head and vanished through the ceiling.
“Let me be certain I understand you correctly, Robert. You’re saying your penis is jerking, right? Is this happening when you ejaculate?”
“No, doc. Not my penis.” Johnson dropped his voice to a whisper. “My tube.”
“I’m sorry, Robert, I don’t understand you. What tube are you referring to?”
Johnson gestured with one hand, waving it beside his ear in a vaguely cranial direction and rolling his eyes upwards. He leaned forwards.
“My…tube.”
Dr. Alpert sat back and blinked in confusion. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to fathom out a complaint without much help from the patient. He scratched his head. Then a look of triumph spread across his face.
“You’re talking about the tubes in your middle ear, aren’t you? You’re saying you’ve been losing your balance. Am I right?”
Johnson sagged a little in his chair but did his best to hide it.
“You’ve got it, doc.”
Ten minutes later he walked away with a prescription for an antibiotic to clear up the infection in his middle ear. In his car he wept without making a sound before tearing up the prescription and dropping the pieces into the ashtray.
Chapter 8
That night Johnson made a decision based on the facts. The tube was merely pulling at him. It had never hurt him and, as far as he could make out, it had never hurt anyone else. The fact that people either didn’t know or didn’t care wasn’t important. Perhaps everyone came to a similar realisation about their tubes when they discovered them. Perhaps they never became aware of them.
He realised it didn’t matter. He wasn’t prepared to throw everything away by letting himself go crazy. He had a beautiful wife and fabulous children. He had a comfortable home and a good but challenging job with a promotion not far away. He had built this life for himself and he was not going to let it crumble over an obsession he could easily control. It was like quitting smoking or going on a diet—it would be tricky, there would be temptations, but he would do it.
He made himself forget.
And when the tube plucked at him, he ignored it with a smile and carried on with whatever he was doing. Following this decision, the power the tube had over him diminished. Nothing about it seemed as bad as when he’d let its presence rule him.
The following evening the family viewing was not interrupted by his trips upstairs. They even had a family session of gaming on their well used Maruyama Entertainment Console, playing Narco Cop and Spider Hunter until late. He did not stare at his children. He no longer worried that his wife was watching him, noticing his strangeness. Together they tracked down drug dealers and blasted hordes of arachnids until their thumbs were sore. He slept well. The next day he was able to concentrate correctly at work for the first time in more than a month. That weekend he took Angelina out for dinner and when they came home they made love for the first time since his birthday.
Johnson developed an intense caring for everything in his life. He began to see the difficulties of his job as blessings, he noticed his children’s individuality more, tried to control them less. He adored Angelina again as if it was only a few days since they’d been married. The twitches and tugs ceased to nag him.
He forgot about what the tube might imply and became the happy, contented man he had always wanted to be.
Summer came and with it the barbecues. The Johnson household played host to many weekend parties of work colleagues and old friends. Johnson himself, with his new passion for life, became a focal point of sociability; an effusive, outgoing entertainer. A joke teller, a storyteller, a shoulder to cry on, a good friend. He had found himself.
Forgetting, as he was soon to discover, was not enough.
Chapter 9
The sun shone, drawing sweat from every brow. The guys sucked on their beers while the girls sipped spritzers and sodas. The kids chased each other with water pistols and squealed. Guffaws and giggles erupted from every part of the Johnson’s back garden. Greasy blue smoke rose from the grill each time Robert Johnson turned the meat. This was how a weekend ought to be; people relaxing, having fun, forgetting about their pressures.
When Johnson’s tube hoisted him right over, leaving him on his back in the grass still holding a wiener in his tongs, people couldn’t help but notice. Some of them genuinely believed that he’d lost his footing and slipped. Others had the unpleasant impression that something had yanked him off balance. They dismissed the idea immediately but deep down, if only for a moment, a few of his guests realised that something very strange had happened to him, that he had been manipulated in some way.
As he picked himself up and smoothed down his cooking apron, Johnson glanced around, trying to gauge people’s response to what had just happened as subtly as he could. He placed the wiener back on the barbecue to sizzle. Everyone appeared to be laughing and talking amongst themselves exactly as they had before he been hauled over. There was no atmosphere of suspicion, no air of uncertainty. Everyone was having as much fun as they were a minute before it happened. He picked his baseball cap and put it back on after dusting some grass cuttings from its peak.
“Want to watch your step there, Robert.” Shuckman was smiling at him. “Either that or ease off the rum and cokes.
Gimme a little of that marinated chicken action, would ya?”
Everyone had let it go. It was as if they’d chosen to forget. For Johnson though, the spores of doubt had returned to grow like fungus in the darkest reaches of his mind. He recovered his poise as best he could but, for him, the rest of the barbecue had all the appeal of flat champagne.
When everyone had left, he went upstairs to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. It was there as, he assumed, it always had been; a huge black artery. He seemed to have shadowy memories of it from his childhood but couldn’t be certain if he was imagining such recollections.
It surprised him that the answer was
He realised that he could not have been born with the tube attached to him. People and tubes were solid things. It would have been impossible. Either the tube had become attached some time after birth or he and everyone else had not been born in the normal way. Feeling the weight of the implications bearing down on him with sudden and irresistible force, he decided to get away for a while. He needed time to think on his own. He didn’t say goodbye to Angelina or the children. He didn’t take his phone or his wallet. He took the car and drove into the hills outside the city.
The higher roads of the mountains had lookout points for picnickers and tourists and it was to one of these that Johnson drove, parking the car with its bumper right up to the safety barrier. It was long dark by the time he arrived. He put the seat back and tried to sleep but couldn’t sink any deeper into unconsciousness than a light dream state. There he encountered only the nightmares that his conscious mind hid from him during the daylight.
He dreamed of umbilical strangulation and Ventouse delivery during which the vacuum sucked out his brain rather than drawing him intact from the womb. He dreamed of running to escape cohorts of black eels that flew though the air behind him. He dreamed that he was paralysed in the trailing stingers of a giant jellyfish. He dreamed that each time he woke and checked his watch, the dawn was always farther away. That was the nightmare that
