THE THING ITSELF

Something was about to happen. He could feel it. He could feel it with the same eerie certainty he used to have in his school days, when he would know, a millisecond before it happened, whether his bat was going to connect with the ball. He could feel it the way he would occasionally dream of an old friend the day before he received a letter from him; the way he once suddenly understood, watching his mother’s car stop at the curb of his school at three o’clock, that his dog had run away again, this time for good. The way, years later, pursuing his favorite hobby, he knew without prior word from his library that Harris’s The Art of Astonishment had arrived, and he could drop in on his way home and claim it for the weekend. The way he’d always known a rainy evening in a cloudless day.

Its precise dimensions eluded him. There was simply an amorphous excitement, a peripheral tingling that had begun to pervade his waking hours, making it difficult for him to sleep. And when he did sleep, even his dreams were harbingers. They’d become vivid and strange. Never comprehensible, at least not in describable terms, they left a residual scent on his skin—his body, when he awoke, had the faintly metallic sweetness that used to clothe him after hours spent outdoors as a child. How strange that he should awake smelling as if he’d been playing all day in the woods outside Durham, New Hampshire—a place he hadn’t visited in more than thirty years.

Such premonitions used to frighten him. Once he seemed to know in advance that he was going to be mugged. He’d just taken a job with the new firm, and for a week he felt overly aware of strangers in his personal space. On a whim, he decided to photocopy the contents of his wallet, although he couldn’t have said why. He thought about asking Daphne, the paralegal who wore low-cut blouses and black fingernail polish, to do it for him. But he’d concluded it was more prudent to do it himself. That night, on the way from his favorite restaurant to his car, he was cornered in the parking lot by a hooded man with a knife. Even as he surrendered the calfskin billfold, he couldn’t help thinking, with a dark pride: I knew it!

But he was a man of logic, not superstition. He was a lawyer. True, he was a lawyer in Los Angeles, but still, there were certain standards. He didn’t think he possessed ESP. On the contrary, he wondered if these weren’t instances of SSP: subtle sensory perception. Possibly the mugger had been casing him throughout the week, and he’d noticed him subconsciously. Perhaps the old friend had called, and left no message, but he’d seen the name flash by his caller ID. Maybe he’d glimpsed a smudge of tears on his mother’s face, or had seen a dog collar or some other token in her steering-wheel hand. There were always explanations for things, if you looked hard enough.

Or so he told himself. Unheeding, his heart beat back its answer: Something was coming. And soon.

“You mean, like the way you know when you’re about to sneeze?” Daphne said, crossing her legs on her side of the booth at Bandera. She was wearing black leather boots that laced up to her knees. She’d been an aspiring actress, and still had the clothes.

“Sort of like that,” he said. It was possible that telling her had been a mistake. On an impulse, he’d chosen her as the person in whom to confide; she seemed more open to paranormal exotica than his friends. He needed to tell someone, and he couldn’t tell his wife. His wife’s parents had died in a plane crash when she was in high school. When she and he were first dating, in the mid-nineties, she’d become pregnant and had had an abortion. Then, when they married several years later, she hadn’t been able to conceive. Now they were both in their forties, and she more than he was haunted by the one child they seemingly could have had, the gift they’d thrown away. She had little tolerance for talk of “premonitions.”

He lifted his glass, then put it down. “It feels sort of like déjà vu,” he said. “Except in reverse.”

“I’m not sure I know what that means,” Daphne said, and he realized she had a point. She sat staring into her globe of merlot, her handsome face catching its scarlet refractions. Was she disappointed she’d never made it as an actress? She was probably in her late thirties—though he’d always had difficulty telling ages—but her heart-shaped face and little-girl voice made her seem younger. If having to give up her dreams had broken her spirit, she didn’t show it.

“Unless—do you mean like feeling nostalgic for a place you’ve never been?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “More like that.”

She reached for her purse, a red suede thing with fringes. “Would you like me to read your cards? I have a Tarot deck in here somewhere.”

“No, thanks,” he said quickly. He was feeling burdened enough by his own presentiments; he didn’t need do-it-yourself prophecy added to the mix.

Daphne’s hands stopped their rummaging. “I’m not sure how I can help you then, Felix.”

“I don’t need help, exactly. I just thought I should tell someone.” The roots of his hair prickled with sweat. He knew how they must look to passersby: an overweight, balding, nervous-seeming lawyer sitting across from a lithe, semi-Goth paralegal at a steakhouse three blocks from their office. “The last time this happened, I was mugged,” he said.

“So you think you’re about to be mugged?” she said, snapping the thin thread of understanding he’d hoped was being spun between them. In the two years she’d been working at his firm, she had occasionally entered his fantasies, but he’d never before had the temerity to ask her to join him for an after-work drink.

