Set the Controls

By Jeffrey Sykes

She smiles and puts her hand on my chest ever so gentle and says “calm down” when I’m having my worst moments of fear. The feel of her delicate fingertips radiates electricity across my upper torso and though the feeling is redolent of the bliss of our early passion it doesn’t do much to quell the stress of my racing heart. It’s been six years now. Six long years of nothingness for me since I was laid off from my mid-level management job at the textile plant outside of town. Luckily for us we got her through her graduate course work three months before the plant closed and sent 435 jobs to the Far East.

Like countless other men approaching or passed their middle age I’ve stood in ceaseless lines at job fairs, sent out dozens of resumes and cover letters with the compliant “to whom it may concern” and “please accept my resume for the advertised position”, spent day after day listening to the seconds tick off on the clock on the wall that was a gift from her grandmother while I waited for a call or for the mail to come as I counted the spaces in between the minutes when I would log into my email hoping for a message from someone real to give me a glimmer of vocational hope as opposed to the endless stream of autogenerated form mail that clutters my inbox.

And so again we’re standing here in the middle of the den, holding each other a little tighter at least than we did a few months ago when I felt we were seriously drifting, and her hand is on my chest and she is whispering to me that it’s ok and that she’s not going away from me. I’m lucky to have such a woman. She’s filled with the strength of her south Georgia ancestors who hewed subsistence farms and cash crops from the flat, unbroken dirt before the Depression came and who went off to war if they were sons and off to the city to build armaments if they were daughters, hoping all the while that after Mars became satiated yet again there would be someone left to love and share gentleness with as life moved beyond youth and toward a pious responsibility.

After she tells me she loves me and kisses me with those pink, youthful lips that still stand out against the rich powder white stillness of her skin I know it’s time to let her go, to loosen the grip I have with my hands clasped around her back or planted firmly on her hourglass hips but I don’t want the moment to end. Live in the moment they say and this is one instance where I think I understand. But she’s got responsibilities, matters demanding her time – the kids, the mound of paperwork she brought home from the office that the dean expects processed by Thursday, Facebook statuses to update, newsfeeds to check again because it’s been 10 minutes since she last logged on – and standing in the den with a husband who’s outlived his commercial vibrancy doesn’t stand much of a chance amidst the matrix.

So I have a choice to make. Do I push deeper into sentimentality – gushing with my best Elizabethan effort like Marlow to tell her how much I love her and want nothing more than to make this moment eternal – or do I beg her to stay in her mind as my 20 year old lover, which she remains in my heart and soul, and not let the low brow demands of the mundane sap any more of her time than it already has? Or should I simply pull away and thank her yet again, telling her I am here for her no matter what she needs – the dishes, the laundry, give the kids their bath, shop for the groceries – and move on to my next set of choices?

If I push the poetic line too much she smiles and thanks me and gently begins to move away because she knows full well that I am mad for her, even more so now than I was the night under a dark and moonless sky when she turned her face away from me as I went in for the first kiss, leaving her delightful cheek wide open for me to pause, exhale a small laugh and then kiss with the gentleness of eternal devotion. Things would be different if our duties were not reversed and she was not pressed into the role of breadwinner and sustainer for half the day while I bounced between paperback books from the library, slow walks around the neighborhood and meticulously grooming the azaleas and small trees surrounding our modest home while I whiled the hours away in between fruitless trips to the employment agency across town.

Reassured again by her gentle caress and filled with the sentiment of remembering the reasons we fell in love in the first place more than 10 years ago I am confident enough for the moment to let her go and watch her walk away, across the living room invariably to the computer desk where she logs on  to her social net and is transported for the moment away from my problems and back to a circle of friends just as if she were still that 20 year old in the dorm who could sit with the girls and talk of boys and hopes and dreams of fulfillment to come. I don’t blame her or hold a grudge. The computer has served us well over the last few years, giving me an opportunity to take online classes, explore small business opportunities, and look, look, look for a job – but with the months having turned into years and approaching a sense of permanence, a creeping resentment is building and it is hard to fight the fear of loneliness, even if it has only been three minutes since I last held her in my arms.

