If only I could have done something out of the ordinary.

I know it sounds pathetic because I’m only 32, but don’t you have the feeling sometimes that the race is run?

That this is all there is: … Rat racing … 

Heck, sometimes I feel so old already that it’s like I should be resident in that home, and notthe one giving mild mannered old Mr. Porter a hand to safely traverse the distance from wheelchair to dining room chair, and then making sure he doesn’t spill his dinner all over him when trying to get it to traverse from from plate to mouth.

Perhaps it’s because it’s Friday, and after another 9 hours there will be a freedom, of sorts, for a whole two days. Freedom enough at least to up on the Everest-sized piles of laundry and maybe get that last paint job done in the old barn. And maybe, if the kids fall asleep early, Jon and I could … you know.

But then again, since it’s the end of the week there is every chance that both he and I will fall asleep early, too.

I didn’t last night, though – Thursday – and perhaps that … book had something to do with it.

*

I had poured over the book all evening before – as if it was for necessary reading for some term paper. But I haven’t done one of those since Cuyahoga High in the good ol’ mid-nineties, when you still danced to Haddaway.

Jon had peered at me suspiciously, from above his stack of week-old newspapers:

“Is that a … German book you are reading, honey?”

“Doch.”

“Wow – you are the brainy one,” he said and blinked at me in a way I didn’t quite know whether to interpret as a compliment or … “I’ve always said that.”

And then he leafed through his NatGeo ish with feigned rapidity as if to indicate that he – Jonathan Reese, ordinary cop-grunt in the Arizona state police – could do no better than look at pictures.

I shrugged: “I know it sounds masochistic, but you know how some people like math puzzles or crosswords for a break? Well, grammar always was my crosswords.”

“I knew that,” Jon said. “What I didn’t know was that you could actually read that damn language… “

“We learned it in school – when I transferred to the community school in Portree. Had a few courses in high school as well.”

“I thought all pupils hated German.”

“I’m good with languages … the ones I want to remember.”

He nods, knowing full well this particular personal border of mine – just how close he can get to it, without crossing it. I hate Gaelic. If I never utter another word of it, I’ll be happy.

It’s funny, though, that I should have felt like brushing up on German now. Not just because there are quite a few similarities, pronunciation-wise to Scots Gaelic, I feel.

No, it’s more like … Jon is right: It was ages ago – and even though I took a class in high school, because I had this short-lived teenager-seeking-identity burst of interest in my great-grandfather … I had indeed forgotten a lot.

Well, almost everything.

But after Anne died, it had felt like a strange necessity. I had only known her so briefly, after that meeting on the bus from Bakersfield (where my mum  now resides with her new guru).

Marvelous creature, Anne … I really wish I’d known her longer: Short and incredibly delicate; simple but elegant dresses; strong glint in her eye but always gentleness in her tone. And she was at least 10 years older than some of the pensioners at the nursing home, but her mind was younger than the mind of most people my own age. Including my own …

We had talked really well on that never-ending bus trip from Bakersfield to Yuma; and then she invited me to visit her when I came back to Bakersfield; and I did. Once. When I came back the second time to look her up … she was gone.

86 is of course quite ‘fair’ … and all that. You ‘have lived’. There’s ‘no need for more’. And yet, I still miss her like … But I guess that’s what death is all about for us living folks:

Selfishness.

We want people who have died to come back, not because we feel sorry for them that they missed living some more, but because it’s to painful not to have them in our own lives.

And yet we have to.

And I wouldn’t have wanted Anne to end up in a nursing home anyway. She would have been as trapped there as she was in that munitions factory in Nazi Germany in her youth.

What was the last words she said to me, as we said goodbye?

“Don’t hold on to it for too long, Cairistiona …”

She was the only one who was allowed to call me that and she had meant the book, of course. I had borrowed it from her: A brick, yes – but not so much as to scare me away.

