Things You’re Not Proud Of FROM Unstuck “ARE THERE PEOPLE living inside our pipes?” my wife asks. “Of course there are not people living inside our pipes,” I say, but: of course there are people living inside our pipes. Where does she expect them to stay? A hotel? The thing she has never understood, will clearly never understand, is this: real estate. Capital. Supply, demand. It’s the reality of the world. Homes are not affordable. Banks are broken. So you move inside somebody’s pipes if you have to move inside somebody’s pipes. It’s happening everywhere. They’re not proud of it. But life is full of things you’re not proud of. She tells me to Drano the pipes, so I ask her if she’s okay with the moral implications of massacring the people inside the pipes just because she doesn’t like undrained water rising above her ankles when she showers. “I thought you said nobody lived in there,” she says. “They don’t,” I say. While she’s out buying the Drano, I’m lying facedown in the tub, warning the people in the pipes. She doesn’t know them like I do, doesn’t respect them, but I understand where she’s coming from. The tub drains too slowly. They pose legitimate health and safety hazards— it has to be against the health code to have people living in there, with their back hair and fluids and communicable diseases. The chaos of their conversations rattles within the pipes, and when they shout at one another about money, the walls hum and clang. They claim they can’t see our bodies when we’re showering, but I suspect they can see our bodies when we’re showering. So I get it. I do. Still and also, I am not enthused about killing them just because their existence is a little inconvenient to my own. They think I’m bluffing. They say: You don’t have the guts. They say: Could you stop peeing in the shower? I say, “If you’re going to stay here, we need to establish some ground rules.” I am still in the tub when she returns from the hardware store, am still working out a verbal contract with the people in the pipes. Negotiations have been arduous; they won’t even make simple concessions, i.e., they won’t tell me how many people are in there, let alone agree to stop inviting friends over for parties. “Listen,” I said. “She’s home, and I’m the only one who can stop her from killing you.” This isn’t right, the patriarch says. He says: Threats of violence. What happened to good-faith negotiations? What happened to constitutional rights? Deeper in the pipes there is a flush of applause. He says: I’m sending an email to my congressman. I didn’t even know they had Internet access in there. My wife is downstairs mixing something in a bucket. Two parts water, three parts mystery powder, one part frustration. The mixture seems to be thickening, because she needs two hands to twist an old paint stirrer through it, and she’s hunkering to generate torque with her midsection and to power through with the legs. Her back is turned to me, and I think about making some kind of joke about witches and cauldrons, but I can’t quite come up with the right phrasing and anyway, she does not like jokes at her expense, not even flirty ones. We are both in our kitchen, which is fully upgraded and has new granite counters and custom cabinets and a heated tile floor and recessed lighting and everything else you’re supposed to have, according to the people on TV. When you don’t have children to pay for, you can afford the so-called finer things in life. The plan was to have three children. It would go like this: girl, boy, boy, and their names would all begin with the letter B, because my wife read on the internet that B is a letter of strength, is a structurally sound letter that would equip them for handling the daily grind, but the plan was flawed because you cannot make your bodies do what you want them to do on cue, you cannot predict that you will have faulty equipment incapable of impregnating your wife. We financed the kitchen upgrades with money that had been earmarked for Barbara’s college fund, the same way Buster’s summer camp money had paid for our bathroom remodel and Blake’s sports equipment and travel budget had been diverted to pay for last year’s seven-day, six-night, three-fight Caribbean cruise. She is wearing a tank top and her shoulders are more muscular than I remember. She seems to be calling on a younger version of herself to aid in the stirring, and I am moved, mindlessly, to sneak up behind her and grab onto her hips, kiss her behind her ear, tease her bra strap out of place with my teeth. She shrugs me away. “I’m stirring, can’t you see I’m stirring?” I can see it. I just thought she looked good, felt myself flashing back to weekends fifteen years ago, afternoons when she casually walked around the house nude and we cooked meals as a team and made plans with friends just so that later we could break them and spend the time together. Now we order Chinese. Now I have guys’ nights and she has girls’ weekends. Now she wears socks to bed so I can’t see her toes. Now I spend nights sitting in the bathtub and talking to the people who live in my pipes. She hands me the bucket and says, “Keep stirring.” The man at the hardware store— his name was Timothy, she tells me, even though I don’t care what his name is, or that the letter T is a bridge-building letter which means he’s skilled at connecting with people— was very helpful. He was waiting at the front door and when he asked if he could help her with anything, she told him she needed all the help she could get. My wife says he took her hands in his and looked her in the eyes in a really serious way, like a hypnotist or a furniture salesman, and he told her he had exactly what she needed. He led her to the storage room in the back to show her something special. “I don’t like where this is going,” I say, which is meant to be kind of a lascivious