Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [28]
Clearly the type of cashier who would not question Milo’s purchase.
Once money had exchanged hands, Milo made his way back to his car. He had hoped to wait until he was home to begin opening the jars, but, as it was with most of his demands, the proximity to its fulfillment increased the immediacy of the need. His head was aching badly by the time he opened the car door.
Sitting in the front seat underneath the yellow glow of the parking lot’s sodium fluorescent bulbs, Milo took the first jar in his hand, fingering the round metallic depression in the lid that indicated the pressurized seal. So close to fulfillment, the need was excruciating now, but he waited a few seconds longer, as long as he could possibly bear, in order to heighten the anticipation. Like those insistent words in his head, the time leading up to the moment of completion was torturous, but the instant of fulfillment, and the seconds just before, were ecstasy.
Grasping the lid around the edge and bringing the jar close to his ear, Milo exerted adequate force in order to move the lid a quarter turn, releasing the pressurized safety seal in the process. The satisfying hiss and pop of the jar caused Milo’s tightened muscles to relax with a shudder. A second later he released a sigh, barely audible despite the quiet of the car.
Milo remained still for a moment, waiting to see if the one jar would be enough to satisfy the demand. Though rare, there had been times when a single jar would do the trick. As he waited, he thought about how different things would be if he and Christine had still been living together. He might have not been able to sneak away to make the necessary purchase, and as a result, more than a day could have gone by before meeting the need. During a delay like this, it was as if that German submariner residing in his head, possibly an admiral based on the power he wielded, would continue to watch through his periscope, slowly and steadily increasing the pressure on the dials and valves before him. The need would linger in the back of Milo’s mind, always present and ever nagging, and at times dangerously distracting and even painful, building until the needles were redlining, steam was venting from the complex web of pipes and hoses within the submariner’s vessel, and ignoring the demand became almost impossible.
Thankfully, his job offered him ample freedom during the day to meet these needs without much trouble.
Though Christine didn’t know about Milo’s demands, she knew that her husband was odd and had said as much to Milo in the past. He wasn’t surprised. Milo knew that it would be impossible to fulfill these demands on a regular basis without appearing a little neurotic and strange, but he had managed to convince his wife that his behavior was the result of his personality and not the demands placed upon him. When necessary, Milo even fostered and encouraged this belief about his peculiar personality. For example, he would sometimes find himself with the need to watch a movie that he had already seen a hundred times before, in hopes that the end of the film might turn out differently. Even though he knew on a cognitive level that this could never happen, something inside his head (that damn U-boat captain, he suspected, jonesing for a little entertainment) demanded that he watch the movie again, and regardless of what his practical side told him, Milo found himself on the edge of his seat every time, half believing that this might be the one time when things finally and miraculously changed for the better.
There were several films that Milo found himself rewatching over and over again, but one of the most common was episode 3 of the Star Wars saga, in which Darth Vader rises from the ruins of Anakin Skywalker. At several key points in this film, the fate of the galaxy rests on the actions of a single character, and in each of these instances,