Martin, interrupted

Martin was at the end of his rope. He had lost his job of 25 years as a theoretical physicist for MIT. He was a senior research scientist as well as a tenured member of the faculty. The university (and local law enforcement) accused him of skimming money from the grants he had received from his projects and laundering the money to an offshore account. They said they had proof of this, although he had in reality done none of those things.

He had been arrested on suspicion but had not retained a lawyer to investigate these claims or to defend himself. He didn't know who had actually stolen the money, and at this point, he didn't even care. Miriam, his wife of 5 years had just left him as a result. She was 15 years his junior. When they met, he was 38, she was 23 and ridiculously beautiful. She said it had been building up for a long time anyway, (Martin wondered how long a "long time" was when they'd only been together for five years) but she never communicated to him that she was unhappy. If she had, he had either somehow misinterpreted her signals, or just didn't see it at all.

Also, she had met someone else. An actor from NYU who had come to New England to work on a huge budget movie with a huge production company. Of course. She wouldn't give him any details, she said she was afraid he would get "obsessive." She said he was prone to obsessive behavior.

This was telling to Martin. Whoever this asshole was, he was a famous asshole and Martin could count on catching a glimpse of his wife at the Oscars in the near future sitting around a white linen table cloth with expensive rented jewelry skimming her exquisite collar bones. Applauding for her new lover with tears in her eyes. By then the bastard could even be her new husband for all he knew. At this rate, it was all the same.

So to say Martin was undergoing an existential crisis brought about by shock and trauma was kind of an understatement. Luckily, he and Miriam had no children (she said she just didn't think it was a good idea to bring another child into the world when there were already so many unwanted, though she had no interest in adopting either...) so he didn't have to worry about sorting out that very potentially important area of his life.

His friend and colleague Alan was letting him stay at his house, for the time being, Miriam had said she wanted him to leave so he did. Alan shared a cozy suburban home with his Mother. Alan's mother was very concerned with Martin's well-being. They had known each other all of their adult lives. He realized pretty soon after the pink slip and the dear john letter arrived that none of that actually mattered. Not really. His work took him to such faraway places philosophically, it was easy to transport himself somewhere else in his mind. All he had to do was lie on his back in his friend's backyard and stare up at the abyss of eternally winking stars.

It was after one of these particularly late nights of stargazing with a bottle of gin that Martin hit another pothole in the road to his redemption. The midday sun filtered cruelly into the spare bedroom upstairs in Alan's house, shining itself directly into Martin's eyes. He was still too drunk from the night before to be awoken by this violation of his senses, but the tilt-a-whirl in his head managed it.

Martin tried to lunge from the bed but was entangled in the bedsheets and fell with a somewhat humorous thud to the floor. The humor quickly evaporated into the air when last night's bottle of red with dinner, the dinner itself, and the gin gimlets (7? 9? he couldn't remember how many at this point) gushed from his heaving guts onto the plush carpet. And the side of the sleigh bed. And the wall next to the sleigh bed. And onto his worn new balance trainers from 8 years ago.

It took Martin a solid 5 minutes of sitting on the side of the bed with his eyes squeezed shut to decide where to begin to fix this crime scene. He resisted the urge to gag again when he gathered the shoes and stuffed them into a trash bag he found under the kitchen sink downstairs. He had also brought up several dish towels and some carpet cleaner. He stripped the bed and put the sheets in the tub in the bathroom adjoining his bedroom. Things started to seem a little more manageable now. He soaked some of the dishtowels in hot water and went to work wiping down the walls and the bed frame. The stench was finally dissipating. By the time he went to work on the carpet, his head was starting to clear and his stomach was beginning to settle. After rinsing out the sheets and starting them in the washing machine along with the towels, he threw the bag with his shoes and socks into the trash outside.

He thought about those shoes. He purchased them after Miriam had decided they should start jogging together every morning before work. Not that she was working, of course, but before he went to work. Martin was never much of a jogger, or an exerciser really. His parents made him take taekwondo when he was a kid, but that was pretty much the extent of his experience with physical activity. He found it fitting they were to meet their fate in a trash can drenched with vomit.

Martin hadn't told his parents yet about what was happening in his life. He knew his Mother would overreact and his father would underreact. Then they'd get mad at each other for doing so and Martin would feel responsible for the vicious fight that was certain to follow. He and his siblings had endured this sort of family dynamic their whole lives, feeling eternally and miserably responsible for their parents' resentful and dysfunctional marriage.

Besides, his family wasn't exactly "close-knit". He hadn't seen any of them since thanksgiving two years ago when Miriam and his sister-in-law Sarah got into a screaming match over what Sarah described as Miriam's "sleazy attempts to get into her husband's pants." Martin's eldest brother Jeff married Sarah right out of high school, they had been together for going on 20 years when this happened.

Looking back on it now, Martin could see quite clearly what Sarah had seen. At the time, of course, he had been completely blind. Standing barefoot in the middle of the aggregate driveway with the sprinklers chirping rhythmically before him across the manicured lawn, he wondered how many other times he had been a ridiculous fool. How many conversations full of pity had occurred between his friends and family about poor desperate Martin and his vacuous trophy wife?
Martin's head began to spin again as he stood in the midday heat, and he realized pretty quickly he'd better get inside and get some food and water in his belly if he didn't want to end up dry heaving in the driveway.

********TBC*********