Day 41

          Today was a step back but it's daylight savings time.  I'm pissed off that I wasted my time hanging out with friends instead of spending more time doing this.  I don't care if I do nothing but work if it means I produce something I like.  It's hard to take risks when you have a fleeting sense of purpose.  Boo.  Stupid friends.  It's a long story though so something can happen in it tomorrow.  And I'll entirely cut this whole thing out when I revise it some day.
         Didn't make it to 1,777 either.  Or whatever number I was aiming for.  Which is fucking bullshit.  I hate this.

 

            He took her to a hotdog stand out by a crescent shaped dingy lake.  The dirt around the lake was fragrant and could be smelled through the slightly cracked window as they pulled into a spot behind a van with a Nebraska license plate.  Couples and third wheels sat in comfortably friendly positions on benches, and the door of Ol Sal’s Chicago Dogs stood wide and erect against a grey concrete brick.

            Sal remembered Charles, and Charles had a vague notion of who Sal was.  Outside of the two dimensional fact that he was a career hotdog vender, Charles knew very little.  He hoped he could talk to him about baseball, and other generic identifying cultural facts.  Anne reached out to grab his hand as he walked through the door, and Charles dodged with a languid one step slide, insisting to himself that the doorway was only wide enough for one person. 

            Charles felt he had accidentally immersed himself in this world in the course of hours.  He had made himself known on the corporate level, did some bidding for his manager, became entrapped with the affection of a female worker, and suddenly it felt like real like was closing in on him.  He pictured himself a year from the day, doing things his current self was clueless about, and felt like a transient in his own mind.  He pictured himself sitting at a bus station while his ideas, beliefs, and ethics drove past oblivious to his existence listening to loud music and staring with blinders on at the road in front of them.  This version of himself was taking the bus between home and work, home and work, home and work.

            He was drawn back into reality by Sal’s attentive gaze.  Sal was wearing a white apron with ketchup stains all over it, a red long sleeved shirt underneath, a visor with locks of long graying hair shooting out of it like grey missiles.  He hadn’t slowed down in his old age, he was still a presence at the hot dog desk.  Unlucky for him, he was working at a hot dog place.

            “I’ll take two of the giant chili ones,”  Charles scrutinized the board behind Sal while perceiving Sal’s impatient expression in his peripheral.  He looked back at Anne, who also didn’t look too happy with him.  He made eye contact with a guy who’s hands were covered in ketchup in a booth eating the last bits of a bun, who nodded and blinked with empathy.

            Anne ordered half the menu.  She must not get out very often, Charles thought.  He nursed his chili dogs so he wouldn’t finish by the time she got her deep fried menagerie.  Sal hollered at the slackjawed, knuckledragging grunts in the back who chopped, sprayed oil and swung frying pans with deft precision.  Scalding noises followed by sizzling repeated perpetually.

            Charles sat across from her in a banana yellow booth towards the back of the store.  It was nice outside and most people seemed to be getting in and out as quickly as they could.

            She was suddenly quiet and happy.  It was funny how those things usually went together.  His nervous energy abounded, keeping him chattering away about inane things like his favorite breeds of dogs and salted versus unsalted nuts.  She pretended to be interested and he hated himself again.  He drowned his sorrow by choking himself with the chili dogs.  They sat like kids who had been transformed into adults overnight and could now eat anything they wanted.  It was an appropriate first date.

            Sal came over when he noticed they had fallen on silence and attempted to break the ice more.  He said he remembered when Charles used to come here with his father as a child, and Charles pictured the man holding the fish sitting across from him.  He believed it was possible.  Sal put a hand on his shoulder, shaking him with gusto and staring across smiling at Anne, who smiled back.  They were playing a game of ping pong with grins.

            Out in the street, someone took one of the lugnuts off of a fire hydrant but instead of spraying it leaked in a continuous flow.  The water took a direct course down a crack in the sidewalk and found its way into the sewer.  A mob of local kids formed, chagrined by the unexplosive and unexciting event.  Sal ran out with a broom and chased them away like a flock of seagulls, shouting expletives in italian.

            He took her home and she tried to kiss him as she got out of the car.  Out of a referred kindness that may have been more commonly identified as relief, he offered to give her a ride to work in the morning.  She smiled and waved through the window, and the old man was sitting twenty feet away from where he was positioned earlier but still staring his forebearing  diffident gaze.

            Charles turned the radio on and twisted the frequency knob carelessly as he drove.  He found a station which was playing a long series of Tom Jones songs, and despair settled over him like a cloud.  He had no idea what he was doing.  He had no choice but to allow his senses to be dulled and wait for his first paycheck.

            He turned the key in his apartment door and went back out to the car to retrieve the black suitcase from the back.  He thought it might be missing for a second, just for the sake of bad luck.  He drew it out while balancing himself on the back seat with one arm like starting a lawnmower. 

            The old man from across the hall saw him walking with a miniature suitcase and a chili stain Charles himself didn’t know about on his face.  A rumbling from the apartment at the end of the hall shook the carpet in front of Charles’ room but he didn’t notice. 

            Charles poured a cup of coffee and plopped two cubes of sugar in it.  He sat down on the couch and couldn’t remember whether or not he had a dog at some point.  His hands definitely felt lonely without petting or prodding at something.  He turned the lights down and flicked on his desk lamp, bathing the room in a dimming glow. 

            The black case stared at Charles from across the room, its golden embroidered surface clashing with the room like a serpent in a field. 

He grabbed a fork and started pressing it into the lock on the little suitcase.  He pushed tentatively and without effort at first, but when it started to feel like he was making progress he pushed harder, until the clasp broke and fell under the couch.  He shrugged and removed the other clasp by applying the same amount of force, and looked inside.

He removed a sheet of refined stationary from the envelope and held it on his lap in front of the desklamp. It was a letter addressed to Mr. Dante Pulp from an anonymous person.  It contained the details of an experiment which preceded the current one.  It was written in a hasty but copious cursive, obviously in the moment of extreme outrage.

“The results were inexplicable.  We didn’t only lose good men, we lost good equipment.  We lost integrity, we lost dignity, we lost it all.  To think you’d try to start the experiment over again from the beginning is out of the question and bordering on wreckless and callous misuse of company funding.”  It was clear to Charles that Mr. Pulp wouldn’t bother reading such a letter, and he wasn’t sure why he even bothered picking it up.  He was convinced the suitcase must have contained something more important. 

He turned the thing around, stared at it from all angles, held it up to the light.  It was some sort of trust exercise, he thought.  He kicked himself for opening it in the first place, he didn’t know what had come over him.  The postscript was a change of pace from the body of the letter, simply stating cryptically:  “We’ll get you.  We’ll be back.  We know where you are.”  The cursive featured flourishes on the “We”s, similar to “we the people”.  It didn’t seem as shocking to Charles as it could have been, Pulp seemed like the kind of guy who could make enemies. 

Charles tried to go to sleep but was drawn back to the couch where he watched gameshows with sleeplessness through the wee hours of the night.  He tinkered with the briefcase, trying to fit it back together and reinstert the unimportant letter.  It felt like he hadn’t been to sleep in days again, but this time he was sure it was the same day. 

Nowhere in the area was open this late, although his restlessness threatened to force Charles out of his solitary confinement.  He dreamed of making money at a job where he had some sort of accountability.  A little blue bird sang to him from the window sill, an effusive and irrating song that signaled the end of time.  Charles slept in a convulsing pile on the wooden paneled floor.