Matthew watched Simone in profile as she rested her eyes on his stained glass icon of clown faces on a field of rose and yellow triangles. Stained glass-- actually a mixed media of gels, resin and glass-- was how Matthew defied the darkness of the air shaft, capturing what light there was. However, a clever idea now epitomized in his mind a wasted life that would have been better spent if the artist he claimed to be, and that she believed in, had not squandered it, leaving them in a hot room on a humid Saturday in July. Matthew saw the weariness in Simone's face and felt responsible for it.
She rose slowly from the round table, "Is there anything you want to say before I do my ablutions?" she asked, "I'm keeping the door closed so the steam doesn't escape. The water will be running so I won't hear anything."
Matthew grimaced, "You caught me at a reticent moment. Anyway, you know I can't talk under pressure."
He raised his eyes from the writing tablet on which he had managed a few potato heads with cup handle ears.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"The pet store."
"Again?"
"I haven't gone in three months."
Simone crossed the parkay floor to a ten gallon fish tank nestled among potted vines in her corner of the room. The water had a copper tinge from the medicine she used to fight a deadly fungus that had snuffed a black molly and several tetras.
"Liar! Everytime I ask, you're off to the pet store," he retorted to the back of her threadbare blue bathrobe as she stooped to feed her minions. He was fond of that bathrobe. He associated it with their first nights together.
"You don't ask too often then," she said, as she dropped pinches of VitaTetramine through the webbing that prevented fish from leaping from the tank. Recently the prized blue and red beta leapt out of the aquarium in search of a better world, but found only parkay and death. What induced him to jump? Remorse for the molly's mysterious death? Or for want of another beta to fight?
"You have no sense of time," he observed as he had often done before, "In your mind, ten minutes are an hour and a half."
"That's why I gave you notice. Anyway, I go to the supermarket more often than the pet store," Simone chided, "And Purrby needs his Science Diet."
"Right," Matthew turned his eyes to his blank page. "You and Purrby are tight--like brother and sister. No-- husband and wife."
"Don't be jealous of Purrby. I love you, too."
"Thanks."
Suddenly the intelligent grey cat trotted into the room, sauntered up to Simone and sat at attention before her.
"There you are, Little One, you knew we were talking about you," Simone scratched Purrby's white forehead and stroked his fur. He rolled his head at the fuzz-rubbing affection, cocked his rump, stiffened his tail, circled and eased himself on his side. Simone smiled dreamily at Purrby's silent ecstasy. Matthew wondered, "Did she ever look at me that way?" Maybe-- when he slept.
He smiled. The love affair of Simone and Purrby fed his cynicisms but also gave him hope. If a woman and cat connected so passionately he might touch the world to which he now felt as remote as an asteroid in space.
However, even this blissful vision of the union of woman and beast shattered in morbid reflections. Simone possessed such vitality that Matthew was struck by a premonition of her mortality. He shuddered at the idea of losing her or she losing him.
"Please don't go," he blurted, thumping the table with his fist, verging on tears, "It's so dangerous."
"The pet store?" she asked.
"Yes, very dangerous," he nodded vigorously, "The last time we went the clerk said a guy came in with a gun raving that they killed his parakeet."
"You made that up," she replied.
"Anyway, the pet store smells," he pleaded, "No matter how many animals there are, hamster odor prevails."
"I won't be long," she said, "At this rate I'll be lucky if the store isn't closed by the time I get there."
She observed a tetra floating on its side near the water surface. "No, don't die, sweet angel fish!" she whispered.
"Wha'd'you do? Boil 'em?" Matthew snickered.
The first winter they were together, Simone bought a heater to keep the fish warm, set the temperature too high and cooked her fish. For six months, she kept the tank vacant in mourning. It was unfair and cruel, Matthew knew, to remind her of this fatal misjudgement but he was in a mood to be unfair. Simone loved her pets and cared for them. In persecuted moments Matthew believed she loved them more than him.
"I treated this angel fish for ick, gill illness, dropsy and fin and tail disease," she murmured, shaking her head. She turned to Matthew, "Since you're so concerned about my safety, come with me. Wouldn't it be pleasant to take a walk?"
"Yeah, great," he replied without enthusiasm.
