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By Root 468 0

two hundred papers before the meds kicked in. Bagging papers was dull, mindless work, made even more difficult by the Deadhead’s preference for tuning the small radio on his worktable to a station whose playlist seemed to have been culled exclusively from the soft-rock soundtrack of my childhood: Cat Stevens continued exhorting people to board the peace train, Streisand and Gibb continued declaring they had nothing to be guilty of, and Joni Mitchell still wanted us to help her, she thought she was falling in love again. The deejay bragged about broadcasting these laments commercial free between midnight and 3, and the Deadhead would play with the reception until he got it just right, and then tap his foot and nod his head while he hummed along. The love songs and the sentimental childhood memories they evoked in me, juxtaposed with the thuds of stacked papers and grunts of the straining workers, made me feel my life had become the punch line of some arcane conceptual joke. After the Deadhead left to deliver, the remaining employees would talk about how much they disliked his music, but no one ever said anything to him. One night, after listening to Michael McDonald claim he kept forgetting we’re not in love anymore, I decided somebody had to make a stand for sanity, and I asked if there was another station we could tune the radio to.

“You don’t like this song?” the Deadhead asked, incredulous. “That’s the Doobie Brothers, man.”

“I’ve heard this song five hundred times.”

“It’s the only station that comes in good,” he said. “The others are fuzzed out because of all the metal in here, but I guess I can try—I don’t want to annoy anyone.” He started messing with the tuning, and for the next minute we heard nothing but static and garbled, distorted voices, until I had to tell him to forget it and just put it back where it was.

“Sorry, man,” he said. “I didn’t know it was a problem.”

“Because you never asked,” I replied.

“Shit,” he said. “You’ve been here for a month? I’ve been here for three years. Just relax.”

“How am I supposed to relax when I’m constantly hearing all those shitty songs?”

“So I’ll just turn it off.”

No one said anything else. In the silence that followed, the sounds of everyone working were distracting and overloud. Even though I’d only said what everyone else was thinking, the silence felt like judgment. They considered me the bad guy, and I ended up wishing I’d never said anything in the first place.

10

Before she left, my wife claimed that she and I were driving each other crazy trapped in the house together all the time, and that with herself and the baby out of the way for a bit, I could apply all of my energy to my job search. Besides, she said, her parents would love to spend some time with their granddaughter. That I agreed with her when she said these things is not in dispute.

Olivia was starting to string together her first speculative, surreal statements at this time. Daddy make a red roof house for Livvy, she informed me on the telephone shortly after they left, and then repeated the phrase multiple times, as if it held crucial information. Her sentences seemed crafted of some cryptic, dreamlike symbolism that begged analysis, and I turned the red roof house sentence over in my mind for three days until, out of sheer desperation one night, I asked the Deadhead what he thought of it. All he could tell me was that it was pentameter, which I thought would be interesting, until he explained what that meant. I told him I thought maybe Olivia had snatched the red roof house from some song on the radio, but when he started listing old songs with the word “house” in them, I knew we weren’t going to solve it. And we didn’t.

11

When my refills ran out, I decided to find a place where I could get some more. I chose a walk-in clinic in an old hospital in the rougher part of town, and waited my turn on the hard plastic lobby chair, while next to me an old Asian man sat with his head bowed and his eyes shut tight, absorbed by some internal difficulty. Across from me, a stocky man in overalls pressed