Salocin

A Break in the Fabric of Banality

Wednesday morning, 6.00am. Tommy Norton wakes up in his Greenwich Village apartment. He does not notice the ruby glow on the horizon, the sight of the day dawning has long since lost all meaning for him. He has no time for such trivialities - the market opens in 149 minutes. He has already lost a full minute.

He walks to the bathroom and avoids making eye contact with the mirror while he rinses his face. He slept 4 hours last night, and his waking moment was filled with a dream in which he was being chased around central park in his underwear, in a blizzard, by an investment memorandum that wanted to skewer him with its pitchfork and bore an unsettling resemblence to Hillary Clinton. He makes a mental note not to watch the evening news while reviewing project plans in future.

He brushes his teeth while trying to identify the stale remains of a taste in his mouth. Tequila? Bourbon? It can be so hard to tell. The headache is familiar, present mostly at the temples and forehead, low down above the bridge of the nose.

Something's wrong. He can't put his finger on it, but something is terribly, awfully wrong. Different. The order of things is broken. It'll come to him.

His cupboard is filled with shirts arranged by size, all of them still in the cellophane wrapper the building laundry service uses. There are many sizes. The smaller ones are on the far left, untouched since they were laundered and pressed when he moved to New York after graduating from Harvard. One day he'll give them to charity. He reaches to the far right and, not for the first time, wonders if quality dress shirts shrink in the wash. It takes him 23 seconds to find two matching cufflinks in the pot on the dresser, a further 43 seconds to fit them to the cuffs of his shirt.

His subconscious is still working at the problem - the break in reality - trying to figure out what it is. It has the area of effect, the epicentre of the psychic earthquake, identified as the bedside table, but can seem to make no more progress from there.

His suit is picked off the back of the chair and he struggles briefly with the trousers, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, leaning heavily on the chair, which creaks threateningly. He then picks a pre-knotted tie from the 7 bundled together in the dresser drawer, scoops up the one he removed last night from the floor and drops it in with the others.

He turns towards the bed as he dons his jacket with a flourish. He is facing the bedside table. He pauses, his hands on the tie knot, checking it. Something terrible has happened, and he is moments away from understanding what it is.

There is a little black box on the table. It appears inert. He does not recognise it. There is something frightening about it - it represents a distance, a gap, a lack. It is dead. His mind struggles with understanding, the digital clock reads 06:13 the sleep is still too fresh in his mind. A sense of panic begins to rise in his throat, he feels nauseous. He puts his hand back on the chair for balance, trying to control his heartbeat. He is sweating, he is going to have to change his shirt. In his mind he sees a blinking red light. It is a pulse. A heartbeat. A lifeline. It is missing. The box is dead.

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In the news today : BlackBerry's blackout leaves millions bereft.

Posted by nlvp at April 19, 2007 11:54 AM