Woke Up Lonely Read Free Page A

forehead. He was sweating. He’d had a Twix for dinner last night and nothing since.
    Dean leaned over to retrieve a hunting knife strapped to his calf. He cut an apple in four slices and put the plate on the seat between them. The soft sell: sometimes it worked.
    “Any news?” Thurlow asked.
    “We’re frisking the staff every day now. No cell phones, nothing. Chances of infiltration are nil.”
    “Good. But I want you to do it twice a day. Morning and night.”
    “Check,” and Dean jotted it down in a spiral notebook. He seemed glad for the orders. He scratched his neck, which was collared in green from a double helix bijou at the end of a gold chain.
    They were headed to a warehouse by the airport. “We’re expecting five thousand,” Dean said. “Give or take. The whole country will be Helix in no time.”
    “Nice work,” Thurlow said. “But get me a new driver.”
    Dean nodded.
    “And buy me a new suit. And have some flowers delivered to the hotel. Roses. And get to a toy store. No, a clothing store. Ask them what all the girls are wearing these days and buy every color.”
    Dean wrote it all down.
    “Make that two dozen roses,” Thurlow said. “Red and white”—because he wanted a bouquet for Ida, too. In the vestry of his dreams was always one in which he reunited with his child, bearing roses.
    He looked out the window and tried, for the rest of the drive, to reinstate the paralysis that had overtaken him on the bus. A terrifying moment—to be so helpless—but also transcendent, because how often does love overrun your experience of life so thoroughly that it lays waste to everything else?
    They arrived at the warehouse, which could probably fit five thousand, but, just in case: a Jumbotron outside for spillage and stragglers. It was twenty degrees out, but no one would care.
    Thurlow sat in a small office. His nerves were like the third rail, like if he thought too much about what had just happened with Esme, he’d electrocute himself. He took a few deep breaths and focused on his speech instead. He thought of the audience, which calmed him down. Five thousand people who’d come to plead their needs. Bodies packed like spices in the rack. Faces upturned, hope ascendant. Tell us something great, Thurlow. Charge the heart of solitude and get us the hell out.
    He stayed in the back for half an hour, then marched onstage. In the room: eyes pooled with light, skins pale as soap. He leaned into the mic and began.
    “Here is something you should know: we are living in an age of pandemic. Of pandemic and paradox. To be more interconnected than ever and yet lonelier than ever. To be almost immortal with what science is doing for us and yet plagued with feelings that are actually revising how we operate on a biological level. Want to know what that means?”
    Decor in the warehouse was bare-bones. Just a couple of spotlights trained on him and the dais, and a screen that lit up just then with a double helix. The sound from the speakers wasn’t reverbed, but it was gritty. The upshot was to make this gathering lowbrow and intimate, despite how many people were there.
    “It means,” he said, “that loneliness is changing our DNA. Wrecking our hormones and making us ill. Mentally, physically, spiritually. When I was a young man, I felt like if I didn’t connect with another human being in the next three seconds, I would die. Or that I was already dead and my body just didn’t know it. Sound extreme? I bet not. I was lonely by myself; I was lonely in a group. So let me ask you: how many of you feel disassociated from the people you love and who love you most?”
    He heard, from the audience, nodding, grunts, snuffles. Applause from a group cozied in the rafters. And a woman who began to cry. To wail with her head flung back, so that her arms seemed to lift of their own accord. She began to talk to her neighbors. She’d been married thirty-five years. Could you really be this alone after thirty-five