a real unhappy expression, close enough I felt I could reach over and touch her.<\/p>\n \u201cOn this<\/em> side, Ulna from Orangeburg is waiting for her brother-in-law Rick to get back from the office. She asked Rick for a loan to keep her house out of foreclosure. Rick\u2019s doing way better than Ulna and her husband\u2014Early, that\u2019s the husband. Ulna and Early\u2014you can\u2019t make this stuff up. Rick\u2019s always been a little too friendly and now she\u2019s waiting for him at the motel, ready to be friendly herself. She\u2019ll get the loan\u2014she\u2019s a determined girl. Another little everyday tragedy. You know what she\u2019s thinking? Over and over?\u201d He began to sing in a weirdly-pitched voice:<\/p>\n I want a girl And then, all at once, all<\/em> the walls dropped away. For a few moments, the whole hotel became visible, stacks of rooms full of people, arguing and ignoring one another, watching TV and fucking, eating McDonalds take-out with the kids, counting money or emptying liquor bottles in glee or misery. And all of them saying one thing and thinking another, or a couple anothers. The first second was overwhelming; after ten seconds, I thought my head would split open. I had my hands over my ears until he realized what was happening and made the voices go away. When he continued a second later, his voice was soft, like he was trying to cut me a break.<\/p>\n \u201cAs for the rest? I\u2019m getting old. This is someone else\u2019s fault<\/em>\u2014fill in the blank as to who. Why is my husband\/wife\/boss\/past such a bitch? I want to be happy but I\u2019m afraid to change<\/em>. Sometimes you get a bundle of ambiguous regret: I wish he was dead. Do I really want to take out a mortgage with him? But the rate is really low<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n He laughed his deep, scraping laugh. \u201cBelieve me, I\u2019m making it sound better<\/em> than it is.\u201d He sat on the edge of the cot, which sagged like he weighed a whole lot more than he looked. \u201cOther people\u2019s thoughts are amazingly banal\u2014what makes them meaningful are the feelings attached.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut Tauber said you feel things, you feel like you\u2019re inside the other person.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh, I feel everything<\/em>,\u201d he replied. \u201cWhich only leaves me farther from any clear notion of truth. Nobody feels one clear, simple feeling at a time. We know what we want to do and twenty reasons it won\u2019t work, all at once. The woman\u2019s too good for us; if only she was more like Angelina Jolie. She loves me-she loves me not<\/em> isn\u2019t doggerel; it\u2019s the persistent state of the human mind.<\/p>\n \u201cI spent ten minutes once, standing within three feet of one of the world\u2019s billionaires, easy pickings, homed in on him completely. I could have stopped his heart on the spot, given him cancer, shot sparks from his fingers. His conscious mind never let up the whole time: Build this, talk to so-and-so about that, the deadlines have to be tightened, appease the regulators, after this step, the next step is<\/em>\u2026The entire time, without letup, just one level below, a high, sing-song voice kept chanting in his head, You\u2019ll die in the gutter, you\u2019ll die screaming in the gutter<\/em>, like a schoolyard chant. This is how everybody<\/em> works. And from this swamp, I was trained to pull facts, make life-and-death decisions. So yes, I hear things but it\u2019s a very limited gift.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWhat\u2019s it like?\u201d \u201cWhat?\u201d \u201cTo know everything,\u201d I said, half-serious. \u201cHa!\u201d he spit. \u201cI have a universe of information and a flyspeck of knowledge. I hear everything they\u2019re thinking, everyone around us, all the time. But that\u2019s not knowledge. It\u2019s …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":125,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-281","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":875,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/281\/revisions\/875"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em>just like the girl
\nthat married
\ndead old Dad\u2026<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n