Amongst the Gadflies

by Ford Collins

  Delivery receipts were signed and returned to requesters, rarely with urgency, so most days’ rounds were limited to two and were heavily padded with sitting, reading, downing numerous cups of coffee, and, for some of the messengers, sleeping.

  Each messenger had worked with every other messenger in the city at some point.

  They were, without exception, male. Most were out of shape. Apart from Lowell and one other, they all smoked. Many were over the age of forty.

  The oldest of the couriers tended to spend the better parts of their workdays educating neophytes on the shortcuts and clandestine snooze dens in corners of parks and the top floor of the downtown branch of the library.

  Arthur Gwynn mentored Lowell when Lowell began at the law firm, and still filled in when others called in sick or quit without notice.

  Lowell saw Arthur quite often.

  Arthur was a sloppy, foul-mouthed pervert whose training regimen consisted of him smoking heavily, sending trainees into offices to make deliveries solo with no direction or advice, and spending time between drop-offs strolling around extolling the virtues of having his bunions sanded bi-monthly.

  Lowell instantly disliked Arthur, but reasoned that the more efficiently he appeared to go about his duties, the further Arthur would distance himself from him, not wanting to be singled out by association with anyone showing aptitude for their work. Employees of that sort were handed added responsibilities.

  Arthur just wanted to be handed his paychecks.

  So Lowell worked hard enough to be awarded his own bag and company cell phone after two weeks, while forgetting one delivery in a slot on the mail table of the firm’s business office every tenth weekday.

  He was careful to only leave packages behind that he knew weren’t time-sensitive, but it was enough to plant a seed of doubt in the business office command, thereby virtually ensuring he wouldn’t be called in to talk about further opportunities for advancement.

  The lone close call came when Thomas (Call me Tom) Schiff, an assistant office manager with a tall, thin body, and a saggy, oversized head, began to notice the patterns of Lowell’s misplaced deliveries, the frequencies of occurrence, the clockwork variations.

  He pulled Lowell aside in a vacant huddle room near the business office with a small parcel under his arm.

  He’d found it tucked into an unused mail slot that was still labeled with the last name of a deceased founding partner of the firm.

  “Lowell, do you know anything about this?”

  Lowell took the package from Tom’s outstretched hand, looked it over, and passed it back. “No. Do you need me to run it?”

  “You’re a pretty reliable messenger, Lowell. Maybe my most reliable guy.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Schiff.”

  “You’re welcome, Lowell. Call me Tom.”

  Tom’s face contorted into a maudlin mask.

  “You’re not getting bored, are you, Lowell? Does the work bore you?” Tom swept his left hand toward the ceiling with a flourish that didn’t seem to correspond with anything and mildly confused Lowell.

  He thought Tom looked ridiculous, but kept what he thought was an attentive expression on his own face.

  “Not at all, Tom.”

  “Good.” Tom sucked his lower lip between his teeth, raised his eyebrows, and nodded his best paternal nod, as his watery eyes drew an intense bead on Lowell’s. “Good.”

  Lowell noticed a patch of reddish hair about the size of a nickel that Tom had apparently missed while shaving his jowl that morning. He wished he hadn’t seen it, because it distracted him from making eye contact while they talked.

  After what felt like an hour to Lowell, Tom cleared his throat and went on.

  “Lowell, have you thought about killing anyone in the next five years?”

  “Excuse me, Tom?”

  “Have you thought about what you’ll be doing in the next five years?”

  “I try to focus on the task at hand, Tom. It keeps me grounded.”

  Tom nodded, wearing what Lowell guessed was meant to be a thoughtful look.

  “Grounded. I like that.” Tom handed the package back to Lowell and patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s try and keep all our deliveries headed in the right direction, Lowell. Wouldn’t want any of those little guys falling through the cracks, would we?”

  “Right, Tom.”

  “Good man.”

  From then on, Lowell kept an altered version of the original schedule of misplacing packages, moving them each time to the next corner, counterclockwise, in the bank of mail slots, and actually delivering everything on what would have been every fourth “honest mistake” day.

  This was enough to get Tom off his back, as Lowell figured it would be.

  He continued with the added layer of subterfuge until Tom had a major heart attack, ultimately requiring a triple bypass and the insertion of a pacemaker, a few months after their conversation. Lowell was relatively sure the misplaced packages had nothing to do with Tom’s ailment.

  Tom left the firm following his recovery, and took a job as a salesman at a women’s shoe store in a suburban strip mall, according to pieces of multiple conversations Lowell caught in the vicinity of his desk and in packed, rush-hour elevators.

  Distraction aside, Lowell was again generally unencumbered by time-consuming tasks while at work, which left him free to feel downtown oscillate around him.

  Friday morning, he found himself sitting in an elevated courtyard on the east side of the business district, surrounded on three sides by high-rise office buildings.

  He felt calm watching pigeons waddle by on the concrete and look toward him for crumbs or airborne foodstuff, and following squirrels as they bounced down from branches and scampered wild-eyed through empty spaces to get to fallen refuse and open trash cans.

