Imposter by Barry Garelick

Imposter by Barry Garelick

A few days after arriving in Arlington, Virginia, Mark had a dream about Jesus. Mark was standing in the kitchen of the suite at the Doubletree Inn, where he and his family were staying until the movers would arrive. Jesus stood wearing sandals and a robe, His back to Mark, a stark image contrasting sharply with the harshly lit fluorescent whiteness of the kitchen. Mark was alone with Jesus in the kitchen. Mark’s wife and three-year-old daughter were sleeping. It would be the only dream Mark would ever have about Jesus.

Mark had never been religious; he was Jewish; his wife Anne was not. Shortly after adopting Laura, he started experimenting with believing in God and Jesus, partly out of a desire to belong with those who did. He had long envied people who believed in God.

Their move came during late summer in September, 1997, from San Diego to a Virginia suburb in the Washington DC area at a stressful time in his life: His marriage was in a rough place. They were in their forties and Anne was often angry about where they were in life compared with others their age. They had adopted Laura at three days old; she was now having her “terrible two’s” at the age of three. He had a bad feeling about the job he was about to start – a think tank on environmental policy – working for a woman named Joanne who he found cold, hostile and humorless based on the job interview he had had with her.

Six months after their move, Mark was put on notice that his work was not satisfactory. Joanne had approached him on a Friday morning wearing her usual fault-finding expression, to tell him she wanted to see him in his office at the end of the day. She added a one-word precis of what the meeting would cover: “Performance.”

His performance was lacking, she said at the five o’clock meeting: mistakes, insufficient attention to detail, having to re-do much of his work. “We will give you sixty days to see an improvement. If your performance does not improve, we will have to let you go.” She spoke in her usual firm voice though at the end her tone took on a softness: “You’ll probably want some time to think about all this.” She left and he wondered whether she was pretty when she was young.

Riding home on the Metro train he recalled Laura, upon hearing about a Metro train stuck for over an hour beneath the Potomac River, telling Mark, “Trains don’t get stuck when little kids are on them.” His last thought before he fell asleep was about innocence and the sense of feeling protected.

A few minutes later he awoke, and wondered how Anne would react to his news. Anne’s mood had reached its lowest point in December when they had a horrendous screaming argument. Over the next few months they settled into an equilibrium with only occasional flare-ups. When he arrived home, he stood in front of the door and took a breath.

Laura was waiting on the other side. “Daddy’s home!” she yelled when he pushed open the door. Mark picked her up holding on to her for longer than he usually did. Anne watched the display, and after Laura ran upstairs asked, “What’s wrong?”

He told her and she hugged him and told him “We’ll be fine.”

“Yes; we’ll be fine.”

“You’ll get another job. I’ll talk to people on Monday to get some contacts for you.” He looked out the window at the night. “I knew this was coming. You never talked about your job. But don’t worry. We’ll be fine,” she said.

Later, in bed, she said, “I’m going to talk to Kate at church. I want you to talk with her. She has a kind heart.” The idea of talking to Kate, the assistant rector, sounded appealing; it was enough to help him get to sleep.

Kate was a pleasant woman about their age, and who had a warmth about her. Laura adored her; it was clear she loved kids, and she was loved by many in the congregation. She stood in stark contrast to the rector, Richard, who always appeared distracted. He never seemed to have time for Mark and Anne other than to say a perfunctory hello on his way to talk to people who, as Mark and Anne both noted, appeared either wealthy or well-connected or both. “I really don’t think he likes what he’s doing,” Anne once told Mark. “And he seems jealous of Kate.”

Anne did talk with Kate after the service on Sunday. Mark was with Laura, making his way through the throngs of the departing congregation and saw Anne and Kate in a hallway. Laura opened her arms when she saw Kate who immediately picked her up. “Hello, gorgeous girl!” she said and turned to Mark. “I’m sorry to hear about your job,” she said. “I’d love to talk with you. I have some time next Saturday. Do you want to talk?”

“I’d like to do that,” he said. “I’d like to talk.”

“Let’s talk then,” Kate said.

He met with Kate on a Saturday morning. Their talk was a roundabout discussion covering many topics in a short amount of time. They sat in her office, a small room several doors down from the rector’s office. On her bookshelf he saw several books by Thomas Merton.

“I’m sorry to hear about your job. I know how that feels. Is this the first time this has happened?”

“Yes.”

“So up to now you’ve done fairly well, right? People have liked your work?”

“Yes.”

“Except now. It hurts. I’ve been there. We’ve all been there.”

“Yes,” he said

She pulled her hair back and let it fall on her shoulders. “Is this the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” she asked.

