The Watchmakers

Chapter 1. March 18th – Nathan Gets Happy

Title of Nathan’s research paper on an occupation of his choice from sophomore year of high school, Duluth, MN, fall 1985:

"A Playwright’s Work: Why I Need to Give Actors Words and How I’ll Make a Living Doing it."

Call me Sisyphus. Or don’t. Call me Nathan if not Sisyphus.

On the morning of March 18th, 2001, the day I decided to be me and nobody else, I couldn’t get out of bed. Not surprising. During the months leading up to March 18th, I’d been unable to get out of bed without a fight. Like a caveman frozen in ice, buried in glacial layers of sheets and blankets, still alive, but just barely, I would lie there, muscles aching, mouth open, eyes burning, staring at the white ceiling above. And March 18th was the same. But March 18th was the end of it.

I had no idea the day would bring revolution. Change seemed impossible. I’d become, as an adult, a salesman of institutional benefits and insurance to small companies. I had a mortgage and a wife and children. Revolution wasn’t in the realm of the plausible. Only brainless, eternal labor was, like Sisyphus rolling his rock up and down a mountain.

And in bed that morning, I fought with every ounce of my thin soul. I whispered, Get going. Get up. Please. And although my body ached, and my eyes burned, I did get up. I did get out of bed, eventually. There were mouths to feed. I didn’t have a choice.

Getting out of bed wasn’t always like that. Before I became a caveman, getting out of bed was easy: it was the first step in leaving home every morning. Leaving made more sense than staying. At home my three kids screamed and my wife’s eyes were dull and sad and the house fell apart in this way and that with brutal regularity. At home I watched our savings get sucked dry. I watched our credit card debts balloon. Work was a reprieve from home. I liked getting out of bed.

Of course work sucked. Work meant making client visits: shaking hands with men who didn’t wash after using the bathroom, making small talk with account processors who had What Would Jesus Do? mouse pads and no sense of humor. But I could go out to lunch at work. Alone. Everyday I ate at chain restaurants where the servers wore candy stripe shirts and were cheerful and TVs hanging above the bar showed sports from around the world. I breathed at lunch. Lunch alone was consolation. And work was better than being at home.

Then Min came.

Min started work in September of 2000. Min was the CFO’s daughter. She had straight black hair cut short at her chin and big blue eyes that darted and rolled as my coworkers talked. And she wore these clothes, these tight and rumpled skirts and old sweaters and big black shoes, clothes that reminded me I had been young and smart and interesting too, not so long ago.

The first time I saw her, she walked past my cube slow, dressed in that perfect way. She eyeballed me and instantly I hated my no wrinkle, no stain khaki pants. Just seeing Min and the way she moved and the way she dressed…I spilled coffee on my pants, the liquid beading and rolling off like water from the feathers of a duck. My face beat red. I jumped out of my chair. Min paused, then walked on. I wanted to melt these fucking pants in a giant fire.

In October I talked to Min in the break room, over coffee, and she told me she was taking a year between college and grad school. I asked her important sounding questions, as if I knew all about grad school. The next day we met for coffee again and she talked about movies and art and I listened and nodded and my eyes watered and I wanted to say everything about movies and art, but couldn’t remember anything. It had been too long.

In November she began calling me on my cell when I was out on client visits. My phone would ring, me in front of some thick-jawed human resources rep, and I’d say to the rep, Um. Got to get this one, then pick up.

And Min would whisper, I know what you’re doing, you sell-out, you cheat, you liar, you pervert. Then she’d laugh and hang up. And I’d nod at the rep and chuckle, Wrong number, and grin through the rest of the meeting, a great bubble of light rising in my chest.

And in the office I’d think about Min, smile about her, wonder where she was in the building, then I’d find her. And she’d look up from her desk and say, I was just thinking about you Nathan Sellers. She caused me to go to work early, caused me to stay at work late. She reminded me of me, and me and Jeannie, my wife, not so long ago – who we were, what I was.

But in December, Min changed. She got tired of the grind and she got dark and she began saying dark things that affected me. I’d meet her in the break room and she’d say, I hate this place. I’d kill myself if I had to stay here forever. I hate it.

I know, I told her – these bright lights and these white bread people and their fishing boats and daycare centers and their vapid talking about coworkers’ work habits. How did this happen? How did I get stuck here? What did I do to deserve this? I finally asked.

You’re Sisyphus, Min said.

Sisyphus. I found Sisyphus on the internet, remembered him from reading in college… Yeah Sisyphus, I thought. He’s me.

