Absurdity

You’ve just woken up. Your mind, exiting the somnolent program it has run for the past four hours, directs your shuffle into the bathroom. You open the faucet. The water tumbles slowly through silent air to splash loudly on the bottom of the cold ceramic sink. You are irritated. The water pressure is good today. It is never good, and you’ve gotten used to the slow meander of droplets trickling onto your hands, to be collected for thirty seconds and then splashed on your face. The new speed throws you off, so you lessen the flow to match the old pressure. Where is the face moisturizer? Your coworker at the call center, Jennifer, had recommended it to you on that particularly bad day you’d had two weeks ago. You’d gone to work after inhaling several lines of a new “research drug” a friend had given you. Of course, it wasn’t a friend. It was just some guy you’d smoked weed with who looked pretty official (apparently the FDA had plainclothes agents now), but that was beside the point. Your face had been abnormally relaxed that day, and Jennifer had noticed.

You have a weird relationship with Jennifer. When you started work three months ago, she fixated on you immediately, looking for something you of all people could not give her: attention. She’d sidle up to you wearing that hideously bright orange sweater and miniskirt and exclaim loudly, “David, you look so good today!” Every day. Always the same words.

At first, you didn’t know what to make of it. You were a twenty-four-year-old man who entertained thoughts of intercourse infrequently; last night, having actually felt some desire, you’d furiously swiped right on several women on dating apps, trying to get a match that very moment, now, so you could jump into your car and feel the rush of sexual release. The only match you’d gotten was a suspiciously young girl whose bio had read “Here for a good time, not a long time!” You can’t stand openly hedonistic young people. You’d gone to the doctor, of course, with serious concerns you might be asexual. He’d checked your signs, run several tests on you, eventually found traces of cocaine in your system, sat down, wiped his glasses two times (you hated the even number, and wished you could ask him to do it again, just to make it a tolerable three) and suggested therapy. Suffice it to say, you never visited the doctor again.

Have you ever noticed that feeling you get when you’ve just woken up and haven’t done anything yet? You’re going through the motions of yesterday’s morning, of every morning you have ever lived; the day is undefined. You walk down the street, it’s a beautiful day, the birds are buzzing and the bees are chirping. But the day is flavorless and you are waiting for it to take shape. You think every day is like this, neutral till some event arrives to define it. You walk to the bus station slowly, savoring the feeling of this nothingness. Were your day to end like this, you’d be happy.

It is not to be: the bus is two minutes late, and instead of Fred, the usual driver, at the wheel you get a thin, pinch-faced lady who looks as though she wants to run the bus through the gates of hell. The box-like machine starts, and you are off. She drives faster than Fred and accelerates dangerously before hitting the brakes hard at red lights. You decide you don’t like her. Besides the unpleasantly new driver, all is the same. In the front sat the still powdered crack addict, who was slyly taking swigs from a SunnyD bottle and smacking his lips appreciatingly, before looking around as if momentarily worried he could actually be seen savoring the children’s drink. Behind him sat a white, rotund lady with a yellow fedora who stared intermittently and suspiciously at the addict. What interested you was that despite her hostile gaze, she always sat in the same place across from the addict. Perhaps she thought the presence of a slightly unhinged individual would repel worse individuals from sitting in the vicinity. So far she was right. You don’t bother to look at the rest of the bus. You look out the window; you are going so fast the wind strikes the window and shears off, whooshing endlessly as the vehicle hurtles on. You wish you could fly. You do the next best thing and take one of the pills you bought last night out of your pocket. Your fingers fumble with the small item, and you shakingly bring it to your lips. Oh, the speed! If Fred was here, you wouldn’t have to do this. The day is no longer neutral.

You get off the bus in front of the Chinese restaurant where you grab breakfast every day. After your last acid trip, you’d decided the idea of breakfast, lunch, and dinner foods were idiotic and launched your rebellion against the food gods by defiantly eating chow mein for the first meal (the old labels sucked, so you decided to denote mealtimes by number instead). Like always, you sit at the large three-person table with dragons engraved in it. The carvings pop out like the sight of a familiar face in a crowd. The dragon, sinuously stretching its long neck, fell short of the boar it hoped to devour. The stern porker looks out resolutely at you. It has evaded capture forever, and its success in escape has been immortalized in this table. The waiter, someone you have never seen here before (what was with today and new people?), approaches you almost gingerly, as though you might bite him or something. Do you look high? You take out your phone and open the inner camera. The waiter waits. Bushy eyebrows, red-tinged eyes, ambiguously receding hairline. What is off today? Oh, wait. You have one eye closed. You tell it to open, and the eyelid grudgingly slides up. You grunt your order to the waiter and look away to signal his dismissal.

It’s time for work. A quick drag on a cigarette and another thirty-minute bus ride later, you arrive at the grim, squat building known as the Help Center (Suicide Prevention Center makes you feel as though you are profiting off of the misery of others). Up the stairs you go, whistling mirthlessly; the fortune cookie you had gotten today had read, “Find release from your cares, have a good time,” and this note fills your heart with sardonically pleasant feelings.