It amazed him how she could turn a walk to the pet store into a pilgrimage. Matthew was grateful for Simone's joie de vivre. How else could he bear being the way he was, spending weekends in the apartment forcing himself to work, taking out the garbage for exercise and a change of scene, and marking his diary with entries like "did laundry"?
Matthew slapped his pen on the vacant page.
"I can't write a thing," he said, "Just depraved doodlings. If there was only a pill I could take. I'm sick."
"You're not sick," Simone replied, "You need to recharge your battery. Relax instead of getting down."
He hung his head low. "I don't know how. I need Verbalex."
Verbalex was not FDA-approved or sold over the counter. It was a fictional drug Matthew prescribed to his students when they had writer's block. They laughed when he used it on them but now that Matthew said it to himself it wasn't funny.
Simone disappeared in the bathroom to perform her Saturday ablutions: a complete facial cleansing, mudpack and pimple drying formula. Matthew took fitful turns reading a pyschology text and watching baseball. He wondered if he did the first to cure himself of the second or vice versa. The announcers' specious quotations, bad stats, non-sequaturs and turgid remarks about old-timers often piqued him. He would bounce off the bed to check facts in his old almanac. Finding the appropriate trivia, he jabbed his forefinger at the screen and yelled, "You lie!"
When the announcer said, "There's a story about Joe that must be told--oooo, a wicked slider for strike two," Matthew ordered the announcer to refrain from all heart-warming stories about Joe signing baseballs for dying kids or raising money for esoteric diseases. When the play-by-play man countered, "That's the kind of season he's having... Nobody hits better in a two-strike, two out situation with two men on in the bottom of the second than...." Matthew shouted, "Shut up!"
Simone burst from the bathroom, a green veil of mud on her face and jabbed her finger at the screen, "Shu-u-u-u-u-u-u-t u-u-u-u-u-p! You heard my ma-a-a-a-a-n, he said, sh-u-u-u-u-t u-u-u-u-u-u-u-p!"
Her green face and vehement basso profundo voice threatening the television made Matthew laugh but the laughter came from the same place as his pain. He buried his head in a foam pillow. He yearned to feel inspired, alive-- and free-- but he was reduced to swearing at a T.V. set.
"When will you be out of there?" he asked.
"Soon," she answered.
"How soon?"
"Real soon."
"Specify."
"Twenty minutes."
He groaned. Another Saturday. He wanted to escape the greasy humidity that did not sap his strength as much as invert it. Anger filled his head and chest like expanding fungus.
Driving his fist in the wall might improve his mood but he had tried it once and only managed to sprain his hand. He would feel guilty if he put another crack in the crumbling wall. He had already put his foot through two bamboo chairs while changing lightbulbs.
"Breathe deeply," he told himself. He meditated on the gray walls. After seven years they were a shade that was not color but shadow. He wondered why they did not repaint. A brighter room would allay the sense of failure he had while lying in it as he watched a sports event in which everyone from players to beer guzzling cowboys in commercials were useful, productive, fun-loving do-gooders.
He took a second look at the room to estimate what it would take to paint it. The precarious makeshift shelves and book cases from The Compleat Plank, crammed tight with books and papers, would fall apart if moved even an inch. Ramshackle file boxes and card tables that comprised his work station would all be taken apart. A sagging rope-woven basket-hamper that looked like a slow volcano oozing dirty socks would need to come down. Great ideas scrawled on paper slips taped to walls, and hangers hooked over doortops and mouldings, dripping scarves and belts, also persuaded against new paint.
Simone appeared in the doorway, arms before her as if she held a basket. Her face was freshly made, peach-cheeked. Her green eyes sparkled in fields of coal, under lashes as long as Spanish moss. Simone declared the perfection of her cosmetic application by her vacant, masklike expression.
"Beautiful," Matthew said drily.
"Simone's smile, mannequinelike to make him smile, fell into glum acknowledgement of his mood.
"I'm sorry," he twisted his body on the bed, hoping to shake out this blob of depression. He knew that his bleakness hurt her, but he could not control it; it oozed from him like sweat. She was in pain, too, and he added to it despite himself. He wanted to reach out of his morass to improve her mood. "I feel like a hundred eighty pounds of nothing," he explained.
"It's your day off," she replied as if that explained-- or excused-- everything. "Unwind!"
She climbed into her chemical warfare pants and tied the string around her waist.
"I feel unwound," he said, "I want to feel wound up."