And then in January Min jumped into my cube, red-faced, on fire. She’d received a fellowship offer from the English Lit department at Indiana and would study Chaucer, because… He’s so contemporary. Isn’t he? He wrote all those disparate socio-economic voices? In the Middle Ages? That’s postmodern, isn’t it?

I smiled yes and nodded but I didn’t know. How would I know? When I was her age I had no discipline, no idea, no guts. When I was twenty-three, my best friend Wells moved to New York and he asked me to go and I said, Yes, then I said, Um, then I said, No. I’d just met Jeannie and she was an artist and so beautiful and I thought, If I’m with an artist, I’ll live an artsy fartsy life. That’s a good answer for me. And I envisioned a future of gallery openings and good wine and late night dinners, which would light me up and I’d be happy… But then pregnancies and marriage and children and student loans and health insurance and houses with leaky roofs and squirrels that died in the house’s walls after choking on the attic’s insulation (do you know what it costs to remove dead squirrels?), and I was a salesman and Jeannie taught art at an elementary school and we spent our days sliding around in the goddamn snow trying to get our poor kids in car seats. I smiled yes to Min, but I didn’t know anything about postmodern. How would I know?

I’m out of this hellhole in May, man. Min raised her hand for a high five.

And lunch out, lunch alone, stopped being consolation.

Beginning, then, in January, I couldn’t get out of bed. And Jeannie would push open the door of the bedroom and say, Nathan. Jesus. Do you want Charlie to be late again? Get up. What’s wrong with you? And she’d leave the door open, allowing the high-pitched scream of our three kids to assault my ears, the bitter smell of peanut butter toast and dark roast coffee to assault my nose and I’d fight and fight and fight, and then get up, just in time to drop Charlie off ten minutes late for first grade. He, a six year old, asking, Daddy, are you all right?

And at work I stopped doing client visits. I didn’t want to drive. I didn’t want to slide around in the ice and snow. I worried about dying in accidents, dying having done nothing, been nothing, a waste of air and blood, and I almost did crash on the way to work, on the way home; it was more mental than environmental: I stopped remembering to look both ways. So I stopped doing client visits: fifty percent of my job description. Instead I sat at my desk, the fluorescent lights buzzing above me, too exhausted to answer the phone, the other fifty percent.

Min would visit and talk about music and art and books and I’d nod and smile, not listening. She wouldn’t notice my eyes were fixed on her forehead.

And at the beginning of March I lost my first client and then another. And I received threats from three others and a note and several voice mails from my boss, Phil, to come see him. I did not go to see him. I decided to battle my situation, my malaise. I tried different remedies.

Instead of going for coffee one morning, I climbed the stairs to the company library, which was always empty, and locked the door, and pulled a chair cushion onto the floor, and sat cross-legged, and shut my eyes, and breathed deep, and tried to meditate to cleanse my mind of the possibilities of the past. But during my meditation I saw Lake Mendota in Madison and my college notebooks and the beautiful girls all around me and I felt this great hope and lingered there and then remembered everything real: work, wife, kids, bills. And I choked, opened my watering eyes. Crashing the car makes sense, I thought. I should crash the fucking the car.

So I gave myself pep talks in the bathroom mirror. You can do it, I’d say. Snap out of it, I’d nod. You’re an adult… And I’d notice gray hairs and wrinkles I never knew existed. I’d shake my head, no. I’d say, Please, to my reflection.

So I put down gallons of coffee to pump up my energy, which caused me to urinate fifteen times a day.

John Bean, a big, hairy, young guy who sat in the cubicle next to me, finally asked, Nathan…dude…are you all right?

I didn’t answer out loud, but I did in my head: me and my family are doomed. There were bills to pay and clothes to buy and furnaces about to die and I was losing it, big-time.

Then Mike Lapinski had a crisis. Then Mike Lapinski left.

Mike Lapinski was the firm’s top salesman for years. He was in his mid-thirties, but had to be a millionaire. The second week of March, his four-year-old son died, leukemia. And Mike, arrogant Mike, cried all day long, every day. After ten days he decided to leave the company.

John Bean got on me the morning of Mike’s departure – March 18th. Gold-standard accounts, Nathan. You going to go see Phil? Lapinski’s accounts are the best, man. Easy money. Huge cash flow. Get in there. Come on. I want that for my family. Don’t you want that for yours?

I looked up at him, his big, hairy arms dangling over my cube wall, he nodding and intense and I nodded back, the potential of big money crackling in my head, and I said, Yes, I do want that for my family. This is the break I need.

On John Bean’s prompt, adrenaline pumping, jacked on money’s potential, I went to see Phil. Me, Nathan. I’d listened to a twenty-three year old fat man with a brand new business degree from a small Lutheran college.

