Goines On: Sinister influences

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Goines’ hours today seemed shrouded by a poisoned blanket. He felt no empathy or love for the woman he saw behind the wheel of a car approaching him as he walked to the gym, however outwardly friendly she may have intended her answering wave. More than one man at Walmart earlier had seemed to look at him with ulterior motives, one of them seeming to be trying to warn Goines off from further observation of what the man’s female companion might be up to.

    Goines hadn’t been able to help seeing women’s bodies at Walmart this morning as objects for sexual gratification. Where did that come from?, he wondered in dismay. Could it be from watching an episode of Sex Education last night, which Mrs. Goines had suggested because the second episode of Howards End wasn’t available yet? The son of the sex therapist played by Gillian Anderson was going through a phase of obsessive sex, one boner after another voraciously stimulating a jerking off, despite his mother’s telling the bushy, craggy-headed client she was having sex with that she didn’t think her son was ready yet to be told that she and the client were getting it off together.
    How or why were faces and bodies affecting Goines like this today? Why had the woman he had often spoken with in friendship at the retail store where she used to work rebuked him when he asked the store owner the other day where the woman had gone after leaving her employment? The store owner had told Goines she would let the woman know he was asking about her and give her his email address. And the same day the woman emailed him not to attempt to contact her in any way or form or try to contact her through companies with which she might be associated. She provided no reason for her preemption. Had there never been any friendship there at all, on her part – only facade, pretense? She was, she had proclaimed during the first store chat they had had, a devout Christian. Had she suddenly stopped pretending?

    Could that interchange be poisoning Goines’ world today? Or was it too many evenings of the murderous Italian crime drama Gomorrah, which the Goineses had now watched into its second of four seasons – its wanton murders by mafiosi who displayed crucifixes on their neck chains, crossed themselves, and prayed often in church? Both of the Goines abhorred and were appalled by the characters and doings of Gomorrah – feelings similar to those provoked by Trump and his toadies – and yet they had watched its first season’s twelve episodes night after night (although never more than a single episode in an evening), and now they had watched the second of twelve more episodes. Was Goines watching it because Mrs. Goines wanted to, or was she watching it because she thought Goines wanted to?

    Thoughts of church reminded Goines that Mrs. Goines had commented as he was leaving for the gym, after seeing him reading a few more pages of Richard Dawkins’ book Outgrowing God, “Why do you guys who aren’t believers want to keep visiting that stuff?” Goines didn’t reply, but he too had wondered why Dawkins thought his book The God Delusion needed a sequel. Hadn’t that book said it all? Goines was reading the sequel because he enjoyed Dawkins’ style of thinking and writing, his frankness. “We tend to think the United States is an advanced, well-educated country. And so it is, in part. Yet it is an astonishing fact that nearly half the people in that great country believe literally in the story of Adam and Eve.” Such observations, reminders, were also unsettling Goines, especially since religious ignorance colluded with Trump.

    More troubling than all of that, Goines had listened last night in bed to the part of Chapter 22 of John Grisham’s latest novel, The Guardians, that describes a defense attorney’s being kidnapped on vacation in Belize and zip-lined out over a pond of ravenous crocodiles to contemplate for a minute what the men who had framed and suborned false witnesses to convict his client of a murder they had committed might do to him if he didn’t back off and write an impotent appeal....
    After reviewing all of these now seemingly pernicious influences, Goines felt relieved, as though the review had been an absolution. The sun was brighter as he walked home from the gym. The waves he got back from drivers now seemed friendly. He walked with more spright. A self-administration of the sort of therapy Christine had provided him at the doctor’s office seemed to have lifted the shroud off his shoulders.
    And perhaps, for a change, he and Mrs. Goines ought to watch a Disney program tonight, or a feel-good movie, if they could find one that wasn’t silly, make-believe pablum.

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