Chapter Two

The first morning of the New Year was cold. Chicago-cold, of the sunny sort which seemed to imply an absence of temperature rather than a cold front. To Will, it seemed as though there might actually just be less air around than normal. The cold bled through the gaps in Will’s coat and up the sleeves as he walked stiffly to the restaurant where he was to meet Nancy, John and Greg for breakfast.

Churchill’s was packed, and the whole restaurant let out a small involuntary groan when he opened the door, sending a rush of cold through the tables.

“Will made a list,” Nancy said, before he even sat down. “He’s got 13 resolutions.”

She looked at the others at the table with a crooked smile, displaying her obvious pleasure at having such news. Will ignored her for the moment, shrugging off his coat and signaling unsuccessfully for some coffee. He was more or less still up from the night before, and if this was going to turn into an examination of his list, he’d need a strong cup of something to keep from attacking Nancy.

Greg was hunched over his mug, engrossed with adding a drop of cream at a time to his coffee. He had poked a tiny hole in the lid of the little tub of creamer, and was squeezing out only one drop every couple of seconds. Periodically he stirred the coffee with his spoon. This was the sort of thing he did whenever he was around two or more people. For some reason, he was absolutely fine one-on-one, but behaved in a manner that led people to suspect he might be autistic in groups. He would find some odd little task and submerge himself completely within it, surfacing only periodically to add something to the conversation.

Will had known Nancy since college. He liked to describe her as loving Jesus and gossip, in that order. They had become friends by virtue of having a similar sense of humor during all-night study sessions for a particularly tough Geology course, and since they had studied well together, they took some classes together after the course had ended. Will and Nancy had never dated, but Will had entertained the possibility a fair amount early in the friendship, before realizing that it wasn’t even an option from her standpoint. She considered religious belief essential in a partner, an area where he was clearly lacking. So he was glad when she had met and later married John, because it at least gave him one less “what if” to ponder when he couldn’t sleep. He figured he was fairly fortunate that she didn’t count belief in God as essential to a friendship, because she was one of the few people who was capable of dragging him out of his apartment on a regular basis.

“…some of them are?” Nancy was saying something, but the crowd noise had swallowed the first part. The tables at Churchill’s were set about eight inches apart, barely enough room to slide one’s leg’s between to reach the bench side, and not nearly far enough apart to be conducive to conversation. When it was crowded like this, it reminded Will of a high school cafeteria.

“Will you tell us what some of them are?” Nancy repeated. She was looking at him now, as were John and Greg. Her eyes were still smiling.

“Some of what?”

“Your resolutions,” she dragged the last word out, stretching and teasing it as though it were a fancy new word Will had perhaps invented.

“No. No, I won’t. Maybe later, OK?” Will tried again to get the waitress’ attention. When she met his eye, he did a pouring motion and mouthed “coffee?” at her with a desperate, pained look in his eyes. She nodded and moved off.

“OK, well, does anyone else have a resolution? John and I decided to resolve to do more charity work this year. Greg?” Nancy was being merciful, shifting the spotlight off of Will until he could wake up a bit.

Greg shook his head, adding another drop of cream to his coffee. The waitress arrived with Will’s coffee, hovering nervously with a coffeepot while clearly trying to decide whether or not it was OK to refill Greg’s cup. In the end, she decided not to and walked away without Greg ever acknowledging her presence.

After they ate, Nancy returned to the topic of resolutions.

“OK, so what made the list? Smoking? Your job?”

“Sort of everything. It’s…uh…it’s a list of the 12 things I’d most like to change.” Will felt a bit silly talking about it. Talking about it made it seem trivial and silly. Deciding to change things was sensible, maybe even wise, but allowing it to manifest through a list of New Year’s resolutions made him feel foolish.

“I thought it was 13,” Nancy said.
<br>“It was. Now it’s 12. I can’t remember what the other one even was. And I’m going to have enough trouble with 12. But, yeah, both my smoking and my job made the list.”
<br>“I may have a lead on a job for you,” John said. He usually let Nancy do most of the talking, but Will had found over the years that this wasn’t because he had nothing to say. He was a decent, articulate guy. Will guessed the charity work he and Nancy were resolving to do more of had been John’s idea. “Well, not a job, really, but some work. Charity-based, so maybe it’ll be something you’d feel better about than your normal stuff.”

Will knew that before John and Nancy left, he’d have a number to call to design some brochure or ad campaign for one struggling non-profit group or another. And he knew that in all likelihood he would take the work. John tended to bring him projects that did make him feel good about having done the work once it was completed, if only because he could tell a woman he just met that he had recently worked on a logo for an orphanage or a pamphlet for a teenage drug prevention program.

