Jim had hanged himself. It wasn't ideal, but there were certainly worse ways to go. The oxygen was slowly leaking out of his brain, but Jim could definitely think of a few off the top of his head. More would definitely come as he pondered it, and he supposed he had little else to do but that. After all, he was just swinging there, to and fro, painfully slowly as the rope twisted in the wind.

Of course, it wasn't exactly a rope, now was it? At least, not really, anyway. Jim wasn't all that sure what it was precisely, but the intense pressure building around his neck was not particularly conducive to such precision.

Not to say that the hanging sensation was entirely untoward. It hardly felt as Jim imagined slowly strangling one's self to death would be like; that was for certain. All the total agony and brutal torture of the cord squeezing the life out of him eased away into a warm, distinctly heavy, but not deeply unpleasant hug. Sort of like the embrace of a hulking, drunkard uncle who smelled badly of cheap aftershave, but from which you could still feel genuine love and affection.

Wait, cord? Ah, yes. That's definitely what it was. One of those old phone cords, twirled around in an endless loop of plastic tubing, trailing up towards the sky. Jim couldn't quite remember where he got this cord or how he had strung it up in this impossibly high, empty warehouse, but he supposed those details weren't all that pertinent by now. His face was draining of colour and his extremities were already turning grey.

One of his pink plush bunny slippers fell off and knocked Evangeline on the head. "Hey!" she cried out, momentarily shifting her gaze to scold Jim's suspended corpse before returning to her phone-call.

She twirled the cord in her finger, making Jim spin like a hunk of shawarma meat on a rotisserie, the cord wrapping around him like some sort of plastic sarcophagus.

"Да, Грегор. я знаю! Я пытаюсь ему сказать," she said, rambling about on some mind-blowingly sexy nine-inch heels as she held the phone to her pasted, ruby-red lips.

"OK, хорошая идея."

The cord pulled taut and Jim felt his corpse being stretched between his wife's strutting figure and the anchor on the ceiling.

"Да, попробую."

Jim's middle was being torn asunder. Every muscle in his body was a cold elastic being yanked to its breaking point by some mystic toddler of impossible strength.

"Cпасибо. До скорого."

The piñata ripped open, and Jim was spread across the cold, empty cement floor. Evi daintily probed the puddle with the tip of her right foot before shaking her head in disgust and walking away.

A thick stack of papers landed on Jim's desk with a heavy thud, awakening him from some half-dreaming stupor. He hastily stuffed his feet behind his chair and removed his bulky headphones, switching his internet browser from a podcast on early Roman history to a nondescript excel sheet.

"Yes?" he enquired to the still formless deliverer, hammering away at the keys in no particular pattern.

"DG wants it finished for the meeting at three."

"What does she-?"

The faceless intruder melted back into the grey void of unending cubicles before Jim could even finish the sentence.

Jim half-heartedly examined the bundle of documents. It was simple enough, just a couple of cabinet memos desirous of editing so that his boss could ignore the edits and tell him to start over from scratch before finally approving the original version. He shifted the pile to the back of his office, covering a sketch he had been making in his spare time, which was basically all the time.

Now, what had he been thinking about? Ah, yes. Rperop. Mr. Rperop.

Jim opened a Word document and clicked on the Symbols tab. He scanned the Cyrillic alphabet. Man, b and B were different letters? What kind of idiot would design a system like that? Oh, St. Cyril. Guess that makes sense. Google was such a wonderful invention.

Jim came to about twenty minutes later with his eyes idling at the bottom of a Wikipedia page on Mustafa Atatürk.

Ah! Jim quickly closed the window and scrambled to throw a few red lines and ink blots on the pages that had been delivered to him. He reopened the Word document and began transcribing in a furious storm of key-stamping. He was a few paragraphs in when he noticed the symbols tab still open.

Jim flashed a glance at the clock. He'd been working for a good half hour. Definitely time enough for a break.

He reopened the Cyrillic alphabet and carefully laid down the symbols in the order he remembered from Evi's phone. Г ... P ... E ... Г ... O ... P. There, he had it! He copied the text and pasted it into a translate app.