When you arrive on your floor you notice Jennifer is shouting scarily at Todd about distribution networks and sensitivity training. You are late, but it’s possible she won’t notice you slip into your cubicle. Shit, shit, shit. You’ve been had. Her eager eyes dart to you frighteningly quick. But she has to cross the rectangular room, with the large columns near your cubicle obstructing your position and three...two...one... You slip off your shoes to go noiseless and start running, shoulders hunched, dashing behind the row of cubicles. At the end of the row, you take a left, making your way to the bathroom. You stand before the door.

Have you ever noticed when you are scared how utterly banal and stupid the words “Just push through the fear” sound? You think about that a lot. Does anybody actually push through their fear? In the corner of the bathroom, water drips; it echoes. The plumbing hasn’t been fixed in years, and along with various kinds of rodents, there is a large colony of mutant cockroaches residing in the building. Are you afraid? Terrified. Your hands shiver, and you feel cold in this place right in the middle of your chest, but it’s not real, it is abstract. The cold is a metaphor you use to describe the altogether weird feeling of being scared.

You crawl into a stall (because at this point, bipedal locomotion was impossible), and maneuver yourself so that your body is balancing on the toilet, legs raised. You listen, ears cocked, in the way you imagine deer listen for wolves in the dark. Head upright, nervousness expressing itself in random spasms, involuntary reactions to imaginary noises. You want to scream. But no. No screaming. That would give the game up. The door opens. You can’t stand it anymore. Your hands dive into your pockets. What do you have? A cigarette, a disposable vape, a random pill that looks like Tylenol.

“David? David, are you in here?”

She pauses, and you swear you can hear her heart saying, “Ba-dum, Ba-dum, Ba-dum.” It is telling you to run.

“David, we need to talk, please…”

You keep still. Maybe if you sit there long enough, the voice will recede into memory, and you could instead be frightened of it in your dreams, where you could reasonably be sure you were in a simulated reality.

Wait a second. What was Jennifer doing in the men’s room? This was the men’s bathroom, wasn’t it? You take a look around. In the corner, you see a small basket full of long thin objects. You unwrap one of them (labels are deceiving, you believe), revealing a tampon. You didn’t notice the feminine products the last time you were here. Come to think of it, this bathroom was a lot cleaner than what you were used to. You always got the feeling that some of the other fellows (you especially suspected Dan) took personal pleasure in the degree of filthiness they could inflict on the poor toilets of the second-floor men’s bathroom. Had you been able to voice your feelings without sounding aggressive or eccentric, you would have, but alas! Regret.

A wet thump fills the air. A scream, and then, silence. You cautiously open the stall door and step outside. Sitting in the center of the room is the fattest rat you have ever seen: Jennifer is gone. Irreverent as you are, you manage a short salute at the rodent. You cannot be sure what happened, but you do not question it.

You exit the bathroom and flee the scene; that is as much work as you’d like to do today.

[Ode to The Day: An Epilogue in C Major]

There was once a Chinese Daoist philosopher named Zhuangzi who dreamt he was a butterfly frolicking on a summer evening, content and happy. In the dream, he flew and flew, fluttering to the heavens before diving down to return to Earth. After all, he was a butterfly, and he was free. Then, in the middle of the dream, the philosopher awoke suddenly: he was Zhuangzi again. Puzzled, he asked a question: “Was he still Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or was he a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi?”

You are standing on a bridge. Below you, above you, around you, lies open air. A thousand sensations fill your body, and you fancy that you can feel the universe enclosed within the tight limits demarcated by your flesh. You rummage in your pockets looking for a rock to throw into the water. Instead, you find your moisturizer and chuckle, a hearty laugh morphing into a full-blown cackle that leaves you breathless and wheezing. You sit for a little while after that, recovering steadily in the moderately chilly air. Finally, you rise. It is time. You take the moisturizer and slowly but deliberately let it drop.

As it sails through the air, you consider the numerous things happening almost simultaneously elsewhere. On Earth, thousands of people are dying, some peacefully, some violently, and some indifferently and intentionally. Lives are snuffed out at a ridiculous rate as Death greedily reaps their souls. Life goes on, though; babies are being born, wailing their claim to a world just recently vacated by others. Various small earthquakes, droughts, and floods(some as of now unrecognized) are happening. Elsewhere in the universe, stars explode, and suns come into being, gloriously birthed into existence. Black holes devour celestial bodies, and planets revolve around their suns (you realize that gravity too is a form of oppression, albeit one with a long chain) in a seemingly endless cycle. You feel like a butterfly diving down, down, down. You don’t know how you feel, how you should feel, even what feeling is. That is why it gives you the utmost pleasure to sink into the anonymity that being but one of an extensive list of concurrent events provides you. No more ambiguity. No more thinking. This moment is everything for you. For once, such a singular focus frees you. You sigh. Three. Two. One. The moisturizer hits the water. Splash.

You start walking home. Outside, the sun shines brilliantly but hesitatingly: it is 6 pm.