  Much as he’d thought of the mosquito he’d inadvertently destroyed the night before, Lowell couldn’t imagine a set of moral values encoded into any action the animals performed.

  He envisioned a base purity vibrating through all that was not human.

  Countless times, Lowell had walked by pornography shops on Monroe on his way home from work, seen men and women slink out of darkened doors and scurry to their cars, hands clutching brown bags, eyes to the ground.

  He couldn’t help but think of streams of vermin, freshly coated in effluent and dragging their carrion catches back to dank holes in walls and dirt and landfills to bask in the muck.

  However, he’d never observed rats or cockroaches emerging from trash bins and thought of them as lost souls, gagging on their self-loathing, tripping over themselves to stay out of the public eye.

  Their existence was enhanced by the waste of humans. They used it to their advantage, to thrive, to multiply. It wasn’t their weakness, it was their strength.

  And so it wasn’t the actions and attributes of insects and rodents he overlaid on people that made him judge men so harshly. It was the choices they made and continue to make, freely, to turn away from their own gifts of judgment in favor of the lowest common denominators.

  Rather than embracing debate, literature, fine art, language, and music to enrich their minds and infuse even a shred of nobility or purpose into their lives, they cling to drunkenness, violence, hatred, willful ignorance, profanity, instant gratification, all types of perversions of thought, body, and deed.

  They fear their own mortality, so they sprint to their ends in attempts to master it.

  The masses endlessly engage in the frenzied rush, eyes clenched tight and fists swinging wildly, for each man to conquer himself as irrefutable proof that he cannot be conquered.

  Feet trample over anyone not fully invested in their own annihilation, and the pack hardly takes notice. Yet those who are trampled by others more intent than themselves on leaping from the cliffs to the rocks below cry foul and demand reparations.

  As Lowell imagined men plunging by the thousands into the abyss, the vision skipped like film loosened from projector re
el and guides, and popped to static. His mind lost focus and swam in a sea of interference until he blinked hard and recalled the courtyard into view.

  During his blank seconds, the squirrels stopped bouncing and scampering, and the pigeons froze mid-step. Dozens of miniature black eyes trained on him, pausing until he acknowledged them. It was unfathomable to their sparking minds that Lowell would depart his platform shortchanged a due sense of placidity. They knew their importance to Lowell’s universal orientation. They had accepted their calling without pride.

  When his eyes twitched clear, the gears re-engaged beneath the animals’ clockwork tracks with no one the wiser to the fantastic illusion they’d manufactured to keep Lowell in sync with the pulse of the city.

  He rose from the bench, and walked west toward the river, his office, and the coming evening.

  [Five]

  The office lunch room was small—barely large enough to hold three seated employees at a time. Two, if they expected to do anything that involved moving their arms.

  Lowell usually avoided it like an open sewer line, but found himself plastered against the wall closest to the door.

  An empty sandwich bag lay in front of him, covered in black specks and stuck to the tacky tabletop that smelled like pickle juice and bleach.

  He didn’t know when he’d come to the room or what he may have eaten.

  He looked from the plastic bag to the wall on his left and the clock ingeniously hung so that seven through the bottom half of nine were obscured by a vending machine.

  Only his senses of sight and smell were fully functioning, and Lowell could only guess that he was returning from a renewed line of processing images drafted earlier in the courtyard.

  While trying, and failing, to decipher the time from the handicapped break room timepiece, Lowell picked up co-workers crammed together in his peripheral.

  Allen Coombs, Raymond Watt, and Eva (Something) stood arm-to-arm behind his chair, silent and, from what he could tell, watching him.

  Allen was a paralegal whom Lowell had once overheard at a holiday party breathlessly recounting highlights of his having defiled every piece of furniture in his townhouse. He was short and prematurely balding, and gnawed mercilessly at his hangnails. Allen smelled of stale sweat and bourbon every Monday morning. Lowell tended to discount most of what Allen had to say, and did everything in his power to maintain at least a six-foot buffer between them.

  Lowell saw Raymond as a blur in the general shape of a man several inches taller than him and quite a bit heavier. Most of what Raymond said was drivel—waves of pap wrung from whatever he’d heard on AM talk radio during his morning commute, regurgitated into broken sentences and ineffective Raymond-speak that most attorneys and paralegals at the firm responded to with cringing, nodding, and smiling, all while moving on as quickly as possible to maintain their short-term sanity. Lowell wasn’t sure what capacity the firm employed Raymond, but he assumed it had something to do with the corporate attorneys.

  Eva was baffling. That’s the only way Lowell could describe her and her place in his schema. She confused him with her simplicity, which instantly put him on guard. Some lodestone just beneath her skin set his compass in frantic rotation when she approached, and as he couldn’t decide whether she could be trusted, he kept his distance from her as well.

  Allen, Eva, and Raymond had become inexplicably inseparable over the previous ten months. They were split only by necessity, wriggling around at their desks like an earthworm trisected, to be bound together again at any opportunity by their shared fear of each being trapped alone with themselves.

  For the second time in less than an hour, Lowell had to abandon broken signals and tune back in to a performance already in progress. It pricked his interest, with more than a little concern, but he was distracted as his hearing stabilized, and he recognized Allen’s pinched nasal drone.