Gregor.

That was his name: Gregor.

A bit anticlimactic. He was definitely expecting something a little more ominous. Like Vladislav or Igor or Ivan the Terrible. Something intriguing, something bold, eye-popping and terror-inducing.

Not Gregor.

What kind of woman would fuck a guy named Gregor?

Evangeline, apparently.

No, it wasn't healthy to think like that. There were plenty of reasons why she'd be messaging him late at night. He was probably just a work-friend or something. Yeah, that made sense. A work friend.

Jim didn't exactly realize he was popping open his wife's Facebook and scrolling through her friends before he had already entered in his search. There were three Gregors. More than expected, but he could work with that.

The first was Gregor Semjonov, an Estonian and not exactly a looker by any means. He wore an enormous pair of horn rimmed glasses that momentarily distracted the eye enough to cut away from his drooping, bulldog jowls, tight, salmon lips and a frizzled, pathetic attempt at a moustache. His hair was thinning to the point of emaciation and his speckled skin betrayed some form of chronic substance abuse.

No, if Evi was fucking this guy, Jim would be personally offended. Jim might be boring, but there was no way in hell he was had become monotonous enough for Evi to fall into the arms of Gregor fucking Semjonov! Maybe if he was absolutely loaded..., but then again, Evi was never really that type of girl. She certainly enjoyed the finer things in life, though not nearly enough to put out to this freakish monstrosity.

Jim closed the profile and brought up the second Gregor: Gregor Garcia. Now this guy, this guy Jim could understand. The appeal was so striking Jim feared he was about to be swallowed up in a maelstrom of sex and desire. His body appeared carved from the softest marble with the precision of a scalpel. Every angle pointed the eye pleasingly downward to a tremendous bulge that nearly protruded itself from the frame in photo after photo. His flowing blond hair shimmered in the sunlight of all manner of exotic locales and destinations from roof-top pools of emerald water glittering in the moonlight to the pale sands of tropical beaches on the edge of paradise.

No question Evi would be fucking him if she could, and Jim could hardly blame her for that. He imagined his ample endowment might start harming the cervix of his many lovers with time, but such was no doubt the price of admission.

Yeah, he was definitely that kind of jockish jerk who herded women like cattle and ignored their pleasure in pursuit of his own gratification. A shag anyone would die for, but an inconsiderate lover that wouldn't exactly linger on the mind. That comforted Jim somewhat. Averageness was okay, just so long as he used it well, and Evi had always told him he used it well.

Wait, had that been a lie? Had Evi just been pretending to be well satisfied all this time? No, he could definitely feel her quivering under him. That had to be somewhat genuine. Right? She couldn't completely fake everything. Jim wasn't that dumb, and besides, surely Evi would have said something. She was French, and the French were not known for being coy about the subject of sexual satisfaction. After all, she had no trouble lugging around a box of sinful mechanical devices when she first moved in all those years ago.

The toys! Oh, no. If that wasn't a symbol of dissatisfaction, what was? The closed doors and gentle whirring. How had Jim been so blind for so long?

And now, she had graduated from vibrators to Gregors.

Well, that was still something of stretch. For all his charm and feverish good looks, there was something a little off-putting about this man. A general aura of douchery exuded from him. After all, how would a Spanish demi-god such as himself be saddled with a name so irrevocably pedestrian as Gregor? That was surely an indication of something inauspicious, perhaps even downright nefarious. And Evi was generally adroit at picking up such signs.

Even if she wasn't, and Jim didn't want to be too mean to his wife, but really, Garcia was within a hair's breadth of being light-years out of her league. Whole parsecs, even. The man had to be almost a full decade younger than her, and almost fifteen years of smoking and heavy drinking had begun to take their toll on Evi's once radiant skin and sparkling teeth. She was certainly attractive, much more so than Jim could ever hope to emulate, and in the right light could stupefy the very soul out of any man who befell her, but that was hardly a novelty to a man like Garcia.

Perhaps with enough booze and ingratiation she could win him over, but Evi never had the patience for chasing after prizes like that. Hence her current husband.

