The Many Deaths of Anthony Petrano - Part Three

The window is open and outside someone is raking leaves. The scritch of plastic tines on grass floats through the kitchen. Anne is at the table with chicken soup and the newspaper. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her husband Frank walk past in the hall. She hears the bathroom sink, hand washing. He's been in the garage all morning with the lawn mower, or the water heater, or whatever it is he's fixing now.

Anne's eyes meander through lines of text. She dips her spoon into the bowl of chicken and noodles, but it's some time before she picks it up again. “Frank,” she yells. “Frank, come here.”

He walks into the kitchen wearing a flannel shirt and a preoccupied expression; focused on his fingernails, he says, "What is it?"

"We know him, don't we?" Anne points at the newspaper on the table. "Don't we know him?" She looks up and sees Frank not paying attention. "Anthony Petrano," she says. "How do we know him?"

Frank picks under the nail of a pinky with his thumb and shrugs without looking up. “Doesn't ring a bell,” he says.

“Oh, come on,” says Anne. “Anthony Petrano. I know we know him. Does he go to St. Luke's?”

“Maybe,” says Frank. “Petrano. Sounds Italian – probably Catholic.” He moves to the refrigerator and opens it, leans into its cold glow and hum. The sound of Anne whispering the name to herself floats through the room. Her voice mingles with the sound of raking leaves and falls into a syncopated rhythm with the scrapes.

"Petrano...Petrano..." Anne says. "Do you think he's maybe in mom's tennis league?"

Hidden by the refrigerator door, Frank shrugs. He picks through some leftovers, but doesn't take anything out.

"Come look at this picture, and tell me if we know him. I swear we know him, Frank."

"Annie, I told you, I don't."

"Just come here for a second. Look at this."

Frank widens his eyes and flares his nostrils with an exasperated inhalation, but he closes the door and walks to the kitchen table. He stands behind her chair and looks over her shoulder as if he were proctoring a geometry test. His eyes scan the article from the bottom up: the blurred, gray text, a grainy photograph, the headline.

“His wife's name is Alice. Do you recognize that? Alice Petrano?”

“He's dead?”

Anne nods.

“He's dead?”

“Yeah,” Anne says. “Car accident, last night. Some kids. I wonder if...was he on the City Council?”

“Let me see that.” Frank leans over his wife – he doesn't touch her, doesn't brush her hair with his billowed shirt – and picks up the paper; the newsprint crackles in his hands. The article isn't long. He scans it, the picture, the article again.

Anthony Petrano was pronounced dead at the scene, killed by three Union College students in a Ford Escort. An accident. “A simple accident,” the paper says, but Anthony Petrano is dead. Frank can picture them, all of them – the three kids, and the wife who heard the crash and ran outside – all huddled around the body, all looking down with hands held over their mouths – it was dark enough that they couldn't really see, Frank pictures, so they couldn't just look, but had to peer at the body – everyone waiting for something, for recognition, for an arm to move or a voice to sound out in the still air, and nothing happening but people standing there, silent and held back by their own hands.

Or it wasn't like that. The wife was screaming, maybe. Slapping and hysterical, her arms swinging and chopping and smacking at the others. Belting those two teenage boys with words like, “Why,” and, “How,” and, “No,” and, “No.” The young men with arms held up and crossed for protection, shielding themselves with “Please,” and “Wait.” “You don't understand.”

And the girl – the girl who the woman had forgotten about – maybe, the girl, she stepped quietly, and maybe, the girl, she reached quietly, and maybe she touched quietly, touched, with just the tips of her fingers, maybe, she touched the back of the woman's shoulder, to calm her, the woman, she touched her, the girl. But the woman, in high dudgeon now, in full fury, she reacted in full fury and swung the back of her hand around the back of her body so that it landed with, not a smack, but with a thud on the girl's already reddened cheek. And although the diamond set in the woman's engagement ring was small and dulled like a milky eye from its years, it cut just the same, just as sharp, just as clean, just like the sharpest thing in the world. One long gash of blood opened on the girl's face, and the scar would someday become the kind of a scar that an artist would draw on a comic book anti-hero to show that, for all of the lives she'd saved, for all the good she'd done, there was a dark side lurking beneath her surface, the girl's, a dark side just itching and waiting to crawl out from that slashed up piece of skin.

“You don't think he was one of the old men who works at the Price Chopper, do you?”

“What?”

“What? Maybe he was. You don't know.”

“Anne, he's just a guy who got hit by a car.”

“Yeah, but I know him. I swear.” Anne grabs the paper back and flattens it on the table.

“Just give it a rest.”

She doesn't seem to hear him. Frank walks to the counter, takes a bagel from a plastic bag, slices it, and puts it in the toaster. He watches her read. The article ended with a quote from the wife, Alice. What happened when she heard the crash: “My heart just sank. It just sank right through the floor,” and Frank can picture that, too. He pictures it happening now, to his wife, at the table. A red, squishy plummet that tumbles from her chest, disappears down through formica, down through the floorboards and into the empty bedroom below. It falls like a ghost through the air and seeps into the carpet, into the damp basement cement, and deep deep into the center of the world where Frank can't see it any more. Where it is gone. The bagel pops up and Frank pulls it from the toaster slot. He eats it without condiment.

After a while Alice says, “Those poor kids.”

“What?”

“The kids in the car. It's sad. I mean, what if they go to jail? That one driving? That's vehicular manslaughter, isn't it?”

“Anne.”

“What? You watch the same episodes of Law & Order I do. That's a crime. And this kid is what, eighteen, nineteen years old? It says it was an accident, and poof, that's it. One accident and that's it for him.”

“What about the guy who died?”

“Well, sure, but he's dead. What does he care?”

