The following is someting I wrote about a year ago, and since have edited a handful of times. Just thought some of you might like to read the most recent version…
When the alarm rings at an all-too-early eleven AM, Justin is fast asleep, so far under that the alarm rings for five minutes solid before he even begins to hear it. And even then it’s just this fuzzy sound at the edge of a fuzzier consciousness. What the hell is that? He can’t figure it out for a few more minutes. When it finally registers, he thinks for a second and then hits the snooze button. The alarm stops. He thinks better of it almost immediately, though, and turns the alarm off altogether. His Saturday errands can wait. He’s still too fucking tired to drag his bony carcass out of bed.
Two hours later and he wakes up on his own. A little groggy, yes, but much better than before. He sits up slowly and clumsily swings his legs over the side of the bed. Before he stands up, he looks over his left shoulder out the uncovered windows behind him, at the end of his long narrow studio apartment. A damp gray light is washing over him, reflecting the general nature of the day outside. Rain droplets form little rivulets on the face of the windowpanes, almost giving the outside world the feel of an impressionist painting. The streets are wet, the buildings are wet, the people outside the buildings on the streets are wet, and the sky is a solid slate gray. It seems much too dark for the time of day, even if the days are getting shorter now. October never seemed this dark in his childhood memories.
Breakfast for Justin is leftover Chinese takeout from three nights before. It is just at that point when one is no longer sure that some particular leftover food is still safe to eat, but at which point one eats it anyway for whatever reason, hoping nothing bad comes of it. Justin’s rationalization is that he is feeling too lazy to cook anything and because his only other options consist of beer and bologna. He did the beer and bologna thing in college, and it never really did anything but to help take the edge off hangovers. On this particular day he is not hung over, and he graduated from college over six months ago, so he feels that it is appropriate to move on to better things. So leftover Chinese takeout it is. He gives it an analytical sniff as he empties it into a bowl, decides it’s safe to consume, and puts it in the microwave. If nothing else, he figures the radiation should kill off anything that might have decided to take up residence in the food since he shoved it into the back of the fridge.
It’s almost two. Getting out of bed and eating took far too long. His self-induced sleep depravation all week long set him up for this, he knows, but he had to get his work done. Whatever. Weekends are for sleeping. They used to be for socializing and partying and getting tanked and wishing he was getting laid. He hasn’t been out on the town for months, he never sees his friends, and the time since he last got laid is a figure that stretches into years – a number he’d rather forget. Now weekends are for catching up on sleep and personal work and trying to make sense of the ever-present stack of bills, invoices, and other paperwork that constantly sits on the back right corner of his desk, half-hidden by the edge of his second computer monitor. The stack steadily changes. As invoices are mailed out and bills paid, the paperwork is filed away, but just as steadily as it goes away, new paperwork materializes almost out of nowhere to stock that stack. When he left home to go out on his own he opened a Pandora’s Box of personal finance. He was getting ahead of things, slowly but surely, but every time he looked at that stack of paperwork, a tired feeling came over him and he wished it would once and for all go away.