joke. “Okay, anyway,” she says, “He takes me back there and he pulls down a box from the top shelf that says Do Not Open.” It’s an elixir, Timothy told her, banned in the US because of some bureaucratic nonsense, accidentally shipped to this hardware store instead of some toy factory in China. What does the elixir do? It does everything. It solves problems. It’s like having a mom you can call on any time of day. “Why do you think Chinese people are so happy?” she says Timothy said. “Why do you think they’ve advanced so far beyond us?” What Timothy told her was we could use it on the drain, but we wouldn’t be exploiting its full potential. We’re supposed to apply it to any problem area. Two coats if necessary. I ask her if she’s sure this is a good idea, isn’t it maybe possible that this is a dangerous thing to do, and what if we get a second opinion from another person at a different hardware store? Or a doctor even. “One of us needs to be willing to solve problems,” she says. “One of us needs to be a doer.” It’s true, she’s the doer and I’m the reactor. Like when that swampy smell creeped up from the basement and I told her it’s just what happens to older houses— they start to smell— but she called in the building inspector and they found all that mold in the walls. Or like the time the sinkhole formed in our backyard and she wanted me to fill it but I didn’t fill it because it seemed like backbreaking work and anyway the new dirt was just going to sink too. So why delay the inevitable? But she called in a guy— she always wants to call a guy, and I have to admit the guy usually knows how to fix things. It seems to me that as long as things get fixed, it doesn’t much matter who gets the credit for the fixing, but my wife does not agree. When she wants something badly enough, she is a missile bearing down on an insurgent, she is momentum personified. “What if one of us needs to be a not-doer,” I say. “What if the thing to do sometimes is to not do anything?” “You’ve tried not doing anything for five years,” she says. “There’s nothing noble about moping around the house and wondering what happened to us. Sometimes you just need to hammer a nail a little harder. You need to tighten the screw.” She dips a finger in the bucket then swipes it across my gumline, says it ought to fix my crooked incisor, and maybe it will make my jokes funnier. Texture of a pulverized crayon, taste of an overripe orange. My jokes are equally as funny as they were fifteen years ago, when she thought they were plenty funny. I want that on the record. I dab some of the paste on her chin where she seems to have given up the fight against her persistent sprouting hairs. I rub some into her ears so maybe she’ll become a more generous listener. She shoves her index finger up my nose to stop my snoring. “What happened with the Drano?” I ask, her finger still in my nose. My mouth feels alien and my voice is distant, like I’m hearing an actor on a TV in another room. “I forgot about the Drano,” she says. She forgot about the Drano. There is a sound like cheering in the ceiling above us. Two days later, the elixir is half gone, and we are both covered head to toe in a turgid paste. She is nude and I am nude, both of us spectral in the glowing whiteness of the elixir, my joints feeling like a twenty-year-old’s joints— not my twenty-year-old self, but some other, better twenty-year-old, a high-jumper who can squat two-fifty and who never wakes up in the middle of the night with cramps in his legs. It’s easier to feel optimistic when your body feels so charged with possibilities; when you hit a certain age, you have to focus on just staying awake all day, and you don’t have time to work on marriage anymore, you want the marriage to work on itself. When we met, it was because the algorithms on a website determined that we were a good match; she wanted a man who didn’t drink and who ran 5Ks on weekends and who had a well-kempt beard and perfect vision and a decent job with potential for promotion and the know-how to make minor home repairs, and I wanted a woman who wanted a man like me, and the website delivered me to her. Computers are amazing, but they cannot predict everything. There was no way it could predict that I would have faulty equipment or that I would hate spending time with her family or that if I spent a couple of hours in the mornings browsing porn sites she would want to call it an addiction. The computer never could have known that even though we had fun on dates and we had the same taste in music and held roughly similar religious views, that we were not cut out for living together, couldn’t predict how quickly we would discover all the ways to irritate each other day to day and wear each other down to raw nerve endings that could be inflamed by even the slightest misstep. Couples counseling didn’t work for me. Eventually it turned into solo counseling for her every Monday and Wednesday evening. My wife’s eyes are psychedelically charged, changing color from blue to green to a deep orange like a tabby. Her laugh is sharper and more crystalline. Her voice sounds luxurious but accessible, like a wind chime made of rare sea glass. She grabs a handful of the elixir and rubs it all over my groin and my faulty equipment, and immediately I can feel myself producing vibrant, potent semen, envision millions of B-named children swelling inside of me, begging to be released. We call out of work and pull the curtains and do things to each other’s bodies that we have never done, and she says she already feels like she is pregnant, already feels like a mother. Triplets inside of her, growing. The next day we are already running low on the compound, but we still have enough to keep us going. We hold hands because we want to, not because we need to put on a show for everyone at the company picnic. Her