“You just spent the last twenty minuted trying to figure out if you know this guy. Now you don't want anything to happen to the kid who killed him?”

“That's not what I said. I just said it was an an accident.”

“Well, sure,” Frank says. “But he's dead.” Frank bites into the dry second half of his bagel and looks at his wife until she curls her lips to one side and turns back to the paper again.

“What if it was me,” Anne says, eyes down, half quiet.

“Oh, come on. Don't do this.”

“What? What if it was me? What if I was driving along one day, and I...I don't know, I look down at the radio to change the station. And when I look down, someone starts to cross the street in front of me. Only I don't look up again until it's too late. So even though I slam on the brakes, it's too late, or I hit a patch of wet leaves, or something – black ice – and I crash into him and he's dead. It's an accident but...but there. He's dead. Would I deserve to go to jail?”

“Anne.”

“What? Would I?”

“Anne, come on. That's not even what I was talking about.”

“Well what were you talking about, then?”

A beat, and then Frank flutters his lashes and rolls his eyes; he shakes his head and mutters. “Jesus, I don't know,” he says, just loud enough so Anne can hear. “Just wanted a bagel.”

“What?”

“I said, I don't know, Anne! I don't know! Christ – your questions, this guy. I don't know, okay? I don't know who he is, I don't know how you know him, I don't know what'll happen to this idiot kid or his friends. I don't – just–” His speech runs out of steam, stalls. He looks at his wife and her face is contorted with shock; her eyes wide and framed by her glasses, she looks like a child. She looks like an eleven year-old kid. “You know what – forget it. I'm in the garage. If you want me, I'm in the garage.”

*

The Many Deaths of Anthony Petrano - Part Two

"It was okay," Jenny said from the back seat.

“Only okay? Are you crazy?” Mark turned around in shotgun so he could argue more effectively. “You dumb bitch: it was amazing!”

Jenny punched Mark's seatback. “I told you not to call me that.”

“Well what am I supposed to do?” Mark said. “We go see what's probably going to be the movie of the year, if not the decade, and you give me that review? 'It was okay,' Jenny Zambrowski, Dumb Bitch Quarterly. I mean, come on – were you even in the same theater?” He turned to the boy driving next to him who was grinning, but trying not to laugh. “Doug, you sat next to her. Was she there? Did she leave after the trailers or something?”

“Dude, calm down,” Doug said. “Not everybody wants to suck Christian Bale's dick the way you do.”

“Thank you,” Jenny said. “I just didn't buy the British accent.”

“Listen,” Mark said, calmer, more composed. “First of all, you two seriously need to have your libidos checked if you don't want to play a couple rounds of SexMatch 2000 with Christian Bale. And second,” Mark's voice rose to a yell again, “the man is British, you stupid, stupid bitch! Christ!”

Jenny whacked Mark's seat again, harder this time, and Doug's laughter finally broke.

“I mean, how can you not buy the British accent? It's his normal, fucking voice.”

“It did sound a little weird,” Doug said. “Just because he's usually doing an American accent, I mean. And besides, the whole thing with the baby at the end? Really? Don't tell me you bought into that shit.”

The car's interior went silent momentarily while Mark held his fist to his mouth. Outside, the world was dark. A car with one headlight passed going the opposite direction. “Okay,” Mark said. “I'll give you the thing with the baby.”

“Ha!” Jenny punched the seat again.

“But I will fight anyone who criticizes Christian Bale's acting ability. To the death. The man is a giant among Vern Troyers.”

Silence again, save the sound of thick rubber on wet asphalt.

“Really?” Jenny said. “Mini Me?”

“To the death,” said Mark. There was a pause, and another, and then, without warning, he unhooked his seatbelt and launched himself headfirst into the back seat. Doug watched his own eyes roll in the rearview mirror as a mix of muffled shrieks and growls emerged from the scrambled pair behind him. The sounds of combat changed to giggles first, belly-laughs next, and Doug felt his heart sink a little deeper into his chest. He could feel it happening; again, it was happening. The same thing that had happened with Laura. The same thing that had happened with Katie. The same thing that always happened. They always found their way to Mark; he always managed to pull them away.

“Hey,” Doug yelled, straining to get a better view in the mirror of where Mark's hands were, what expression was on Jenny's face. “Come on, guys. Knock it off.”

He thought he'd been doing alright. He'd gotten the seat next to her in the theater. He'd gotten the handbrush on three separate occasions while grabbing for popcorn. And she'd smiled. All the time, she'd smiled. At him – Doug – and once she'd smiled while doing a category five hair-behind-the-ear-tuck at the same time. But give Mark two minutes on the soapbox and it's over. He'd lost another one.

"Ow, hey!" Doug said as Mark's foot clipped his ear. "Seriously, I'm gonna get pulled over. Quit it." In the mirror, their movements were a blur.

“To the death!” Mark yelled, and Jenny accompanied him with an exuberant squeal.

“I said quit it,” Doug said, but quietly this time, so no one else would hear. He batted Mark's foot with his right hand. He turned around for a second and saw Mark's teeth flash in the light of a streetlamp; he saw the glint in Jenny's eye. Doug reached behind him and slapped his hand on Mark's back, grabbed a handful of sweatshirt, and tried to heave him back up to the front seat.

He only took his eyes off the road for a second.

Just one second.

There was a terrible noise – a thump, but the kind of a thump like dynamite thumps; the kind of a thump that thumps you from skull to coccyx and back again – and the car lurched sideways and up. Mark flew in the air and crushed Doug's hand between his back and the ceiling. He landed on Jenny and they all heard the breath go out of her in one, amazed expulsion of air. And they all heard the tires squeal along the blacktop, and they heard the leaves crackle under the tires. But most of all they heard the thump. It echoed in every one of their heartbeats and made sure they knew what they had done. It made sure they knew that whatever they had hit – whatever it had been before – it was dead now. It made sure of that.

