Playing God (eBook)

Chapter One

September 2003

Phillip

Out of nowhere, blurred vision and pain that throbbed with every heartbeat forced him to his knees on the coffee-stained carpet in the editing room. He fought to keep the nausea in his belly from erupting and lay on the floor even after the newscast had gone off the air. Standing over him, the nerdy meteorologist who for a brief moment had toyed with the idea of going to medical school, pronounced his diagnosis. Thinking back on it now, Phillip was certain that his first migraine headache had appeared just as he’d begun to suspect that he no longer had the heart for any of it.

Recovery was slow. In the days that followed, sitting at his desk in a robotic trance in the middle of an ordinary week, he stacked folders into neat piles and spent several minutes re-arranging paperweights on top. Beside the familiar chipped mug filled with sharpened pencils, he placed a photograph mounted in a ceramic frame his daughter had made in art class. Leaning back in his chair, he closed his eyes and concentrated on rhythmically breathing in and out. The flashing button on his desk phone announced messages he hadn’t bothered to pick up. He tried to remember the last time there hadn’t been any messages and wondered if anyone ever got to the end of the queue.

Can’t do it, he sighed. Not today.

Summoning energy he didn’t feel, he pushed his chair away from his desk and swiveled 180 degrees to take in the bustling newsroom. He hoisted himself up and made his way over to the window, where for at least ten minutes he stood and witnessed the trees beginning to shed their autumn leaves.

Phillip Lynch could think of little before him that he looked forward to and nothing behind him worth remembering, and it was in that moment that he started to imagine an assortment of scenarios. After that, the juggling of different possibilities became an addictive mental pastime, one that he couldn’t seem to stop. Trapped in editorial meetings about what was and wasn’t newsworthy, or at Gracie’s piano recital where girls in ruffled dresses plodded through tunes from The Little Mermaid, or feigning interest as Susan recounted her sister’s latest calamity, Phillip began to make a plan.

Eight years after he had started working at the TV station, the board of directors rewrote its original mission statement, and a new program director arrived on the scene to remap the entire broadcast direction. Phillip had been working on several projects, and every one of them, in various stages of development, was now unsuited to the station’s new direction. Management encouraged him to come up with fresh ideas on the double, or to start pounding the pavement with his resume in hand.

On the home front, his fourteen-year-old son had just begun a college prep high school with a price tag that exceeded what they could afford, and his eight-year-old daughter was midway through years of shiny metal braces guaranteed to produce a picture-perfect smile. As if that weren’t enough to make a man sprout a sudden explosion of gray amid his thick dark curls, his in-laws had been hinting about a visit. Phillip sighed and rolled his tongue over a sore gum that probably meant he’d been grinding his teeth again. Lately he hadn’t been sleeping well. He’d rubbed his eyes at breakfast nearly every morning that week and had to ask his wife to repeat whatever it was she had just said. By then, Susan had given up trying to remind him to pick up a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread on his way home. At the office, he had been observed at his desk staring into space, sometimes pausing at length in mid-sentence as the cursor flashed on and off. His boss, commenting that some recent submissions had been less than compelling, chalked up his lackluster performance to the general malaise everyone was feeling.

“Creative types all go through dry spells,” the boss had said with a shrug. “Nothing to think twice about.”

God only knows how long he’d been moving through the days on autopilot, not feeling bad, but not feeling good either. Phillip knew he’d been going through the motions, and he had to imagine that everyone else knew it, too. After a particularly rough week at work - a week in which two of his pieces had been rejected for inadequately verified sources and a third had been judged lacking in sufficient audience interest - it seemed to him that there was only one thing to do. All weekend as he mowed the lawn and took out the trash and sleep-walked through a hundred other ordinary chores, he deliberated, going back and forth over the idea, looking at it from every angle. By Sunday afternoon when he drizzled lighter fluid onto the black briquets and struck a match, he had made up his mind, and he knew there would be no turning back.