“No,” he said, staring at his untouched gimlet. “It’s not that. It’s more …” He struggled for a way to explain the sense of urgency he felt like a rising tide in his blood. “It’s more like this bumper sticker I saw on the back of an eighteen-wheeler.” He found himself thinking of the tailpipe slogan several times a day; it cropped up, unbidden, in myriad idle moments.

“That said what?”

“ ‘After a rolling ball comes a running child.’ ”

She looked at him. Her eyes were smudged with black, like a raccoon’s, and for a second she reminded him of the way his wife used to look, when she was younger, after one of her crying jags.

“Sounds like a line from a poem,” she said. She pulled a compact from her purse and began to refresh her lipstick.

“No—don’t you see?” he said, shifting in his seat. He tugged at the collar of his shirt. “It’s a warning. It’s meant to warn people, so something terrible doesn’t happen.”

Daphne appeared bored and irritated. Her cell phone chirped, and he wondered if she’d somehow willed it to do so. She read the text message eagerly, then slid a ten-dollar bill under her wineglass.

“It’s my boyfriend,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”

Janet was brushing her teeth. Felix was sitting on the edge of the bed, still in his jacket and bow tie. He looked handsome in bow ties, had since he was a kid. They’d just come from an office party, where he’d had several seltzer waters—lately he felt it necessary to remain clearheaded at all times—and she’d had enough wine that the little chapped patches of skin on her lips had gone purple.

“I think the new partner likes you,” he said.

Janet spat in the sink, ran the water. “What makes you say that?”

“I can just tell.”

“That’s not a bad thing, is it?”

“No.” He undid his tie, still sitting. For some reason he lacked the will to stand up and undress. After a moment, Janet flushed the toilet. She emerged from the bathroom and slid next to him on the bed. She seemed happier than usual. At the party, an associate had been trying to convince her to get an iPod, saying there were so many scholarly podcasts on the Web, it was a shame not to have access to them during her long commute. Especially someone like her, who worked in research, and liked to keep up-to-date.

“You seem to like info,” he’d said.

“Oh, I’m an info maniac!” Janet had said, not hearing how it sounded until it was too late. Then her face had contorted, and the whole group had erupted with laughter.

“You know, there are treatments for that now,” said the new partner, dabbing at his eyes with his napkin. “Perhaps Felix could help you out with that.” Then they’d all laughed again, Felix with his hand at the small of his wife’s back.

Beside him on the bed, she leaned over and kissed his neck, then bit the end of his loosened tie and pulled it off with her teeth. She smiled at him with the thing still in her mouth, like a puppy. She looked ridiculous—and cute. He knew there’d been times she’d thought of leaving him. After the failed fertility treatments, for a while they’d both avoided sex, and he’d wondered if it might be forever tainted with a subtle ache, the memory of failure. The failure was difficult to forget, not least because they’d never refurnished the nursery. Janet’s therapist had advised her to make room for a child in her life, to visualize and prepare, to attract success by assuming success. So Felix had refinished an old mahogany sleigh crib that had been his father’s, and Janet had bought onesies, baby-björns, and a rocking-chair’s worth of stuffed bunnies, lambs, and giraffes at stores with names like Babycakes and Little One. They’d even had a local artist decorate the walls with scenes from their favorite nursery rhymes in low-fume paints. On one wall stood a little match girl whose hair and tiny flame were the same color as the whorls of stars on the ceiling—a silvery butter. In the end, neither of them had had the heart to take it all away, paint over the stars. So they just kept the door closed, à la Miss Havisham.

She was unbuttoning his shirt. Her hands dropped to his belt. The cheerful speediness of her movements stilled and excited him. He kissed her forehead as she worked off his shoes. He hadn’t seen her like this in a long time. Maybe it was the wine; he made a mental note to ask the host for the vintage.

Afterward, she curled away on her side of the bed, the sheet up to her chin. He moved over and put his hands on her shoulders. They were quavering.

“Janet,” he said.

She kept sobbing. “I’m sorry,” she said, without turning around. Her voice sounded strange and faraway.

He took his hands off her. “For what?” he said.

“I was reading this book and it said: ‘When you don’t forgive someone, it’s like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die.’ ” She wiped her nose with the sheet. “But what if the person you can’t forgive is yourself?”

He exhaled. For a second he’d thought he was about to hear her confess to an affair, potentially ending his marriage and his premonitions in the same breath. Instead it was just the old pain, rearing its graying head. Their pain was aging along with them.

“Then forgive yourself,” he said.

She reached for a Kleenex. “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“Sure it is,” he said, taking her hands. “I, Felix, forgive thee, Janet.” He waited. “Now it’s your turn to forgive you.”

“You know I hate it when you get like this,” she said, but there was a smile in her voice.

