Mario Moussa
Damian Puts His Foot Down While God Watches
Damian opens the front door of his row house early one morning to find a woman sitting on the stoop. He pauses before closing the door, then hops around her, his hands waving in the air, almost sticks the landing on the sidewalk, and with a quick shuffle step, steadies himself as he exclaims, in the packed stadium of his mind, Olé! He twirls around. Hoops and studs run up her right ear—gold, diamond, turquoise, pearl—her hair pulled back tight in a ponytail. Black yoga pants, yellow tank top, taut skin visible in-between. Sunlight filters down onto her shoulders through the leaves and branches above. Past lovers shimmer in the verdant glow, one and then another and then still others, but they appear indistinct, like overlapping images on a faded billboard. Always, in recollection, his MBA program intrudes—the courseload, the hyper-competitive classmates, the stress-filled search for the best jobs (six-figure starting salary, plus a bonus, at a top-three consulting firm). It caused lasting PTSD, though his wife dismisses the feeling as an exaggeration.
It’s not an exaggeration.
But today could be different. Dance with this woman along the sun-dappled sidewalk. Uber to the airport and in the afternoon sit cross-legged on a beach in Big Sur. Grow a long beard. Pull his hair up in a bun. Discover the divine in a purple flower pushing up through the sand. A post-professional sadhu. What would it take?
When he was in business school, his dad became his second mom and his first mom married a woman and then he had to cope with having three moms. He married Katie and then she became a doctor and they had kids and they traded up from a small house to this bigger one, with four floors and a roof deck with a garden—lush with tomato vines, lavender, rosemary bushes—and a covered garage in back. These things should feel like markers of progress, but they feel like a slow-motion video of a collapsing building, dust rising from a pile of concrete as the walls tumble down. The debris settles in the thought-video, and the quiet that follows is palpable, like a fine powder falling on the skin.
He squares his shoulders, inserts his earbuds, and walks to the bike rental station.
Later, over lunch at an outdoor café, Damian sits with his friend Ashish. The smell of grilled hamburger floats in the air and mingles with exhaust from cars and buses rumbling by. People at neighboring tables stare at their phones, fingers flicking. At the firm where Damian works, Ashish is known as a quant jock. When a CEO wants to squeeze a few more percentage points of margin from a useless product, Ashish gets the call. Damian has never gotten such a call.
“On the way to work, I listened to an unbelievable story on NPR,” Damian says.
“Yeah?” Ashish, hunched over his Greek salad, speared half a cherry tomato.
“Bill Bennett—Secretary of Education under Reagan. Bennett thought potential mass shooters should be exorcised, to get the demons out of them.”
“How exactly would that work?”
“He didn’t say. He just said, ‘Where are the ministers? Where are the priests? The rabbis? The imams?’ ”
Nearby, office workers trudge across a plaza in midday heat, like the Israelites lugging tents and baskets across the desert. Was God watching the Israelites as they wandered from one camp to the next? Is God concerned about mass shootings? Where is God? (Gott ist tot, says a philosopher devil into Damian’s ear.) Why didn’t Bill Bennett ask about God? Damian considers sharing his thoughts with Ashish, then thinks better of it. He imagines that if he could step inside Ashish’s head, he’d find that Ashish is thinking about nothing besides the difficulty of capturing another cherry tomato. But then Ashish asks about Damian’s work on the Diversity Group.
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason really.”
Damian suspects there really is no reason behind Ashish’s question, except an auto-pilot impulse to ask a question—any question—after a conversational lull.
“Most days I feel good about it, but some days I’d like to get out of my pigeonhole.” He waits for Ashish to ask about the pigeonhole. Damian wants to talk about all the ways he feels stuck. Stuck with thoughts about random women, like the woman on his stoop with studs in her ear. Stuck in middle-age with two daughters and a wife and two cats and a dog and tropical fish (or did they die?) and three moms. Stuck being pegged at the firm as a soft-skills guy and not a quant jock.
“You play the hand you’re dealt,” Ashish says.
Damian feels he had a chance, a moment ago, with Ashish’s help, to pull himself out of the pigeonhole, even if Ashish is just a work friend and not a close friend (does he have any close friends?), but maybe he should just hunker down in his pigeonhole, embrace the darkness, and settle into the hellish little space where he deserves to be stuck for the rest of his days.