It was just in from the German bookstore in Sacramento, the owner of which Anne had known for 20 years and who always kept a few copies of the really good stuff for her, when everything else had sold out. She didn’t come up there so often as she had done … 20 years earlier.

I wasn’t sure, though, if I was going to read it. After all, it had been almost 20 years for me to – as regards German classes.

But Anne had taken some cooing old-womanish delight in my demonstrated ability to still translating single lines from Brecht and a few other books in the original German, so many of which presented themselves on her brimming shelves: ‘Take me … take me’ …

I think she had great fun with it the first hours I was there, and then later it became a test, and then a game to her once more.

I never quite got to figuring Anne out, and I’m not sure I would have gotten the chance, had I known her for 5 years more and not just 5 months. She had her quirks, yes, but she didn’t have an evil bone in her body – that I already knew for sure.

It was more than I could say for the people she grew up with, though. The book was about them, too.

And about the few people who dared to stand up against them.

*

In the dream I was walking through a dark wood, and then I came upon a campground with a single fire lit. There was a girl sitting there – in the a brown uniform, with tie and all: It was the Jungmädel-uniform I knew instantly, sort of a Hitler-Jugend for girls. She was staring into the fire, brooding.

I also knew instantly that I was somewhere in Nazi Germany, but although I thought it was real, as you usually do when dreaming, I was not afraid.

The girl wasn’t a beauty by any measurement; she was rather bland and normal-looking, I thought: And she had short, cropped hair, almost as a boy. And hardly any shapes to speak of … but then again – I wouldn’t have taken her to be more than 15.

Or maybe it was the ugly brown shirt that did it – the uniform. She might have looked better in a simple dress.

And there was something about her eyes – as if they beheld the whole world.

I sat down beside her. She hardly noticed me.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked her cautiously.

“I am thinking of how unfair it is.”

“What?”

“That women aren’t allowed to do much in the Party.”

“They aren’t?”

She looked at me, oddly, as if she recognized me as a complete stranger – and yet someone she had known.

“Of course not,” she then said, as if taking a few second to gauge how stupid I was – how simple she had to put it ” – we can only do so much in the Youth Movements, and then in the homes. If you really want to fight for Germany, you have to be a man.”

“Do you want to go to war?”

She scoffed at me: “There’s no war.”

“No yet ” – I felt a spark of cold coming from the fire ” – but … there might be.”

She looked as if she chewed on something.

“Perhaps,” she then said. “But I would still like to help Germany become great again. I am good with music – and children. I could teach … but I am also a good leader.”

She didn’t need to tell me who had said that to her. It was obvious she trusted completely in her own abilities. I couldn’t help feeling a sting of perverse jealousy.

I mean, sure, she was some brainwashed Nazi-teen, but at least she knew what she wanted. I was twice as old as her and had just drifted along, being thrown back and forth between cities, jobs … men. I had nothing to show for it, and probably never would.

All the old dreams … of becoming an artist, or a lawyer … all too late.

As if on cue, the young woman pulled out a picture from her rucksack.

I recoiled: It was a drawing of

… him.

“Tell me your opinion” she solicited – and with an insisting frankness, too. She didn’t want just another stranger telling her how “good” she was at everything she touched, without any substantial critique.

And yet that’s what I did:

“It’s … very lifelike,” I tried, working overtime not to show my disgust. “It’s good – really is.”

“But you don’t like who I have drawn?” she guessed immediately.

My God, she was so … sharp …

I have ducked Jon’s inquiries with that poker-face several times; and many more from my “broom sisters” – in the nursing home staff:

‘Are you all right, honey?’ - ‘Not coming down with something, are you?’ -  ‘Feeling down again, Carrie?’

But I could poker-face them every time (well, almost). It was an art.

But she saw right through me: The little Nazi-girl.

And still … I didn’t feel in any danger. Not yet. 

I shook my head:

“No, I don’t … like who you have drawn.”