She stamped her foot.
"You don't know how to relax."
She turned from him. Her profile registered a slow-building irritation with his dejection. When she could not abide his doomsaying, she shut him out, to protect her sanity, she claimed.
"I feel like I've been here like this for centuries, watching baseball, reading, writing, waiting for you to get out of the bathroom," he said.
"I'm out of the bathroom now. Why don't you shave? I have to get to the pet store before it closes."
He stared at the chipped ceiling, unable to move.
"Why are you so afraid of the pet store closing? Is that how you put suspense in your life? Pet stores never close. People prefer buying their pets at night so they can carry them home and whisper endearments to them when nobody can see."
"Come on, Honey, or I'm leaving without you."
He heard this as abandonment. Anger drove spikes in his jaws. Lava of hate poured over his eyes, his view of her. Then it receded and he saw her again-- tugging at her parachute pants to make them billow. She was his companion, not his enemy. The enemy was inaccessible. He could not identify or locate the enemy but knew it was there.
"You take two hours and I'm supposed to take five minutes, is that just?" he asked.
"Shave now and we can get to the pet store before it closes. Or shave later when we get back."
Matthew smacked his face with both hands and shouted,"Ah YAH!" as he inspected his shave; someone told him this was the Afghani epithet for eternal copulation. In the mirror he caught Simone smiling at him. He questioned her joy.
"After tonight our troubles are over," she said.
He shook his head as a smirk stretched his face despite himself. "Come on!"
"Why not? It's more likely that we'll win LOTTO than you watching baseball for centuries."
He laughed but her luminous eyes glowed beatifically and nearly subdued him.
"We could go anywhere, do anything. No more inevitable Saturday stagnations after an exhausting workweek. Believe me!"
He scanned her eyes. She was serious. Suddenly he felt a bit of that mush in his head drain out.
She clapped her hands. "Yes. It will happen."
Her repetition of hope infected him. He smiled doubtfully. His mood lifted. He touched his pocket. She made him feel like the money was already there.
The path to the pet store was a tunnel buried under a thick sky. A few heavy dollups of rain smacked their faces and shoulders, occasinally, like they had better things to do than fall.
"Oh, no! It's going to rain," she moaned.
"Isn't it great?" he replied, "I'm in the mood for a rain storm." Matthew loved getting caught in heavy rain. When he was six, he ran home from school and got drenched, laughing the whole way home. Later, in high school he and his friends would play tackle football in dounpours in the mud. Simone was like Purrby: she could not tolerate surprise water when her makeup was on. Matthew held up his palms to entreat the skies but rain did not come. The street air was sweet with warm vapors and gasoline.
Crossing Broadway with its empty lots and car parts stores, Matthew hummed tunelessly a few bars of the Drifter's On Broadway. The myth of New York's glamor street had not stretched this far north. Up a steep side street across from the precinct cars were double and triple-parked, blocking traffic and pedestrians.
"The precinct's right here and not one ticket," Matthew fumed, "On our street they'll give you a ticket for having a dirty car."
"You know cops," Simone said, "They give tickets to people they think will pay them. But after tonight we don't have to face such injustice," she said, "no more unfair parking tickets, we'll park in a garage. No more fines, and if there are, we pay them. We won't even have to live in this neighborhood."
His grim thoughts were bathed by her warm fantasy. They discussed where they would move. Midtown, downtown, out of town. He wanted a place in the country, to smell grass and walk a dog. She rolled her eyes. "How monotonous!" Compromise arrived: a country place no more than two hours away and an apartment in the city. That way, Purrby would have few adjustments to make.
"You know how he gets," Simone mused, "his digestion's ruined for a week when he moves."
They approached the pet store on St. Nicholas and found its gates down. Closed.
"Oh no!" she cried, stamping her feet, "I knew I should have gone by myself! I knew you'd make me late."
"But you invited me!" he said guiltily.
Saved! The store was open. The gate halfway down was the manager's effort-saving ploy to shun all but earnest customers. Energized by this reprieve, Simone charged to the back room in search of a healthy young beta. Matthew hovered near the front counter scanning fish medicines. Before Matthew met Simone he thought all fish died of natural causes; he had no idea they got sick. He looked at the many colored and configured dog treats, each advertised as containing more of one vitamin or another and was amazed at how hi-tech the pet industry was. You could spend a fortune on pets and pet products. He would have to speak to Simone about that. He would not permit her to squander their lottery winnings on a menagerie. She'd probably insist on sending Purrby to a cat-hypnotist to cure his constipation.