*

The Many Deaths of Anthony Petrano - Part One

The beginning of the beginning of another story. Here you go.

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The Many Deaths of Anthony Petrano

A chill tickled the air to attention. It was a good chill – the first autumn chill – and it brought with it the smell of dying leaves and snow that was yet to fall. The glow of the living room light bled onto the lawn from the open front door. Anthony Petrano stood under the transom taking the chill into his nostrils, into his lungs, into the blood of his muscles and veins. He appreciated autumn. He loved and respected it in a way that he knew few others did. His wife, for one, and his grandchildren. So resentful of the end of summer, the inevitable return to raking and math tests. They didn't understand autumn the way he did. They didn't understand the life that burned at the edge of the chill. Anthony took another deep breath and hefted the black garbage bag in his hand, walked out of the warmth of the living room light.

It was dark outside, but light enough to see that he would have to rake the leaves soon. Next week, probably. The Monday after at the latest. The grass between the leaves bristled against his bare feet. The ground was cold and a little wet from a late afternoon shower. The feeling reminded him of when he was younger – when he used to wear a beard – and what the frost felt like when he rubbed it off his face after coming in from the winter.

The streetlight on the other side of the road ticced on and off. Alice called it, “The neurotic lamp.” She'd written letters and spoken in town meetings about it. It wasn't that people ignored her, it was just that you can only fix the same streetlight so many times before you give up and go deaf to any more complaints about it. Anthony told her that when her latest letter to the editor of the Schenectady Gazette was returned with the words “Cease and Desist” stamped in red ink across the body.

Anthony dropped the trash bag on the corner of asphalt that wedded driveway and roadway, and he watched to light wink on and off in rapid succession. He tried to find a pattern in it. As a child, he'd learned Morse code with his neighbor, Louie Carvallo. They could each see into the other's window across the street, and they used to send each other messages at night by switching their own lamps on and off. D-A-N-N-Y-I-S-A-B-O-O-B when Danny, Anthony's older brother, had gotten him grounded for breaking the vase that Danny had been tossing around like a football with his friend. And M-O-N-A-I-S-A-M-O-A-N-E-R when Louie had finally lost his virginity. And B-A-C-K-B-Y-X-M-A-S when Louie left with the rest of the 1-A boys. The streetlight flickered dot-dash, dash-dash, and then fizzled and went black entirely. It would turn on again, Anthony knew, in an hour or two at the outside. From around the bend that led to Route 7 he heard the engine of an approaching car. He turned toward the sound instinctively. As it came into view around the curve of the night, Anthony noticed it only had one headlight.

“Padiddle,” he said, as his daughter had done when she saw such things back before she knew how to drive. He laughed at the word, and at the thought of his daughter, still just barely post-pubescent, scowling at the music on the radio, touching her finger to the roof at the sight of a one-lamped car. She did it to, “Ward off evil spirits,” she said. And he would do it too, if he knew what was good for him. Anthony watched as the headlight swung around to point at him. He waited for the breeze the car would bring with it.

*

First Draft - The End

So this is the last section of this particular story. I don't have a title yet, so any suggestions would be much appreciated. And no, Jordan, I'm not calling it "The Suckiest Suck That Ever Sucked." That can't be the title of every story I write.

Anyway, without further ado...
____________________________________________________________________

"Timmy, are you ok?" she says. She only ever calls him Timmy if she thinks something's wrong.

She knows something's wrong, he thinks, before he realizes it's even her. Before he realizes that the voice is more than just his imagination.

“Why are you standing like that?” Kara says. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing. No,” he says. “It's nothing. I'm fine.” He realizes he should look at her so he straightens up and turns. To prove that he's alright; to prove that nothing's wrong. He sees her, and she's colored with concern. Her fingers are folded at her chest, and her elbows are pressed tight to her sides. Tim smiles to reassure her, “Fine,” but he feels the smile go wrong. He can feel that it's one of those sickly smiles that looks like it's being pulled down at the corners by some unseen weight. He can feel that it looks almost sarcastic, that it looks almost mocking. Kara's eyes and expression go flat, and he sees that he's done nothing to reassure her, that he must only look worse. So Tim lets the smile fall, lets his eyes droop, lets his face pull his head down a little. His breath escapes him in one, thick rush. He looks up at her again. He says, “Kara. I think you're great.”

Nothing about her face changes, and This, he thinks, is unexpected.

“I, I think you're great. And I just wanted you to know that. And, but, well...”

“You're breaking up with me,” she says. Her voice is vacant of emotion.

“What? No, I'm...well, um...”

Her voice the same, her face the same – flat – she says, “You're breaking up with me.”

“Kara, I,” Tim starts. “I just, well...” His gaze leans out the window again. Earlier he'd thought that the rain's intensity was growing, but now he sees that it's slowed to a patient drizzle. “Yes,” he says. “I am.”

“Fine.”

She doesn't leave. She stays. Tim can see the haze of her in his periphery. This is something that she does, he knows, so she can win. She waits so she can have the last word. She waits until she has you by the eyes. Tim focuses on the Draper building, on the tan-brown of the bricks. He doesn't want her to win. He doesn't know why, but there is that feeling, strong and at the base of him – that feeling of, No.

“Fine,” Kara says again.

Tim feels his neck twitch toward her. A gust of wind throws some rain against the window. It obscures the view, and as the water sheets downward, it makes the Draper building look as if it's dancing, as if it's wriggling back and forth like a charmed snake. Tim knows that Kara is waiting, and that she can wait for a long, long time, but I won't look, he thinks. Not until she's gone. I won't look. I won't look till it's over. But it doesn't end. She waits. And she waits. And she waits. Tim's neck twitches, and then it twitches more and more, and although he doesn't want to see, he wants desperately to look. He wants desperately for the twitching to stop, and the moment to stop, and for all of it to stop and be over with: gone.

