Free Wild Abandon by Joe Dunthorne

building it; the students gave up, and left the structure mostly intact. After that it became the community’s overflow sleeping area, though it had not been used in a long time.
    It didn’t seem like a big thing to be asking Don: a fortnight’s time-out, for her and for Albert. A month maybe. After all, they both agreed that something needed to be done. Yet she found herself unable to broach the subject. All of which went some way to explain why, this morning, after a night of maddening sleeplessness, she had decided it would be a good idea to type him a letter about it. She got as far as
Dear Don
, then her daughter came in, and that was the point that Freya realized she was behaving like an unstable, sleepless person, not a wife communicating to her husband about a shared concern.
    Freya let her poetry book drop to the duvet. Her reading glasses fell off her nose and hung round her neck. She turned to her husband, but he started speaking before she could.
    “I told Patrick he needs to finally forget Janet,” Don said. “Don’t be the victim. Stop moping. Quit the demon weed.He was still puffing on that pipe—some potent concoction.” There was a tone in his voice, and an angle of his chin in delivery, that let her know he was saying something he’d already practiced in the well-attended auditorium of his mind. He spoke up toward the curtain rail. Sometimes he would premiere a statement with Freya, then over the next few days she would hear him say the same thing to other communards, perhaps editing a word or two, depending on the audience. A good strong utterance might see nine or ten outings before being archived. “You live in a community with a constant flow of young, attractive left-leaning men and women. Get stuck in, Pat, I said. Sixty’s not too old. All these tremendous women spending time here, intelligent, freethinking, body-confident. Get out there. It feels good to make other people feel good. Be active. Sweat out your problems. Let’s reanchor the fences. But I think he’s worried about dislocating his shoulder. It’s his
mind
dislocating that I’m worried about.”
    “Don.”
    He turned to look at her. He had the sheen of an uncollected sneeze in his mustache hair. He saw something in her expression and closed his book, let it drop to the duvet, and patted the back cover. “Yes,” he said.
    “I’m worried about Albert. I don’t think it’s good for him to be spending so much time with Marina.”
    “I’m with you, Frey. You know that.”
    “I was thinking he and I could go to the roundhouse for a while. A fortnight, maybe. A kind of holiday.”
    Don blinked twice. She felt the mattress shift as he sat more upright. “But the roundhouse is half-built.”
    “I thought that could be part of it. I’ll show him how to finish the cobbing. It’ll be educational.”
    He looked around the room. “When did you think of this?”
    “I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”
    “You’re saying you want to move out of the house, you and Albert?” The volume of his voice spiked.
    “I thought we could talk about it.”
    “All this because of Marina? Let’s not go crazy. Why doesn’t one of us just speak to Albert? Education, not prohibition, we could”—she saw the hairs on his neck ripple as his Adam’s apple bounced—“dig out the Personal Instrument?”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “I honestly think it might help.”
    “I’m sure you do.”
    “Why are you being like this?”
    They stayed in silence for a while. The Personal Instrument was a learning tool that, according to her husband, helped “encourage young people to make active choices between right and wrong.” He had built it himself. Every young person, shortly after their thirteenth birthday, got to wander the farm wearing the device. Don liked to say the experience was equivalent to the vision quest in Native American cultures. It was frightening to glimpse the gap between Don as he viewed himself, and the reality.