This Time Will Be Different

3

He'd never been to a police station, except once to have his fingerprints taken as part of his substitute teaching application; that had been out in the suburbs, where the police stations were, if not inviting, at least calm and sterile, with upholstered chairs in the lobby. Here in the city, the station buzzed with chaotic energy, and there was a dinginess to the place that evoked hopelessness. He told the man at the desk he was looking for his wife, Sarah D'Albero-Ampong. The officer buzzed him in past a bulletproof glass door and motioned him to another seating area in a small corridor. The overhead fluorescent lights hummed like those things meant for killing mosquitoes. Here the walls were lined with bulletin boards of wanted posters and sketches: a thirty-five-year-old white male who killed his girlfriend with a kitchen knife, an unknown suspect who held up a liquor store and shot the clerk in the face at point-blank range, a Hispanic male wanted for sexual assault.

I deserve this, but she doesn't.

That morning Jack had woken up early to cook breakfast—a peace offering following the previous evening's fight. He made a mushroom, pepper, and cheese scramble and rye toast (with olive oil, which she preferred to butter). Sarah had been unusually quiet that morning, contrite even, which was unlike her. He had been prepared for a fight but, instead, she'd given him cold politeness.

"You want to talk, Sar?" he'd said.

"Not really." Her half-smile was a sharp, sarcastic dagger.

It all had made Jack uneasy—like something both important and terrible was about to happen. And it could have been his last memory of them together: eating breakfast like strangers sharing a table at a crowded restaurant.

He couldn't even remember what their fight had been about. Or, more precisely, he couldn't remember what the catalyst had been. Regardless of the superficial "topics" of their quarrels, they were all about one thing: his job. Or rather, how two years before he'd quit his well-paying job as an analytics manager at a marketing agency to write and substitute teach. Eventually, Sarah would come to some permutation of the argument that he was being selfish or irresponsible or both. Jack would accuse her of caring too much about money. "If we don't do what we love," he'd said, "then what's the point?"

"You think I love going to work every day making sports collectibles? Is this what I've been dreaming of?"

"Don't do it then. Quit."

"Quit? Quit, he says. I'm trying to have a life. Maybe have a little saved for our kids' college, if we can even have kids. Someone's got to make money around here, especially since you're so 'uncomfortable' getting any help from my parents, who literally just want us to be happy."

She had a point, but this only had the effect of making him more upset, more desperate, a cornered animal with nowhere to go.

When he'd first quit his job, she'd been mostly supportive; she bought him an antique rolltop desk at an estate sale in Manayunk—one of the models with a hundred little drawers and compartments—and she'd had it set up for him in the spare bedroom. Above the desk, she'd hung a framed calligraphic rendering of a Samuel Beckett quote that, although he'd never actually read any Beckett, was one of his favorite sources of inspiration:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Months passed and Sarah's support waned. Jack could hear it in how she asked him about his progress on the book—in how she made little side comments about money being tight, bills being high. They might be walking past a real estate office with listings in the window, and she'd make a passing comment. "Wouldn't it be great if we could afford a place like that?" she'd say of a quaint-looking brownstone in Fishtown or of a newly built loft in the Northern Liberties.

Jack's book had been something he'd been mulling over for twenty-plus years. Ever since reading The Lord of the Rings in the sixth grade, he'd dreamed of one day writing his own series of fantasy novels. Through adolescence and early adulthood, he began to piece together the plot, characters, and setting of his imagined books—drafting up journals full of appendices, faux historic documents, and academic articles related to his fantastic world. He drew a massive map across thirty-six pieces of paper that combined to form a six-by-six grid, tracing the coastlines of various real-world maps to form the imagined continent on which his novels would take place. From here, he noted—in painstaking detail—the location of every city, town, hamlet, country road, forest, mountain, river, stream, abandoned mine, ancient ruin, and dragon's lair.

In college, when Jack started reading a lot of "real literature," he decided that rather than write a novel, he would tell the story of his fantastical world in a series of interconnected short stories. "Like Dubliners crossed with Tolkien," he'd say. The premise revolved around a medieval world controlled by a giant, bureaucratic empire. The world was populated by peasants and nobles and knights, yes—but also by elf-like beings (the Tolkien, not Keebler, kind) whose memories were passed down through a near-extinct variety of tree and where a small smattering of the population, called the Cree, had the ability to tap into mystical powers to perform amazing feats.

During this time, Jack happened across an article on fantasy world- building that argued any time a fantasy story employs magic, the use of the magic ought to come at a cost. Perhaps the practitioners of magic lose a limb every time they cast a spell, or else maybe someone they love loses a limb. Jack disliked both of these examples but thought the concept of magic "coming at a cost" was compelling. He toyed with several ideas, but only decided the cost for magic in his world when Sarah and he had married and he'd started writing in earnest. The Cree, Jack decided, would pay for their power by also being cursed with sterility. And so, they were faced with a sort of existential crisis—they were gifted with great power and a prolonged lifespan but had no hope of offspring and, therefore, their lives held no real "meaning."

Eventually, writing became his obsession; at lunch, he'd sneak away from the office to write at a nearby café or while sitting in Rittenhouse Square. He thought a lot about quitting his job. Finally, after completing more than three hundred manuscript pages, Jack—on an impulse and without consulting Sarah—went through with it. He was surprised how his boss, Michel Chowdhury, who he secretly despised, reacted.

"Good for you, Jack. I'm happy for you," he said and gave him a warm handshake.

That night when Jack got home, Sarah was understandably upset. "You can't just unilaterally make decisions like that," she said. "We're partners—a team. We need to talk these things out."

"You're right. I should have told you," Jack said. "I guess it's just I was afraid you might talk me out of it."