by Don Hall

THE POUNDING ON THE DOOR WAS HARD AND FAST LIKE WHEN A COP IS ABOUT TO KICK THE DOOR IN. Dan leapt up from the couch, stopped himself, and called out "Yeah, yeah. Who's there?"

"Where the fuck is she? Where's Diane? Open this fucking door, Diane, or there's gonna be some serious shit going down!"

"Diane? There's no Diane here!" Dan grabbed the baseball bat from the closet and approached the door.

"Bullshit! BULLshit! DIANE! I know you're in there!"

Dan was mystified. "OK. Dude. Calm down and I'll open the door and we can sort this out. OK? Can you cool your jets?"

There was a moment when Dan thought the guy had split. "Alright. Alright. Open the door."

Dan poised with the bat at the ready and undid the chain and deadbolt. He slowly opened the door. The guy looked around his age—mid-fifties—and he looked disheveled. Manic. A little nuts.

"Is Diane in there?"

"Brother, I'm telling you there is no one named Diane who lives here. If you want to come in a check to be sure, I'm fine with it, but if you get out of hand or try to rob me or something, I'll beat you to death with this bat."

He opened the door and the guy stepped in slowly, wary of the bat, but still looking around to see if this Diane was in the one bedroom apartment.

Once he was satisfied, he reached out his hand. "Hey. I'm sorry, man. Holy fuck. You must think I'm insane. Diane is my wife. I checked her on my Find My iPhone and it said she'd been at this address seventeen times this month."

"This address?"

"Yeah."

Dan assessed this man was harmless. Panicked and angry but not a threat. He lowered the bat but held on to it nonetheless. "Maybe she's a friend of my wife Laura? I don't recall a Diane but she's always out and about so I'm sure I haven't met half the people she hangs out with. You want a drink? Want to sit down? You gotta name?"

"Yeah. Yeah. Jerome. Thanks. I mean thanks for being cool. That was not cool of me."

Jerome sat down. He was still wired up but was quickly calming himself. Dan poured a shot of whiskey and handed it to him. He threw it down in an instant and set the shot glass on the coffee table.

"You think she's your wife's friend?"

"I dunno. I can call her and ask. She's out at some event. I'll shoot her a text."

He grabbed his phone and typed in Hey. Some guy is here looking for his wife, Diane. Do you know a Diane? and hit send.

Dan never saw Laura again.

✶

FOUR MONTHS LATER, DAN SAT IN A ROOM WITH SEVEN OTHER BROKEN MEN. They all sat in a circle on eight metal folding chairs. It all reminded him of one of the early scenes in the movie Fight Club as men cursed with testicular cancer all sat around and exposed their pain and anger at losing their nuts for no reason they could fathom. Their manhood clipped, they didn't quite know how to proceed in the world.

So they sat in a circle each Monday night to talk about it and feel less alone.

"Hey. I'm Alex and I was married to her for a year."

The chorus chimed in. "Hey, Alex."

"I can't sleep. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thinking she'll be home, that this was all just a nightmare. I miss her so much. Then I remember the person I miss never really existed, right? I know in my head that her name was never Whitney, that she didn't come from Indiana, that she was never the woman I married. That it was all fiction. The rest of me can't quite catch up to that information, you know?"

Alex's story was the same as most of the men. He met her in a bar off of Boulder Highway. She was reading a book. He bought her a drink and she blew him off. Intrigued, he waited a bit then moved in to talk. She was mysterious and judgmental of him. This was like freaking catnip. He pursued her and inside of a month, they were married in one of those Vegas wedding chapels on Las Vegas boulevard, north of the Strip.

When Jerome came over to Dan's house and Dan texted her, she disappeared. In one night, nine married men suddenly couldn't find their wives. All nine of them spent a month obsessively searching for her and finding out that she was not who she said she was.

William was the one who united them. He took out an ad in the Las Vegas Review Journal with her picture and a plea for any information as to her whereabouts. Inside a week, all eight of her other husbands had contacted him. Dan had put together a timeline.

In terms of the nine, she had married him first. Dan and Laura had been married for over ten years. They had met in New York, flew to Vegas, got a quickie union, and went back to NYC. The two moved to Vegas six years later, in part out of boredom with the Big Apple, in part a bit of wanderlust, and in part out of nostalgia for the city in the desert where they wed.

As far as Dan could piece together, Laura and he were in Vegas for six months and then she married Willam. Next was Jerome. Then John. Then Kent. A period of another six months went by and then she married David, Joseph, and Brad in one weekend. Alex came last just over a year ago.

"Can we come back to Dan's forgiveness bullshit? You said that last week and, man, I can't see it. How do we forgive her? How is that even possible?" Brad was definitely taking it harder than the rest and was incredibly angry. Last month he'd bought a pistol and spent his nights driving around, looking for her.

John joined in "He's right, Dan. We don't even know why she did this? How do you forgive someone when you can't even ask her why she lied to all of us?"

