Aaron Wallace Page 1

Aaron Wallace

                                            by David

A great tragedy of the world is that nothing done can be undone, and that everything’s been done before. That was the way Aaron felt. And it was one of those unusual days where his attitude corresponded exactly with the atmosphere. The rain had come hard that morning. Branches still lay in the street. The flower patch in front of the house exhibited a broken marigold, and the mulch had been washed away when the rain came through a hole in the gutter and pounded down. Now there were puddles butting against the street curbs, the sky was still overcast, and every time the wind blew, beads of rain fell from the leaves.

Aaron was inside, trying to work it out.

Jade was inside too, not trying to work it out. She was asleep on the bed, on top of the covers. In her arms was a plum throw pillow with “Alice” stitched in saffron thread.

          Aaron sat in the kitchen, the house quiet except for an Andrew Bird song that he was playing on low volume. Jade could sleep through louder—she could conceivably sleep through Aaron dancing in his socks in the bedroom, grooving to Belle and Sebastian (“You’re the boy with the fil-thy laugh,” leg kick, strum the air guitar, “You’re the boy with the A-rab Strap,” spin one-eighty, boogie down). But Aaron kept the volume low, because he felt that waking his wife would be like interrupting the Christmas carols that had paused the World War. Jade’s nap had brought a temporary ceasefire to the Wallace homefront, and Aaron was using the short peace to formulate a strategy. The truth, though, is that Aaron had painted himself into a corner, leaving himself a dry space that would have cramped a snail. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Alexander the Great Lover of Women would have tossed in the white linen. Harry Houdini would have known escape was impossible. Even the flexible, redundant, immortal Wil-E-Coyote would have fallen flat, not to appear again with a new roadrunner trap. Aaron was royally fucked.

          Aaron was the repressed type. The type to hold in emotions, to stem the tide of Feelings, to suppress the urge to Talk With Someone, and to generally Not Complain. He was the kind of guy who gets pooped on by pigeons, who wipes the shit from the shirt, and forgets it happened. Aaron was the type to let slide his lascivious coworkers’ crude comments about the women workers, the comments relating the women’s sexual outputs to the temperature of a freezer. He could withstand the doldrums of a Kansas DMV waiting line then not get hacked off with its employees’ tartness. If the world paid cash for repressed emotions, Aaron would be Bill Gates. And in a world of emotional sea swells that were amorphous and that buckled atop the slimmest sandbar, Aaron’s internal turbulence was a sure enough, large as life, With-God-As-My-Witness Tsunami Wave. And Aaron, as has been written before, was royally fucked. He had screwed the proverbial pooch.

          Aaron’s strategey session was not going well. He figured he had two options, both as appetizing as a twenty year anniversary at McDonalds. For the first, he looked longingly to the window. It was a two story drop to the bottom, and the results would be, well, striking. Hopefully terminal, but no gurantee on that. But Aaron, the repressed (read: ‘stoic’?) guy, was repressed (stoic?) because he lacked guts. In fact, Aaron didn’t just lack guts, he was scared shitless. He took his fear to the level of a child and beyond—a metaphysical experience that Aaron called “the first step to hell”. And such peculiar fears! Aggressive women, PhD holders, tall women, religious zealots, and Englishmen were just a few of the types that could frighten Aaron into hiding where, in the past, Jade would have coaxed him out with cooing noises and logic:

          “Come on out, Aaron.”

          “Hardly. There’s a pasty Brit at the door.”

          “Oh, honey. They’re nothing to be afraid of. A bit fruity, perhaps, and with the devil’s own dental hygiene, that’s sure. But really, Aaron, they’re as harmless as they are funny looking.”

          “A bit fruity? The fellow wants to sell me encyclopedias and bum a fag—that sounds a bit fruity to you?”
          “They’re cigarettes, dearie (coo, coo).”

          “If you ask me, it sounds perfectly Freudian.”

          Suicide through the second floor window, for a gutless man (scratch ‘stoic’) afraid of our transatlantic neighbors was right out of the question then. Too many variables. What if he accidentally flipped in midair, breaking his back and making him a parapalegic? Parapalegics could be sent to prison for crimes like his. And then how to defend his saintly, unblemished bum, if he couldn’t even muster the muscles to run? And what if he chickened out (Pa-kawk!) during his run at the window, finding himself highcentered with his feet off the floor and his waist on the windowsill? Would the moxy be there to tilt himself forward? It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes or Matlock to solve the mystery; Aaron knew he would lean his weight back onto his wriggling toes, away from the vertigo and the drop, back to the solid floor. He would preserve his own life, even if the future ruined it.

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