The day I lost my job I knew things would be bad. I’m smart enough to understand demographics and the basics of globalization. With tens of thousands of baby boomers having never recovered meaningful employment after the era of corporate downsizing in the early 1990s and stock bubbles, dot com booms and housing as cash cow all having come and gone leaving us on the precipice of economic meltdown by the middle of the first decade of the 21^st century I knew that my narrow skill set combined with my age and my dark history would make it likely impossible to regain what I lost that afternoon at the office. I called her on the phone after lunch because I knew it was coming – the rumors had been circulating for months and grew increasingly real with the impending visit of Carl from the corporate office – and she told me she loved me and that we would get through it together. I thanked her and I think it was that whisper of love that steeled my spine and kept me from falling apart as I was told to hand over my keys, handed my bag and told to come back in two days to pick up a box that my personal belongings would be placed in and left for me at the security desk downstairs. The vice-president was kind enough to grant my request that she take the framed picture of my wife and place it in my bag and take from the cork board above my desk the black and white printouts of photos of my newborn son crawling on the floor on a play mat beneath an upholstered mobile with tiny stuffed birds and puppies and monkeys floating over his head. She cried as she handed me the black leather bag I carried with me each day and Carl told me he was sorry, that I was a good man and that they wished me luck.

I refrained from collapsing in the parking lot and made it home and in the door before I rushed past my wife in tears telling her “I’m sorry babe” and into the bedroom where I sat on the edge of the bed and cried for a few minutes to get it out of my system. So much lost in that moment. Not only a sense of male pride in being able to provide for your family and be seen as king of your castle – no that was nothing, typical really of what any man might lose – but a decade almost of a changed life, a life reclaimed from the gutter of American failure, transformed from a weak will of failure through personal growth into an average success. Now I knew even average means would be out of my reach.

But she has sustained me. And I know it can’t have been easy. It’s not easy for me to bear the hours of nothingness as my midlife wastes away and as I fight bitterness and anger borne of sadness the way a junkie fights off the urge for a fix. I owe her so much yet I can give her nothing tangible.

But you can never really ever touch the things that are important in this life. You can’t ever really feel the things of this world that sustain a person beyond loss.

In the last year I have tried to wean myself off of the tangible things I felt had come to dominate my life. The bottle, Facebook, green plant like material, politics, the news and holding on to earlier dreams of hope that have long since faded with the fancies of a young man’s heart. In their place I have tried to put devotion to the ones I love, devotion to a latent thirst for literature and a dream about a bitter man who fights through it to become a sage. But that’s not easy in a small town where I am an alien to the habits and intricacies of local knowledge, such as it is, in a region where the economy has left stress and collapsed lives and families strewn in the wake of a decade of transformation.

At her church alone no less than five marriages have collapsed due to financial pain, infidelity or just plain sorryness. It’s a sad place when the buzzards circle over the sky above your town and even the church can’t provide sustenance for the last vestiges of the American family.

Maybe it is Facebook. Maybe the constant access to your past is a limiter of your future. Maybe trolling the web living vicariously through status updates and shared memories is as much of a tear against real intimacy as a short temper or a hurtful word let loose from a bitter tongue. And what kind of demons lurk just around the next bend of time when all that separates a spouse from a dalliance is to click on “send message” to a former lover an old flame or a new beau du jour?

Last fall a young woman was shot in her bed as she slept, her husband standing over her with a handgun that he next turned on himself while their two daughters slept in the next room. When I read the story on the newspaper website I was mortified, but when she came home and told me the woman had gone to her church and that her husband sometimes came and that everyone was distraught about it I went to Facebook to see if the woman had a profile.

And there she was, smiling, posing in running shorts with a number on her shirt, a hat and dark sunglasses, or in a row of three at a night club in a shinny blouse that had room for a view. Sarah was her name, not much older than my wife. Educated. A dental assistant. Healthy. Happy. Now in ICU in Durham with a gunshot wound to the abdomen – and if she survived – a shattered life with traumatized children and a dead husband.

I shook my head as I clicked off of her profile. I Googled their address and zoomed in to street view to look at their home, a nice brick ranch in the country in a nice part of the county. A nearby home on a realtors website listed for $175,000. I paused to consider, as my mind is want to do, what could have possibly taken place to crack a hole in logic and rationality and cause a man with a healthy, attractive wife and two kids and a mortgage to shoot her in bed and blow his brains across the wall?