On Tuesday morning, in the tidy split-level home nestled on a tree-lined suburban street just south of the fog line, Phillip forced himself to swallow a spoonful of the sticky oatmeal his wife had placed in front of him. He buried his face in the morning paper to avoid being drawn into the kids’ rehashing of Survivor, fixing his eyes studiously on the Chronicle’s Sporting Green. Susan handed all three their lunches and sent them off for a good day, just like always.

“Let’s go, everybody! Time to get in the car. Gracie, don’t forget your new glasses. You left your cleats on the front porch, Andrew, and they’re full of mud,” she called out as she wiped a speck of oatmeal from the corner of her husband’s mouth.

Gracie remembered she’d left her homework upstairs. Andrew grumbled they’d be late again as he grabbed his cleats and headed out to the Volvo in the driveway. Susan handed Phillip the car keys. His gut rumbled as he backed the boxy ten-year-old sedan out of the driveway and tried not to look back at his wife in her pink terrycloth bathrobe, waving cheerfully from the open doorway.

He dropped the kids off at their respective schools, kissing his daughter on the cheek and patting his son’s back, not allowing his gaze to linger on either of them. A brightly colored banner caught the corner of his eye: Parents Back to School Night - Save the Date!

Keep moving, he whispered under his breath. Don’t think.

He stopped at the dry cleaners to drop off his navy-blue suit. As the clerk turned away to print out a receipt, Phillip quietly tucked his wallet into the back pocket of the trousers. “Be back Saturday,” he called over his shoulder before hurriedly climbing into the car. He turned the Volvo toward the freeway entrance and gunned the engine as he approached the on-ramp. He’d chosen the southern direction because the weather in San Francisco was beginning to grow chilly, and anywhere south would be warmer. The air felt crisp and cool, and he’d seen a hint of frost on the windshield as he’d started the car. Phillip settled back and turned the radio dial to a jazz station before driving over a hundred miles with no particular destination in mind, stopping only to get gas and stretch his legs.

By then the morning mist had cleared to reveal a cloudless September day, and as he filled the tank, it struck him that he was completely out of anyone’s reach. Although just last winter he had been given a cell phone to use for work, he deliberately left it charging on his desk. His wife of fourteen years, his bosses and colleagues, his parents, the accountant who prepared his taxes every year, and even his tennis partners - guys he’d played doubles with nearly every weekend - all of them would wonder where he was and what possibly could have caused him to vanish so suddenly. If asked, they would say that he was an agreeable fellow, easy to get along with. They would declare with certainty that he had never seemed temperamental or unstable in any way. His friends and coworkers would insist they had never seen him fly off the handle, slam a door, or storm out of a meeting. If he’d been down in the dumps lately, they couldn’t say they’d particularly noticed. In the days ahead when the news surfaced, they would all be asking themselves whether they’d ever really known Phillip Lynch at all.

As he continued on his southern journey, the uncomfortable rumbling that had plagued his gut since breakfast began to subside, and a calm nothingness took up residence. He opened the window, taking a deep, cleansing breath, feeling neither happy nor unhappy. If he felt anything at all, it was an emptiness in the core of his being in the place where disappointments and secrets harbored over too many years had festered. Too late he had begun to see that keeping those secrets might have granted them far more power than they should ever have had. A few mellow notes from Miles Davis on the radio helped to soothe any remaining discomfort, and Phillip knew that what he was about to do was right.

He knew it was his lifetime habit of accommodating everyone around him that had squeezed and molded him as easily as a block of clay, both that and the relentless expectations of those who professed to love him. When he’d wondered whether there was still time enough to start over and do it all differently, he’d discovered that he had no desire to come up with a solution close to home. The ties that bound him there seemed like cheese that had been stretched to the breaking point, stringy cheese full of holes. More than he’d wanted anything for a long time, Phillip ached to break loose, to walk away from everything he’d known before this moment. Every nerve in his...