But the resolution was not about the moral quality of his clients. While it would be nice to do less of the morally-ambiguous corporate work, what he really wanted was to get out of design and into something else. Design had been something he more or less fell into after college, and it had never been a passion or a source of pride. It was simply something that paid him well enough to survive, and allowed him to work at home if he so chose, which was convenient, but tended to exacerbate the whole sleeping during the day thing.

“So…smoking.” Nancy began. She had long been trying to encourage Will to quit, and knowing it was on the list obviously excited her.

“Yeah. I think it’s probably the hardest thing on there. I can’t decide if that means I should tackle it first, or if I should try to knock a couple of the others off first.”

“How are you going to quit? What method, I mean,” John asked. Perhaps because he was a scientist, he was always curious about methods and the details behind things. He was the kind of guy who took things apart to see how they worked, and had an insatiable curiosity about virtually every subject. On their first meeting, John had cornered Will at a party and asked him questions about graphic arts for almost two hours before Nancy came and pulled them back into the rest of the group.

“Cold turkey,” Will said, wincing a little at the idea.

“Ouch,” added Greg.

Nancy looked unhappy. “Why not try the patch again?”

“Well, I’ve tried the patch a lot, and it does make it a little easier to get through the day, but I know for a fact that I can still smoke a pack a day while wearing it without any ill effects. I think it’s just that 21mg of nicotine is so much less than I usually take in.”

“That’s the most they do?” asked John.

“Yeah. Plus a guy I used to work with quit with the patch, and after going through the 14 weeks or whatever it is, ended up not being able to let go of the patch, and eventually started smoking again.”

“The gum?” Nancy suggested.

“Tried it once. Apparently if you chew it like…well…gum, you can give yourself a heart attack. Plus I find it difficult to put my faith in people who marketed a gum for like ten years before deciding that maybe people might prefer a mint flavor to, I don’t know, wet ashtray or whatever the original flavor was.”

John suggested the inhaler, and Will told him that it was weirdly too much like smoking, and just made his craving worse.

“Plus it burns your throat,” he added.

“Hypnotherapy,” Greg threw the idea out there as if involuntarily, a little word spasm while he was poking a hole in another creamer tub.

“Believe it or not, I tried that once, too. It was definitely one of the weirder attempts.”

“Wasn’t there something about a ghost?” Nancy asked. She had heard the story before.

“Yeah,” Will began, a little reluctant to tell the story as if not sure if it made him or the hypnotherapist look bad. “After the session, the guy told me he had found and freed a ghost who had been living inside me for years. He said it was the ghost who smoked, and that with him gone, I would probably never crave a cigarette again.”

“Seriously?” John sat forward. He was suddenly very interested.

“Yeah. He said that the ghost knew one of my relatives, and had taken up residence for some reason, probably with good intentions, and that my being a smoker was just a side effect.”

“Do…uh…do you believe that? About the ghost and stuff?” John asked.

John usually tried to avoid asking people what they believed in, since he sometimes had to avoid talking about such things at work. A lot of people seemed to find it highly unusual that a devout Christian would also be a scientist. His argument was: “God and science aren’t mutually exclusive. I find God in the things we cannot understand, and also in our methods of understanding the things we can.” He actually had a t-shirt imprinted with the statement.

“No,” Will answered with a laugh. “He freaked me out, telling me so earnestly about the ghost he had found, and I ended up lighting up before I even got back to the car.”

“They make a pill, though. Pam at work said it worked for her,” Nancy threw in quickly, eager to avoid an hour of conversation about ghosts, smoking and otherwise.

“I tried it once. Within a couple of weeks, I didn’t notice any effect on my wanting to smoke, but it sure did completely take away my sex drive.”

“And that’s why you stopped?” Nancy didn’t really approve much of Will’s sex life, but was generally kind enough to not make it a big topic if he didn’t, which seemed to work out pretty well for both of them.

“Well, the girl I was dating…it was largely a sexual thing anyway. And she started to get mad about it. At one point she told me I had a choice, and pointed out that she intended to keep smoking, so I, uh, made the choice that involved having sex again.”

“Anyway,” Greg said.

“Yeah, and I tried a ‘Stop Smoking’ tea once, but it was just terrible. It tasted liked boiled ass with dirt in it. I started calling it ‘Stop Drinking Tea’ tea.”

“I seem to remember that,” Nancy had been around for all of his quit attempts, cheering quietly from the sidelines.

