The Stager: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

through the end stages of dementia while working full-time.
    Settling in London is a step in the direction toward a more consolidated life: at least she won’t be commuting five hundred miles most weeks. Still, the job is highly visible, and she is often on television, so the stress must be lodging somewhere, or so it seems to me, although that’s to presume that stress is a physical property, like light. Luxum is doing a huge media blitz to highlight the rebranding campaign, and these next few weeks are critical to a successful transition. Or at least that’s what she says; even if I understand only about half of what her new job is about (which is more than I’d understood about the equity-derivatives job), she is managing so many moving parts and so much data that her phone keeps freezing up.
    On top of this, there’s Elsa. She is unsettled by the prospect of the move, and reports from home are confusing at best. Nabila insists everything is fine, but even the most oblivious parent can’t help but detect holes in the otherwise chipper reports. Which is all to say that Bella is entitled to take her signs as they come, or as she thinks they come, and a stone rabbit standing sentry at a house that’s for sale is as good as any reason to go to contract, even if none of us actually likes rabbits—not even our own. We haven’t actually had a conversation about whether our own rabbit, assuming he has not disappeared forever, will come with us to London. It’s possible we each privately see this as an opportunity to unload Dominique and to blame his abandonment on the United Kingdom’s draconian quarantine laws.
    Mostly I can get things right in my head. I can sort my issues into tidy piles: my physical injury; my wife’s betrayals; the problem of the light. I can even make everything stay put, sometimes for days at a time, but it only takes the smallest trigger to unravel it all, and this attack of sweatiness feels possibly like the beginning of something bad. I once heard a philosopher, or maybe one of the therapists my wife sent me to (or maybe it was a character on a television show?), say that confusion was good, that it would eventually give way to wisdom, but it’s been three years, and I wonder how long this transition is meant to last. The mess I am, the full-blown wreck of me, can be really quite embarrassing. I do my best to keep the worst parts hidden, so when Bella asks again whether I’m okay, when she puts her hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eye, this time with genuine concern, I insist, somewhat testily, that I am fine. Maybe I’m not fine, but I am determined to be, and that is half the battle—or so I also read somewhere. It might have been in an article in an in-flight magazine about jet lag and how it’s best just to power through it.
    *   *   *
    SOMETIMES, AS WE have already established, an easy, albeit temporary, fix comes along in the form of an entertaining new kitchen gadget, or a new kind of pill, or, in this case, a Polish contractor named Jorek, who arrives at the house right on time. The minute we shake hands, my symptoms disappear. Don’t misunderstand: there is no ambiguity in my sexual orientation (I am, or was, a real ladies’ man. One newspaper described me as looking like Liam Neeson, another like Peter Frampton; go figure, since the two men do not have much in common, apart from being, to women, devastatingly attractive), and yet I feel something like love, and an intense magnetic attraction, as soon as Jorek steps through the door. I know he will save me, and I wonder if I have conjured him somehow, especially since he turns out to be the kind of person who is exactly as you might imagine him to be from the sound of his voice on the phone—a pleasant, skinny fellow who speaks very little English, but who understands intuitively the problem with the light.
    “Put two there, done deal, have a nice day!” he says as we stand in the living room. He points to the