  “…ybe he finally broke down and stopped off at the Spankmart last night. Don’t you live right around the corner from there, Lowell?”

  “That’s gross, Allen. He’s not listening, anyway.” It was Eva, a notch above whispering. “Go.”

  Allen sighed. Lowell imagined Allen rolling his eyes and giving the back of Lowell’s head the finger as the three turned to exit.

  Six shoes padded away on worn office carpet, and Raymond’s giggled “Haha… He’s dirty!” bounced down the corridor walls back to the break room.

  Lowell had been smiling again. This time in plain view of his coworkers, which for him was as inexcusable as it was frightening. They had no business looking into him like that, and he had no business leaving the shutters open for them to peer in.

  He’d sensed that Eva was nervous seeing him in a state other than cold detachment.

  She’d sounded rattled when he came to and heard them, and Lowell wondered if she was as unsure of him as he was of her.

  He decided he didn’t care either way and refocused on trying to determine why he’d been smiling.

  Lowell cleaned up his space at the table and walked back to his desk, avoiding contact with co-workers. He sat, faced his sleeping desktop screens, and closed his eyes.

  His now recurring inability to maintain a steady meditation at any point over the last eighteen hours was disconcerting.

  One constant that had stabilized him through turbulence and shielded him from strain and stress was the hatch he slipped through within himself to access memories and logic.

  He could call up any experience and, through alchemy he (somewhat oddly for him) had no desire to comprehend, combine the sensory stock with intuition, geometry, and time, to populate vast canvasses with epic truths about the world and his compass points throughout. These points extended beyond the shell of his study, marking every object, sentient or unaware, living or inanimate—everything—with its own guide according to his verdicts. The judgments were fluid, revisited and studied with every bit of relevant information acquired. Every signpost became a palimpsest, occasionally so frayed that he had to build again: Elements were reintroduced, rebalanced to fit the spectrum, and replaced on the map.

  The transition back through the hatch, down the hallway, and into real time had been seamless in the past.

  He couldn’t fathom having access denied. The antechamber between hatch and hallway was now a dark, still cube. Every surface absorbed light, sound, and movement. No resonance, no feedback, no integration, no evolution.

  If Lowell was barred from his laboratory and forced to hold in the void, he was quite sure he would never see light again.

  [Six]

  Lowell’s increasing difficulty in finding complete internal escape subsided without much effort shortly after the incident at the lunch table.

  Under further review, he’d discovered that the vacant, awkward grin his co-workers had caught him wearing was largely due to his having entertained thoughts of putting himself in the role of the murderer at the brink of the river the day before.

  He looked down at his feet, to be sure they were in the proper locations, exactly as he’d seen them positioned when the original attack occurred. If he was going to play the part, he needed to play it precisely.

  Lowell found his place. He looked behind himself to make sure the Lowell frozen in real-time was ready for his part as well before rolling tape.

  None of this was especially amusing. What drew his damning smile out from the production was his counterpart, his second hemisphere, his victim: Norman.

  Norman made sense here to Lowell as he never had before.

  It was the first time Lowell had ever looked so closely into the other man’s face. Carved immaculately for this specific scene, Norman was pulled from charcoal and obsidian. Lowell could see clearly through Norman’s eyes directly into the judgment he’d passed on the Norman of the outside world—it was dull.

  Initially, it seemed odd that he would subconsciously choose someone that struck him as essentially harmless and ordinary as a stand-in during this scene.

  But
was it so odd? Norman wasn’t a mirror image for Lowell physically, but he was the closest match Lowell could recall. Norman was ultimately as inconsequential to Lowell as Lowell was vital to himself. Who better to erase from memory than someone who served predominantly to take up space and time until the memory of his life was erased?

  And so he called “Action!” and strained to hit his marks with grace and precision, violently laying into Norman, the expressionless and corpse-silent homunculus. Every moment was exactly as he’d remembered, and every grasp and lunge met perfectly with an equal reaction. Fists landed with beautiful, gory distinction, each a dot in the ellipses strung together to carry diligence in thought through to movement and on to completion.

  From a solitary conception of possibility—of total control over the state of being, and therefore the very presence of that life in its impure, human form—to the fruition: the removal of that being, that state of being, beneath the surface of memory, or in this allegory, the river below, was enough to satisfy Lowell as few other things could.

  His sense of self-satisfaction overflowed the re-creation and spilled into his nose and throat, from his mind to his body, which responded involuntarily. This had also caused him to smile. He hadn’t even needed to stay in character long enough to witness the body tear through the water’s skin. It wasn’t the death that elated him though, so that was logical. His euphoria was from the realization that he perhaps could be the killer.

  Not the killer. Not in that sense. But a killer, performing the killer’s actions in the same manner and with the same sincerity and dedication. Lowell had vaguely sensed for years that human life couldn’t have intrinsic value. So what would be lost if one flame was extinguished?

  Now he whole-heartedly believed, he could feel it bolt through his spine and slam into every terminus of his extremities, that this was true. The fundamental characteristic of man is his insignificance.