Read Online Watchlist by Bryan Hurt - Free Book Online

you’re—”
    I should have stopped it right there.
    â€œâ€”you’re prissy .”
    â€œPrissy?” I couldn’t believe it. Not then and not now.
    She made a broad stoned gesture, weaving on her feet. “Anal-retentive. Like, who left the dishes in the sink or who didn’t take out the garbage or what about the cockroaches—”
    â€œStop,” I said. “Reset. June 19, 1994, 11:02 p.m.”
    I was in another bedroom now, one with walls the color of cream, and I was in another bed, this time with Christine, and I’d timed the memory to the very minute, postcoital, in the afterglow, and Christine, with her soft aspirated whisper of a voice, was saying, “I love you, Wes, you know that, don’t you?”
    â€œStop,” I said. “Reverse five seconds.”
    She said it again. And I stopped again. And reversed again. And she said it again. And again.
    T IME HAS NO meaning when you’re reliving. I don’t know how long I kept it up, how long I kept surfing through those moments with Christine—not the sexual ones but the loving ones, the companionable ones, the ordinary day-to-day moments when I could see in her eyes that she loved me more than anybody alive and was never going to stop loving me, never. Dinner at the kitchen table, any dinner, any night. Just to be there. My wife. My daughter. The way the light poured liquid gold over the hardwood floors of our starter house, in Canoga Park. Katie’s first birthday. Her first word (“Cake!”). The look on Christine’s face as she curled up with Katie in bed and read her Where the Wild Things Are . Her voice as she hoarsened it for Max: “I’ll eat you up!”
    Enough analysis, enough hurt. I was no masochist.
    At some point, I had to get up from that chair in the now and evacuate a living bladder, the house silent, spectral, unreal. I didn’t live here. I didn’t live in the now with its deadening nine-to-five job I was in danger of losing and the daughter I was failing and a wife who’d left me—and her own daughter—for Winston Chen, a choreographer of martial-arts movies in Hong Kong, who was loving and kind and funny and not the control freak I was. ( Prissy , anyone? Anal-retentive ?) The house echoed with my footsteps, a stage set and nothing more. I went to the kitchen and dug the biggest pot I could find out from under the sink, brought it back to the reliving room, and set it on the floor between my legs to save me the trouble of getting up next time around.
    Time passed. Relived time and lived time, too. There were two windows in the room, shades drawn so as not to interfere with the business of the moment, and sometimes a faint glow appeared around the margins of them, an effect I noticed when I was searching for a particular scene and couldn’t quite pin it down. Sometimes the glow was gone. Sometimes it wasn’t. What happened then, and I may have been two days in or three or five, I couldn’t really say, was that things began to cloy. I’d relived an exclusive diet of the transcendent, the joyful, the insouciant, the best of Christine, the best of Lisa, and all the key moments of the women who came between and after, and I’d gone back to the Intermediate Algebra test, the very instant, pencil to paper, when I knew I’d scored a perfect 100 percent, and to the time I’d squirted a ball to right field with two outs, two strikes, ninth inning and my Little League team (the Condors, yellow Ts, white lettering) down by three, and watched it rise majestically over the glove of the spastic red-haired kid sucking back allergic snot and roll all the way to the wall. Triumph after triumph, goodness abounding—till it stuck in my throat.
    â€œReset,” I said. “January 2, 2009, 4:30 p.m.”
    I found myself in the kitchen of our second house, this house, the one we’d moved to because it was outside the LA