“Fine,” Kara says with flat, affectless fury.

I'm going to look, Tim thinks. I can't help it, I'm just...I'm going to look. I know it.

“You want to break up with me, that's fine, Timothy.”

And, She never calls me 'Timothy.'

Outside, a shadow appears to fall over the Draper building, darker than the rest of the day's shadow.

Just go away, Tim thinks. Please, just something happen, and make her go away.

“But look at me when I say this.”

And like that – like she had snapped, or yanked a leash around, or like she had smacked him hard in the face – he turns to her. Christ, he thinks. And as he turns: the sound.

The crack, the breach. The thunder that is not thunder, but worse. So loud that inches-thick, body-proof windows can't hold it back. So loud, it shakes the earth. So loud, the ground itself is afraid.

And because he can't see it, the sound – the explosion and crush of fifty stories-worth of concrete, metal, glass, of flesh – of one whole building as it topples in on itself and crashes down outside, because it is sound without source, for Tim, at first, because it is only sound, the sound has no meaning. It is only sound: awful, terrible, horrible sound. But then he sees Kara look outside, and he sees all of the heads around the office look outside. And so he looks outside, out the window, through the rain, and he sees what the sound was, and he sees what has happened.

Someone, speaking for everyone, says, “Oh. Oh my God.”

And still the sound is there.

He felt horrible about it later. He never told anyone about it later. But the first thing that Tim thought when he looked out the window and saw the shattered remains of the Draper building – a cloud of dust and terror swirling up and consuming one black, bony spike of tortured architecture – the first thing he thought was, Thank God. Thank God that building just blew up. And before the first siren-wail could be heard on the street below, he was gone: alone and atremble on the shiny men's room floor.

First Draft, Part Six

The water cooler is in the corner by the windows - grand, wall-wide stretches of glass that look out onto the expanse of skyscrapers and pollution that fill the city and give it life and give it death. Tim pulls a paper cone down from its holster, fills it with water, gulps it down, still hunched halfway over. He re-fills and re-gulps, then re-fills again. On his third cup he stands up straight. He takes his time; he takes a sip. He looks at the world outside, at the gray sky, at the gray streets far below, at the gray rain that he thinks has only just begun to fall.

The buildings in the city all used to have different names than the names they have now. Tim used to know them, most of them. His father taught them to him years and years ago. He was a businessman, Tim's father, with an office in the old Draper building. He used to take Tim to work with him some summer days, and he'd rattle off the names of the buildings as they walked past. Warren Brothers, Viceroy, Hart & Landers and more. And now the Hart&Landers building is the SunCola building. And the Warren Brothers building is the First Bank Center. And the Draper building that once was the tallest building in the state...Well, that's still the Draper building. But not for much longer. It can't be much longer, I'm sure.

Tim stares at the Draper building, just a few blocks away from the Sanseko Industries building where he is now. He remembers wearing a tiny suit and tie as a child, and the way he followed his father through the office and pretended his lunchbox was a briefcase full of important files. He kept out of the way well enough as a boy, and none of the other men minded having him around. Most of their square jaws cracked into grins when they saw him approach; some of them ruffled his hair and called him, “Buster Brown.” But sometimes a meeting was too important for him. Sometimes a client would come, and Tim would have to hide under his father's desk, silent and secret, until whatever business that needed to be done was done. Those were Tim's favorite times. He would wedge himself in between his father's socks and the thick, oak paneling of the desk, and suddenly the whole world would change. He would be a hero cornered in a cave, waiting for the right moment to steal some treasure, or save some damsel, from under the monocled eye of a mustachioed villain. Or he would be a spy in a deadly foreign land, collecting secret information about “unit cost” and “shipping expenditures” to bring back home to Uncle Sam. Or he would be, or he would be, or he would be...Something. Back when I could be anything, he thinks. Back when I wasn't what I became. This...

Tim finishes his cup of water and drops it in the trash bin next to the cooler. He leans closer to the window. He stares out through the curtains of rain. Little gargoyles run up and down the corners of the Draper building, but Tim can't make them out. He leans closer to the window, until his forehead bumps against the glass. It's bulletproof up here, he was told – up on the 39th floor. You could run and hurl yourself at it, full speed, and the worst that would happen to you would be a cheap bruise. Tim tilts his head downward, hears a small squeak: skin sliding on a smooth surface. Below, apart from the indistinct gray of sidewalk and weather, he sees a yellow line of cabs, all stuck, all waiting for the light to change.

First Draft: Part Five

And then it starts. It starts when he returns from the break room. Tim runs back through his speech, from the top, from “Kara, I think you're great,” and, as he does, his words begin to betray him. They disappear, the words. They vanish. At first they only do so in drips: one or two at a time. At first he thinks nothing of it. They're drips. It's nothing. Tim opens his notebook and scoops the the words back up, plugs up the holes. And he moves on.

And then he goes through the speech again. And then it's a phrase that goes missing. And then an entire sentence. And panic trembles through the voice in Tim's head as he comes to “The Reasons.” And then, when he comes to “The Reasons,” they're gone. All of them. The whole section, a paragraphs-long piece of script, vanished and blank.

Gone.

Tim tries to backtrack. He goes back to the sentence before.

Gone.

All gone. So Tim reads his notes. He re-reads, his words, his sentences, his phrases. He says them out loud; he hammers them into his mind with his voice. But it only feeds the flood. As soon as they flow in, the words, the phrases, they cascade out of him again. Tim closes his eyes tight and tries to pull them back, but they're all gone. Simply gone. All of them. Gone. And the only thing they've left behind is static.