I knocked at Phil’s partially opened door. I could see him in his office. He sat back, staring at the ceiling, tasseled loafers on the desk, throwing a Koosh ball into the air. He had wavy gray hair and a thin salt and pepper beard. His fingers looked puffy and white. His office smelled vaguely of baby powder. I knocked again, loud enough to get his attention, my energy dissipating with my inability to breathe. I poked my head in before it was too late, and he looked up.

No shit, Sellers? You coming to talk to me?

Yes sir. I moved, sat down in the chair across from him.

Took you long enough.

To? I squinted.

To get in here. I’ve been after you for over a week.

Oh, I said, feeling my face heat, I’m not here about my clients, Mr…Mr… I couldn’t remember Phil’s last name.

Then what? You can’t be here about Lapinski."

I am.

That’s funny, he said, taking his feet down from the desk.

I don’t agree.

You want bigger accounts?

Yes. I…

Man oh man, Phil shook his head. You know what? he smiled, Let’s talk about the clients you’ve got, first. Okay? Then we’ll talk about Lapinski’s.

Okay.

I got a call this morning from Dana Murray. You remember her?

Yes. My neck muscles tightened.

Sure you do. She’s your contact over at Callahan’s. Remember them?

I nodded.

She told me she’s been calling you every hour on the hour for two days straight. You don’t pick up. You don’t return her messages.

I’ve been busy.

Really? Phil laughed. That’s not what I’ve heard.

I’ve been extremely busy, I told him.

Phil paused, stopped smiling, then said, Goddamn it. You don’t know this business… This business is about people pleasing people, Sellers. If someone calls, you pick up. If they leave a message, you return it first opportunity. And you do it because you want to. Not because you have to. You do it because you’re about serving the customer. That’s who you are. Make sense?

I nodded.

And that’s Lapinski. Not you, hombre. And if you think I’m going to let you within a mile of Lapinski’s clients, you’re out of your mind.

I am about service, I said weakly.

Phil pulled a folder out of his desk drawer. He opened it. I thought the folder contained information pertaining to me. But it didn’t. I watched Phil write in pen on some kind of purchase order. Then he looked up and mumbled, You can go.

But…

You’re dismissed.

I pushed my chair back and stood, my eyes burning.

And Sellers, Phil said. This is a warning. Your official warning. If you don’t know what that means, read your employee handbook. Okay? Whatever you’re doing, you not going to keep doing it. Not on my dime. Now go call Dana Murray. Call her, straighten her out, then sit down and make a plan. I want you back in my office tomorrow at three. I want you to give me a detailed plan for getting out of this mess. Got it? Or there are going to be some big changes in your life.

I nodded. I took a step. Everything sunk. The blood drained from my head. I left. Fluorescent lights in the hall almost blinded me.

And worse, outside of Phil’s office, Min leaned against the wall. She’d been listening. Her face was red; her eyes wet.

Min? I mumbled. She didn’t respond. Just stood. I shuffled past her, went back to my desk.

John Bean asked me how it went. I sat down. I didn’t answer. I brought up ESPN on the Internet. I didn’t read, just looked at the colors.

And the day took forever to end. I imagined myself a skeleton, still propped on my elbows at the desk, no-stain Dockers and bland blue Oxford dusty, but still draped over me. Min didn’t visit me.

Finally people closed down computers. Finally they pulled on coats. Finally people filed towards the doors. It was the close of business. I pulled on my own down coat. I pulled on my mittens. I walked down the hall towards the lobby.

I shuffled from the building into the parking lot, soaked of energy. Coworkers doing their own little shuffles surrounded me. I shivered. Fog clung to floodlights in the parking lot. A slush snow melted on the cars. I kept up my slow walk, feet dragging through puddles of muck that soaked through to my socks. I had to find my car. It was beginning to sleet.

I found mine. It was parked next to Min’s. She was there in her stocking cap and German army coat. She slid slush off her already running Audi with a wooden-handled, red-bristled brush. I walked to my Toyota without speaking to her, pretending I hadn’t seen her.

Fuck you, she said behind me.

What? I turned.

I know what you were doing. I heard you.

You heard what? I said.

You talked to Phil. Her chin trembled. Her voice crept louder. That’s depraved.

I…

Lapinski’s son is dead, she said.

I know Min…I’m…

And if you’re depraved…Nathan. I don’t know…You were a hope to me…But you fucking… She pointed the red-bristled brush. I thought she might poke me. You make me sick…Lapinski’s son? He’s gone… She broke up. She began to tremble high into her cheeks. But you were better. But you’re a…

Min…you don’t…

You’re a real opportunist, aren’t you?

