Not that it's becoming easier, but consistency has made it easier to generate that 1,000 words I'm looking for. I need to up that to 1,100 soon. Once we get to 2,000, that's a pretty big amount of text. Then it's just a matter of working slowly and meticulously on a central theme, maybe I can keep that sucker going long enough to put 200,000 words together in 100 days about the same thing. I have a feeling continuity will be the most difficult thing to establish. Either way, people that have stuck on board this far (which is only me, congratulations me!), we're getting somewhere. It feels like trying to dig a hole in concrete with a spoon, but we've went through a lot of spoons, and soon we'll have that leaden weighted spoon that doesn't break as easily but still has a difficult time getting past the surface. I need to find a character I enjoy and stick with that guy. Most of the books I've read lately have had central characters that are uninteresting, pathetic, or are overly flawed so that a breakdown seems inevitable throughout, like ticking time bombs. I don't want that lame time bomb character. But I know I'm not in a position to critique anyone. Quantity quantity quantity.
He picked up the newspaper, unfolded it, andremoved it from the plastic. December 15th 1920. Had he traveled through time?
Entering the phone booth between the two monolith buildings, he released and pressed and released and pressed the coin return, but there was no dial tone. He remembered the days where people were using cekkphones, now there was one payphone out here and it dd not work.
The sky still looked impregnable, even with the smokescreen line splitting it into two. Like on an old sitcom, it had been unequally diviced for two forces. It’s just me on this side, Calvin thought. He rubbed his ear, still red and agitated from the sounds of the bullets racing past it like cars on the freeway. He adjusted his nylon strapped wrist watch and read the hands through the cracked surface. Four oclock.
“The train station! Four-thirty!” He blurted out with a hand over his eyes. He couldn’t remember why only that he had to be there. Appointments stuck in his mind, even before the war he had been conscious of exactly what he had to do next. He put the receiver down quietly and peered down the empty street, adjusting his glasses for maximum clarity.
Stepping out of the booth, he left the door sitting slack like a japanese wall partition. In the alley between the two office buildings, he sensed he was being watched. He stood with his arms up in the air, palms in front of him, gesturing for whoever was there to come out. No one did. Turning on a heel, he walked down the bricks of the street. It occurred to him how unpleasant it would be to drive in this area, the summit formed a giant slowly inclining V shape, the constant kathunks would be on par with a rollercoaster ride.
Reaching the top, he peered down on the city before him, suddenly unfamiliar. The arms on the four faced clock tower read three thirty. He reset his watch, twisting the knobs like radio tuners. The spring inside felt like it was wound too tightly, ad he chose to believe the big clock.
Calvin looked up from his watch and saw two monkeylike creatures, arms dragging behind them, dangling like ribbons. The look in their eyes were absent, noncommital, and Calvin stumbled backwards against a construction fence as they scuttled by. The second creature featured a moon shaped birthmark on its back, a spot which was bereft of hair, red and agitated in a crescent. Its lower half convulsed as its stiff legs carried it in a crisp army march, and it saluted with one long arm as it passed.
Calvin walked in the direction they came from, staring into vacant office buildings and small buildings as he passed them. The streets had went from familiar to generic, the ostensible absence of people removing the personality from these streets. He remembered weeks earlier walking these same streets, there would have been a gang of bums asking him for quarters. He got into a scuffle with these hooligans before, throwing a hand of change and running the other direction. They weren’t interested in the change, but his apartment was close by.
“I’ve got an hour,” Calvin said to himself, looking at his newly reset watch. “Better stop by the old apartment.” Calvin was still living in the place he had before the war started. Funny they would all die for a life that no one wants to live. He dodged admission into the special forces in the natural way, which was blind luck. He sat glued to the glinting box in his apartment by himself, on his birthday, and cheered as he heard mixed responses from each room around him. His friend Bug-Eyed Willy from across the hall hung himself that night. Self fulfilling prophecy, he thought to himself. That poor sucker.
Calvin entered through an empty square which inhabited a line flanked by panes of glass still intact. The revolving door was locked from the inside, it only turned a few inches left or right. The overlook above was cluttered with tree branches, dirt and sod, spread inside of it like a walless flower pot.
Wally the concierge stood by the desk, with a freshly pressed maroon suit with a chrysanthemum rising out of his breast pocket. Many of the hotels residents still lived here, and he continued his duty, with little else to live for. Since the accident, Wally was less guarded and inhibited than before, and had grown ornery and jaded.
Calvin tried to sneak by to the elevator by following the path along the wall, Wally’s view obstructed slightly by the facsimile Michaelangelo statues stretching out in a line in the interior. Calvin stared at his watch and hit the elevator button. The elevator looked to be stuck on the 17th floor, so he moved to the next one, and the one after, none of which moved when he pressed their call buttons.
“Doors jammed!” Wally called, leaning forward on one hand on the desk. “Waiting for a maintenance guy, but that’s fucking me, and what am I gonna do about. Take the stairs.”
Calvin thanked him with a nod and proceeded onto the stairwell. Flight after flight of stairs passed by, he felt like the mechanism on an escalator that moved it higher and higher. He reached into his pocket and removed the hotel passcard key from his wallet. Passing the 9th floor, Calvin heard the scraping and pillaging noises of looters at work, hurrying the rhythm of his walk to beat them back upstairs.
They’d reach the 9th floor already, it’s only a matter of time, he thought. He referred to the looters to himself as the scientists, due to their facial masks and white suits. Their work was meticulous, even-keeled and systematic. They would wave at passerbies before unloading their cargo in a gigantic assembly line down into the depths of the dungeon below. They worked during the day, and at night you’d hear them tinkling early into the morning hours.
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