Tim starts over. He reboots. “Kara, I think you're great,” he says. His voice is soft and measured. “And–”

Kssssssssssssssss.

“And–”

Kssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

“Shit.”

The clock on his computer screen clicks over to 1:42 in silence, but Tim feels it like someone behind him taking another step closer. Like someone behind him adjusting her grip on a knife. He's managed to recall a few snippets of the speech. The first line, which never left, and a few shopworn pearls of wisdom about friendship, about why they'll both be better off apart. Nothing more.

1:43. Another step. Tim thinks that Kara will be back soon. He thinks that, Kara will stop by. Because Kara always stops by. She always has to stop by, she can't just leave me alone for one damn day. And then I'll have to do it. I'll just have to do it.

The thought that hasn't entered his mind, now that the speech is gone, is that he won't do it: that he won't break up with Kara, that he won't have to. As each minute ticks down, he knows that he's only getting closer and closer to the inevitable. And his terror deepens like a river-split canyon.

Tim thinks about the first line, and that makes him feel worse. He imagines Kara's reaction to it. She smiles at the end of the sentence. Her lips turn up, like the wings of a heart, at his words. Because he thinks she's great. Because he's going to say something nice, something sweet, something lovely. Because, maybe, he's going to say, “I love you,” and maybe they'll be together forever. Or so she thinks. Or so he thinks she thinks.

And he thinks, What if I can't go on? What if I see her smile and I can't do it? He sees himself in his mind, staring at the smiling woman across the way, helpless in the face of her happiness. He's stuck. He opens his eyes to get away from the look on Kara's face. He looks at the computer screen. 1:46. Tim's mouth is dry. Water, he thinks, and he stands up and walks away.

First Draft, Part Four

At 1:00, Tim thinks he should eat something. He makes for the break room to get a candy bar from the vending machine. When he opens the door, he sees that Dave is already back from his food run, sitting in a plastic chair at a plastic table, wrapped in the heady scent of grease that's been fried to perfection.

There's someone else at the table, too. Tim walks in on their conversation. And he hesitates mid-step when he realizes who it is who's eating lunch with Dave: that it's Third-Floor Shelly. Third-Floor Shelly who is funny, actually funny. Third-Floor Shelly who gets a dimple on just one side of her face when she smiles, although Tim can never remember which side. Third-Floor Shelly who made Kara scowl when she said Tim was the only one who looked good in his Hawaiian T-shirt on Hawaiian T-Shirt Day last summer. Third-Floor Shelly eating a celery stick filled with peanut butter and laughing at something Dave has just said. She takes a bite and turns around. She says, “Oh, hi Timmy,” not very embarrassed at all that her mouth is full of food. And Tim says, “Hi,” back as his momentum carries him the rest of the way through the door.

At the vending machine, Tim takes his time with the rows of candy bars. He needs something filling and tasty, but not so ooey or gooey that he has to spend the rest of the day tonguing nougat from the concavities of his teeth. He imagines what his breakup speech will sound like if he has to go through it with the tip of his tongue jammed in one of his molars. It doesn't sound good. Behind him, Dave and Third-Floor Shelly talk about Ron Daltry and the real reasons he must have come all the way up for an afternoon meeting. “Corporate fraud” reasons, and “Layoffs” reasons, and “To experience the transcendent ineptitude of G.T. Kressman first hand” reasons.

Tim chuckles at that. It makes him forget the right number to push for the Milky Way bar he's decided on.

“What? I'm serious,” Shelly says. “Stupidity like that only comes around once in a generation. You should appreciate it”

“I'll appreciate it when I don't have to do his work for him anymore,” Tim says. The Milky Way crashes to the bottom of the vending machine, and he bends over and picks it out.

“Crazy,” Third-Floor Shelly says. “You're crazy. If my boss made me do all of his 'Powerpaint' presentations and called half of his staff Jenny and the other half Jerry, and called his secretary Apple Bottom...” She closes her eyes and a smile crawls over her face. She savors the thought. A dimple pops into her right cheek. “Veuve-Clicquot in a bow tie,” she says. “That's what he is.” Third-Floor Shelly opens her eyes.

Tim takes a hasty bite out of his Milky Way. Because he was staring, and because he doesn't want this woman, this beautiful woman who's smiling at him, to realize that he doesn't know what Veuve-Clicquot is.

He smiles, and Dave laughs, and Third-Floor Shelly turns back to the other man in the room and his laughter. Tim leaves and lets the conversation fall back into its two-person rhythm. As soon as he's outside again, he wishes he were inside again, but it's too late, again, so he walks back to his cube.

First Draft: Part Three

Tim spends most of the morning reading, re-reading, until his speech is memorized. Dave from three cubicles away stops by around 12:30, just as Tim is cycling into the “Where Do We Go From Here” section of the script.

For now I think we should take some time apart. Maybe in a couple of weeks–

“Holloway, I'm picking up Drive-Thru. You want in?”

“No. Thanks, Dave. I'm good.”

–once things have settled a little, we can go to a movie, or grab something to eat at The Vantage. Just as friends. I think we'll be good friends. And on and on like that, the words float by. They hum in him like Muzak in a department store – each interruption no more than a call for assistance in menswear, a blip between two tinny notes.

He's never broken up with anyone before. In eighth grade Jenny Silverson asked Marsha Handey to ask Hal Underwood to ask Tim if he'd go to the end of the year dance with her. Tim told Hal he had to think about it overnight. He wanted to say, “No,” because Jenny Silverson had this thing where her gums were too big for her teeth, so, “No.” But she was a girl. And Tim had never been asked on a date before. And maybe her gums weren't too big after all, so he would think about it before he said, “No.” But after dinner that night, Hal called to say that he'd asked Marsha to the dance and she'd said, “Yes,” and that she'd told him that Kyle Sanders had asked Jenny Silverson out on the bus ride home, so now she was going with him instead. Instead of Tim. And that's the closest Tim's come: an almost “No.” Twenty-five and he's never gotten closer than that. So he wants to practice. He wants to make sure he does it right.