“It’s okay,” she said, as-a-matter-of-fact, and put away the drawing. “There aren’t many who understand our beloved Führer, and you are obviously a foreigner. You would not understand what he does for us – why I am willing to give my life for him.”

“No … you can’t do that,” I blurted.

“Why not?” she came back sharply. “Perhaps I will get the chance despite any rules and regulations about what women can do and cannot do. You said there might be war?”

I pressed my lips together. She hesitated for a second, then continued her offensive:

“If our neighbors cast themselves on us, trying to destroy all that our Führer has rebuilt for us  – all that is good … is that not worth dying for – in order to protect that?”

I didn’t say anything, but she could see in my eyes the answer I didn’t dare to give.

She breathed in deeply, as if I now had indeed exhausted her enigmatic patience:

“Everyone will be required a great sacrifice … ” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. It is for a great cause.”

Then she turned away from me and stared into the fire once more.

We both did, for a while.

Then I said:

“Have you considered the … alternatives?”

“Alternatives?” She tasted the word as if it was some kind of strange fish.

“Now it was my turn to take a deep breath:

“Suppose it wasn’t … the others who threw themselves at Germany? Suppose it was Germany who attacked them?”

“That would not happen.”

“How can you be so … sure?”

“Our Führer says that we only want what is ours by right, and that it will come to us by means of peaceful negotiation – and the others will have to understand that. They may attack us and force us to defend ourselves, however … “

“They won’t … ” I tried again, feeling desperation growing ” … you will attack them – all of them. And they they will respond, in self-defense.”

“But that’s not just!” she exclaimed, and with such perfectly genuine sincerity – as if she really believed that Nazism had anything to do with justice that I could not fathom she had put on that ugly brown shirt in the first place.

“No … no it’s not,” I said, getting a hold of myself. “But that’s what Adolf Hitler will do. And there will be more … much more. Everybody who is against him will be killed, or put into camps.”

Her eyes widened, and then she shook her head – but in a sad kind of way:

“You are lying.”

I had had enough. I got up.

“You’ll see … ” I said and wiped my trousers (an odd thing to do in a dream, I know – but I remember it vividly … as the rest).

She shook her head as if I was not worth explaining anything to anymore. It just made me fume even more. What did I need to sit here and try to lecture that brainwashed little Nazi-bitch? She could go on and die for all I cared.

Then our eyes met.

Christ, she was only 15 … and at 15 you really, really need a direction in life, don’t you? To make the first, best choice about who you are … preferably a choice that is sanctioned by those you care most about.

“ … Do you mind if I sit down again?” I asked.

She looked at me for two long seconds. She was sitting there, legs pulled up under her, arms around the legs, her face seemed lit up but I couldn’t tell if it was the glow of the campfire flames or …

Two seconds but they felt like two hours … as if she had to size me up definitely now.

“I don’t mind,” she finally said. “You are a very strange woman. I have never met anyone like you. I would like you to tell me more about … the place you come from.”

And so I did.

*

I don’t remember the rest of the dream, but I assume that we talked a lot more. Then my bedside clock’s alarm hammered into my poor head that it was 0630. Time to get into the race again.

Yup. I didn’t think anything else than a 1000 other things for the next 9 hours.

But when I came home … after having picked up Michael at the kindergarten …  after I had once again wrestled with the ungrateful curriculum of teaching him why he should not hit back at the other boys who hit him … after that I could finally drop down in favorite rocking chair and loose myself a bit in German verbs.

And I had a pretty big dictionary lying right beside … Anne’s book:

Sophie Scholl

The life and times of a young student and her friends, who distributed anti-Nazi propaganda, got caught and executed for it. She was 21. I knew I had to read it the moment I saw it.

I took up the book and paused before taking out the bookmark; glancing briefly at the cover again …

The resemblance to the girl from the dream was … but no, that couldn’t be.

Could.Not.

And even if it had been her, it was just a dream.