She came to the front with plants and a white molly but no beta. They didn't look healthy, she said with regret.
On Broadway they passed the fifty cent hotdog place. "OUR HOTDOGS ARE BETTER THAN FILET MIGNON." read the neon sign inside the lasso of linked grey weenies. The savory smell of meat bi-product, garlic and moustard filled his nostrils. "I need a 'dog," he said.
"Poison," she screwed her mouth in vivid disgust.
"Sometimes I feel like poisoning myself-- a little," he answered.
"You can't afford to now. What would happen if you got hypertension and died? I'd have to die or live in loneliness."
"You're right, thanks, honey," he said, "Filet mignon! To think I once ate that garbage happily!"
"You were ignorant and depressed," She said, peeking into her pet store bag to steal a glance at her molly.
"They make hotdogs so alluring. As tasty as filet mignon. It makes a poor person feel proud to eat a hotdog, makes him feel smart. He has something as good as rich people. But then it repeats on you and you taste it in your mouth for hours. I hate to think how many folks I offended when I abused hot dogs."
"I'm sure they've forgiven you."
That assuaged his conscience. As they headed up the incline of the business street, past the Chinese take-out, McDonald's, Don Quixote Travel Matthew was moved to make a promise.
"I swear if we win LOTTO I'll make dietary changes. No more hotdogs or filet mignon. We'll go organic."
"It's a wonderful resolution, Honey. But you don't have to be rich to eat vegetables. They're cheaper than meat," Simone replied.
"Don't be naïve. You hate to cook. You had a jar of mustard and a bottle of white wine in the fridge when we met. Vegetables are cheap but boring. To make vegetables exciting-- takes money. I propose a feast of vegetables, bean-curd, seaweed and wild rice, garnished with sesame seeds and smothered by tahina, all consummately cooked by our vegetarian gourmet chef. Raw fish from only unpolluted south Pacific swells will be our protein. Health is a luxury."
"I know. And I'll go on a diet without starving and have the fat sucked from my thighs," she said.
"Exactly!" Matthew thrust his finger in the air.
His throat was dry so they stopped in at a pizzeria for red white and blue ices. Carlos, the weekend pizza man, reached in the smoking freezer, scooped out perfect little balls and dropped them into water cups. Carlos was like all the people Matthew liked-- men trapped by circumstances in a mediocre reality. Carlos had been a jockey until a career-ending accident. Then he fell into the pizza business. He would have owned his own pizza store but his partner absconded with five grand. Carlos searched for him all over Los Angeles for a year on foot but never caught up with the crook. Now he worked for George, a Greek, evenings and weekends. Carlos was too good a pizza maker to work for another man. Many of George's customers waited till Carlos's shift for his distinctive Caribbean crust. Matthew asked Carlos how he was and the pizzaman shrugged with a cool, quinine smile-- a tough guy's last resort.
Matthew slurped the ices too quickly and came down hard from the sugar rush as he and Simone approached home. Thoughts of Carlos and his dismal predicament and the scent of damp trash full of melon rinds turned his mood to funk. He looked up at the angry sky that yearned to pour and was reminded of Purrby's bladder infection the previous winter when he was unable to jump or sleep. If only the sky would tear apart!
If they won LOTTO he would be more relaxed, better dressed, kinder to his fellow man, never betray the nervous anxiety poverty injected in his behavior, that sweat-beaded brow and red neck they despised in him and anyone who looked like they needed something badly. Yet money would not relieve their isolation, only increase it. They would need protection. And if money bought success, it would not belong to him but to the money.
At the A&P the checkout girl stared out the window as she placed the groceries in the bag. Her eyes hopped from Matthew's to Simone's like fingers on the register. They seemed to ask, "You're stuck here, too?" then added, as if to assert her superiority, "I had to be in the hot smelly city; what's your excuse? Lack of imagination."
Matthew stormed past the public phone that never stopped ringing. Simone caught him at the corner.
"What's wrong with you? You forgot your change."
"Did you see how the checkout girl looked at us?"
"Did she look at us?"
"Yes. With contempt and pity."