Lapinski is leaving, I said.

Fuck you, she shouted. Then she slipped in the slush, caught herself on my bumper then pushed off to her car. She opened her door, crying. She shouted at me, Hopeless Nathan…that’s you….you should have no hope…you’re one of them… worse… you’re hopeless… I think she mocked shooting me. Her glove made it hard to tell. She ducked into her car, slammed the door, slammed it into reverse and backed out fast, spinning slush onto my no-stain pants.

I didn’t know what to do. I pounded on her hood as she left. Don’t leave... Min. Wait! You don’t know shit! I tried giving her the finger but my big wool mitten prevented it from having any impact. Her car spun out of the spot as I shouted.

I screamed at her car as she took off. Her attack was unwarranted. I had to do it. I had to compete. The only difference between me and them was that Min and I talked about books and about art and about music. She had an inflated expectation of how I should act. I had kids. I had to roll my rock…or my kids would...their feet grew and they needed shoes… And I thought about Lapinski’s dead son. The thought of him not breathing suffocated me, the little boy in the ground, his little feet... But, somebody had to have those accounts. Somebody would get rich from them. Not me. Didn’t she listen to the meeting? Didn’t she hear what Phil said? I’d never get them. But, yes, I tried. And I was going down. Because of Min… I needed money, desperately. I needed it. She didn’t understand. Her father was rich. She would go to grad school soon. She didn’t have a mortgage. She didn’t have loans. She didn’t have to worry about insurance. And she wouldn’t let me explain. She just left me standing. She shouldn’t blame me. She shouldn’t say I was hopeless. She couldn’t say that.

You can’t, I screamed after her, a vein pulsing in my forehead. My sinus passages went wide open. They drained. I smelled a saltiness in my head, like I had a concussion. You can’t, I screamed again. And then reality began to rotate. The world rotating around me, the world spinning away; I filled my lungs with the air to really let loose, and then…

A switch flipped. The switch flipped and I started to turn. My blood stopped flowing the normal way and flowed the other. And I thought: what am I doing? What am I doing? This is ridiculous. I’m screaming in a parking lot? This is nuts. About Min? I began to laugh, a little. I looked around me, watched my coworkers watching me. I waved at one and thought: I’m not Min. I’m not like her. I’m not young and smart and hipster. I’m them in their parkas. Coworkers walked past me, staring. I’m them. Sisyphus. I breathed deep, my heart pounding, my eyes open, air rushing, inhaling sleet and water. And I thought: I’m not Min. So stupid! Look at me. I’m them.

And the world turned upside down (or right side up).

On the drive home, I couldn’t stop smiling. Was I hopeless like Min said? Was I without hope? A tickle rose in my stomach as I drove. Had I hoped unnecessarily? What had hope ever given me? Longing, disappointment. And hope for what? A different life? Good luck. Then why hope? The tickle swelled into a rush. It fired up my spine; it blew into my shoulder blades. If I didn’t hope, did I have to worry? Why would I care? Why would I worry? The tickle exploded. It roared out my arms and down my legs. If I didn’t worry, wasn’t I free? Wasn’t I free? Wouldn’t I be free?

And I felt hopeless. I felt ready. Holy Christ, I called to the traffic around me, Holy shit. So fucking simple.

I rolled down the windows of the car, allowing slush and muck to come splashing in. I got soaked. I sang Boys Don’t Cry with the adult alternative radio station. At intersections I pointed at pedestrians, shouted hello at them, waved at them.

And this was it. I was hopeless and delighted and ready to be me. Nathan Sellers, salesman. Nathan Sellers, father. Nathan not a playwright Sellers. Nathan Cotton Dockers Sellers. Nathan Sellers, Nathan Sellers. Let it be. Let it be.

And this thing – this idea, this hopelessness – it shot me to the moon.

Chapter 2. April 9th – Jeannie Burns out of Years of Repression

Item Jeannie took for Show and Tell in first grade, December 1975:

A crayon drawing of an enormous buffalo standing next to her tiny sister.

I was repressed.

When I was twenty-three I read French philosophy and stayed up all night painting.

At thirty-one, I began doing Pilates to strengthen my core. And on winter nights, instead of going down to my studio when the kids went to sleep, I’d clean the kitchen like my mother, wiping down the counters and washing dishes and after that, instead of painting or drawing, I’d walk on the treadmill, then go to bed, exhausted. I stopped smoking, ever. I spent my lunches in the teachers’ lounge gossiping about students. I worked to be present when my kids were awake, because my mother was present with me, and my kids are small and innocent and beautiful. I worked to not let my mind wander, to stop imagining, to stop wondering what went wrong, wondering what happened. I wrapped up all the angst and intelligence and rage that once drove me and called it done.