I couldn’t find a profile for the husband. A Google search of his name turned up nothing. As the days turned to weeks there was little discussion among the locals about the incident. A friend organized a charity event for Sarah, even contacted my wife to participate, but details of the man’s motivation remain scarce.

Joblessness or infidelity, I decided. Too much pressure on one, the other or both and so the sky cracked, death rained and one more family falls by the wayside, cast off by pressures few could have imagined just a few short years ago.

A few weeks later I spent a few hours deleting my Facebook pictures and then deactivated my account. It wasn’t a direct reaction to thoughts about the shooting, but it played a small part. I think it just freaked me out that I could learn so much – get such a view into a person’s life in one or two or three clicks at the most. Sitting with my wife watching financial television one night there was a special about social networking and Facebook’s push to become the Internet. A walled garden as one writer so deftly put it. And on the show a young programmer, former head of such and such at Facebook, talking about how addicted people are. “Some people deactivate their accounts” he said assuredly “but our data show they come back. Again. And again.”

I was struck by the smugness, the surety with which he gloated that we couldn’t stay away. And as I thought about my wife and the purity of our love as we sparked not 10 years ago and the pressure and drift we’ve endured in recent years I made a decision then and there to go dark. A social network has little value if it undermines the very fabric of your most intimate responsibilities.

And it had that for me. I could spend hours arguing local or national politics with people on Facebook. I could watch Egypt collapse on Al Jazeera’s page while arguing about radical Islam’s evil intent with an undertaker sitting in his office less than half a mile from the spot on my couch where I sat surfing the collective brain power of humanity in the living room of a bungalow built in a small industrial town in the south in 1936.

I could talk to my high school friends about our first girlfriends. I could relive the insanity of my first drug experiences with my buddies from freshman year at State. I was friends with two former girlfriends and the person who was my ideal of what a woman should be when I was 23 years old. While the woman who I swore to have and to hold, forsaking all others and clinging only unto, sat a few feet away with a remote clicking through the Kardashians to Sister Angelica and back to local cable access, with a few stops on home shopping and that crazy guy who sells home décor and cheap art to the lumpen each night from 9 to 11 pm.

So I deactivated.

A few days later I kissed my wife with a fresh passion. A simple kiss of love with no hidden agenda. She was a bit apprehensive. I’ve not done the best job of being a lover or a friend in recent months because life at the bottom of a pity party is not an attractive position. And it was nearing the end of the semester. Crunch time for her to get reports done for the vice-president in case the auditors come during exam week. Piles of spreadsheets on class attendance, grade curves, and retention reports to be sorted and filtered and organized into manageable data that could be massaged by the administration at the snap of a finger.

And so I picked up a few novels at the book store and sat beside her. In between pages I would stop and look over at her and remember the freshness and the devotion and the gentleness she brought into my life. I remembered the passion and the great sex and the laughter and the fun we experienced together in the days when love hung in our home like mist across the hills of our beloved mountains after a quick rain shower in summer. Fresh and visible. Welcome and cool. A point of contentment between the scorching heat of a summer day and the bright dawn of mornings to come.

Before I knew it I had finished one novel, a post-modern text on the pressure of the crowd, and moved on to a second. And along the way we had conversation again. We made small talk about the television. Or our children. I made her laugh again and remembered how much her smile brought joy to my life.

Six weeks ago I would have brooded and wrote a bitter status update on my social network if I fell to my knees again, as I sometimes do, under the pressure of joblessness and the agitation brought on by the fear of an unfulfilled future.
But this afternoon when I felt like crying I was able to turn to her and pull her close to me and feel the reassurance of a loving touch that abnegates the stasis of my middle age.

-I’m right here and I’m not going away- she said.

And like a rider by a patch of woods gazing along the horizon past a clump of snowy trees I realize that there is still time for me.

-I’m thankful for you. And I cherish you as much as I ever have.- I said.

And as we kiss softly and move away from each other and on to the list of random events that after so many years begin to constitute the balance of a lifetime I feel up to the struggle again.