"You're paranoid. She was looking at the prices."
"Your problem is you shut out the world around you. You're afraid of facts. Here's a riddle. What's the difference between us and the old people around here?"
"What?"
"Fifty years."
A tow-truck screeched around the corner dragging a totalled orange import behind it like a dead fish.
"C'mon," she started across the street, "Frank's gonna close."
He knew it was no later than six and the liquor store would not close before seven but Simone had a phobia of closing stores. "What do I care?" he said, "I don't drink."
"You should."
The suggestion appealed to him though he didn't give it much chance of working.
Frank, the liquor merchant, a large man with red hair, stood with arms folded watching a basball game in progress. An old man in a suit sat behind the counter and observed them with bitter eyes and stubborn silence. Frank glanced sidelong at the old guy, rolled his eyes and shrugged for his customers' benefit as if to tell them, "It's not you, it's him."
"How are you folks doing?" he asked.
"Fine. How's this wine?"
Simone lifted a fat, green jug from a display from which a Great Value sign obtruded like a flag on previously uncharted land. "I get good response on that one," Frank replied, "It's a big seller."
"And this one?"
He pursed his mouth, fluttering his hand chest high.
"I get compliments on that but only from people with no taste."
They all laughed except for the taciturn old man who stared with his hostile gaze.
"If they know who they are," Simone said, "they'll be offended."
Frank shrugged. "Most of my customers probably wouldn't know what I was talking about."
"You sound cynical," Matthew said.
"I wouldn't say that. I just have a low opinion of the public."
"You have so many friends," Matthew said.
"I've been in business for twenty years. When you deal with people, I don't care what it is, they want a piece of you."
They paid him for the wine. He took the bill in his hand with a significant pause, as if the passage of money from another person's hand to his demanded a moment of reflection. Putting the bottle in a bag and wishing them a good weekend, he thrust his forefinger upward, remembering a detail at the last moment, "Would you like a calendar?"
"It's August," Matthew said.
Frank put the glossy cylinder in his hand. "It's next year's," he said, "This year wasn't great, so I thought we'd get a start on the next one. Each month has a picture of flowers and plants. I'd have given you one with mating horses but I ran out."
He excused himself for the joke which he admitted was in poor taste. "It's being in these four walls all day," he said, "especially with certain company."
Matthew knew Frank was an avid sports bettor so he asked him who would win the pennant. Frank half smiled and shrugged, "What they call parity I call mediocrity."
"You're not betting on anyone?"
"Naah."
"You picked right on the last NCAA championship."
The liquor store owner scrunched his ruddy face. "Don't listen to me. I'm a loser."
Simone had suggested Matthew select a vodka or rum so he could have a few drinks and lighten up. He bought a brand with a two-headed eagle on a red label and a spurious Russian name.
Later, as he chomped on the celery stick of his third Bloody Mary he complained of sluggishness.
"It's your own fault," Simone said as she peeled carrots, "You drink breakfast drinks for dinner. I told you to drink rum and coke or vodka and orange."
"I don't know how to drink," he sulked, "I can't even make the right drink at the right time."
"You're amazing!" she replied, "Now you're down on yourself for drinking?"
"It's symptomatic. Like what I've done with my life."
No reply.
"Like what I've done with my life," he repeated.
Still no reply. Matthew depended on her to say he was wrong, that he was depressed-- or that he was right, in which case they could discuss change. Her silence forced his desolation back on himself and echoed other non-responses: magazines that sent back stories with xeroxed memos, agents who did not return his self-addressed envelopes, students who cut his classes, manuscripts returned to him unopened-- and now Simone's silence.
Emptiness crashed in on him. Was she trying to drive him over the edge? Telling him his life was meaningless? No, her silence was a border guard. He had reached the frontier of her love and could go no further. He couldn't bear it.
He bounded from the wicker chair, pinching his butt between the slats-- a loose peg slipped from the chair back and tinkled on the floor-- and confronted Simone, who still chopped carrots.
"Well?" he asked.
"Well what?"
"Tomato juice is the same no matter when. Don't you see? It's not the Bloody Mary that makes me heavy and lifeless. It's how I feel. It's how we live."
Her eyes showed surrender, that she shared the same four walls with him, the same existence. What could he say that she did not know-- about his life or her own? She could not change reality.
