Thomas World by Richard Cox

I’m an ass for keeping all this to myself. I mean Gloria is my wife. But I’m so worried that if I tell her, I’ll have to face the truth, the real truth, and who in this world wants to admit they are going crazy?
    â€œYeah, it was an odd weekend.”
    â€œYou know you can tell me anything, right? If something’s on your mind, you can tell me.”
    â€œI know, Junior.”
    â€œYou keep things bottled up sometimes. Always mister funny guy, but you don’t really talk about the things that bug you the most.”
    I reach over and take her hand in mine.
    â€œI’m fine. Really.”
    â€œOkay,” she says. “Good night.”
    Five minutes later her breathing slows and deepens. Her body jerks once, twice, and she’s out. Before the Ambien she tossed and turned all night. Now she sleeps like the dead.
    And me—the guy who can fall asleep anywhere in two minutes—I’m lying here like an insomniac.
    I wish today had just been a dream. A Halloween party hangover.
    Because even dreams seem more real than this.

SIX
    A ll these cars, all these cranky people behind steering wheels, jammed at stoplights or crawling along a freeway where the posted speed is sixty-five miles per hour, frowns on their faces, ninety percent of them dreaming about where they’d rather be right now. Back in bed. On the beach somewhere. On a golf course. Skiing fresh powder. Anything other than driving to their boring jobs.
    Working in a cubicle at a job you hate has always seemed vaguely bizarre to me. In theory you are providing food and shelter for you and your family, but from moment to moment it sure doesn’t seem that way. It seems more like you are just a cog in a wheel that would roll on with or without you. I sometimes wonder if cavemen ever felt this disaffected. I bet they didn’t. Can you imagine them standing in the trees, debating the merits of hunting for food? Me neither.
    But today I feel a bit differently about work. Today the morning monotony is comforting, because it seems familiar to me, as if I could right this sinking ship by settling into a routine. My cubicle may be a prison cell but at least I know what the four walls look like.
    One thing I really hate, though, is when traffic stops on a bridge. Intellectually I know the bridge isn’t going to fall down when my car is sitting on top of it. The structure has stood for years, will stand for many more, and even if it were to collapse, the likelihood of it happening when I’m on it is almost zero. And yet whenever I am stopped on a bridge I feel this irrational fear that it might fall, or that somehow I might fall from it. Today I’m stopped directly over the apex of the bridge, in the farthest right lane, and when I look out my window I see cars and trucks and tractor trailers intersecting my path in two dimensional space. Of course ours is a three-dimensional world, which means they are on a plane below me, which means I’m safe. But I don’t feel safe. I feel like any minute the bridge will fall and I will be crushed.
    I hate stopping on bridges.
    Finally traffic begins to move again, and the very next exit is mine. From here it’s only a few hundred yards to my employer’s property, a gorgeous plot of hilly land with red brick buildings hidden among giant oak trees, and whispering streams that drain into a shaded duck pond. Wait. That’s not true. In reality the campus is actually a flat rectangle covered by acres of parking lot and a five-story, concrete building that is conspicuously short on windows.
    Every morning I park in the same spot—all the way in the back of the lot against the curb. There are ten of these curbside parking spots, and typically people with new or expensive cars park in them, for obvious reasons. Today, however, there is an old Chevy pickup truck parked in my spot. It was probably blue at some point, the truck, but the paint is so faded it’s