Day 70: Trucking along

Let's keep this thing going.  I might have lost a little direction over the weekend, yeah.  Now it's Monday and this is serious business.

I better figure out something to do with myself during these winter months, it's already snowing out there.  I'm going to drive myself crazy with loneliness reading alone, but that's no biggee!  What do I expect?  Every day I spend exclusively reading I feel more in touch with the "outside world" again.

            Roger would push his way out of the house, carrying the girls backpacks, a thermos of coffee, his keys n his mouth, and somehow locking the door behind him.  Even on the weekends, Jim would be sitting tinkering the day away.  The car was parked a city block away from the house the garage had been off limits since Jim started to live in it.  Roger fumbled the backpacks a number of times, the girls insisting on not carrying anything themselves.  He laughed and pretended the bundle was extremely heavy and that he was a circus strongman, picking each foot up like the legs weighed hundreds of pounds.

He threw the bags in the trunk of the car, putting the thermoses and lunches into the cupholders at the front of the car and then opening the girls doors for them.  Sandy had a bandaid under her eye from when her glasses broke and nicked her, Patty dressed just like Dora the Explorer.  They piled into the Subaru Hatchback, Roger incredulously checking the rearview mirror as they left.  The tree vanished, the house vanished, the sharp turn onto the dirt paved road would have alluded him if it wasn’t for the sign post that tipped them off to the cabin.

The girls sat in the back, they were inseparable.  They talked in their hushed aboriginal language, discussing matters that Roger wouldn’t be able to make sense of even if he paid close attention.  He dropped them off at the school in downtown Rockford, getting a polite “Thank you daddy” as they jumped out onto the curb, and Patty reminded him school was out at 2:30.  Every day was a fresh adventure, it wasn’t like he had been doing this for 3 months since Miranda went on her expedition.

            He checked the mail as he drove back up, singing along to an Emerson Lake and Palmer cassette in the Suburu’s tape deck.  The mail from yesterday still sat there, he retrieved it after manually cranking down the window, a stack of past due notices, credit card fliers, and subscription renewal notifications. He was subliminally influencing the girls with his music, although he doubted they heard it at all.  He was clinging onto his favorite bands like his identity depended on it, he wasn’t sure how to be a dad when his wife was gone.  The car came roaring back into the driveway, his heavy burdens gone momentarily. 

            “You gotta be willing to swing and miss, you have to keep swinging.”  Jim was repeating to himself behind the closed wall.  The sparrows chirped constantly in the tree standing between the building and the garage.  He laughed under his breath at the sheer ridiculousness of Jim, nonplussed by the little men he had been keeping in the cage. 

            Jim left the shack for a minute with a huge coil of extension cable, unraveling it behind him as he went up behind the house.  Roger was sitting at the table, trying to figure out what to make the girls for dinner.  He had embraced his guilty obsession of watching day time soap operas, he left them on as background noise at first but now wanted to know why Denise would let her father take the baby with her back to the ranch.

            Jim shouted loudly, it was success again.  He had a false positive atleast once a day, which usually resulted in the racket going on outside getting louder for awhile and then fizzling out in disappointment.  He pulled the drapes shut, went out to check the mail once every couple of hours, and generally just checked his watch every few minutes. 

            At a quarter after noon, Roger stopped depressing himself by looking through the bills.  All of the nice looking, watermarked letters were made out to his wife, all of the mass circulated ones to him.  He stepped out into the backyard, the clothesline with the string of pins hanging white sheets off of it, the birds perched on the supporting fence.

            “Last week I was awesome, this week I suck, what’s up with that?”  Jim said, with the pieces of his robot sitting dejected in front of him.  “You know, I’d appreciate it if you knocked, Roger.” 

            “Sorry I let your little men run all over the place.”  Roger said, not genuinely sorry, but looking for a stomping block to start talking to Jim about.

            Jim listened stoically, and demonstrated a mouse trap kind of device he had setup.  He pushed a button which looked like a Jeopardy clicker, a fan hanging above them powered up and released shining phospherescent balls that hung in the air like bubbles.  He reached out and caught each one on a extended fly swatter, adding them to a jar where they didn’t pop.  It was marked “Food Bubbles” on the side, and Jim inserted a few of them into his nose.

            “Those little guys, they’re pretty good with language and teamwork,”  Jim said, Roger distractedly looking at all of the other seemingly useless objects in the shack.  “They probably went out to town and found real jobs, maybe got a house together.  I didn’t like keeping them in the cage much but they seemed kind of mad at me.  I hope they don’t come back with weapons.”

            The day came and went, Roger stared at Jim doing his work.  He was perplexed as to what Jim was doing the whole time, this perplexion transformed into genuine interest.  Jim combed the hair of a long pipe that was covered in hair and it spit out a silver mucus that he immediately threw away. 

            “The cord that’s attached to the house keeps the air from escaping that pneumatic tube.”  Jim said suddenly, referring to a tube that started on one end of the ceiling and popped out of the other.  Roger nodded, thought it over, and then nodded again.  “If the air gets out of the tube, it’s no longer the special genius air that keeps me stable and secure inside the garage.  The outside world offers too much variety for a genius like me.”

            Jim had once left the house for a day, and when he got back all of his good ideas had left his brain.  He had to start over from scratch, throw everything away.  He couldn’t leave for supplies, he had to figure out ways to conjure up equipment for experiments from thin air.

           That's all I got guys.  Shitty day.