The Kings Of Cool

69

Dennis has a beautiful wife, two beautiful little daughters, and a beautiful if modest home in a nice suburb of San Diego where the neighbors grill steaks and salmon and invite each other over from across the fence. He goes to church on Sundays (one of those nice tame establishment churches that believes in God and Jesus but not so much that it’s inconvenient) and comes home and catches the afternoon football game or maybe goes for a walk with the family on the beach.

He has the sweet life and knows it.

Career going great.

You get (good) headlines for the guys who sign your annual reviews, you put them between a bunch of cameras and bales of marijuana, you let them pose beside mug shots of Mexican cartel figures (autopsy photos even better), your life plan is looking pretty solid.

It’s not cynical — this you must understand, you have to get this or none of it makes sense or has any meaning — Dennis does work that he loves and believes in, scrubbing the scourge of drugs from the American landscape.

He believes.

So where does it start?

You could say it starts that morning, as Dennis stands in front of the mirror shaving and feels that discomforting little tingle of undefined discontent. But maybe (the whole concept of “omniscient narration” is pretty fucked, anyway, right?) it doesn’t.

Maybe it starts the night before with the discussion of the granite countertops. They’re remodeling the kitchen and his wife really wants granite countertops, but when you look at the prices in the catalogs, it’s like, holy shit.

Maybe it starts because his work is the kind of thing he wants to talk about at home on Thursday Pizza Night, when Domino’s delivers and his oldest girl is already seriously into the Idol results show. When his wife asks the “How was your day” question he answers, “Fine,” and that’s it, and that wears him down, isolates him from the people he loves the most.

Maybe it’s the cumulative effect of that, or Maybe it’s a baby frozen blue in a dark gray dawn twentysomething years ago in a war that never seems to end.