Her words echo in Jack’s brain. I dreamed of a man. A tortured soul. Crazed and dancing in the streets to his own lunacy. Excusing himself now. Needing to piss. At his age, he is lucky he hadn’t pissed the bed. Getting up from the kitchen table, he walks to the bathroom. Jack is broken and weak. He unzips his pants, relieves himself, flushes, and turns on the faucet. His soft, uncalloused hands cup cold water, lather up, rinse. He splashes his face again, wanting to wash away whatever reality he had wandered into. There is the acrid smell of old sweat, of himself. Perspiration and dirt collected in transit, from his dream. And Jack feels beaten and worn, powerless. His hips, knees, and elbows are aching and bruised from the pummeling. He stands in Fabiola’s bathroom, taking in his surroundings: sink, toilet, chipped claw-foot tub. There is no large, spacious area, no marbled shower stall. No Jacuzzi tub, no bidet, no mirrored walls, and no sauna room. Here he stands, feeling a deep burn in his bones and gristle, a back spasm like a dagger, and something akin to judgment being cast upon him. He takes in his splotched face, pouches dark as an eggplant beneath his eyes. Deeply lost internally and searching for his center, he had found this woman, Fabiola, for a reason. An answer to an unknown query, but she is as crazed as he. He couldn’t sit at the table any longer, couldn’t be in the same room as Fabiola and her crazy talk about dreams. It was like being stuck in a modern-day episode of The Twilight Zone.

Overcome by emotion, he remembers his father calling him “useless” when he was a kid. Jack grits his teeth, recalling the endless put-downs telling him he would never amount to shit. And that only incited him to become something, to make good grades, get into a good college, and earn a living that created a cushion for life. He never saw what was happening around him unless it involved work, unless it involved growth for earning more money. Board meetings, pie charts, Excel spreadsheets, market reports, think tanks—these were his everyday lingo of life for all those years. What he never realized then was the slow crumbling of lives—the dominoes that lined up around him, that would tip and fall, one into the next. He never planned for the sickness, the death, the fear. This unraveling is haunting him.

Dry air warms the home as daylight brings heat. Drying sweat has left a faint white dusting of salt on his skin. There is no smell of wood smoke, no fumes. Only his unbathed body—something he’s unaccustomed to. Till now, he seldom went more than twelve hours without a bath. He fights back tears. He fights back at how weak he feels after being stripped of all the things in his life that made him him.