He opens the window a few inches to extend an inquiring hand into the outside world. It’s still raining, he knows this already, but what he’s testing for is the temperature. It’s cool out there, but not so cold as to present a situation requiring much in the way of insulation. A cool rainy day isn’t a bad thing – Justin likes such days – but cool past a certain point and the atmosphere takes on a bitter, desperate feeling that eats through your parka and gets into you, right down to your bones. Luckily, this is not such a day, but if the temperature drops much as the light diminishes later on, it might become such a night. He hopes to the contrary. Without regard to what the weather might become, he closes the window, walks over to his chair, where some of his clothes have been hastily folded and laid down. Off with the slippers and the flannel pajamas. A slight aching feeling develops in the bottoms of his now-uninsulated feet as he puts them onto the bare hardwood floor. He rummages through the stack of clothing on his chair, doesn’t find what he though he would find there, and goes over to his chest of drawers, where he extracts an old, battered pair of cycling shorts, a pair of socks, and an old maroon t-shirt. Everything else he needs is strewn about on the floor. On with the shirt, on with the shorts, on with the socks. He pull on an old pair of jeans that he has cut off just below the knees, snugly fastening the buckle of the belt that is still in the belt loops from the last time he wore them. The jeans are worn through in the crotch and are heavily frayed and tattered at the bottoms, but he likes it like that. There’s also a hole in the left pant leg just above the knee from when he caught the edge of a truck bed in heavy traffic while trying to avoid an angry taxi. Over the t-shirt he pulls an ancient blue sweatshirt, a relic from running track in high school. There are holes at the elbows, the elastic is gone from the cuffs, and the printing on it is all but illegible. It was gray to start and is basically still gray now, but has taken on a bit of a yellowish tinge from years of dirt and sweat and abuse. It’s the kind of thing that you know you really shouldn’t wear any more, given how badly it has broken down, but you keep wearing it anyway because you love it and because it’s the most comfortable garment in the whole of the known universe. Next are his shoes – clunky mountain biking shoes with rigid plastic soles, Velcro straps across the top, and metal cleats screwed to the bottom just under the balls of his feet. They were once canary yellow and black – a stark chromatic contrast that had contributed to their being purchased in the first place. But now, following daily abuse and exposure to all the ungodly chemicals one finds on the streets, they were slowly becoming various shades of ugly, quasi-gray. The black getting lighter, the yellow getting darker, and both of them getting ever dingier.
He gets up, walks across the room, dons a waterproof windbreaker, grabs his helmet, shades, and riding gloves. He thinks for a moment and puts the sunglasses back. There’s no sun today, and he figures he’ll just brave the tire spray. He walks over towards the door, slings his bag over his left shoulder, and walks his bike out the door.
Down on the pavement now, he sees that the rain has let up some. This is a positive development, as it means that upon returning home he’ll be slightly less cold and wet than he might be otherwise. Traffic appears light today, too, which is nice. Fewer drivers to piss off and fight for space with. It’s probably a product of the weather. Nobody wants to be outside when it’s like this. Well, most people don’t. Justin figures he’s a little bit different in that regard. He looks straight up, lets some drops rain down on his skin, breathes deeply and smiles a little. He can feel his energy building as his body finally kicks into gear. This is a good day to ride.
Click. Left foot. Click. Right foot. Now both feet firmly attached to his pedals, he rolls towards the curb, looks to his left, and hops down onto the street, swinging wide into the far left lane. A delivery truck clad in battered, white-painted steel rolls up to his right and nearly stops, but belches out a cloud of diesel soot and accelerates again as the light changes to green. Justin turns left and hammers down the pavement, glistening black and beautiful below him, water spraying up on his face and painting a stripe up his back as his tires rip across the surface. He applies a little extra leverage to his handlebars and grinds harder. Ups his cadence. He makes it through a light on the yellow as the buildings on either side of him trudge by like sleepy giants. Taxi behind him, wants him to move. Fuckit. He stays where he is, the taxi cuts into the right lane and hauls past him with great disdain. He sees his turn coming up on the left. He glances behind him – it’s clear – so he signals and swings left, cutting across the lanes coming the other way and into a break in the curb at the end of an alley. He dismounts, walks the bike to a steel trash receptacle, pulls off the front wheel, and locks the whole thing down with a heavy U-shaped lock. He pulls on it hard once to test it, turns around and walks towards the door.
There’s not much on his mind at this point. Not a lot to do today, so he doesn’t have to feel stressed or rushed in any way. He doesn’t walk with any great urgency in his step. Just a comfortable pace. Though it was nice laying there in bed catching up on sleep, it feels even better now that he’s up and moving. He hates to feel lazy. Can’t stand it. When he does it’s almost as if he can feel all the wasted moments of his life slipping through his fingers. It’s like some twisted hourglass. The lazier he thinks he’s being, the more he can feel death pulling on his coattails sixty or seventy years down the road. When he gets this feeling, he has to move. There’s nothing like the thought of impending death to motivate a man, distant though it may still be.