Jim scrolled back to the third Gregor: Gregor Stravinsky. There was nothing too intimidating, and that was without a doubt the most intimidating thing about him. His profile depicted a beaming wide face with ample forehead and a massive, toothy grin reflecting a slightly painful amount of light. There was hardly a single photo on his page lacking his giant rosy cheeks and warm gaze, staring with such love and yet a tender melancholy, hinting at some mysterious, irredeemable loss.

No matter his pudgy figure, poorly combed and clearly grease-ridden brown hair, the sharp point of his over-large nose, the jagged edges of his yellow-tinted teeth or his remarkably mundane collection of checkered sweater-vests, khaki pants and straight coloured golf shirts, his sad blue eyes, darker than chilled wells of ink, left Jim feeling chilled to his very core. He had never seen someone he so desperately wanted to comfort and garrote at the same time.

He knew in an instant that the mystery man had been found. It was just mundane enough to be true.

Of course Evi would be fucking him. He was Jim. They were the exact same fucking person.

Winnipeg? Really? It made sense, Jim supposed. If you're going to be boring, you might as well be brilliant at it. Nobody ever wanted someone who was mediocre in their mediocrity. Now, did he still live in Winnipeg, though? Jim just needed to look up his address...

"Oh, how do you know Gregor?" Evi asked, coming up behind him.

Jim realized he had his laptop open on the granite countertop of the kitchen island, scrolling through Stravinsky's Facebook profile without even a fake excel spreadsheet to hide behind.

"Oh, I don't know him at all," Jim said, feigning nonchalance. "He just liked one of our photos, and I was wondering who he was."

"Oh..."

There was an awkward pause as they both stared at each other, their eyes making contact and then flitting to the floor and then locking again in a dance of agonizing social niceties.

"So..." Jim said.

"So?"

"Who is he?" Jim hoped there wasn't any animosity in his voice, but at best it was rife with suspicion.

"Oh, just a friend."

"From work?"

Evi looked confused, and her forehead narrowed with irritation.

"That's ... starting to get a little nosy, dear..."

"Oh no, just curious," Jim stretched, and slapped his hands together like he was preparing to throw discus, trying to work out the knots that were tying his stomach tighter and tighter. "Just ... curious."

"Cool...." Evi replied, shifting her cadence to turn the word into two painfully long syllables. She half-closed one eye while biting her lip in thought then sighed and quickly returned to a neutral expression. "I ordered some pizza. You want to put a film on?"

It was then that Jim realized the peculiarity of the situation. He had arrived home first, instead of being an hour after his wife. Evi had stayed late somewhere but not notified him to start dinner early. That could only mean one of two things: a) it was completely unexpected or b) it was being deliberately obscured. Now, Evi was pivoting away from both a conversation on Gregor and her unexplained absence by suggesting a TV dinner, a meal format she abhorred, in an obvious effort to placate her prying spouse.

One had to thoroughly examine the possibilities before coming to a conclusion, however. First, was an urgent matter at the department possible? Yes, absolutely. Evangeline worked as a translator for Foreign Affairs, and if there had been some issue of national security or a humanitarian crisis, she would certainly have to respond, even at strange hours given the local time of the potential disaster. Evi could very well have been writing a communique to a host country or negotiating with terrorist hostage takers or just jerking off some Azerbaijani bureaucrat whose bribery requests had been refused by too many impolite Canadian diplomats.

But, was there any scenario whereby Evi wouldn't be able to tell Jim about it ahead of time? Evi was neurotic about texting. She spent vast quantities of time on her phone, photographing every banal detail of her existence, messaging acquaintances and updating the world about every manufactured twist and turn in her moribund life. She had the keyboards of seven different languages programmed into her phone and would send messages written in a jumble of characters and symbols that theoretically was the most efficient and exactly true to her meaning (as well as completely incomprehensible). It was inconceivable to Jim that such a woman would deliberately keep him out of the loop in such a crisis, especially given that the translator's work always comes at the end, giving her plenty of time to message while the head honchos figured out what exactly they wanted her to say.