But calling it done and having it done are not the same thing. Having angst wrapped tight inside you is repression. And by April, after Nathan’s change, my façade, this domesticity, wore thin. Even when I kissed my kids good night, their warm heads asleep on their pillows, I felt it going.

And then one night the hole opened and it all started pouring out. Nathan snored.

The sound of Nathan snoring seeped into my subconscious as I slept. The snoring rode my synapses and took form in my dreams, a buffalo, a big, ugly, drooling buffalo.

I painted on a hill over-looking a gaudy, movie version of the valley in which my parents live, in which I grew up. Charlie, Maudie and Clara played tag in a meadow below – their clothes these saturated reds and blues. I felt warm and in love painting, watching my children. But then there was a hot wind and then I heard the snoring, or snorting, and smelled this animal armpit smell and this buffalo with lines of drool hanging from of its mouth lumbered toward me, blocking out the light. I tried to scream, to stand and run. But I couldn’t. My feet were swallowed in mud.

I shook myself awake. I sweated, tangled in the sheets. The room was dark except for some moonlight that slid between the slats of our window blinds, lighting Nathan’s smiling face. My heart pounded. The dream buffalo scared the shit out of me. But not nearly as much as the source of that noise. My Nathan snored. He inhaled, smiling. He opened his mouth, exhaled and snored. My Nathan snored…which made him not my Nathan.

Nathan never snored when he was the boy I fell in love with. He was too perfect. Snoring is what old people do, careless, heavy, old people. Not my Nathan.

Nathan was a perfect twenty-three year-old when we met at a party in perfect Madison, Wisconsin, 1993. Nathan wore a black t-shirt and had wild, curly hair and was clean (of spirit if not body) and pure and right. And he didn’t snore: I slept with him the first day I knew him (we didn’t kiss or anything – just slept, I swear to God), after we spent the whole night talking about Jim Jarmusch films. In fact, he slept in my bed every night from that night on and when he was twenty-three, moonlight would show on his face and he was beautiful, innocent and he breathed in soft wisps and he had this body scent, this sweet scent that made my heart pound. And I seriously wasn’t predisposed to romantic bullshit at that time. But Nathan’s sweet face and his gentle voice and his sense of humor…I fell into him and that was that.

Six months later I was pregnant and we married. I couldn’t help it.

The hormones from pregnancy, instead of making me dull, lit me up. I had ideas, life inside me, all this energy. I painted late into the night, Nathan next to me smoking cigarettes. My relationship with Nathan led me to this safe place, this perfect place, where I could do anything in my work.

But seven years later, I owned a Pilates tape and I’d lift my legs and crunch my stomach muscles if I had free time. Because Nathan wouldn’t, I’d play games with my kids on the floor every night. And although I had a full studio in the basement, I rarely used it for anything but doing the family laundry (the machines were in the corner).

Still, until the night he snored like that, it never occurred to me to go. We’d been through tough times with money and work and three young kids – still I hoped. But Nathan’s snore, a snore that came on the heals of these tough years, and then his personality change – a change in Nathan that made the continuation of life like it was unfathomable – everything together, it drove away all hope, which, stupidly enough, is what Nathan claimed his change was based on: a complete lack of hope. And then I had the idea…go – you’re dying.

Nathan’s change happened on a night in March, three weeks before he became a buffalo. Nathan came home from work soaked to the skin. I was in the kitchen cutting vegetables, putting dinner together, when he burst through the side door and into the house, this half-cocked smile on his face, completely on fire. He slid into the kitchen, streaking mud and water across the floor. I turned and stared.

Jeannie, he said, Why are we always fighting?

We don’t fight, I said.

I don’t mean each other. I mean life.

Why are you wet, Nathan?

I drove home with the windows down.

It’s sleeting.

It’s spring, Jeannie, he whispered. It’s fucking spring. He paused. He smiled. Where are the kids?

Are you drunk?

No, not drunk, Jeannie. Hopeless.

I paused. What do you mean?

I am without hope.

I know what hopeless means, Nathan.

I don’t think you do. Where are the kids?

Upstairs.

He dropped his bag, threw his coat into the foyer and ran up the second floor stairs. The noise he made with Charlie, Maudie and Clara – the shouting and thumping noise of wrestling around in the TV room – it completely jarred