He spent a long time on the beginning. He knows, from the public speaking class that he took in senior year, that it's what you say at the very start that sets the tone. Even the very first word is pivotal. The first word of Tim's speech is, “Kara.”

“Kara,” he'll say. “I think you're great.”

Tim stares at a spreadsheet on his monitor and thinks about how important it is for her to hear that before anything else. He wants her to understand that he's breaking up with her, not because she's not great, but because they are not great. And that line was in there, too. “It's not that you're not great, it's that we're not great.” He put it in as close to the middle as he could. He thought she would need to be reminded by then.

First Draft, Part Two

The clock ticks past 10:17 with no sign of Kara. Sometimes she calls when she gets in. Not always, but sometimes. Just to say good morning. What a nice thing to do, he thought the first time it happened. But the phone doesn't ring, and he is thankful. And then she calls. Her name pops up on the phone's display: Tansetti, K. 478. He thinks about not answering, but his hand moves to the receiver. Let it go to voicemail, but he picks up. He cringes – deep breath. “Tim Holloway.”

“Hey, babe. Good morning,” comes her digitized voice through the handset.

“Oh, hi. I didn't know it was you."

“Are we doing lunch today? Because I have that thing at 1, and I need to make sure I'm back by 12:45 to get ready. So if you can't go early, we should just do our own things today, k?”

And there it is: “k?” Kara's favorite little expression. Kara's favorite little letter. She's obsessed with it, the letter K. K mugs and K t-shirts and plans to buy the giant K from the K-Mart on Carlson Ave (which should, of course, be spelled “Karlson” Ave.) as soon as it goes out of business. She told him once, on the couch, under a blanket, with the TV aglow and her head leaned soft against his chest, that the Ku Klux Klan couldn't be all bad, when their acronym was so good. KKK, she said, and there was relish in the timbre of her voice. Then she laughed. And before he knew what he was doing, he laughed too. And they didn't even have sex afterward. That night they just went to bed. But Tim still laughed.

“Oh, yeah,” Tim says. “Yeah, I've got a meeting until, like, 12:30 I think. Let me check.” He pulls up his calendar over his email and drags the mouse cursor down its neat rows of empty hours past 2:00. “Yeah. I've got a thing, too. Also. Sorry.”

“Is yours as bad as mine?” she asks.

“Me? No. No, not bad. Just stupid...stupid prep stuff. For this afternoon. You know.”

“Sure. Wait, this afternoon?”

“You know. That thing. Ron Daltry's coming up from D.C. Gotta get ready for the big boss.”

“You're presenting at that meeting? I didn't know that. Babe, that's huge, why didn't you tell me?”

“What? Me? No, no. Just. You know, just have to get ready. Prep...stuff.”

“Oh, well,” she says, and in the silence, Tim hopes she can't hear the sweat beading up from his forehead. He can hear it. Plink. Plink. Like rain on tin. Plink. He thinks the sound must carry through the receiver. He thinks that must be why she's so quiet. Plink. Plink. Plink. “Alright,” Kara says. “Well maybe I'll stop by after my one o'clock and say hi, k?”

“K,” he says. He hates himself for it. But he says it again in case she thinks he's going to break up with her later in the day. “K.”

“K, bye,” she says, and the phone clicks off before he responds.

A First Draft: Part One

This particular morning, Tim Patterson wakes up three minutes before his alarm tells him to. He lays on his side and watches through bleary eyes as the red LED colon that separates the 6 and the 5 winks on-off, on-off, on-off. He counts the blinks. One hundred three, one hundred four. He wills them to slow down. Slow, he thinks. Slow. Slow. With each blink, Slow. But despite his best efforts time moves, unstoppable, on toward the ante-meridian boundary between rest and the real world.

At seven a.m. “Howlin’” Hank Hargrove breaks the quiet that had nestled into the room. He is halfway through an unpleasant weather report: “-rain and low 50s this afternoon, and a chance of T-storms tonight, folks, so do what the doctor says and wear your rubbers!” A sound effect cuts in – a woman’s alluring “Ooh!” – and Tim rolls onto his back.

The ceiling fan creaks and taunts him – getup getup getup getup – until he finally squirms out of bed. He turns on the light. He pulls a clean pair of boxers from his dresser. He hobbles, morningsick and tired, down the hall and into the shower. When he gets back to his bedroom, “Fool in the Rain” is just hitting its Latin stride on the radio.

He’s prepared what he wants to say. He’s written it all down. He pulls his notebook out of his bag and flips it to a page toward the back. It lays open on his bed and Tim moves to the closet. While he sifts through his clothes, he mutters to himself. “It hasn’t been working for a while…” He looses a maroon dress shirt from its hanger. “We just don’t match, you and me…” He drags a pair of charcoal slacks up his legs. “I…I…” He pauses halfway up the buttons on his shirtfront, he stares up at the fan. A grimace passes over his face as he blurts out, “I don’t think you’re funny, and I really want to bone Third-Floor Shelly, ok?” He exhales and slumps his head, closes his eyes and cups his palm to his brow. “Jesus, Tim,” he says and pulls his hand down the skin of his face. Back to the notebook where he picks out the trail of his speech with his index finger, saying softly, “I think we’d both be happier if we were just friends.”

He reads and rehearses over a bowl of cereal and the sound of Top-40 hits on another radio, another station. In his imagination, Kara starts to whimper as soon as she hears “We have to talk,” and she’s reduced to tears before he even gets to the part where “We should see other people.” She’s a nice girl, Kara. A nice girl, Tim thinks, and he thinks about how nice she is. He thinks about how she’ll find another guy in no time, and about how happy they’ll be together. But the cereal doesn’t sit well in his stomach.