Figures, when I finally do something worthwhile, something really important

… it is not real.

*

*

In memory of Sophie Scholl (1921-1943) and the other members of the White Rose resistance group, who dared to dream of a Germany without Nazism in a time when reality was a nightmare.

As contradictory as this may sound, you would know what I’m talking about if you have suppressed a part of you that was as vital as your heart and blood for 11 years.

I’m talking about artwork, of course – or in my case, drawing. I always did it, especially in high school – with Lin. I don’t know if it was a good enough reason to stop when Lin died, but that’s what I did.

I also threw out a college degree, traveled South America like a spiritual vagabond and nearly got myself killed on sex and drugs and not much more. The latter two were enough. Then I met Jon and got married and had children and was saved for the first time, kind of. But it was the first sensible decision I had made in years, the first that would not destroy me for sure if I continued to live like this.

And yet … as I’m sitting here in the kitchen, laptop on table, coffee steaming from mug, vista outside the window a think crisp blanket dropped over everything during the night … I know that that kind of salvation comes at a price. If you ever tried to be creative, whilst trying to raise a family you know what I’m talking about: They demand a price from you.

Children and a husband demand your love and that love, sometimes, has to be taken away from over parts of your life. Because there is only so much time in the day to do dishes, help with homework, clean the house, or work at a dead-end job. It may sound ungrateful but what if it’s true?

That doesn’t mean I blame the people I do love most in the world for my own failure to find the time to draw in the past years. It just means that I have to change my conception of love and extend it to myself more, otherwise I’ll poison the love I have for Jon and the kids. Isn’t that what happened with mum, with she increasingly had to carve out time and energy to try to ‘save’ dad from his bout with the bottle and us kids from getting beat up at school? It was beyond her power and in the end she had to make a clean break: Divorce.

I’m not talking about that, though. In Deborah’s case it was the only option. In my case it would be ridiculous, although I sometimes feel like it. But much as I yearn to have more time to myself, I also want to be with Jon and Emma and Michael – and the rest of the family. They are a part of my heart, as surely as drawing once was. So how do I divide my heart again? I think I have to divorce something …

I have to divorce the idea that I always have to prioritize my family first. Of course, I have to prioritize them first if you added up all the days and nights and looked at the general trend of my actions: They had better come top score for of my husband and children – otherwise what’s the point of being a family in the first place? At least that’s how I see it …

But so far I’ve been too lousy at changing that tune. It was always family first, every day. There was never that ‘other day’ when it was me first, except in stolen moments in front of the television with a bowl of candy, late a nights. But what do you get from such moments except extra fat?

It sounds awfully trite, I know, to realize this – a grown woman, 32 years old and all – but unless you’ve deliberately chosen career first, can you honestly say that you’ve done much more than pay lipservice to the need for balance between your own, purely egoistic needs and those of your family?

If you’ve done that – just paid lipservice – 90% of your time, I don’t blame you. It is natural and you are a good person for doing it, a kind and caring person – except to yourself. And in the end that will help to ruin that which you claim to fight for: The family.

Because bitterness of always prioritizing family first is not something that can easily be suppressed. In fact, it can’t be suppressed. Trouble is, that it’s you try and then it explodes in your face at some point and you do get that divorce.

I don’t believe in drastic solutions. So I am not going to run away to some artists’ colony in San Francisco and live there for 3 months. It’s like a diet – unless you make it a lifestyle it won’t work. At least that’s what I’ve read. I’ve yet to try it. But it feels like it should be so, because I have often tried, in my own little way, to make a run for it. It hasn’t made anyone happier.

