Freudian Slip. Erica Orloff
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seat of her Porsche Carrera. The stick shift kept ramming into his butt as she straddled him on top.
But close like this? Never. He didn’t cuddle after sex. He didn’t even like to kiss during sex. He liked it raw and fast with no talking—except for dirty words and moaning. The dirtier the better, frankly.
Kate rolled over, facing the middle of the bed, so Julian walked around to the other side and lay down next to her. He liked listening to her breathing because he felt so lost in Neither Here Nor There. It was contact with a human being. He had no idea how long he’d be stuck in God’s stupidly named in-between world. And he also knew he could find himself ending up there. In Hell, if he died. Or Heaven. One or the other. But he preferred to go back to living in the real world. Where there was Patron tequila. And people who could see him.
“Wake up, little Katie, wake up!” He started singing again. Louder and louder. And finally she stirred. He leaned up on one elbow, thrilled for the company.
She stretched, yawned and punched her pillow. Then she sat up and stared at the clock and groaned.
“God,” she exhaled. “Four in the morning and I wake up with a song stuck in my head. Shut up!”
She punched the pillow again and then flopped backward.
“Don’t go to sleep, Katie Girl. Sit up. Talk to me. Come on. Talk about anything.”
She stared up at the ceiling in the half-darkness—the illumination from the clock radio and city lights outside kept her tiny bedroom a deep gray. She had managed to get the mattress back on her bed that morning. Julian had watched her struggle, unable to lend some muscle.
“Aren’t you happy Zack found your dog? And you can get a new TV. Now we just have to get you over this boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Kate, you should have deleted his picture. Don’t agonize over this guy, this jackass who screwed you over. He’s not worth it.”
He’d had so many one-night stands, he’d lost count. But he wasn’t misleading. He didn’t need to lie to get women, and he had no problem with saying it was for sex and nothing more—not looking for a relationship, I don’t need your number, let’s not do lunch, there’s the door. But he didn’t lie.
He watched her, finding the entire voyeur experience strangely erotic. At the same time, she was his only companion, unless you counted Grandma across the hall, and right now, he needed Kate.
Her eyes remained fixed on the ceiling.
“What are you thinking?” he asked her.
She was silent for a few minutes as he studied her. And then she whispered aloud.
“God? It’s me. I…know you aren’t Santa Claus. I can’t just make a wish and have it all get better. But it’s been a really hard few years. First Daddy. And then Mom marrying that money guy. I’ve tried to like him, God. I honestly have, but he’s…not my dad. Maybe that’s what’s so hard. He’s nothing like my dad. Not heroic. Not handsome. Not funny. Not anything. He’s like striped wallpaper. You barely notice him.”
Julian saw she had clasped her hands together on top of the blanket like a small child saying bedtime prayers. Not that he knew anything about that. He hadn’t ever prayed in his life, he didn’t think, which made his recruitment for this job all the more ridiculous. He wasn’t even agnostic. The very word implied someone who had given some thought to the question of whether or not there was a God. He hadn’t. Not ever. He was nothing. Not an atheist. Not an agnostic. Just apathetic. When would the Boss understand that and let him get back into his body and wake up?
Kate whispered again, “And David. I…feel like my guts have been literally ripped out from me. When I saw them together, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even think past the pain. I don’t think I want much, God. I am truly, truly thankful for the material things I have, the roof over my head, my health, a profession I adore, all of it. But to find someone who loves me. Deeply and totally and all of me. Is it impossible? Is a soul mate impossible?”
“You know, Kate,” Julian said, “if you had told me last week that I would believe in soul mates, I would have said you were fucking nuts, but…this whole cosmic thing going on? Maybe God does exist and does know what He…She’s…doing. Maybe there’s someone out there for you.” He filled in his half of the conversation in the pauses.
“I can’t sleep, God. It’s like I hear this constant chatter in my head. It’s driving me nuts. I know it’s the stress of it all. At least I think it’s stress. I don’t want to go to work next to Leslie. It makes me want to throw up. On the good-news front, I have lost six pounds since this whole thing started—even after eating pizza. The stress diet.”
Kate pulled the covers up. “Please let me fall to sleep, God. Otherwise I’ll be so tired and will look horrible and Leslie can have the last laugh knowing David picked her and I’ve become a hag.”
Leslie, Julian decided, needed to be put in her place. And there was no way Kate was going to do that tired and stressed. “It’s okay, Kate. I was just…bored and lonely. I’m sorry I woke you. Go to sleep.”
He touched her cheek and watched as her breathing grew more shallow. Finally, she drifted off.
Now what?
He climbed from her bed and wandered into the living room. There were no phones in Neither Here Nor There, so what was he supposed to do if he had a question?
“Gus?” He said it loudly. “Gus!”
Nothing.
“Fuck me,” he said. Pissed at Gus, and at God for that matter, he sat down on the couch and waited for dawn. He wanted answers. Like when or if he was going back to his body.
He looked down at his arm. It looked like his arm—the same arm he always had—but when he touched it, he barely felt it. The tattoo of a heroin needle mocked him. He used to love heroin. Love and hate it. He’d be the first to admit he had abused his body, but now he wanted it back. If he could talk to God, wherever She was, he’d tell Her that he’d take better care of himself. A little less Patron, a little more broccoli.
He leaned his head back on Kate’s couch. What did he miss about his body? He’d discovered that the longing for heroin never goes away completely, no matter how long you’ve been clean. He craved, constantly, the euphoric sense of well-being, or floating. That place where everything was like a slow-moving bubble of warmth. Coming down from it, every muscle, every inch of him, hurt. Even his eyelashes hurt. If Gus was right and the universe was made up of strings, in a quantum sense, his particles hurt. Every neuron, proton, every cell.
He hadn’t gone to rehab. Instead, after an on-the-air rant in which he’d said some things that even for his show were pretty outrageous—and after the FCC scandal of it, the fines, the firestorm of criticism, he’d been taken off the air for thirty days. And in those thirty days, he and his producer had holed up in a hotel in Costa Rica, near the rain forest. He’d never gone through such pain in his life. Every day, an ancient native woman visited and brought him an herbal concoction to drink that their guide swore by. Julian sweated and cursed. At one point his producer, Frank, had literally tied him to the bed.
He emerged from that jungle hotel a couple of weeks later, clean but not sober. He drank more heavily, partied harder, screwed more women, chasing the demon of heroin.
Julian sighed. Then, with startling clarity, he realized that he didn’t want heroin. Or Patron. He had lost his earthly cravings. It was as if this lion he wrestled with every day for the last several years had suddenly turned into a kitten. The desire for heroin was completely gone.
“Okay, Boss.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Nicely done. If I could be this way and be back in my body, though, that would be the key. I miss sex. I miss touch.”
Suddenly, from Kate’s bedroom, her clock radio blared an old Britney Spears song.
“Crap, Kate,” he yelled. “Don’t tell me you listen to pop radio garbage. The Ramones, baby. You need to listen