Work, and the light over his cubicle is blinking again. Facilities came to fix it the night before, as Tim was on his way out, but something more important must have come up. How many assholes does it take to change a lightbulb? he thinks, but only halfheartedly while he waits for the computer to boot up and his email to open. Twelve new messages. None from Kara. Relief. A news update and a pending trade in his fantasy football league, a forward from his mother that he deletes without opening, memo, memo, memo, memo. He sips his coffee and he reads, and soon the flicker overhead fades from overt annoyance to just another piece of background irritation.

Kara works in PR and she won't be in for another hour. PR doesn't come in until 10. Tim never understood why. That was his in when he met Kara: “Why do you guys come in so late?” A simple enough question.

“Well, I don't know about everyone else,” she said. “But I can never get to sleep, thinking about you – I need the extra rest.”

It startled him, it caught him off guard, and he felt himself make that face where his neck pulls back and his brow furrows in and his mouth half-opens, half-smirks, and he stayed like that, silent, until Kara laughed into the awkward silence by herself. She touched his arm when she laughed, and then he laughed too. Even though it wasn't funny. Nothing about it was funny. But he laughed. He laughed because she was pretty and the way she smelled reminded him of the dancers at the strip club. What she said wasn't funny, but it made him think, and what it made him think was, Here is a woman who might have sex with me. So he laughed.

He thinks about it now. He remembers it over his coffee that isn't quite lukewarm, and he shakes his head from side to side in disbelief. Not to say that it wasn't worth it. Not to say that he wasn't thankful for the sex. He looks up at the speckled-tile ceiling. It's not that I'm not thankful for the sex. It's just...well...you know, everything else. With his head leaned back, Tim closes his eyes. Because she really isn't funny, he thinks. And she thinks she is, but she isn't. And that's the worst part. Laughing at all those jokes that land dead in the air. I should have known from the start. I did know from the start. His computer beeps at him. Another email. Just a reminder. Meeting at 3:30. New initiative. Potential for top-level recognition.

College Smells Funny

When I was younger, I never wanted to be anyone else. Well, that's a lie. I used to spend hours pretending I was Link from the Legend of Zelda on his never-ending princess-saving quest. And on more than one of my birthdays, I wished that I would turn into Garfield - the cat, not the dead president - as soon as I blew out the candles on my cake. But the point is, I never wanted to be anyone else who was real. I never wanted to trade lives with sports stars or actors or scientists or leather-panted rockers.

Looking back on it now, I sometimes think I used to be an idiot.

All I seem to do these days is wish I were someone else, someplace else, doing something infinitely more exciting and rewarding. Right now, I'm in a study-carrel in the basement of the Purchase College library wishing I was still in college. And I hated college.

Sometime in my early-to-mid twenties I guess I just lost the will to accept myself for who I am and my life for what it is. I think it was right around the time I realized, I mean actually began to understand, that the only thing I can be, in the end, is whatever it is I make myself into. And making yourself into something, into anything - baker, butcher, businessman, beloved - that's really hard to do.

I kind of wish it would just happen already. That I wouldn't have to work at it and I'd just turn into something or someone. I'd have made something of myself without doing anything at all. And I guess I can do that, just sit around and wait for my life to fall into my lap. But I'm pretty sure if I did that, before I knew it, I'd have made myself into a bum. And I'm pretty sure I'd be better off as me now as me as a bum.

Still, how much cooler would life be if I were Ed Norton instead? 8 million, that's how much.

Writing a Novel: Parte the Firste (and possibly the laste)

John Steinbeck did this thing when he was writing East of Eden: each day, before he began work on the story, he wrote a letter to his editor, Pascal Covici. It was a sort of a warm up, a stretching of the mind-muscles, and if the end result is anything to go by, it was an incredibly good idea. I don't know anyone with a name as cool as Pascal Covici, but I do have a blog now, so I figured, why not put it to good use?

I've been writing this so-called novel for too long now, and today I'm about to set off on another unexpected tangent. It may result in this three-times-a-week slog becoming even more grueling, or it might end up making the story into exactly what I've been struggling to make it since I first had the idea: finished.

The idea I had last night is a bold one - compressing three semi-realized characters into one hyper-real super-character, the likes of which hasn't been seen in literature since Theodore Geisel introduced us to this fine fellow. Well, maybe not quite that bold. Still, it's big enough for me to be afraid of it. And that's always a good sign, right? But the problem is that it requires rewriting. And rewriting and rewriting. In fact, if I follow through with this idea, it will be my 3rd time drastically rewriting the first 50 pages of Part II. If it comes to a 4th time, I think I might cry.

But here I am, enamored of the idea. What's a boy to do but follow it down a brambly path? And now it's getting late. I need to start working for real. Today an outline to see how crazy my plan might be. Tomorrow? Self-destruct mode begins anew.

The ineffable genius of Paul Simon

I was going to write a whole thing just now about this quote from the song "Hurricane Eye" by Paul Simon:

"You want to be a writer,
Don't know how or when?
Find a quiet place,
Use a humble pen."

A whole post about the nature of audacity and humility in the life of a writer, and how they can - and must - coexist if that writer hopes to get anything of any real value done. I was going to spit out an entire discourse, full of links and words of wisdom from my mother's refrigerator ("Quiet women rarely make history"). I had a plan. I had an outline. I had slightly more energy than I usually do at 10 pm on a Wednesday night.

And then I started to write.

Which is about the time that the true meaning of humility blossomed in front of me in much the same way that a traffic jam can blossom in front of you while you're driving 64 m.p.h. on the Hutchinson River Parkway at 8:03 on a Monday morning. My mind seized.