Thus, one came only to the second possibility: Evi was fucking Gregor. It was amazing how well she was able to keep it together after walking in and seeing her husband inspecting the man with whom she had just cheated on him, but Evi had always been a difficult woman to read: great to have on your poker team, not exactly an ideal partner for charades.

Now, she was covering it all up with pizza. Jim desperately hoped they didn't go skimpy on the cheese, because his silence was not going to be bought for just any old, mediocre slice. He and Evi had some things to discuss, and he wasn't just going to let some movie night get in the way.

"Jim!"

"What?"

"The movie, what movie do you want?" Evi's voice was raised in frustration. This clearly wasn't the first time she'd asked the question.

"Ummm," Jim said, trying to remember the boring parts of reality his mind had apparently just skipped over. "I'll go check my IMBD watchlist."

"I just suggested that, Jim!"

"Okay, okay, you're right. You're always right, Evi. That's why I married you."

Evi snorted. "Whatever, Jim. Let's just get it loaded. The pizza will be here any minute."

"What did you order, by the way?"

"Your favourite," she said, more or less indifferently.

"Meat-lovers?" the excitement was far too palpable in Jim's voice for his liking.

"Yes." Evi grinned, deviously.

This was red-letter day, indeed! Evi refused to eat bacon except on the most auspicious of occasions. She was entering into Neville Chamberlain levels of appeasement.

Jim scrolled through his watchlist, carefully scanning over each title with his skeptical eye. They'd watched almost every Godard film there was within the first months of knowing each other, and Jim regarded the rest of French cinema, maybe with the possible exception of Tati, as a commensurate mess of clichéd erotica and nonsensical experimentation passed off as triumphs of genius. That, of course, did not stop Evi from forcing him to watch every piece of pulp Francophone cinema that came out, but Jim enjoyed his meaningless thought rebellions quite immensely.

There, of course, was Tarkovsky, Jim's favourite director, but Evi refused to watch anything produced under communism as a rule: a rule he begrudgingly obeyed. There was Wes Anderson, but Evi missed a great deal of his humour and the resentment would visibly fester inside her as she watched her husband laugh seemingly without reason for two hours. She lacked the patience for Kubrick or Paul Thomas Anderson, and definitely would not put up with the unapologetic raunch of Lars von Trier.

Horror and science-fiction as entire genres were no good. Jim enjoyed watching horror movies with Evi, as she would curl up around him for protection and it made him feel strong and masculine, but she took film far too viscerally and would yell at the screen the whole time, informing the characters on how to avoid their fate and chastising them for ignoring her sage advice. She had a similar problem with science-fiction, only she'd begin analyzing the actual science of the story and explaining how every plot device was impossible and the movie was ruined for its inability to stick to reality!

He settled on some fairly mainstream German film by Tom Tykwer, and went searching for links to stream it online. Jim did every so often feel a tinge of passing guilt from this dubious practice, but he did it anyway not necessarily because he wanted to save money but because he couldn't bare the exhaustion of finding his wallet and typing in his credit card information for every off-beat foreign film that tickled his fancy. A man as busy as him surely had better things to do with his time.

Jim found a link and paired his laptop with the living room television, letting it play. Naturally, an advertisement of a rather morally ambiguous nature decided to pop up instead. A breathy female voice warned the audience to "not enter this game if you're under the age of eighteen."

"What's that?" Evi asked, accusingly.

"Hmm?" Jim replied, already half-way to the computer, ready to close the pop-up.

"How did you get that?"

"I have no idea, Evangeline." Jim said, crawling on the floor to level with his laptop, too exhausted to offer a more thorough explanation.

"Isn't it based on your search history or something?"

"Yes...."

"So, you admit it."

"Wait, what?" Jim wasn't exactly sure what he was admitted to. He turned back to face Evi, the well-bosomed but poorly-clothed woman still smothered all over the TV screen.

"You look at this kind of stuff, don't you? This, this," Evi gestured wildly, "this porn stuff."