“Did you hear about the road-rage shooting downtown? Ashish says. “A driver jumped out of his car and opened another guy’s door. Two shots—stomach and leg.” Ashish shakes his head.
Damian hadn’t heard about it.
“My wife says I should carry a gun,” Ashish says.
“Bad idea.”
“I have a Zoom back at the office.”
Biking home, Damian pictures Ashish on a subway platform brandishing a six-shooter like a gunslinger in a 1950s Western, the weapon twirling around a crooked finger. Math Prodigy Had Enough, Brings Order to Commute. A phone call interrupts his thoughts. It’s his wife Katie.
“I’m so tired. The hospital was so busy today. Pizza tonight?”
Damian likes the idea, suggests they grab the girls, get out of the house, try the new place by Fitler Square. They’ll take an Uber—avoid the stress of finding a parking spot. “Deal,” says Katie.
The evening air is thick and hot when they pile out of the Uber. Damian approaches a waiter standing on the sidewalk by an outdoor dining hut. The waiter’s hair is pulled into a bun and perspiration trickles down his tattooed neck. Damian asks for one of the outside tables by the corner so his family can feel the breeze. The girls, wearing flouncy pink dresses, dance from one foot to the other. Either they’re hungry or need to pee. The waiter says the hostess is inside and he’ll get her. The girls keep dancing, and Katie looks off into the distance, as if she’s surveying a metropolis from a skyscraper observation deck.
Heat surges like a wave along the sidewalk. Sweat soaks Damian’s shirt. Katie starts leading the girls in a modified two-step. The girls giggle—left foot out, stomp, back, right foot out, stomp, back—then stop, cross their arms, and begin to whimper. Katie leans down, hugs the girls, glances over at Damian. Her face is red and glistening. Damian looks skyward, searching for help among the indifferent stars. A group of four people—two men and two women who look like they’re in their late twenties, all dressed in faded T-shirts and dark cotton pants—take one of the outdoor tables. The waiter walks over, fanning himself with a handful of menus. He smiles and says something that Damian can’t hear and the young people laugh. Damian checks the time on his phone. They’ve been waiting almost fifteen minutes.
“You’d like a table?” says the hostess. Damian hadn’t seen her come outside. He turns and her face is inches from his. She wears tinted aviator glasses and a long black dress.
“An outdoor table,” Damian says. “It’s way too hot anywhere else.”
“We can seat you over there,” she says, gesturing to a table inside the hut. Above the table, a fan rotates slowly. The other tables inside the hut are unoccupied. “The tables outside on the sidewalk are for people waiting,” she adds.
“But . . .” Damian begins to say, pointing toward the four young people seated nearby, then trails off. He feels like he’s been Tasered, though he’s never been Tasered, or been in any kind of situation in which that would have happened, but he imagines he’d feel like he does now. His girls begin to jump up and down.
“We’re not going to do this,” Damian says to the hostess. “That fan is just moving the heat around.”
Katie mumbles: “Here we go.”
“What?” says the hostess.
“I’m not sitting at that table,” Damian says. “It’s too hot in there.”
“Suit yourself.”
Damian turns to Katie. “Let’s go.”
“What?”
Damian remembers the woman on the stoop, the sweaty office workers, Ashish and his cherry tomato, their conversation about the Diversity Group. “We’re not going to do this.”
They walk away, their daughters whining in unison, “I WANT PIZZA!”
Damian knows it’s unlikely they’ll find an open table at another restaurant. The girls collapse on the sidewalk and start to cry. Damian and Katie stand over them, heads bowed as if in prayer. Damian feels reverent in this prayer-like pose. God must be watching.
“Boy, you really put your foot down,” Katie says, keeping her eyes on the girls.
He hears the sarcasm in her words, but a solemn voice in his head intones: “You did it, Damian. You did it. You put your foot down.”
Mario Moussa is a best-selling author whose work has appeared in such varied publications as Fortune, Forbes, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. He was a finalist in the Principal Foundation’s 2024 Story Initiative contest. A recent story is forthcoming in the Chicago Quarterly Review. He is finishing a collection about a fictional neighborhood in Philadelphia.