And here I am again. Seizing.

There's something inside me, swimming around in the axons and glia of my brain. I don't know how to spit it out. I just don't know. But I know it's right. I know it's true. And it is quickly becoming the source of unimaginable frustration. Why? Because I'm forgetting my humility. What do I want to say? I want to say this:

Tell the truth. Tell it fearlessly.

That's all. Six humble words. But I wasted 250 gaudy ones before I found them. And I think that's what Paul Simon was talking about when he said, "Use a humble pen." Tell the truth and nothing else - as simple as it may be, it's the only thing worth telling.

I hate to say it, but the poets might be right.

A Brief Commentary on the State of Cliches and Time Travel in Modern Folk Rock

Here is an example of how the future can influence past events. It's kind of like in Back to the Future II, when 2015 Biff steals the Sports Almanac from 1985 Marty and gives it 1955 Biff so that 1985 Hill Valley turns into a toned down version of 2007 Baghdad. But not really.

Anyway, here's what happens. The song is called "Two Points," and it's by a young lady named Deb Talan who'll sing a nice song if you hand her a guitar and a microphone and say please. In the second verse of this song, she sings this fine example of a cliche:

"Why's it get so complicated
When two people make love?"

I remember I cringed a little the first time I heard it. I'd liked the song so much up to then, and she went and threw that little gem in. Seriously, we've all heard it before. Sex complicates relationships. Do you really need to write another song about it? No, you don't. But you did anyway. Crud. But I digress...

The thing is, for people who consider themselves writers, cliches are like fingernails on a blackboard. Case in point: writing that previous line made me shudder like a wet kitten - except I didn't look nearly as cute. I think it has something to do with a deep fear of having someone in a tweed jacket point a finger at us and call us "unoriginal." I don't know where this fear comes from. Maybe it would go away if we just got rid of tweed jackets, but that's another story for another time. But I digress. Again.

Anyway, after that cliche I'd just about written off the song by that point. But imagine my surprise when these lines popped up:

"I wish I were a bird, she said.
So you could fly away? No.
So we could be together,
with no thoughts of yesterday."

And this is why I was surprised. With that first line, she sets you up for yet another cliche. And you should be expecting it at that point, because of what came earlier. Hell, with the 2nd line she actually feeds you the cliche that you should think she's going to say.

" 'I wish I were a bird,' she said."
Then you say, "So you could fly away. Yeah, I get it. Let's all move on."

But instead of sticking with that, she twists it on its head and turns the expected cliche into something quite unexpected.

"No, jerkface: so we could be together with no thoughts of yesterday. God, I'm not that shallow."

See? Unexpected. And even - dare I say? - poignant. It's a nice trick if you can pull it off, and it made me like the song more than if the first cliche hadn't existed at all.

So what does any of this have to do with wayback machines and whatnot? Well, Sherman, let me explain:

1. You hear the first cliche ("...make love...") and you have a particular reaction to it ("Aw, jeez. Really?")
2. You hear the second, twisted non-cliche ("...no thoughts of yesterday...") and you have a contrapuntal reaction to it ("Oh. Huh. Wow. That was nice.")
3. You're forced to re-evaluate your initial reaction to the initial cliche ("Wait a minute. Maybe...")
4. Therefore, events from the future have directly influenced, and changed, events in the past. You just inadvertently traveled in time. QED.

Unless, of course, the 2nd lyric about the birds is just a cliche that I'm not aware of. In that case, I just spent an hour writing this up so I could sound like an idiot. Well, it wouldn't be the first time.

Foodstuffs

Just a list: Things that, when I tell people I won't eat them, make those people want to punch me in the throat.

10. Kettle Corn
9. Cheese, in most of its forms (more on this later)
8. Mexican food (see above)
7. Bananas
6. Tea (do you like tea? Well, I don't get it.)
5. Cream cheese (I felt this, of all the cheeses, deserved special mention)
4. Cheeseburgers (see #9)
3. Sushi - yup, even tuna rolls
2. Macaroni and cheese (this is the one I get the most comments on, and it would be #1, except most people don't have the imagination to expect the real #1, which is...)
1. Soup. I hate soup. Fuck you, soup.

Let the punches commence.

Listening to Elliott Smith makes you want to kill yourself...but in a good way.

The song is "Waltz #2" on X/O. It's amazing, and you should listen to it if you've never heard it before. In fact, whether you've heard it or not, you should listen to the whole album. Right now. Instead of reading this. Go do that. You'll thank me.

For the idiots who are still reading this, I'll refer you to the chorus of "Waltz #2":

I'm never gonna know you now,
But I'm gonna love you anyhow.

These lyrics are more than melancholy enough to fit perfectly into Smith's oeuvre - yeah, that's right, "oeuvre" - but for the longest time, as I wept softly and sang along, I was singing this instead:

You're never gonna know, you know,
But I'm gonna love you anyhow.

And what I wonder now is, divorced from any context within or without the song, which of those is the sadder state of affairs?

In my sprained heart, I think that the second one is the sadder of the two, although just barely, and this is why. In the first version, it feels like "you" could be anyone. It could be someone walking down the street who "I" is never going to see again, hence, "I'm never gonna know you now." But in the 2nd version, the "you" who is loved seems like someone who the "I" would be forced to see day in and day out, while lugging around all that unrequited baggage. But "you" is so amazing that "I" has no choice but to love "you." Think Tim and Dawn from The Office. And really, what's sadder than that?

So that's the debate that's been raging in my head for the last 6 months or so. I'm glad we cleared everything up. Seriously, though, listen to that album.

Blog City

So this is what Blog City is like. I figured the buildings would be taller. A gilded with crackles of electricity. Come on, Interweb. You can do better than this.