Jim looked over his shoulder to examine the cartoon woman of imaginative proportions. He turned his gaze back to his wife, a smile on his face. "No, I definitely don't watch this kind of stuff."

"But you watch other things?" Evi was just not letting it go.

The smile dropped from Jim's face. He suddenly realized this interrogation was as serious as it had first appeared. He figured it was probably not the best conversation to have on all-fours, so he tilted back up to his knees.

"No, I definitely did not say that, Evi."

"But you used the verb 'watch' to respond to my question, which centred around the verb 'look'. My question was referring to images alone, but you replied as if it were about videos, indicating a higher degree of knowledge on the subject than simple innocence would allow."

"Not everyone thinks like a linguistics major, honey," Jim said, dismissively.

"Now you're just being patronizing," Evi huffed.

"And policing what I jerk off to is not!"

"Oh, you don't just watch these videos of strangers, but you pleasure yourself to them as well!"

"That's what they're fucking for!"

"No!" Evi was furious now. "I am your wife. It is my job to give you pleasure just as it your job to give me mine." She jabbed herself with her thumb to emphasize the point while glaringly aiming her index finger at Jim to make the counter-point.

"You have a full fucking drawer of vibrators!" Jim was exasperated.

"Only with you," Evi retorted, losing some steam. "Just as a way to widen the experience."

"I hear it whirring all the good-damned time, so don't you start with any of that bull-shit."

Evi's face reddened at the accusation, and not from embarrassment. She started speaking slower, through gritted teeth. "That's only for messaging my back. You know I have back-pain, James."

"Yeah, that's exactly what my mother said when I found her box of sex-toys too." Jim replied, incredulous.

"Maybe your mother had strained muscles."

"Maybe my mother couldn't get it off sleeping with the same, morbidly obese, genitally challenged man for fifty years."

Evi suddenly went back to a paler colour, some understanding in her eyes. "Is that what this is about? Just sexual frustration?"

"Oh no," Jim replied sarcastically, "how could I be frustrated when we have sex so freaking often. Like twice a month, and I'm good. Just stuff me in a coffin, and I'll be ready and erect the next time you need me."

"That's what this night was supposed to be about!" Evi shouted, small tears of irritability rolling down her cheeks.

"You ordered pizza because you wanted to have sex?" Jim's voice raised in disbelief.

"No, I bought this." Evi pulled out a Victoria Secret bag from behind the couch. She looked down at Jim, deflated. "I told you this morning; you seemed really into it."

Jim didn't know if he should pretend to have been listening to her earlier and just forgotten, or to admit that he was thinking of something else. He could probably pretend some crisis at work had caused a memory lapse. That would be reasonably believable, although Evi had a pretty good sense of how remarkably dull and unimportant his job was, so maybe she wouldn't buy it. Probably better to stick to as few details as possible now and spin a more elaborate story if prompted.

"Oh, I'm sorry, babe. I'm completely forgot."

Jim saw his wife had not fully accepted the apology, and so he rose from the floor to come intercept her. "Come here." He embraced her and placed a loving kiss on Evi's forehead, rocking her gently back and forth. "You are so sweet. I really don't know what I did to deserve you."

Evi's eyes glazed over. Jim knew exactly what he had done to deserve her. He was an expert flatterer, and he would happily employ his skills wherever necessary. It was just usually more fun to suck up to his wife than his boss.

"I will happily have sex with you tonight."

"Even after the pizza."

"I don't care how bloated and filthy I feel after devouring my fourth slice of lukewarm meat-lovers, I will, and I promise this with all the seriousness of a solemn oath, absolutely, without a doubt, fuck your beautiful brains out and then do my best to fuck them back in again."

Evi cringed. "I might need to wait awhile after you're saying that, but, thanks. Merci."

"De rien, ma chatte." Jim winked, going in for a kiss.

Evi shook her head and placed her finger on Jim's lips. "That's just misogyne."

"Noted," Jim said, tilting around to plop himself on the couch.

"What's on your mind, Jim?"

"Hmm?" Jim mumbled, tracing his fingers up and down Evi's back, following the markings of her vibrant, colourful tattoos.

