Freudian Slip by Erica Orloff Page A

agnostic. Just apathetic. When would the Boss understand that and let him get back into his body and wake up?
    Kate whispered again, “And David. I…feel like my guts have been literally ripped out from me. When I saw them together, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even think past the pain. I don’t think I want much, God. I am truly, truly thankful for the material things I have, the roof over my head, my health, a profession I adore, all of it. But to find someone who loves me. Deeply and totally and all of me. Is it impossible? Is a soul mate impossible?”
    â€œYou know, Kate,” Julian said, “if you had told me last week that I would believe in soul mates, I would have said you were fucking nuts, but…thiswhole cosmic thing going on? Maybe God does exist and does know what He…She’s…doing. Maybe there’s someone out there for you.” He filled in his half of the conversation in the pauses.
    â€œI can’t sleep, God. It’s like I hear this constant chatter in my head. It’s driving me nuts. I know it’s the stress of it all. At least I think it’s stress. I don’t want to go to work next to Leslie. It makes me want to throw up. On the good-news front, I have lost six pounds since this whole thing started—even after eating pizza. The stress diet.”
    Kate pulled the covers up. “Please let me fall to sleep, God. Otherwise I’ll be so tired and will look horrible and Leslie can have the last laugh knowing David picked her and I’ve become a hag.”
    Leslie, Julian decided, needed to be put in her place. And there was no way Kate was going to do that tired and stressed. “It’s okay, Kate. I was just…bored and lonely. I’m sorry I woke you. Go to sleep.”
    He touched her cheek and watched as her breathing grew more shallow. Finally, she drifted off.
    Now what?
    He climbed from her bed and wandered into the living room. There were no phones in Neither Here Nor There, so what was he supposed to do if he had a question?
    â€œGus?” He said it loudly. “Gus!”
    Nothing.
    â€œFuck me,” he said. Pissed at Gus, and at God for that matter, he sat down on the couch and waited for dawn. He wanted answers. Like when or if he was going back to his body.
    He looked down at his arm. It looked like his arm—the same arm he always had—but when he touched it, he barely felt it. The tattoo of a heroin needle mocked him. He used to love heroin. Love and hate it. He’d be the first to admit he had abused his body, but now he wanted it back. If he could talk to God, wherever She was, he’d tell Her that he’d take better care of himself. A little less Patron, a little more broccoli.
    He leaned his head back on Kate’s couch. What did he miss about his body? He’d discovered that the longing for heroin never goes away completely, no matter how long you’ve been clean. He craved, constantly, the euphoric sense of well-being, or floating. That place where everything was like a slow-moving bubble of warmth. Coming down from it, every muscle, every inch of him, hurt. Even his eyelashes hurt. If Gus was right and the universe was made up of strings, in a quantum sense, his particles hurt. Every neuron, proton, every cell.
    He hadn’t gone to rehab. Instead, after an on-the-air rant in which he’d said some things that even for his show were pretty outrageous—and after the FCC scandal of it, the fines, the firestorm of criticism, he’d been taken off the air for thirty days. And in those thirty days, he and his producer had holed up in a hotel in Costa Rica, near the rain forest. He’d never gone through such pain in his life. Every day, an ancient native woman visited and brought him an herbal concoction to drink that their guide swore by. Julian sweated and cursed. At one point his producer, Frank, had literally tied him to the bed.
    He emerged from