November 14, 2002

what

Whatever do you mean she says softly over her shoulder while at the same time realizing that it sounds very english-butler of her to say and not at all natural for her but in this case caught in an obvious lie she suddenly feels very formal like this is an event, a performance that she must get up for because she has known that it will happen one day and she supposes that she has been mock rehearsing it in her head, analyzing and traversing the various paths that the conversation can take and creating little scripts in her head, memorizing her lines without realizing it but now she has failed completely on her first line because she never thought about how the performance would start and so he will know now and all is lost.

What the hell are you talking about anyway he says to himself as he braces himself for the sudden but expected stop of the train. He is quite tired and his mind was wondering, random firings after a day of very structured and disciplined thinking or at least the perception of such brought about by intense concentration and very fast context switching to avoid daydreaming - hours upon hours of thinking about the same thing, the same domain, the same realm of thought, a vast list of problems and possibilities that he traversed one by one and analyzed systematically - his mind so preoccupied or at least the top of it, the visible part to him, the concious, controllable - but after that was over his mind was wandering without his control and this is when the thought came to him and expanded into a thousand possibilities unfolding all the advantages systematically like it was used to, he could travel then, he could go to Asia, well maybe to California at least, and how he could be anything he wanted for real this time, you know like his parents had said once and he wouldn't be caught his foot on the track of normality. By the time he got through the doors of the train he had his thoughts back under control, wrestled to the ground by the thought of her.

What in the world is that guy doing she thought out loud to herself and was suddenly embarrassed and glanced around only to see that no one was looking at her or even at him even though he lay there right outside the window picking at it systematically lost in the sheer concentration of it. Looking around she saw everybody else was looking straight ahead, but that was where he was - straight ahead - only they looked at various angles so that they weren't looking at him but at the tree behind him or at people walking by or the building across the street, between hurried bites of salad and chicken. They were acting like they didn't see him just like a moment ago when the motorcycles went by and filled this place with sheer sound and nobody looked up from their papers - reading one sentence between each bite but mainly just looking at the pictures - even as the place shook and the blood rushed to her face and she thought that they were going to crash right through the window - who would look up then - and she glanced around and saw that nobody was doing anything different and suddenly felt like an idiot and that she was the loud sound. She glanced back over at him and saw that he had stopped picking at it now but it was bleeding a little or was that blood it didn't look the same color as her's but instead was a little darker or maybe that was just because she was looking through the window and out past the sidewalk and maybe her view was just distorted some or maybe a lot and now he was just staring ahead at the sidewalk maybe he was counting cracks and studying their shapes maybe he saw them as parabolas and important metrics, jagged edges crawling up the sky of profitability, numbers from clever market segment analysis, maybe he used to be very successful with a big family too but something had happened to him, no, no, he had happened to someone, he had done something wrong and he had hurt somebody and this was just how it was that was better much better and now she turned her head back to her purse which she held with both hands in her lap, the strap wrapped around her wrist, and checked to make sure that her jacket was still on the back of her chair that it hadn't been taken because that is what happens around places like this and you must rely on the advice of experienced friends in new situations like this one. She saw that she hadn't even started her salad yet, she hoped that he got here soon so that she could stop feeling like this.

What the fuck is that he says and looks up over the row of two-story shops and sees through the clouds a large plane banking sharply turning to the airport not a commercial but a military one he had never really seen one like it it was a little scary looking not the sort of thing you would want to see in wartime not a good sight for our enemies he thought but that did not make him feel better while the sound still shook his body and he realized that he had stood on this street a thousand times and never looked up at all so if he were deaf then he never would have during his entire life so then he looked down just to make sure but maybe he shouldn't look new places if this was the kind of shit he was going to see and have to think about and so he kept walking, switching his bags to his left hand.

November 14, 2002 02:51 AM