Evi didn't like to talk about it too much, but going to high school in Canada, away from all her family and friends had been something of a terrifying experience. For the first few years, she had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Whether that meant drugs, crime or even prostitution, Jim didn't really know. All he knew was Evi had worked very hard to dig herself out, and it was important to be gentle with her.

The tattoo was a sort of commemoration of the effort she had made to clean herself up. It was giant tree with branches stretching across her back, each demonstrating how one small decision could lead down a different path. Some branches ended in dead twigs, others in glowing bushes stuffed with leaves and heavy fruit.

There was a branch for her learning every language that could fit into her head, to help communicate, find more friends and stifle the creeping sensation of loneliness. There was another for having quit her heavy smoking and binge-drinking, though she still preferred both in moderation, as with all good things. Yet another for when she'd stopped shovelling down processed foods, started eating healthy and spending long, tedious but necessary portions of her day at the gym.

The work showed as well. Evi's body has fit and well refined. Jim never missed a chance to run his hands along her, softly tracing every inch, like a farmer dipping his hands into his black, earthy soil. With most sex, two people would explore each other's bodies. With Jim, it was always more of a land surveying expedition.

"I know you're thinking about something," Evi smirked into her pillow.

"And how would you know that, my dear?" Jim asked, settled back on his side, his hand still outlining circles above his wife's buttocks.

Evi pressed her elbows down and forced her face up to greet her husband. "It took you a little while to get hard tonight."

"Yeah, I know." Jim looked down, somewhat dejectedly.

Evi's hand rushed to Jim's chest. She lightly pecked him on the cheek. "Hey, it's not your fault, dear." She laid back on her stomach and spoke more into the pillow than to Jim. "If anything, it might be mine."

"No, no. It has nothing to do with you." Jim raised Evi's head and kissed her. "Nothing at all."

"It's just, you know." Jim shrugged. "My mind wanders sometimes."

Jim couldn't see Evi roll her eyes, but he heard it in her voice. "You think I don't know that!"

"Hey! It was interesting movie," Jim chuckled. "I was having a hard time getting it out of my head."

"Having a hard time getting that German bimbo out your head, you mean." Evi was joking, but her words were just a tad too biting for humour.

"Evi.... C'mon. You know that there is no one else in the entire world who could hold a fricking candle up to you, dear."

Evi rolled onto her side to face Jim.

"Then why don't you treat me like it, Jim!"

Jim stared blankly, his hand gone limp on Evi's waist. "I'm not sure what you mean."

Evi took Jim's hand and planted it on her buttocks.

"Take your hand, Jim. I know you like my ass. We've been together for almost eight years, Jim. I know you really fucking like my ass. So why are you tracing your fingers around my back, edging ever so close to it then coming back up. If you want to grab it, just fucking grab it already!"

Jim slowly blinked, not really sure how to respond, but he clenched his hand dutifully around Evi's bountiful bottom.

"There. You like that right?" Evi asked with all the intensity of an anesthesiologist making sure his drugs were taking effect.

Jim nodded.

"Well, if you like it then you should take it, yes?" Evi made a pained grin, though she was starting to get a little excited, hoping that she was making progress.

"I just, I ... I don't want to make you uncomfortable."

"You're my husband, Jim." Evi sat up on her knees and kissed Jim long and passionately. "You're not going to make me uncomfortable." She hugged him. "Just ... you know you can be rougher sometimes, right? I think you'll like it."

Jim grimaced. "I'm not so sure."

Evi deflated, falling back to the bed. "Okay," she said, gently rubbing Jim's arms.

She kissed him again, smiled, though not without a slight twinge of sadness in her eye, and rolled back towards her side of the bed. "I think I'm going to get ready for bed now."

"Okay. Good night," Jim said.

Jim waited for his wife to leave the room, and the click of the washroom's light-switch before he allowed himself to rest, to remove his barriers and think the one thought that he had caged away, all alone, guarded carefully in the darkest corner of his overcrowded mind.

How long does it take to buy lingerie?