A piece in the NTF Collection.
Conklin was my best friend and differed from my other friends at the Company because he was not in IT. He was a Licensing Manager on the business side, and a decent, affable, honorable, mentally deranged man, which is why I couldn’t tell him that his wife was a slut. He stood a little over six feet high, a big-boned man with the crushing grip of thick sausage fingers and dense, ligneous wrists. His chest was made of concrete, his heart made of gold.
Everyone knew Conklin's wife was cheating on him, except Conklin himself. She was not a faithful wife, but she was a very dedicated slut. He suspected she was a slut but would not admit it until he could witness her cheating firsthand. He was obsessed with catching her in the act and she was obsessed with making him think he could, in fact, catch her in the act without, of course, letting him catch her in the act. The more she denied, the more she left clues; the more he found clues, the more he accused; the more he accused, the more she gaslighted. But for him, this was all just conjecture anyway. If he only suspected but didn’t know for sure that she was cheating, he loved her with all his heart and wouldn’t leave her.
Conklin would not cheat on his wife even though he suspected she was cheating on him. He had plenty of opportunity but refused to pursue alluring, adulterous opportunities. While he was spending a great deal of time being faithful to her, she was spending even more time being unfaithful to him. The time he could have spent cheating on her, was spent trying to catch her cheating on him. But he could never catch her in the act, because while she was a very slutty wife, she was not a stupid slut.
Conklin was a real hot head before his wife’s psychiatrist convinced him to take anti-psychotic medication. His seemingly uncontrollable fits of anger were mostly caused by her insidious, carefully constructed plans to incite him. But once he was on olanzapine, he was as docile as a tranquilized bull. While this drug was typically used to manage schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, it was just beginning to be used in management of non-psychotic disorders, such as your wife is a devious whore disorder. I knew something was wrong the moment I walked into his office. He sat behind his desk, pliant and obedient with a sedate smile burgeoning across his anesthetized face. A stark difference from his typical jittery, over-caffeinated, high-strung, animated demeanor.
"I went to see my wife’s shrink and they both feel it would be better if I were on these anti-psychotic meds. I feel really… Weird.”
“What? Why did you let them talk you into this?”
“Well, it seems I’m the problem in our marriage. I’m a little explosive at times.”
“Only because your wife is a slut,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t remember the conversation as he looked at me with a murky, exhausted and quickly dimming radiance. “Let me see those meds.”
Conklin stared at me for a long moment and then when the request finally registered, he started checking his pockets and nearly a whole minute later produced the bottle of pills. I snatched it from him and walked to the door.
“Wait,” he said alarmed with indifference. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t worry. You’re going to wake up from the coma and everything will be simply fine again.”
The day Conklin recovered from the anti-psychotic meds his wife and her psychiatrist coerced him into taking was also the day he ordered Macho Nachos from Taco Bell and everyone there wondered why he was not on anti-psychotic meds.
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