Thomas World by Richard Cox Page B

marriage.”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œSo what’s the big deal? What makes yesterday special?”
    â€œIt was that blue orb.”
    â€œThe what?”
    â€œIt floated across the church and penetrated my forehead.”
    Okay, I don’t really say that. That would make me sound crazy. What I do say is, “I guess it’s the way the Father was so adamant about it. We look up to this guy, confess our sins to him…and he’s up there demonizing people who haven’t done anything wrong. What bothered me the most was that no one cared. They all seemed so damned enthusiastic about it—”
    â€œHow do you know what anyone else was thinking?” Dick asks me. “Are you psychic?”
    â€œIf you had seen these people, you wouldn’t have to ask me that. They may as well have been hypnotized.”
    There is only a bite of two left of my sausage, and the eggs are all gone. I stab one of the sausage bits with my fork and eat it.
    Dick watches me and says, “Isn’t pork forbidden meat of the cloven hoof?”
    I laugh in spite of myself.
    â€œAll I know is it’s greasy and a little rubbery.”
    â€œManufactured and frozen for your convenience,” Dick says. “Just like my high school cafeteria.”
    I nod and keep chewing. Through the windows I see a lawn crew cutting grass and manicuring hedges. I think about what Dick said about his high school cafeteria, and about this lawn crew outside, and I imagine the lawn at my own high school, Placerville High School, which does not fuck around, which comes right up to the building and says howdy.
    â€œYou ever get the feeling nothing ever changes?” Dick asks. “In school you sit at a desk in the morning, break for a prefab lunch, then go back to your desk until they let you go home. Now I’m twenty-seven and it’s the same damned thing.”
    I remember a strange event at Placerville High School, where a crazy kid held a classroom of students hostage, only it turned out the kid wasn’t so crazy after all. In fact it seemed as if the kid had been labeled insane because he was the only person willing to tell the God’s honest truth. And then I remember this isn’t even a real event. It happened in a book I read once called Rage , written by the novelist Richard Bachman. It’s interesting, don’t you think, how my first instinct was to remember that book as a real event, that I couldn’t separate it from actual reality? And now that I think about it, Bachman himself wasn’t even a real guy. He was the pseudonym of Stephen King.
    â€œThomas?”
    I look up, startled out of the scenes playing in my mind.
    â€œAre you all right?”
    â€œSure,” I say, rubbing my forehead. “I guess I zoned out there for a minute. You were talking about how going to work every day isn’t that different from going to school. Right?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œWell, I know what you mean. Sometimes I want to stand up, right in the middle of whatever project I’m working on, and just walk out of my cube. Without saying a word. Down the hallway, out the door, drive away. To wherever. I don’t care. Get the heck out of this life.”
    â€œRight on,” Dick says. “Right on, man. I think about that very same thing all the time.”
    â€œYou do?”
    â€œShit, yeah. But you? I thought you were happy in all this. I never thought you were the kind of guy who might rage against the machine.”
    Dick believes these things because he doesn’t know anything about me. No one at work does, because I don’t talk about my personal life here. I don’t generally like people to know who I really am. But for some reason I am willing to make an exception for Dick.
    â€œThen you probably wouldn’t believe I sold a screenplay once.”
    â€œYou what?” he asks. “When?”
    â€œIn 1998. Well, it didn’t actually sell. A