The bell on the door of the convenience store rings as he pulls it open from the outside. The plastic soles of his shoes make hard noises as he steps inside. After riding it always takes him a minute or two to get to walking normally again. Go straight from spinning hard to walking at a comparatively lethargic pace in stiff shoes on a hard tile floor and your motor facilities have to reevaluate the situation and switch modes. He looks around – the store is virtually empty. The only other people there are a cashier behind the counter, who is reading a dog-eared magazine, and an obscured figure towards the back getting a gallon of milk out of the refrigerator case. He spies his quarry in the third aisle – toothpaste. Well, toothpaste, floss, mouthwash, and a new toothbrush. The night before he had run out of the first three things and at the same time his toothbrush suffered a fatal blow when it had been inadvertently knocked off the edge of the sink. He had lunged to try to catch it, but only managed to deflect it and in doing so changed its course so that it made a graceful arc through the air straight into the toilet bowl. He remembered briefly an episode of Seinfeld and subsequently made a mental note to get a new toothbrush the next day. In any case, he figured that to suddenly find himself without any proper oral hygiene products was a bit of a strange convergence of events. He took it as a sign.
With a new arsenal of supplies in hand, he approaches the counter. The cashier is a tired-looking heavyset white woman with bleach-blonde hair set in a bad permanent. She looks as though she couldn’t possibly be more bored. He wonders when the last time she laughed was. The transaction is completed in a completely nondescript manner; he declines the ubiquitous plastic bag, and loads his new possessions into his courier bag. Somewhere along the line he unconsciously stuffs the receipt into the front left pocket of his jeans. Back into the wet streets. With the lock removed and his front wheel remounted, he once again rolls out onto the wet pavement, dodging a pothole in the process. He has to stop almost immediately for a red light, and as he waits there behind the white stop line, he lets his eyes wander to the street corner ahead and to his left, where a tree is growing up through an open space in the concrete. It has one of those cast iron skirts around the base where some of the falling leaves are accumulating, plastered down by the rain and trodden black by pedestrians. He tries to imagine the way the leaves must smell in the rain – it’s something he remembers clearly, the recollection of it being drawn from some obscure corner of his mind where memories like that often reside. The light changes, he starts to roll forward again and settles in.
The blocks blend together as they often do when he is in a riding groove. It’s really like a moment of Zen – this feeling of connection with the asphalt, everything flowing around him like water flows around a log in a river. He stops worrying about what traffic is there. It fades into the background and he reacts instinctively rather than consciously. Cities really aren’t as chaotic as they appear on the surface. Sure, individual people and cars and things like that may seem pretty random, and on that singular level they often are, but take a big step back and look at how things flow and you see that it simplifies and smoothes out. It seems like it’s hard for most people to see this, or to even want to try to see it, and to a lot of people it must just seem stupid. But it’s true. And Justin is looking at the city in that greater frame of mind.
In a much smaller frame of mind, an unmarked delivery truck is barreling west, driven by a tall, angry man who is half Greek and half Irish. He hates working in the cold and he especially hates working in the rain. It just makes his deliveries that much more of a pain. He’s getting impatient – he keeps catching the lights at the wrong times and seems to have lost count as to how many intersections in a row have required him to come to a complete stop. Finally, a break – he catches a yellow. And again. He has to slow down momentarily after the second light due to a taxi pulling into traffic, and so as he arrives at the next intersection, the light is already red. But just barely. The intersection looks deserted. What harm could be done? He’s in the clear. He accelerates, flies over the stop line and for an instant catches a glimpse of what looks like a pedestrian to his left, only it’s going too fast to be sure what it is until he hears the sudden, gut-twisting sound of impact from below the front of his truck.
And he sees broken aluminum and blood mixing with fresh rainwater on wet asphalt in lower Manhattan.