“Yes. It is.”

“Then you’ve had a very good life!” He laughed at this and she joined him. “But now you’ve learned that you can’t afford to be complacent. Especially here; in Washington.”

“I know,” he said. “This isn’t the first time we’ve been here. We came here for about two years in the mid-eighties. We had been married a year, and Anne was out of a job during the recession. Someone we know had moved to Washington and we thought that sounded like a good idea. At the time,” he added.

“Why did you leave?”

“Anne’s mother had a stroke and she wanted to get back,” he said, recalling a moving van coming after a blizzard, barely catching their flight the next day, and promising each other they would never go back.

“And now you’ve come back again.”

“Yeah. We were looking ahead. Laura will be going to Kindergarten in two years and the schools are pretty bad in San Diego. We know the schools are fairly good here. ”

“So you did it for Laura,” she said.

“Pretty much, yes.” He looked down, recalling how a woman in the park where Laura was playing had said bluntly to Anne, “I sure as hell wouldn’t travel across the country because of the schools.”

Looking up again, he said “Yeah. Washington’s not a nice place. It’s easy to get sucked in to thinking it is, though, when you’re not living here.”

She shook her head and laughed. “What on earth made you think that?”

“I traveled a lot to Washington in my job back in San Diego. I was meeting with policy people in DC and would think, ‘Yeah, I can do that’. I thought it looked easy. So I found out it isn’t; I analyze environmental rules which is fairly nebulous; but policy is more nebulous. So I feel like I’ve been pretending. And up to now, getting away with it.”

“You feel like an imposter, she said, clasping her hands together. “Many successful people feel that way. It’s called imposter syndrome; it’s really common.”

“I’ve heard about that,” he said. “But sometimes you think you know more than you know.”

“So you’re saying you are an imposter.”

He nodded.

“I’m sure you’re good at some things, right? You stretched too far. You’re just finding your way. Where you belong in the world,” she said.

The two said nothing for a moment; he heard birds outside, and someone walking in the hall. He found the silence oddly comfortable.

“I had a dream about Jesus,” he said.

“How wonderful!” she said, her eyes widening. “I’ve never had a dream about Jesus. What happened?”

He described the dream. “There he was; standing in the middle of the kitchen.”

“Did he say anything?”

“We didn’t speak. I thought he was angry.”

“Why would Jesus be angry?”

“The imposter thing again,” he said. “I’m Jewish. I mean, so was he, but, you know. My family isn’t religious; I’ve never been. I started praying in desperation; about my marriage, my new job, raising Laura.”

“Many people come to God out of desperation.”

“Even so, though; I feel like my faith is more a convenience than anything else.” He thought for a moment; “Then again, people thought Jesus an imposter. Doesn’t he say something like that? When he visits his home town?”

“Yes,” she said. “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“What I really believe. I question my faith.”

“You have faith. It takes faith to have a family,” she said. “You’ll find your way. With God and Jesus.” She looked at her watch, and then stood up. “I’m sorry. I have to go. But I do want to talk more with you.” She grabbed his hands, “Let me know if you want to talk,” she said, and then they said goodbye.

That was his only talk with Kate, apart from saying hello at church. She now existed in his head as a presence; sometimes commenting, other times observing. He wondered if the dialogues were how God or Jesus talked to people. Alternatively, he sometimes thought that maybe he was just going crazy.

At work, he and Joanne avoided each other. They met every week; then every two weeks, in which she would assess his progress which when it wasn’t about needing more improvement, was faint praise. His evaluation period had gone beyond sixty days but he knew his time there would come to an end and it did. He found out one day when Joanne came into his office in one of her rare genial moods, complete with sympathetic, kindly voice.

“I’ve come to tell you this in the nicest way possible,” she said and told him that his final day would be in three weeks, on a Friday in mid-July. “I can’t extend your time any further than that Friday,” she said. Her hands were tied, she said. “I told upper management you’re working on a project; they assume you will have it finished by then.” Her brow suddenly furled.

“How are you doing on the project?” she asked.

“I’m waiting on some information but things are moving along.” he said.

“If you need to, I can give you a few extra days past Friday to finish things up,” she said. Funny how irrevocable decisions could be rescinded when needed, he thought.

“Friday will be fine,” he said drily. Joanne’s jaw clenched and she abruptly left his office.

Anne did not share in Mark’s pride in his comeback that evening. “We need all the money we can get,” she said. “She’s offering you more time, for Christ’s sake!”