So I have to force myself to get up each morning, a little earlier than the rest – and then I will have the time and peace that I need to get drawing again. It just has to be made a habit. And why not? Why do I need to stay up until midnight going zombie in front of the TV, watching half-decent movies – (or even some decent ones) – but still feeling oh-so-sorry for myself? I need to go to bed early and get up early. If people who run for fun can do it, then so can I. Unless I can’t …

I just checked my archives on this blog, at this is the third time I write a similar post about wanting saving my life ‘a second time’. The two other posts are back in draft mode, because I couldn’t maintain the habit long enough. It wasn’t Jon’s fault. It wasn’t Emma or Michael’s. It wasn’t the jobmarket, or my bouts of depression, or the bad heating in the attic where I usually feel best about sitting down with my pen and paper. It was my fault. I slipped back into the wrong balance.

There was too much that ‘needed’ to be done: The house needed to be a little cleaner, the lunchboxes of the kids needed to be a little better prepared, I needed to be a little more loving and understanding towards Jon when he came home after a 10-hour patrol. So what will be different this time? What will it take to actually do what I have stated clearly and unequivocally is so important for that vital other part of my heart not to die?

I think the problem is that I have not been willing to pay the price. Getting up early has a cost. You have to go to bed earlier, at least if you are me. So I can’t be as attentive to Jon as I want when he comes home after a long day of earning all the real money for our family. (And yeah, you know what I’m talking about – but whatever is on your dirty little mind right now … that doesn’t make it any less of a problem for me, does it?)

What it comes to is this: I have tried to get something – extra time and energy – without being completely clear about what I had to cross out instead, without really daring. Cue: Old habit knocks on the door and history repeats itself.

Aside from some husband-wife stuff that might benefit from less repetition and more romantic planning, I am still not sure what I should do less of in the evenings, in order to be fresher in the mornings? Do I need to find other times at day to draw – when? Do I need to find other places where I can draw – where? Do I need to rethink this all over and leave this blog post as yet another draft because I will fail yet again? Maybe I do, but that will also make sure history repeats itself in my case, and then I might not be in a condition to try again next year.

I’ve always been afraid to do something without a plan, just as I’ve always been afraid of failure and the two seem to go together – like heads and aches. I’ve always been afraid of saying I wanted to do something, really wanted it, announcing it – and then not being able to live up to my bold promises about what I’d do to change this time. And the more banal the chance, such as getting up two hours earlier, the harder it becomes for me to actually state that I am going to do it, because it will be more humiliating than ever if I fail yet again.

What a whiny lil’ housewife, I’ve become, huh? Yeah, that’s right. Bottom line: Go and comfort yourself with the chocolate again, Carrie, and call up some of your fellow semi-white trash girlfriends from Yuma, like Lorrie, take the four-wheeler and drop by at her place and sit and backtalk your husbands for a couple of hours (don’t forget the chocolate!). That will make you feel better, for a little while, just like that other Carrie you once were, body and soul, like that other white you once mistaked for beautiful snow.

What was it that it said in that neat little book which my bro-in-law and creative conscience had found for me  … and the only thing I remember, aside from the light between the words:

You’re allowed to be scared, just do it anyway.

Right. So despite all my dead-end ruminations, and despite my failure to see what I have to do to be strong enough to keep at my heartwork this time – there are still choices left.

People will tell you that if you really want something, if you really have a burning passion than you will do it by yourself. ‘If it’s important enough you will make the time’. It is not entirely true, because just as you can become unable to trust in the love of other people, after having seem them blown to bits in a war you never knew had anything to do with your life, then you can come down with artist-post traumatic stress disorder.

You can even feel ashamed and ridiculous for calling yourself the a-word, sitting there in your kitchen, with your mug, with your hair all over the place, dreading the moment when the kids will begin to make noise. It doesn’t matter what happened, or whose fault it is – it happens. The only question is what you will do about it.

For example, will you post a long rant, like this, and risk for all the world to see your penchant for obsession, your chronic ability to be indecisive and your general weakness … and thereby line yourself up for another failure – a promise to yourself and to the world that you can’t keep?

*
Categorized under: Art-healing, family balance, ruminations, indecision.