“So, it isn’t hard for me to think that maybe cold turkey is the answer,” Will concluded. “I figure if I can do it, I’m stronger because I walked the wire without a net, and if I fail, at least I can’t easily blame it on a product not working.”

“But you won’t fail, right?” Nancy asked. Will answered with a grumpy-sounding, non-commital noise.

“My doctor said that all of the methods of quitting look promising in the data for the first two weeks, but that the numbers for cold turkey are pretty much the best at the one year mark,” John always had data to contribute.

“Why were you talking to your doctor about smoking?” Nancy asked the question they were all thinking, since John had never smoked a cigarette in his life.

“I don’t know. I was curious. He’s very, uh, patient with my questions. How many times have you tried to quit smoking?”

“Hundreds, maybe,” Will said. “I’m getting really good at it.”

They talked about John’s latest work project, which Will found fascinating in a vague way, but did not actually understand. Something about clouds. And about Nancy’s latest showdown with her boss at the bank, but after a little while Nancy and John departed. Will and Greg stayed at the Churchill’s to talk for a while longer.

Greg relaxed, and put the creamer away, to the visible relief of their waitress.

“So. Your love life?” Greg asked as he watched his coffee being refilled.

“What about it?”

“How’s it going? Is it on your ‘list?’” Greg was obviously a little suspicious about the idea that making a list of items to address would lead to an actual addressing of those items. He didn’t say if he felt this way in general, or if this was specific to Will, and based on knowing him.

“Yeah….”

“So, what happened to Jennifer again?” Greg asked him, adding sugar to his coffee.

“Which one?” He wasn’t being coy. There had at one point been a run of several Jennifers which had led to Greg referring to any person he dated as “a Jennifer.” Through the last year or so, Greg had detected, in addition to a couple of new Jennifers, a pattern of “J” and “S” names which he found almost as amusing as the string of Jennifers, although it was harder to keep track of who was who.

“The first one.”

“She was fake intuitive.”
>
“That’s not a real thing, is it?”

“I could say that I’m thinking of getting a haircut and she’d go ‘I thought you might.’”

“Not exactly evil,” Greg said.<br>
“I could also say that I was thinking of scraping cells off of my left forearm and submerging them in maple syrup in the hopes of making a subservient duplicate of myself, and she’d say ‘Oh, I figured you were going to get into cloning.’”

“Well, that’s different. And the second one?”

“Republican. Which wasn’t the real thing. The real thing was that she loved to fight with me about her being a Republican.”

“And there’s Stacey,” Greg liked Stacey. He thought she was good for Will, for reasons he would never explain.

“Yeah. I like Stacey. I just don’t see it going anywhere. She was at Jeffrey’s last night.”

“That’s fair, I guess. And Jessica?”
<br>“Jessica, uh…. Well, Jessica didn’t actually like me very much.”

“I thought that was Suzanne.”

“Susan,” Will corrected him. “Suzanne was the one who decided after two dates that I was ‘too emotionally available,’ in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Susan was the one who liked some person she thought I could be. Some totally other person she was imagining, superimposing on top of me or something. So the whole relationship was based on some potential she thought I had. I was something of a fixer-upper to her.”

“And to yourself, now, if your list is to be believed.”

“Well, that’s different,” Will insisted, signaling for the check. “It’s totally different.”

“I guess….” Greg said. But his tone was skeptical.

Will walked home, past the rows of little houses and buildings that were mostly in some stage of being gutted and converted to condominiums. He had walked past one earlier in the week which had had all of the windows smashed out during the night. The next morning, they had boarded the gaping holes in the structure up with particle board. The morning after that, the particle board had been torn from the building and strewn along the sidewalk. On each piece someone had spray-painted “Fuck Condos,” which Will was a little surprised to discover he found amusing.

He still hadn’t decided whether or not to try quitting smoking first, but wanted to be prepared in case he should decide to go for it sooner rather than later. When he got inspired to quit smoking, the plan was to lock himself in his house for several days, ignoring the phone and sleeping as much as possible until the worst of the cravings gave way to a dull ache and then gradually transformed somehow into strength and acceptance.

He stopped in at the corner market to pick up some supplies. He bought a lot of soup, snack cakes, bottles of water and multivitamins to help him along. He also filled his little cart with various types of chips, an obscene amount of candy and other sweets, flavored coffee creamers, canned almonds and frozen foods of all shapes and sizes. He wanted to be prepared for virtually any craving he might have.