He pulled her hands behind her back. “Say it,” he said. “Like you mean it. Or I’ll keep you as my prisoner forever.”

She started to speak, but as soon as she opened her mouth, her eyes filled again. He felt her body go limp. Then, a moment later, she did it.

“I forgive you, Janet,” she said quietly, barely breathing the words.

He drew her into an embrace. “You can still be my prisoner,” he said into her hair. Then he released her and looked at her seriously. “We need to redo the nursery,” he said.

Things were good between them for the next few weeks. But Felix had a secret, and Janet was catching on. Why was he keeping a tape recorder under his pillow at night? How come he kept calling in sick to work when he wasn’t really sick? What was making him so edgy? He told her the tape recorder was in case something came to him in a dream. Janet laughed. As if the illogic of dreams were worth remembering. He explained that work had become stressful and boring—if it was possible to be stressful and boring at the same time—and that his stomach really had been bothering him. Janet looked him over and said she knew what he needed. He needed a vacation.

The plan was to go snorkeling off San Diego, stay in a bed-and-breakfast, eat clam shooters and drink white wine, sleep till noon. It was not as relaxing as it sounds. It was bad enough to be on an airplane when you felt Something Big was about to happen, but the baritone in the row behind them was some sort of amateur earthquake enthusiast. At one point Felix balled up bits of his cocktail napkin and stuck them in his ears. Janet turned away. After she finished her Bloody Mary she began folding her empty peanuts bag into smaller and smaller triangles. Finally she said, “Is that so you won’t have to talk to me?”

Once they were settled, he was less at home in the ocean than was Pisces Janet, and at one point swallowed so much water through his snorkel that he coughed for twenty minutes. He’d always thought snorkeling—the renting of mouthpieces hundreds of other people had mouthed—was disgusting, like eating bowling shoes. But Janet seemed determined to get her money’s worth, so he swam along, one eye on her black bikini (she could compete with any twenty-five-year-old), and the other eye scanning the periphery for barracudas and sharks.

At dinner they both ordered the mahi mahi, and as soon as the waiter was out of sight, she stared him down.

“What,” she said, “is going on with you?”

“Nothing,” he said. He saw little bulbs of muscle at her jawline tense.

“You do realize there are all kinds of betrayals in a marriage,” she said. “Screwing the neighbor’s wife isn’t the only one.” A gull cawed in the distance, and she turned to the ocean. “You used to tell me everything,” she said.

He sat perfectly still. She was right. He’d told her things he’d never told another living soul, things he knew she’d take with her to her grave. When they were first dating, they used to sleep together on his twin bed, and they could have fit two more people.

But there was no way to explain this to her. After his mother, Janet was the most practical woman he’d ever met. She would laugh him out of the restaurant. She would think less of him.

“It’s a surprise,” he said. “You’ll see. You won’t want to have known in advance.”

“I’d rather not be surprised,” Janet said, unswaddling her knife and fork from their napkin.

The waiter arrived with the appetizers. “Well, you’re going to have to be,” said Felix.

Back in their room, Janet stuck to her side of the bed and immediately went to sleep. All night long, while she slept beside him, he stared at the ceiling fan, as alert as if the cashews he’d eaten from the minibar had been fistfuls of espresso beans. The red numerals on the alarm clock seemed to quiver with life. Something’s coming, they said.

The Monday he got back, the head of the firm called him into his office. “We had a problem while you were away,” he said. Felix felt a percussive rhythm in his chest. “Hackers got into our system. I’ll need you to draft a letter to all your clients explaining what has happened. And you should expect an internal audit of all your accounts.”

In his head, Felix began scanning his data banks for possible humiliations. As unpleasant as it was to contemplate his boss reading every personal e-mail he’d ever written, he hadn’t done anything objectionable. At least, nothing he could think of. But he didn’t really want to think about it too much. Instead, he went into his office, closed the door, and began to work on the letter.

While he set out to make a list of his cases with the most sensitive confidential information, that wasn’t the list he found himself composing.

One of his most important clients was a company that was spending more money defending its toxic dumping than it would have cost to clean it up. He laid down his mechanical pencil and stared at the page. He didn’t recall having written the final three words, but there they were: I hate this.

At the end of the week, he went to Bandera. Janet didn’t expect him until late on Fridays, and Bandera was always crowded in a way that made him feel part of the throng rather than separate from it. Not that he would have minded being alone. By this point, the anticipation had escalated to a low-frequency ringing in his ears, and after a long day, he sometimes had difficulty understanding what people were saying.

