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.