“You planning some kind of party, pimp?” Tiny, the owner of the market asked, staring incredulously at the enormous stockpile Will placed on the counter. He called Will “pimp” mostly because Will usually bugged his eyes in a mockingly scandalized fashion and told Tiny earnestly that he was not a pimp, and that Tiny was going to get him arrested if he kept talking like that. Simon had trouble calling him “Tiny,” but didn’t know his real name, and Tiny was what everyone else called him. He’d been shopping there for too long at this point to easily ask Tiny his actual name. He started waving the merchandise in front of the little laser scanner. “A get fat party?”

“Quitting smoking,” Will said, ignoring the tiny, involuntary eye roll he got in return. The clerks at this particular market were conditioned to reach up for his cigarettes the moment Will approached the counter. The only question was usually how many packs he wanted. “Sorry to take away such a huge portion of your income.”

“Well, I hope you make it.” Tiny seemed to mean it, and Will took this as encouragement. “I’d much rather you quit, even without your money.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I’ll be able to shop here longer if I don’t drop dead, I guess.”

“Exactly. It’s $182.17.”

So much for #6, Will thought as he watched Tiny starting to put the food into little, black plastic bags.

The phone was ringing as Will returned home, and he struggled with the lock in his hurry to get it, almost dropping one of the bags of food in the struggle. By the time he got the door open, the phone had stopped ringing. He threw his keys on top of the tray of loose change on the table, wresting the bags up beside it. His cat Ebola looked up at him as he shut the door behind him, weighing whether Will’s return warranted rising from his spot on the sofa before deciding that it did not, opting instead to lick his leg a couple of times and fall back to sleep.
He put the food away in the kitchen. With all the frozen items, he had to play a bit of fridge-Tetris to get it all in, but eventually he was able to shut the freezer and return to his office. The light was flashing on Will’s phone, telling him he had a voice mail. He thought for a moment that John would be able to easily explain how the phone knew that without there being a physical machine in the apartment to tell it so, but it was a total mystery to Will. He was just glad it worked. The Caller ID identified the call he had missed as being from Jeffrey, with an earlier call coming in from his mother while he was at breakfast.
There was a decent chance that Will was up for a reprimand, perhaps mercifully nestled complete within the voice mail, but more likely to be drawn out for quite some time, until Jeffrey felt Will had apologized with appropriate sincerity and frequency. There was every chance that Jeffrey hadn’t even left a message, letting the Caller ID send a silent accusation instead, which might eat at Will more than an actual rebuke.

He reluctantly dialed the number to retrieve his messages.

“The following message will be deleted from your mailbox,” the robotic voice informed him, leading into a message that was now over two years old. He had started saving it because it contained a phone number he kept losing, and now saved it again because it had become a nostalgic routine. It was from his friend Dave, calling Will with the real Will sitting right beside him, and the both of them joked a bit at the beginning before Dave delivered the phone number three times. Once normally, then another joke, then the number again as a television announcer, and then repeating it one last time as though he had completely lost patience with Will’s inability to remember such a simple thing, delivered in the measured tones of a teacher talking to a particularly dense pupil whom he was trying not to strangle. Only a couple of months later, Dave had been sent off to Iraq, A couple of months after that, he had died in what seemed to have been a random accident on what should have been his day off. It was bittersweet to hear Dave’s voice, but Will still couldn’t bring himself to delete the message.
“Hi honey, it’s Mom,” the first new message began. She always began her messages like this, as though he wouldn’t recognize her voice, as though there were thousands of people who called him “honey.” “Happy New Year to you,” she sang, using the tune from “Happy Birthday.” She ended with a request that he call her back, even if it was just so that she might hear his voice. He deleted the message, making a mental note to call her later that afternoon.

There was no message from Jeffrey, which meant he really was angry. Jeffrey was a very easygoing guy most of the time, but carried a grudge if he felt someone had gone too far past his imaginary line of impropriety, which Will had apparently done at the party.

He dialed Jeffrey’s number, figuring it was best to get it over with as soon as he could. Maybe he could score some points through conscientious punctuality alone.

“Hello?” It was Jeffrey’s partner Ramon who answered. It occurred to Will once again that he didn’t know much about Ramon, who was in some kind of over-the-top performance mode most of the times Will had met him. He knew that his name wasn’t really Ramon, and that he worked as a personal assistant to a management type downtown, and he clearly cared a great deal for Jeffrey, but that was about it. His name was pronounced like “Raymond” without the “d,” and he got angry (or at least pretended to get angry) whenever someone pronounced it in the Latin fashion.

“Hey, Ramon. Happy New Year. It’s Will.”

“Will! Jeffrey is so mad at you. It’s all he could talk about this morning.”

“Yeah. I’m calling to apologize. Is he in?”

