Strychnine Over(ride)

Thursday

    The sigh behind him as Adam's feet landed square at Michigan and Vallejo could have come from those feet, or hands or eyes or elbows that swung, or shoulders as the job drained from them: only the exhaling bus doors closing, though, that breath fitted in, the last part in his working day. Adam kicked heels after toes and walked away, letting the job with its myriad petty headaches and tyrannical urgencies drain away, sheepish shadows filling cracks and stormdrains in his wake. Down a block and then left, then up four flights and it was almost gone: lights up over his furnished one-bedroom Adam swung the door behind him and the decided slam shut the office out. Door closed, all else was forgotten.
    Fallen on the floor, his backpack slouched beneath the table there by the door, supporting spare keys and a week of mail; his shoes Adam kicked further into what might have been a breakfast nook in some other life and carried on, leaving the red button-down across a convenient chair. In the kitchen was a refrigerator, in the refrigerator was a beer: Adam pulled one up by its neck and swung with it toward the living room, the television there lurking something he's bought when he discovered he had the money. The remote he unearthed, found beneath a growing pile of books and papers on the couch, and, shoving them to one side, he brought it to bear and turned on the news.
    Adam immediately changed the channel. His beer and interest levels both subsiding, he spun the dials, once, twice, wading through the hysteric weariness of prime time. Sighing, he left the remote to fare among the cushions and padded over to the built-in bookcase, its sullen shelves bearing up under his mixed media, flipped a few movies over, checking discs for cases and vice-versa. Finally he found one he wasn't altogether familiar with, something his last girlfriend had left behind her, like the tampons under the sink or the bicycle pump, and threw it in the DVD player. It was one of those movies full of conversations, people talking earnestly, endlessly: it might have had Meryl Streep in it, or Woody Allen, and he thought he might be in the mood for it. He set it to play and returned to the kitchen, letting it find its feet while he tried to marshal thought and appetite into one concerted force, the joint effort resulting in three kinds of leftovers going together into the microwave. When they came out, he took a fresh beer and them back to the couch.
    Adam ate in silence: the people in the television, with their long, intense discussions, sometimes escalating to hysterics, talked enough for both of them. Another landslide from the unstable periodicals beside him revealed the stereo remote and Adam grabbed it, flipping on another source of noise, and under this assault he kept his head down and ate his rations. Dinner done, he left the two devices to their conversation, abandoning them for the other room with its bed and desk and closet and cable modem. Spilled across the desk Adam ignored more papers, shoving to the side bills and junkmail and the occasional grocery list; an inch of beer left Adam pulled the slumbering computer up and sent it out in all directions. He sorted through the things he had to check, personal email, his bank account, the balance on those student loans now nearly gone, all things he couldn't do at work: the thought wormed its way in and he clamped down on it, flinging it out of his mind with the rest of the office, changing to political gossip and comics.
    Skimming the shallow end Adam was comfortably unsurprised at the level of discourse and lack of substance; he distracted himself with them, sorting through the eye-catches and bad headlines, ignoring opinions and hackneyed analysis whose like had prompted him to rant at nearby friends or lovers. A cursory glance was bad enough, and soon he disengaged from even that solitary pursuit. There were others available, however, and Adam lingered over his history, considered pulling up a good hardcore site and getting himself off before going to bed. He closed the browser without opening his zipper, though, and crawled between his sheets on the rented mattress, electric guitars and impassioned vapidity mingling to attend Adam as he slept.

    In the morning he retraced his steps back out to the office, avoiding the eyes of the advertisements on his way, first right and then up. Adam scuffed rubber against concrete, treading on his shadow's toes as they slunk toward the bus stop, his eyes tracking along    the sidewalk and halfway up the street. He checked his watch, still in good time, and let a passing bird, all swooping arcs and underbelly, catch his eye upward, following it diving under awnings in the early air. Adam registered the sound of the cross-town shifting gears around the corner, remembered the difference between a starling and a swallow, and took one extra step, off of the kerb.

Posted at Monday, January 25, 2010 08:31 PM
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