Anne went on talking angrily when Mark thought he heard Laura calling from upstairs and walked to the hallway by the living room entrance. Anne’s back was to him. She suddenly noticed that Mark was not in sight. “Mark?” she said. Her voice had a tremble to it, as if she thought he had left in anger, maybe to leave her. He heard the fear in her voice.

“I’m right here,” he said. She turned, and seeing him continued on like nothing had happened. “What the hell were you thinking talking to Joanne like that?”

“She’s depressed,” he heard his imaginary Kate say, in her office or over his shoulder – somewhere. “She’ll probably forget she ever said this.” It was true. Anne never remembered the conversation.

When Mark’s last day arrived, his project was finished and he left early; no one noticed. “How do you feel?” Anne asked later that evening.

“Relieved.”

“I’ll bet. She was such an awful person.” He nodded.

 “I love you,” she said. “Do you know that?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“I need to hear you say it.”

“I love you.”

“We need to be saying that more,” she said.

The next week he went to the unemployment office. He qualified for a $200 per week payment and was required to call in once a week to a recorded line to report on where he had applied for work. During the next two months, that was what he did.

The summer moved on, slowly and inexorably, in deadly heat. Washington moved on as well. Clinton had been served with a subpoena compelling him to testify before a grand jury. The world moves on, Mark thought; and so do I. In the mornings, he took Laura to daycare, applied for jobs, went for interviews if any; if none he would go for walks in the afternoon. In the evenings he would make dinner and later he and Anne would talk. Arguments came and went but were lesser in intensity in the equilibrium of their new normal.

One day he had an interview with the EPA which led to a follow-on interview a few days later, and a week after that to another with a panel of interviewers. He would hear one way or another within a week they told him. Two weeks passed and then three. His walks in the afternoon became more frequent – one time walking frenetically in the woods of a park as if he were running late for an appointment. He stopped, out of breath, his heart pounding and temples throbbing and sat down by a tree.

He remembered Anne telling him a few nights before about a fellow she worked with in San Diego who had lost his job; it took him seven years to find another, she told him. The story would not go away, even as he sat watching TV that night with Anne. He left the room and went upstairs to their bedroom. A few minutes later Anne found him sitting on the bed, head in his hands, weeping.

“Oh no! What’s the matter?”

“I keep thinking about the guy who was out of work for seven years. What if it takes me that long? What if I never find work?”

“You’ll find work, I know you will. He had problems. You’re not like him at all. I shouldn’t have told you about him,” she said. They sat for a moment and she rubbed his back.

“Let’s all do something this weekend. There’s something going on at the Community Center for kids,” she said. “You need to not think about getting a job.”

It was now mid-September; Congress had just released the Starr report presenting evidence against Clinton, various impeachable offenses and details of the affair with Lewinsky. They walked to the Community Center that Saturday, each holding Laura’s hands. Although the goal was to not think about getting a job, their mood was somber. He felt as if they were walking to a funeral. Anne said “A lot of people are praying about Clinton. God is just busy right now. He’ll get to you.”

They took their seats in the auditorium. The performer was a young man, who juggled, clowned, rode a unicycle, and told horrible jokes while doing those things. At one point Mark whispered to Anne “This is really stupid but I can’t stop watching it.”

However stupid it was, the performer was definitely good at doing it. Perhaps the young man saw Mark whisper – they were in the third row – and decided Mark would be ideal for his next stunt.

“I need someone from the audience. You!” he said, pointing to Mark. He hopped off stage and handed Mark an apple. “When I give the word, you are to throw the apple as hard as you can. I will catch it.”

The performer, back on stage, said “OK, throw it!”

“Are you going to throw it, Daddy?” Laura asked.

Mark threw it and the man deftly positioned himself so that the apple hit him squarely in the middle of his forehead. Laura exploded with laughter. “How did you do that, Daddy?”

“Whoa! You’re trying to kill me!” the man said, wiping his brow with an oversized handkerchief. “Let’s try this again, shall we?” he said, and combed through a duffle bag on the stage. He pulled out a large head of cabbage, and came over to Mark. “I want you to throw this at me and I’ll catch it. Do you think you’re up to it?”

Laura was now hysterical with laughter. “Are you going to throw it at him?”

Once again onstage, the man looked in the duffle bag and brought out a small pitchfork. “OK, I’m ready; throw it!” Mark did so, and the performer caught it on the prongs.

“Take a bow,” the man said and Mark did so to loud applause, an imposter of a different sort, made to look good by a true artist. It was as if God were speaking to him, or Jesus, or maybe Laura who, still laughing, hugged him. He was a giant in her eyes, able to do anything. A man of great faith, whatever that happens to be.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Barry Garelick 2024