*

*

*

*

Links: http://www.lovetrustproject.com/

He glanced around their new bedroom and wondered if all rooms that had been newly refurnished lost a bit of soul in the process – and thereby the instinctive feeling of safety that was always connected with the well-known. He certainly felt like somebody had stolen a part of insides right now and implanted a chunk of ice instead.

Dave pulled the sheets aside with annoyance: It was what he could do to suppress his uneasiness. In a moment, he knew, he would prowl the kitchen for a snack. Then he would consider texting Ken down in Memphis – and then think the better of it as he had done the previous two nights. And then he would feel sorry for himself, and then – Christ – he had to do something else this time. But what?

He shuffled over to the window, which was dark and smeared by cold sleet. The view of the narrow back street outside didn’t do much to relight his sense of calm, especially not an ink black winter’s night such as this. Some kids had even stoned the lamp post down there – the one on the sidewalk at the location exactly beneath their bedroom, two stories down. For a second Dave felt like a shadow, as if that single light’s demise had left a dark spot inside him as well.

Dave sat down on the bed again, on Ken’s side; still struggling with himself – about whether or not to go to the kitchen, to text – heck, maybe even call Ken. But he would just come off as a whiner, wouldn’t he? … He shook his head; and it was in that moment, perhaps to distract himself, that he began rummaging a bit in Ken’s BBB (his Black Book Box), as the latter had dubbed it.  

It had always been below Ken’s part of the bed, an old package box that once had contained a long-forgotten Christmas gift and now it had become a repository of curly-paged paperpacks. Dave had never  been particularly interested  in the BBB. If there was one thing they didn’t have in common it was taste in books. But then he noticed one – the sole hardback: Hidden Reality – by someone guy named Greene.

Dave opened the brick and leafed through it, and after a few pages he felt that chill again, as he had when he had just been torn out of sleep. The Greene guy, smiling without a care in the world from the inner cover, he actually claimed that there could be “parallel universes”- if not scientifically observed yet, then very much validated by theory:

The case in a nutshell seemed to be this: Our universe might be infinitely big. If that was true, so there could be only so many ways matter could arrange itself within that infinite universe. Eventually, matter has to repeat itself and arrange itself in similar ways. So if the universe is infinitely large, it is also home to infinite parallel universes: What we thought was ‘all there is’ – our own universe, could in fact contain many, many versions of ‘all there is’.

Thus, if there could be an infinite number of these parallel universes, so there could be universes which was completely the same as ours – copies, if one liked. But there could also be universes that looked the same, but with slight deviations. Perhaps the sole difference was that you had been born in Spain and not in Louisiana. And then, of course there could be the ones in which not only you had taken a sligthly different turn on your way to work one morning, but universes in which all of history had taken a major turn.

And now he had to stop.

For Dave alternate universes had always been something that was only real in comic books … Surely this was some fringe science?

He leafed a bit more, and then found himself actually reading. The book was lucidly written, surprisingly clearly in fact, and he became engrossed – against all odds. Or perhaps because of the odds: What were they that he, if he went back to sleep, would not have the same nightmare – fourth time in a row:

Being a young soldier in the Third World War, some insane sequel to the second war  – in 1946 when Stalin had decided to grab the rest of Europe for himself, and the US had scrambled to build nukes quickly enough to stop him. The context was, of course, ridiculously unclear, just as it always was in dreams. But he knew it well enough, because it was the only book on his own nightstand. Nothing but a good alternate history-yarn, right? Not something you had to think too much about – unless you dreamed it instead …

Dave put the Greene-book on the bedside table; Ken’s midnight pastime, with serious scientists discussing parallel dimensions and alternate universes. But had he – Dave – developed an obsesssion about his own book; and now, was he seeing ‘signs’ everywhere, including in Ken’s book, that his obsession actually referred to something real?