Dan scooted to the edge of his chair.

"I hear you. I do. I knew her the longest by six years. I suppose I feel like this was never personal. Hold on. Let me finish. She is a liar on a level that none of us has ever encountered. She didn't take a lot of money. None of us is financially bankrupt because of her. She left us emotionally destroyed. That’s a whole different thing. She is like the laziest, least ambitious Anna Delvey in history.

"I understand the need for answers but, guys, we're not going to get any. She's gone. What difference does the why matter? I'm choosing to forgive her for me. She's gone. My forgiveness doesn't affect her in any way but I believe it will prevent me from becoming a bitter, angry, distrustful person. I don't want to live like that. That's not the person I want to be. It's a choice and I'm choosing forgiveness because it's the best, most healthy option."

"Fuck that shit." Brad was getting agitated. He stood up and started pacing the room. "Grow some fucking balls, man! She stole something from each of us!"

"What exactly did she steal?" Dan asked as calmly as he could.

"I don't fucking know! A sense of who we are. Our fucking balls. Shit, I was in a bar last night and saw a woman I liked and then, like a fucking shitty voice in my head, I wondered if she was a serial killer or secretly had a dick. I bought the gun because I wanted to off you guys, not her. The idea of her fucking each of you while pretending to be with me is almost more than I can handle. Now I just want to shoot someone—anyone. FUUCK!"

"I just don't want to lose what little bit of myself I still have pursuing something that will only leave me with nothing in the end."

Jerome raised his hand. "I'm not that angry but the thought that she's somewhere out there, enjoying her life with someone new while I'm spending every day thinking I'm fine and then vomiting uncontrollably is some serious mindfuckery.

"I'm watching TV and then wonder if she's watching the same show. Then I start into a mad spiral of thinking about other shows that we watched together. Then movies we went so see and our conversations about them. Then places we went together. Then I start throwing up. I don't know if I can live like this anymore."

Everyone became silent. Kent was the one they avoided talking about. She had left nine of them but Kent had hung himself in his shower after their first meeting. It was the ghost of Kent that kept them all coming back every week. No one wanted this to lead to suicide but every one of the men understood the impulse.

After a beat, Dan put his hand on Jerome's shoulder. "I get it. I do. You know I do. And I get your rage, Brad. Let me tell you a quick story.

"I read once about this Texas rancher who took in a crew of men who ended up stealing from him. Money or cattle or something. I can't remember the specifics. The rancher was so pissed off, he spent the next ten years of his life chasing these guys down. He found all of them and they were all tried and convicted.

"The thing was, he was so obsessed with getting justice or revenge, that his wife left him and took his kids. He lost his ranch. He went bankrupt. By the time he got his vengeance, his life was a shambles. He lost everything for some sense that they got what they deserved.

"Brad. I'm not being nice or kind in this. I just don't want to lose what little bit of myself I still have pursuing something that will only leave me with nothing in the end.

"Maybe I'll never trust another woman again. I've earned that damage. We all have. She managed to break something essential in all of us. We can't take it back from her. All we can do is hope that the damage isn't permanent. Hope that the wounds scar up. The thing about scars is only the living have them. Scars mean you're still moving forward. That you still live. That you survived."

Joseph finally snapped out of his thousand yard stare. "I don't about why she did this or even how. I want to know how I could've missed it. I mean, she was married to NINE DIFFERENT MEN IN THE SAME CITY. None of us suspected. What does that say about us, about me? I feel like I might be among the nine dumbest motherfuckers on the planet."

David sat up. "Dan, you called her Anna Delvey a minute ago. Did you see The Dropout? About Elizabeth Holmes? I keep thinking about George Schultz. I think Sam Waterston played him in the show. This was a former Secretary of Defense. A former Secretary of State. Definitely not the dumbest motherfucker on the planet.

"Despite all the evidence that she was full of shit, that she was playing him, that his grandson told him he saw her fraud, Schultz never wavered. He believed in her no matter what. He believed her because he wanted to believe her. We believed our... our wife... because we wanted to. I spend some of my nights going over all the warning signs I should've seen but ignored and it's enough to drive me fucking nuts."

Alex began to cry. "I'm sorry, guys. I know I shouldn't say it. I know that. But I loved her so much. Isn't that supposed to count for something? Isn't the love I felt, the love I gave, supposed to count?"

John sighed. "We all did. It didn't matter."

"Alright Forgiveness Boy. What are you gonna do now?" barked Brad.

Dan smiled a weary and sad grin. "I don't know where things are going to go for me. I really don't. I may leave Vegas because it feels like this town took something from me I can't get back. I guess I can't focus so much of my energy with this stuff. Like a car accident or the death of a child, it happened. Nothing I do can change that. Resilience is a choice. Trauma is a choice. Anger is a choice. Like the knight in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade warns 'Choose wisely.'

"I will say that I'm thankful that you guys are here. If I was the only one she deceived and left hanging with all of this, I might give up. Like Kent."