Free Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel Page B

Dwight. It’ll do you good. You’re completely provincial anyway.”
    “How can I be provincial? I live in New York City.”
    Aphoristic Alice was like, “A cosmopolitan provincialism is the worst.”
    In the end I referred the question to the reliable and impartial coin-toss method. I have reported the results in the Prologue, and they were still the same as then.
    The next morning I went to work at the Problem Resolution Center, just as on thirty-four of the previous thirty-five Monday mornings. Which meant that I still had one week of vacation time available. Yet it was uncertain to me whether I was really allowed to take time off on such short notice. So I called Alice from my desk to ask for some advice.
    “I didn’t say you should call me every day,” she said.
    “You called me yesterday. Twice.” Then I presented her with my dilemma.
    “Family tragedy. It’s obvious. Say there was a death in the family.”
    “All right.” I turned around to make sure Rick wasn’t eavesdropping. “But also I’m going to need to say something to Vaneetha.”
    “Lie to her. Better to lie to other people than yourself.”
    In some way I had always imagined maybe the opposite was true. “Really?”
    “Listen, lying is incredibly important in developmental psychology. Telling a lie is the child’s way of separating its world from that of the adults. It establishes your independence, it’s how you mark off your own private area of the truth.”
    Alice could be so helpful when she wanted. “I don’t see why you can’t still be my shrink, Al.”
    “If you had a real shrink they would tell you why.”
    “Not that I haven’t lied. I don’t want you to think I can’t lie.”
    “But not well. Not with that face.” It was like with her tone of voice she was pinching my stubbled cheek. “Now I know how to lie.”
    I emailed Natasha with the fantastic news of my likely visit—an action that made me feel so guilty that immediately after hitting SEND , I called up Vaneetha at work and told how vividly I was looking forward to seeing her on Thursday and eating some Cambodian food.
    “Lovely. You know if you’re so much looking forward, we could do it a bit sooner. I’ve hardly seen you.”
    I said I had plans. And it was true. That evening I visited a travel medicine center where I spent hundreds of dollars on all these shots and prescriptions for pills that I certainly hoped weren’t contraindicated for Abulinix users. But that seemed like the least of my worries. The information the nurse gave me on various Ecuadori dangers made it seem amazing that anyone who went there didn’t pitch off a cliff in a bus while reeling from dengue fever and nibbling at some piece of hepatitis-soaked fruit as a scorpion crawled up his shorts.
    “But what about spiders?” I asked the nurse. “I hate spiders—if something’s going to bite me, I want it to roar at me first.”
    The nurse flipped through some papers. “Nothing here about spiders.”
    Faced with the reality of Ecuador’s many perils, I felt almost frivolously morbid to be devising the death of a fictional relative whose fate of not existing I might soon be forced to share—and then I wouldn’t take it so lightly. Still, the next morning I asked Rick if we could speak in private.
    We went out into the hall by the vending machines.
    “But a whole week?” Rick said. “This is extremely short notice.”
    “He was my favorite uncle.”
    “I’m so sorry. What was his name?”
    “Um . . . Dwight. I’m named after him. His name’s the same as mine. Spooky.”
    Rick nodded his head. “But are you sure you need a full week?”
    “Well see the ceremony is in Quito. That’s in Ecuador. But first you have to fly through Bogotá. I could show you a map online. Anyway they have a very humid climate down there, so it’s important that we get there by next week. At the latest.”
    “So the funeral—I take it that’s what you mean by the ceremony—the funeral’s