heart thumps against her ribs and we hear it like a bass drum. I tell her we ought to trade hearts, put mine in her and hers in me, see what happens. She says okay, but later, and then she says as long as we feel like we’re twenty, we should do what twenty-year-olds do. She says, “we were both so much better before,” and I look at her and I realize how sad she is to be getting old. I see how hard it is on her to be this deep into a life she doesn’t want. So I agree with her: let’s be twenty. Acting like a twenty-year-old means being reckless, it means feeling no pain ever, it means being oblivious to both past and future. We put on clothes and we go for a run, beyond our suburban development and alongside traffic and through woods as far and as fast as we can go until we are lost but we are not afraid. She climbs a tree and says she’s a squirrel and wants me to chase her so I chase her from tree to tree. We don’t get home until early morning, because we spend hours wandering the woods and then we hitch with a man who looks like his side job is modeling for Wanted posters. We sneak in through the bedroom window— I give her a boost, then she lowers the fire ladder for me to climb up. It’s as if we are young and our old, beaten selves are our parents waiting for us in the living room. She shushes me and I shush her and in the dark of our bedroom we both see everything so clearly it’s blinding. On the fifth day, there is no more elixir and the paste is flaking off of our bodies. My eyes feel heavy like ball bearings, and my throat sometimes closes involuntarily, forces me to consciously attend to my own breathing. My wife checks her pulse every ten minutes, says she feels like a bird, hollow-boned and graceful. She rubs her belly now and then, the absent-minded way an expectant mother is supposed to do. She presses my hand against her so that together we can feel the kicking of the triplets she is incubating. This wasn’t the plan exactly, but it’s better than having no plan at all, she says. The people inside the pipes seem to be having a party, the pipes groaning and whistling urgently, the house clattering like an overworked radiator. On the sixth day, she rolls out of bed, spends a long time in the bathroom. I watch her still shadow beneath the door. She turns on the exhaust so I can’t hear her crying— an old trick. My body is turning forty-three again. I feel growing pains like I’ve never felt before. The door swings open and she emerges slowly. Her eyes are swollen and her mouth looks like a collapsed bridge. “I got my period,” she says. Even in the pipes there is silence. My tongue tingles, my hearing is alarmingly acute, but otherwise, I am back to normal, which is to say I am worse off than I was a week ago because I’ve tasted the good life and lost it. We both go back to work on Monday. And we revert to watching television quietly next to each other on the couch. We order Chinese for dinner and eat leftovers for four days. At night, I lie in the tub and talk to the people in the pipes. They seem happy, relatively. They seem settled. They’re developing a small business in there, removing unwanted body hairs from other people’s home pipes, and they don’t think there is any reason to ever return to the surface. They say it was bad at first, but the fresh start has rejuvenated them. I ask if maybe I can come down and visit sometimes. This isn’t a tourist resort, the patriarch says. This is our home. My wife wants to know who I’m talking to at night. She says she can hear me, says I should level with her and tell her if I’m having an affair. I tell her I must be talking in my sleep. “But you’re not in bed,” she says. “I’m thinking of moving into the pipes,” I say. She goes to the hardware store that weekend, saying as she leaves, “I am going to fix this thing.” Because divorce is not in her plan. Having a husband in the pipes is not in the plan. The elixir will get us back on track. She will buy enough to last as long as we need to feel something other than what we feel. When she comes home, she tells me Timothy is gone, nobody knows what happened to him. Nobody has ever heard of the mystery elixir. She removes a bottle of extra strength Drano from her bag. The label says eliminates even the toughest clogs, and there is a picture of an anthropomorphized clog— a mucousy, sinister knot of sludge and grime— screaming in terror as the patented formula advances on it. She says, “If you can’t take care of the problem, then I will.” I chase her up the stairs, but what am I going to do, tackle her? I am not going to tackle my wife. I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t hate her. I just also don’t love her.
 She pours the entire bottle into the tub’s drain, even though the label says a half-bottle will do the job. The liquid is silver like mercury, glugs out of the bottle with drunken hiccups. The label says to allow thirty minutes for the liquid to penetrate the obstruction, and I envision it creeping like lava through the homes of my friends in the pipes, drowning them, igniting their lungs and chewing through their intestines. My wife and I sit beside each other on the tub’s edge for a half hour listening to a shrieking like failing brakes. She won’t let me leave, says I need to hear this, and I tell her she is a monster, ask how could you do this to anyone, let alone the harmless people in the pipes? I turn on the faucet, but that seems to expedite the process, the echoing, gurgling screams more frantic than ever. My wife sits behind me sweating, crying onto my shoulder, decade-old tears welling up from her, and I think, I should be in there too. Even as they’re dying, I want to crawl down inside with them, to feel the burn on my skin, to feel myself purged, to be propelled through fevered heat and anguish and terror into whatever lies on the other side.