“Yes,” Ramon hissed out the “s,” taking his time with it in a way that made Will think Jeffrey was standing right next to him. “Did you leave with Stacey last night.”

“I refuse to answer any questions without my attorney present,” Will said.

“I thought you broke up. Do I smell drunken make-up sex? A festive, holiday booty-call?”

“We were never really together, Ramon. We start and end with booty-calls.”

“Ah, a fuck-buddy.”

“No.”

“You’re no fun,” Ramon announced, as though this might be news to either of them. “Here’s Jeffrey.”

Will heard a loud banging sound, and Jeffrey’s voice say “Dammit!” from a distance. After some rustling sounds, he came on the line.

“Sorry, dropped the phone,” Jeffrey said.

“No problem. So, I’m calling to apologize for last night,” Will knew from experience to lead with the apology if he entertained any hope of talking about anything else.

“You were really mean to Stanley, Will. You really hurt his feelings. He told me you told him to fuck himself.” Jeffrey’s voice dropped in volume on the last two words. Unlike Ramon, who took a peculiar delight in using shocking language, Jeffrey tried to speak like a gentleman, and when he swore, it was usually very quiet or couched in quotation marks.

“I thought I just told him to mind his own business. I’m really sorry. I don’t have his number, but I’d be happy to call and apologize to him.” There were a lot of things Will would rather do than call Stanley and apologize.

“No! You just leave him alone. He got very drunk after you left, and with any luck he won’t remember it at all.” Jeffrey’s tone implied that he would remember it forever. “Honestly, Will, do I need to ban you from social functions?”

“Again, I’m really sorry. I’m trying to work on my temper. It won’t happen again.”

Ramon said something in the background, and Jeffrey laughed.

“Well, it better not,” Jeffrey said, implying a tentative forgiveness, and Will knew that it was going to blow over. He guessed that Ramon had been on his side, and had possibly been working to get Jeffrey to soften during the morning.

Jeffrey extracted a couple more apologies before making Will promise that it would indeed never happen again, and the matter was settled. They chatted for a while about the party and the New Year before getting off the phone. Will was relieved that the list hadn’t come up.
Will rubbed his eyes, which were burning a little from lack of sleep, and thought about taking a nap before deciding that staying up now, as it was still only early afternoon, would help him get on track for his resolution to start sleeping during the night. He started a pot of coffee and returned to his office.

The list, crumpled from being in his pocket the night before, was on the desk in front of him. He thought it might help if he put copies of it throughout the house: on the mirror in the bathroom, by the doors, maybe the fridge. He started to enter it into the computer.

When he finished, the list now read:

01. Quit smoking – quitsmoking, quitsmoking, quitsmoking.
02. Only drink in groups, and try not to reach the point where you become drunk.
03. Fall in love.
04. Begin a regular exercise routine.
05. Be careful about your spending.
06. Think before you talk.
07. Try to eat healthier.
08. Control your temper.
09. Sleep during the nighttime.
10. Figure out a new career.
11. Be nicer to people in general.
12. Travel more.
13. ???

Resolution #3 had switched from a sex resolution to a love one, which he thought included the original one by default. He eliminated the original #4 because driving after drinking was not really something he did. He barely drove at all. When he refueled his car just before driving out to see his mother on Christmas, he couldn’t even recall the last time he had had to buy gas, but he thought it might have been summertime. He had put it on in the first place because he thought it would be an easy win. But while typing the list, he felt like it just wasn’t equal to the rest of the things on the list. And scoring an easy win seemed to cheapen the rest of the list.

The new #12 was one he found exciting. He had always loved the idea of travel, and he both made good money and had an awful lot of time off with his current workload.

It was starting to bother him a little that he could not recall what resolution he had crossed off of the initial list.

Will drank his coffee, staring at his list while turning on his stereo. It was set up so that he could play songs from his computer through the main speakers, so he created a quick set of songs about change, redemption and personal growth. When he had finished making it, however, it made him feel a little weird, so he put on “When I Was Cruel,” by Elvis Costello instead.

It felt much colder than the 62° he had charged the thermostat with maintaining throughout the winter to save on heating costs, and because when he was working, he liked to be a little cold. He turned it up to 70, and took a long, hot shower to warm himself.

He frittered away the rest of the day: researching health clubs vs. exercising routines he could do at home and looking up tips on quitting smoking and fiscal responsibility on the internet before switching his computer off and getting into bed to watch television until he felt tired and drifted off to sleep.

The last thing he heard on New Year’s Day was a woman’s voice on the television.

“How about a great new life?” she said. “It’s yours for the taking. Jerry’s course has helped millions of people and it can help you, too.”