Three O’Clock in the Morning
When you wake at three a.m. the next morning, your heart is beating very fast. Your husband is not in bed, but you can hear the television. You’d like company, but you just lie there, feeling your heart bumping along. You don’t want to know what happened, so you just turn on the BBC. Only they’re talking about walls popping up everywhere and suddenly they don’t sound so soothing.
Rioters are burning an American embassy somewhere in the Middle East. The British prime minister is expressing grave concern. The Secretary General of the United Nations is calling a special meeting of the Security Council. You switch it off, and just lie there in the dark.
The perky blonde on the morning news tells you the latest: a second wall, on the other side of town. This one separates you from the more affluent. Your husband says, “Good riddance. We don’t need them hoity-toity types.”
More people do not come to work. Your boss assigns you yet another region. Today you stay two hours late. You wonder why you must do so much, when many of the people whose claims you review are on the other side of the wall. But you don’t complain.
Two days later you come home to find your husband sprawled in the recliner, a pile of beer cans tumbled beside the chair. He tried to go to work, but ran into a wall. You try to sober him up, cook him a nice dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes, but halfway through he gets up and slams out the door. Comes back fifteen minutes later with a big bag of tortilla chips and a six pack of the new dry light beer you keep seeing commercials for.
You would like to comfort him, but you don’t know how anymore. You wonder if he feels the same way, or if he really just doesn’t care.
The hearty news guy tells you the next day that new walls have cropped up running the other direction. “Authorities speculate that some parts of town look like a big checkerboard,” he says, and his co-host gives the perfunctory laugh.
You know one morning when you wake up at three a.m. that a wall is now between you and work. You wonder if other people wake up when the walls go up. You haven’t heard anything about this on the news.
You get up and dress anyway. Your husband is still snoring in the recliner when you leave. You drive down the street until you run into a wall. This is the first time you’ve actually seen one.
From the TV pictures, you expect it to be smooth, but it’s rough, barely finished concrete. You notice a man trying to climb it, using the rough parts for hand- and toe-holds, but he loses his balance and falls hard to the ground. He lies there a few minutes, then crawls to his feet and starts back up. You leave before he falls again.
Your husband is drinking his breakfast, watching the morning talk shows. They aren’t saying anything about walls. Another perky blonde is interviewing the author of a diet book that allows you to eat all the beef you want but doesn’t let you eat any chicken or fish. Or vegetables. The perky blonde swears by it, says she lost fifteen pounds.
You start to clean. Scrub the grout between the bathroom tiles with an old toothbrush. Wash the baseboards. Get on a stepstool and wipe the top of the refrigerator clean. Vacuum until your husband yells at you that the noise is interfering with the TV.
The next day you work in the yard. Cut the grass even though it’s only three days since you last cut it. Weed the flower bed. Dig a hole for a new azalea, and go off to the nursery to buy one, only to run into a wall.
In the evening you stare at the TV with your husband. You watch a new sit-com about madcap young people living on the space station. They talk about sex non-stop but never actually do it. Neither of you laugh.
The late news comes on. The anchorman puts on his most somber face, and informs you that a man was cut in half when a wall landed on top of him. They do not show pictures. The anchorman says this is not the first time that people have been hurt by the walls. His words imply a government coverup. He seems more concerned about this than about people being hurt by the walls.
They run a clip of the President, expressing compassion for the victim’s family, and promising to appoint a government commission to study the walls. Your husband starts to snore, and you take that as notice of bedtime.
