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yourself out. That’s all. Anxiety manifests itself in weird ways. I’ve got this little boy, a patient. He has this rare form of narcolepsy. Whenever he gets stressed, like if his parents are having an argument or he’s got a pop quiz at school, he just goes to sleep. He doesn’t faint or pass out, he just falls asleep, on the spot. That’s what your johnson is doing, falling asleep to cope with stress. Your cock has narcolepsy.”
    God bless my dopey friend in his white coat. This is his favorite part of being a doctor, wowing people with all the shit he knows. When someone in the dorms was super hungover back at school, he’d sit with them all morning and explain exactly why they felt so shitty. “There’s ethanol in alcohol, and that causes dehydration. When you’re dehydrated, your brain actually shrinks and pulls away from your skull. Here, have some more Gatorade.”
    “Don’t you need to, like, look at my prostate or something?” I ask. It dawns on me that that’s the first time I’ve ever asked someone that.
    “Well, as nice as that sounds, no. We’ll worry about that in ten years. Right now, your malfunction isn’t in your ass, it’s in your brain. There’s a lot of stress in the world. Watching the news is stressful. Trying to get pregnant is stressful. Your body is reacting to that. Anna is stressed about it, too, I’m sure. But the girls don’t have to worry about rising to the occasion. They have it easy. Well, aside from actually having to carry and birth the babies. Some of them find that difficult.”
    I tell Charlie about hearing Anna’s sex dreams. This information seems to cement something in his mind, and he begins rummaging through his desk drawer until he sets a little box of sample pills on his desk. I recognize the logo from the commercials that come on whenever I watch sports.
    “Fortunately, the good people at Pfizer are looking out for guys like you.”
    “You just keep those in your desk, like Skittles?”
    “Take one forty-five minutes before you’re ready to go. Works every time. Trust me.”
    “Umm,” I say, but humiliation claims the rest.
    Reading my mind, Charlie leans forward, resting his elbows on his desk. “It’s just to get you back in the game, man. You need to be out of your own head. That’s what these babies are for. When you’ve got your confidence back up, you can sell whatever you’d got left on the street to teenagers. It’s all good.”
    My BlackBerry makes a little chirp and vibrates in my pocket. It means I have a text message, and there’s only one person in the world who texts me. Katie has written:
    Need to get bk here. Ppl r lookin 4 u.
    “What’s wrong?” Charlie asks.
    “Nothing. It’s just work.”
    “You guys gonna survive all this doomsday stuff?”
    As I get up to leave, I shrug, because, in truth, I have absolutely no idea.
    “What does your company do again? I can never remember.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I say.
    “Hey, dumb ass, aren’t you forgetting something?” Charlie tosses me the sample box. “Go home, Tom. Fuck your wife. You’ll both feel a lot better in the morning.”
    I think of Mr. Halgas again in his Velcro sneakers. Like him, I’m hating the prospect of medication. But, also like him, I’m begrudgingly beginning to accept it. “You know, I still have a few minutes. You sure you don’t want to look at my prostate? Just for a second?”

Chapter 6
    B ack at the office, I head for Cubeland. This is what we call it, Cubeland, where everyone who isn’t a manager works. Every floor has one, row after row of tiny little work cells. Each cell is personalized with cat calendars or Dilbert cartoons or coffee mugs, but they’re all uniform in their sadness. The tension here today is as palpable as air pollution. Nearly every computer I see is turned to a news site, and articles are up about how we’re all spiraling toward a national state of bankruptcy. Lehman Brothers is officially gone, as in, it no