Tonight it was the opposite of when he’d come with Daphne. It seemed he couldn’t drink enough. He ordered a gimlet, then a vodka tonic, then a martini. He was hoping to discover the elixir that would clear his mind, sober him up. Nothing did. It was a mistake to have admitted to himself that he hated his work, and now that he had, he couldn’t take it back. He could see with painful clarity how he’d wound up in this predicament. He’d enjoyed the study of law, but the practice of law had less to do with John Rawls and more to do with filing BlueBacks. Law school had been the classic intellectual sanctuary from certain practical considerations. Then it had ended, and he’d needed to make a living. So here he was.

When he was young, perhaps because of the premonitions, he’d wanted to be a magician. In a box somewhere in his mother’s attic there was even a photograph of him in a peach tuxedo, holding a black hat and a pack of cards, grinning. As a teenager, he’d told his secret ambition to his mother, a woman who lived as if she’d come of age in the Great Depression rather than the 1950s. “Dreamer,” she’d muttered, under her breath. But Felix had heard. Some mornings he wondered if he’d become a lawyer precisely because it was the least dreamlike thing he could be.

There was Daphne. She was sitting at the other end of the bar, with what must have been her boyfriend, a surprisingly preppy-looking guy in a St. John’s lacrosse shirt. Felix rose and ambled toward her, sliding his glass along the polished brass countertop.

“Hello, Miss Edmunds,” he said. He could see the lacy outline of a black bra through her blouse. “And how are you this evening?”

“Bug off, buddy,” said the boyfriend.

Felix was eager to correct the impression that he was a suitor. “We work together,” he said. He thought, but did not say: I’m her boss.

“Whoop dee do,” said the boyfriend. Daphne was plucking a cherry off a toothpick with her dark fingernails. “Leave her alone,” he said. “You’re not her type.”

Felix looked at Daphne. The minx lifted her shoulders and let them fall, as if to say: You’re not; what can we do?

Of all the—“Look, pal,” Felix said, straightening to his full height.

The boyfriend laughed. “Look? Yeah? Look where?”

Felix checked himself. It wasn’t worth it. None of it was worth it. He walked back to his stool and grabbed his coat, tapping his forehead in a quick salute.

“See you ’round,” he said.

He was too drunk to drive, too agitated to sit still in a cab. So he decided to walk. As he swayed his way up the freeway on-ramp, he realized why no one walks in Los Angeles. All these drivers, swerving and honking, in a hurry and angry about it! It was as if they were all late for somewhere they didn’t want to be going in the first place. Why didn’t they just go somewhere better?

Then it hit him. That’s what he would do. He would change his life. It wasn’t too late. He had money in the bank; Janet had a good job; he didn’t have to sit at a desk growing bitter like Daphne—clearly she was more bitter than he’d first imagined. He could switch careers, take a risk—he wouldn’t have to become a magician, but he could do something he enjoyed more than practicing law. Heck, at this point, almost anything would satisfy that criterion. He picked up his pace. He felt more surefooted. Maybe this thing wasn’t something that would happen to him so much as something he would initiate himself.

But he needed a plan. A plan was paramount. He pressed his fingers to his temples and tried to think. The driver of a red Taurus threw an empty Pepsi bottle out the window, and it nicked his elbow. Felix didn’t care. The world, like a bride, was finally unveiling its hidden mysteries to him. He had a friend who was opening a bar and had asked him to look over the paperwork. Perhaps Felix could go in on it with him, be his partner, make it a place like Bandera. Or maybe he could start a restaurant that also had a cabaret in the back, for musicians and actors, even magicians.

He was smiling and his heart was beating fast. It was possible he’d found the perfect solution. When he got home, he would open up and tell Janet everything. She might not like his idea at first, but she would come around—she always did. He would kiss her on the lips while she was still asleep, then he would turn on the bedside lamp and explain to her that change was possible. Change, life, all of it. The dream of his youth was not entirely dead. There was a flicker of something true that burned within him still. It was a relief to realize such a thing. No, it was victory. It was the thing itself.

Someone yelled something and waved his arm out the window. Felix ignored it. A feeling he recognized from childhood had crept into his chest and was radiating out his skin. He felt free for the first time in decades; it was as if the air he’d been inhaling up till now had all been made of counterfeit oxygen. Tomorrow morning he would quit his job, then he would call his mother and ask her to look for that picture of him in the peach tuxedo. Life could still be an adventure. It wasn’t too late. Cars whizzed past him, but he didn’t even notice them anymore. His eyes were fixed on the moon, full and low and lovely, like a beacon. Like a rolling ball of white light in the sky.

It all happened so quickly it was hard to feel anything except surprise. He got home and closed the door quietly; he didn’t want to disturb Janet. He stepped inside, feeling stealth and tiny, like an ant that had just completed a long journey. But as soon as he crossed the threshold, there she was, standing in the foyer, her eyes glossy with a happiness he’d never seen in them before. As if she’d been waiting for him. As if his adventure were just about to start.