"Why don't you chill out?" she pleaded softly, "Honey, I can't take much more."
He bowed his head, "Forgive me. I wish I could control it."
He kept his mind blank as he watched the news and its crushing pile of sordid tragedies, heroes, stars, powerful people, successful entrepreneurs, a summit of world leaders. He controlled his sense of failure by rationalizing that if he seemed to waste his life in pet stores, supermarkets and a dark apartment, maybe he was not missing anything since his life was not necessarily supposed to be better or different. The problem was he expected too much. Everyday life was how it was for everyone.
An old Bette Davis movie was on at eight. Simone rushed to achieve the best reception and finish dinner so she wouldn't miss a minute. Matthew recognized the film as one he saw twenty years before on another local station in another town so he ate quickly and extracted from the bookcase his diary of the previous year. He often consulted old diaries to console himself that this day was not all that different from the same day of years gone by. If there was there no progress in his life, he reckoned, at least there was continuity.
Simone often ridiculed Matthew's diary abuse. Where impressions and feelings were supposed to be Matthew jotted chores, errands, meals, work done. He justified himself by claiming his diary documented a life devoid of excitement, events, changes or belonging. But now he played a game of filling in blank pages of the previous year with events that might have happened, and feelings that should or could have been felt. He turned a journal into a fiction.
"It's time! It's time!" he heard her call from the bedroom. "Aren't you going to watch?"
It was 10:15. A baseball game was on with the sound down and Matthew was unsure which inning it was or who was ahead. The clock said, "10:15" which meant there were only eight minutes till the LOTTO jackpot drawing. His skin tingled and his jaw was taut. He hated himself for the puerile weakness these symptoms revealed.
"I can't watch," he said, "Tell me what happens."
She burst in the room where he sat at the butcher block table, his page half-written on, switched channels to the LOTTO drawing and turned the sound up.
"You have to watch," she cried, "You'll want to remember everything like it happened, in perfect detail-- the night we won LOTTO. If you don't, you'll plague me with what we were doing and where we were sitting and when we first believed we'd win it all and how we felt after the fourth ball fell and after the fifth. I won't be able to tell you. Remember the Super Bowl? You insisted on washing the dishes when the running back scored a sixty yard TD and they didn't show a replay? You were mad for a week."
"And the balls are set..." the man with dark jowls, who had played Richard Nixon somewhere in summer stock, barked in his clown-voice. "Alice Kinderchuck of Hoosit Falls is watching on the new color television console she bought with the five million dollar jackpot she shared last year with an unemployed meat inspector in Rochester. Alice always plays....She knows you have to be in it to win it. Just like Rory Sluzik. Rory, you'll recall, won ten million dollars in March. You out there may be like Otis Mills of Valley Stream who won a cool seven million dollars in our June 7th drawing. And the first ball is..."
"Come on. Let's watch in the bedroom!" she said.
"I can't look!" Matthew blurted as he pressed his hands over his face.
The ping-pong balls in line were not the numbers on their cards. Simone threw herself on the bed across his legs and moaned, "We're losers--again!" She pulled herself up and lumbered to the bathroom with a bowed head. Minutes later she shuffled into their bedroom in burgundy mules, irregular long-johns and a sweatshirt reading Sport across the chest slipped off one shoulder. She threw herself across Matthew's body.
"Our problems were almost over," she intoned in a cartoon voice, "but we didn't win."
"Yeah, that kind of blew everything."
"I'm so disappointed."
As Purrby sniffed her deformed pink panties on the nap-worn carpet rescued years ago from the trash, Simone's eyes bulged with sadness. Matthew wrapped an arm around her and caressed her cheek.
"Did you really think we had a chance?" he asked.
Her wistful eyes queried his wistfully, "Didn't you?"
Matthew stroked her hair as Simone sank her face against his chest.
"I was so sure of it. I dreamed we won: a flock of gold birds took flight over us," she said.
He laughed. "They probably had acid rain on their feathers."
"We're such big losers!" she cried.
"No, we're not," he insisted, kissing her face, "We only paid two bucks."
"But we lost our chance for millions." "We have Wednesday," he said, "and twice a week for the rest of our lives."
He hugged her tighter, inhaled the perfume of her heated skin. Simone's eyebrows lifted, her mouth tightened with resolve.
"If nobody won, the jackpot will be huge when we win on Wednesday."