But that was crazy, too! An obsession, at least as far as he knew, was like … not being able to shake a certain line from a song, or worse – some hideous thoughts about committing murder, or maybe being afraid of touching a doorhandle for fear of bacteriae. His sister-in-law had had a small bout of that a few years back, and it had been bad enough. But why those nightmares? Surely they couldn’t be classified as that?

And there were no other links between the alternate history lightweight paperback  and Ken’s hardcover brick with that friendly Greene-guy arguing enthusiastically why parallel and alternate dimensions weren’t so far out after all. He had to think about that, for a moment. Then he came to a conclusion of sorts.

Okay, fine, one of the characters in that World War III-anthology was a young gay man, who felt so ashamed of not having the courage to live openly as gay back home that he went to war instead, and that had moved Dave a lot. He could identify. He had the bruises to prove it – very literally. But that was not enough reason to invoke Freud, Jung – let alone some oddball superstitious connection to a fringe science world view.

And, yes, he had always been completely absorbed in those history documentaries on Discovery – about World War II and the Cuban crisis. He could easily identify with that past, too, although it had happened long before he was born. So perhaps it wasn’t so strange that the combination of something relatively personal, and dark imaginations  about alternate history wars had affected him. But for it to have become a ‘mental infection’, too … ?

Dave lay down on the bed again. He wondered: Was it enough to be considered mentally unstable if he fell asleep and now dreamt about some World War III fiction which had not happened … at least in this universe … for the fourth time in a row? And if that was a sign of some mental condition … could he do something to stop himself from going insane?

What was it his sis-in-law had always said about her fights with OCD?

‘Maybe you don’t know what causes your obsession but the only cure is to confront it, otherwise it will grow and take control of you. You can’t outrun it. The only cure is to confront your fear until your mind tires of it.’

He had already summed up a lot of good arguments why he should not do this. After all, he had been moved thoroughly by the book about a imaginary World War III, yes, … but to have become literally afraid? He wasn’t afraid of something that was just … fiction. He didn’t have to ‘confront’ it.

Still, he reached out and took the book from his own bedside table: World War III – 1946. He had a few chapters left; might as well get something done about it, now that he had woken up in the middle of the night. And there was another reason: Perhaps he was going insane in some fashion, but he would not go insane without a fight. Even if that fight was imaginary as well.

Because fighting was part of him. Dave had had to fight all his life:  First to survive the streets in Southern L.A., later to survive when he came out, and now to survive having to clean that lab in a dead-end job whilst working blood and sweat in the nights on his art submissions. He had almost broken down when he didn’t get that job at DC after all. They had virtually signed the contract and then – “unexpected cutbacks”. Sorry, mate – and what a load of horseshit that was!

But as if it hadn’t been enough, there had also been the ever-more toxic arguments with Ken over the summer, and the growing feeling of emptiness about their relationship, and the fear that his beloved sister-in-law might crack again, and –

… and here was the bookmark.

He began reading, keenly aware of the silent streets outside and the silence in their apartment and inside himself. Like the whole world was bracing for a big thunder storm, or something  – just waiting for it to break loose. But what the hell would that all be about? He certainly wasn’t waiting for any storms.

All he wanted was stability: If he could just hold out a little longer, with Ken, with the submissions, with the gnawing feeling of being alone in the world as he sat in his corner of the living room every evening, pouring over the drawing board, hands still stinking of cleaner and industrial soap … then he would eventually make it, turn his life around for the better. ‘Just hold out’ – that’s about the only useful thing his old man had taught him, although old Joe Reese himself had not been able to live up to it much.

But here and now, just thinking about all that crap he had to grit his teeth and endure, made Dave smile; made him actually look forward to loose himself in that silly, but gripping, World War III-yarn for half an hour or so … even though things now looked pretty grim for the young man in the book.

Perhaps, Dave mused, if he went to sleep again and found himself in the Third World War parallel universe for a fourth time, then he would not wake up and be afraid again – not of the nightmare of war itself, nor of worry about his mental health.

After all, hadn’t he already fought a war all by himself in this universe?