Obsession Police
By Chad Eschman
There was Gary at the office. He taped a new picture of his daughter up on the walls of his cubicle every day until his entire corner was a patchwork of green-eyed six-year-olds lost in a custody battle. That last week before he disappeared, all he did was sit in his $1200 ergonomically-engineered chair and slowly spin in circles. Then there was that barista at the coffee shop, the one who made you your cup of coffee every morning before work. You noticed she was chewing the nicotine gum. The morning they took her away she was on the floor behind the counter, trying to re-light a used cigarette that someone had left in an empty coffee cup. They even came for Jasper, your neighbor’s dog. He kept breaking out of the yard to chase motorcycles.
Obsession is a big ugly bird that flies down and grips you in its talons and flaps its wings so you can’t walk straight, so you can’t go anywhere without struggling. It’s the thumbnail that you forget to clip, and it feels uneven and sharp all day long, and even though no one else notices, it digs against your palm all afternoon, not letting you forget, until you grab Jenny by the arm to stop her from tripping on the stapler that fell on the floor and you cut her arm with the edge of your nail and she gasps and looks at you like you’re a lunatic. Obsession is a sunburn. It’s a rusty pipe. And it’s in your bloodstream.
That’s why you have to sell the piano, your sister tells you at lunch. It’s spring, and the two of you are sitting at a table on the patio of Lavendera, that bistro she loves. You ask her to repeat herself, you tell her the truck that just drove past was so loud. She stares at you evenly and folds her fingers on the table because she knows you were thinking about the song. You see a government billboard in the distance: End Obsession, don’t let it end you. Report suspicious individuals.
Sell it, she says with a sharply aspirated t, because if you don’t stop yourself now, they’ll have to take you away just like those other miserable people, and if that happens, Mom will lose her mind and she’ll die –– you know she will literally die –– and then Dad won’t know what to do with himself, and I’ll have to take care of him and you know we don’t get along, and I’m too young and attractive to be staying home with a cranky, helpless old man who will drive me crazy until they finally have to cart me off, too. She stabs a fork into her salad. And besides, she says, I’d miss you.
It’s been eight months, three weeks and six days you’ve been trying to finish the song. You started writing it for Lydia originally, but she left when she realized you were more concerned with it than with her. She wore that silk kimono and tried to get you to make love to her on top of the shiny black piano that you wouldn’t move from for three straight days.
It’s that final phrase that’s killing you, something about that chord progression isn’t right, but you’re not sure what it is. Is it the discordance of the diminished F7? Is it that the crescendo is too contrived? Maybe the problem is bigger than that, and you should cross out the time signature and start all over again, but that doesn’t seem like the solution either. Maybe the piano is not quite in tune, but you tuned it yourself, and then you had someone else tune it, and then you tuned it again last week, just to be sure. You haven’t been sleeping and it’s beginning to show at the office. You know that your supervisor, Terry, is already watching you sideways with those eyes that say Great, now I’ll have to replace another one, and you start to think that maybe your sister is right. Maybe selling the piano is the best thing to do.
You start sleeping with Shelly from the finance team. She’s always been flirtatious with you, and she has amazing legs which walk past your desk frequently, held together by a skirt that’s just barely professional, and propped up on pointy little heels. It seems like a good distraction, something else to do at night other than sit at the piano, staring at the keys until they blend together into a blurry bar of gray.
Still, again and again, after Shelly falls asleep exhausted, you find yourself wandering out to the piano. You move through the chords over and over, rearranging and alternating and adjusting to try to find a way to finish. One night Shelly comes out wearing your shirt, her eyes half open, and asks you What are you doing, it’s three a.m., and you tell her you’re not tired. She smiles at you like maybe she wants to help you get tired, but you turn back to the piano and start playing until she shrugs and goes back to bed.
Then comes the day that Terry pulls you into his office and you know right away, even before you go in, before you sit down across from him, before he looks at you with a wrinkled forehead and tired eyes, exactly what it is he’s called you in about.
We’ve been getting inquiries, he says, and he’s having a hard time looking at you now. He says You know, phone calls and emails and things. From Them. I’m not supposed to be telling you, but well. I’ve noticed you’re getting distant, tired, and I’ve been worried. But I think you can still make it. If you try. You can turn things around. You can beat it out, I’ve seen people do it.
You ‘re touched. You know it’s dangerous to give warnings, that if he gets caught he could really get busted, and that means a lot.
He looks directly at you now. If it’s about Lydia, he says, please man, don’t let that do it. Don’t let that be the end of you. Don’t make Them come and remove you like those others. You’ve got so much else. What about your music, right?
You thank him, promise him you’ll turn things around right away. Then you step out of his office, go directly to your desk, grab your bag and the emergency bottle of rye you keep in your bottom drawer, and walk out for good. You can see Shelly out of the corner of your eye, watching you, but you keep walking and she doesn’t follow. She’s one of the lucky ones. She can still shrug and sleep quietly, and you wonder how someone like that was able to stand you, but then you realize that’s exactly why she could.
When you get home, you drop your things on the floor, push the couch up against the front door, take a drink of the whiskey, and have one last look out the window. Clear sky. Warm sunlight. Green, green leaves. You take another drink and head for the piano room.
You play painfully loud. Imperceptibly soft. You play with only your right hand, only your left, you play with your eyes closed and your mouth open. You’re sweating through your poplin shirt and your suit jacket feels heavy and hot, but you don’t stop. You don’t stop when your fingers start to bruise, you don’t stop when tears blur your vision, you don’t stop when you hear the banging on the front door. Bang. Bang. Them. You play faster, pounding the keys while the door thumps against the couch, you crescendo to the crash of the breaking window, you change key as voices yell from the other room. As the door to the piano room splinters open behind you, you jump up and attack the keys thinking Wait, this is it, this is it, of course, this is what ties it! But several strong hands grab you and wrestle you back. They push you to the floor. Roll you over. Handcuffs. Then, as you shut your eyes against the cacophony of voices and radio static and stomping boots, you wonder what they’ll do with this piano that your sister told you to sell.