by Ford Collins
Man only seeks to find and fulfill an arbitrary destiny. That destiny ceases to exist when he does, rendering the man and the plans he’d created for himself nothing more than dirt, to be scattered in the wake of those who follow.
It’s true, Lowell thought, there were legacies of some that were celebrated and carried on for finite numbers of years. But it certainly wasn’t the body that lived on, only the legacy. More importantly, it wasn’t the specific actions and words of any man, but the interpretation of his actions and words within the frame of currency that defined any legacy, any memory of him.
Something so malleable could never serve as a foundation for the creation of a meaningful, endless life.
Lowell let the weight of this balance itself and settle. He stepped back from his thoughts and paused to take it in all at once. As he surveyed his latest work, he heard a muffled scratching somewhere under the skin just above his eyebrows. It was faint but insistent, in volume and substance.
Taking a step outside his hatch into the antechamber, he saw the ends of two lengths of insulated wire stretched in an effort to couple near his feet, but failing to meet and so settling for dizzily skittering around, inches apart, attempting to create a spark that could arc the gap.
Lowell knelt to the floor of the small, near-black room and examined the wires directly in front of his face. He could make out a small, neat script on one spastic line: Insignificance. Written on the other: Legacy.
He looked up, and began selecting a sequence of steps to process this discovery, but inadvertently rubbed the tips of the wires together in his hands, bridging the space and hosting the full charge.
His arms and chest convulsed wildly. His jaw clamped tight, his eyes rolled back in his abstract skull. A violent pinch shot through his right shoulder, jolting him backward. He slammed into the wall to his rear, and the contact was enough to short the system and flood his mind with total darkness.
Lowell slumped to the floor, impotently blinking his eyes in an attempt to reboot. The pressure in his shoulder returned, now not in the midnight in his mind, but in the chair at his desk. He scrambled to his feet, bounded through the hatch and back into himself, and turned his head to see the unfocused outline of Lauren Merrill standing behind him.
Her hand rested on his shoulder, squeezing lightly every few seconds.
“What are you doing?” Lowell stared at her, straining to focus on her face.
“Lowell, you’re gray.”
“What are you doing behind me… standing behind me at my desk?” He jerked his shoulder from beneath her hand and turned back to face his long-sleeping monitor. “Why would you touch me? That’s… Don’t. Don’t come in here and… Go someplace… away from my desk.”
She didn’t talk with Lowell often, but she’d heard him speak to others in the office enough that she wondered if he was now having a breakdown of some sort.
“You’re gray, Lowell,” she stepped around to his side to find a less frightening angle of his ashen face.
An alarm bell screamed from one side of his skull to the other. Lowell straightened abruptly, snapping the seat back into an upright position with him. A relative warmth returned to his expression and his hands. He stood and spun toward Lauren.
“What’s wrong with being gray?” He looked her in the eyes for the first time she could remember. “If we can’t find balance between light and dark, what hope have we got?”
Lauren’s eyes blinked once and widened.
“I’m off.” Lowell lifted his coat from its hook and walked past Lauren to the bank of elevators in the hall nearby.
She watched him step into a car, watched his finger stab at the bottom button on the console within, waited for the doors to clank together, sighed, and whispered: “I know.”
[Seven]
Lowell may have been most comfortable locked inside himself, but he needed to cull frequently from experience in the tangible world in order to expand his abilities of reasoning and assessment.
Watching people stumble around in stupors, contaminating all they touched, provided terrific grist for his theories on the grand folly of humankind’s existence.
Every day offered up countless opportunities to indulge in the theater of the lost, with front row seats scattered around the city.
Bars, bookstores, cafés, and—for some strange reason—parking garages were prime locations to gather data to bolster his theses. Anywhere people gathered was a winning ticket.
Occasionally, Lowell found places that drew confrontation to the surface of even sparse populations like salt leached from saline soil by irrigation.
One man and one woman, walking toward each other on a sidewalk laid over the ribs of a side street on the city’s periphery. Woman: [Eyes to the ground. Silent.] Man: [Eyes slithering over her contours, searching for any crack in her shell, any water trickling through the foundation that he could follow inside, any weakness he could breach to worm his way to her flesh below.]
“You got a boyfriend, pretty?”
“…”
“I said ‘You got a boyfriend?’ Does he look good as me? Does he take good care-a you? I can take good care-a you…” His hand slides into his pants pocket and grips, prepared to present himself, give her a prize she just needs to reach out and take.
She tucks herself deeper within her jacket, stares harder into the concrete, gains velocity to pass him and break away.
He holds himself tighter and spits a filthy chuckle on her back. “Yeah, okay, you fuckin’ ugly bitch. Go on home to yourself, bitch. Have fun with…”
By then she’s twenty steps past and has tuned him out, sending her thoughts on ahead to her apartment to turn up the thermostat and warm some coffee, readying her sanctum for her return.
Lowell sat on benches, leaned on brick walls, stood on curbs and in doorways nearly every day and looked on as this scene unfolded itself. Once the players had moved along, the roles flew by in reverse—every piece reset, revised, and frozen in place for the opening of the next iteration.
Minor details were altered from one showing to the following. Sometimes there were multiple men taking on a single woman. Sometimes one man would have at multiple women. Sometimes, depending on what part of the city Lowell had posted watch, it would be a man harassing another man, or, very rarely, two women in the roles. Sometimes the actors made physical contact during the performance. Sometimes the targets acquiesced. Sometimes they threw themselves into counteroffensives that startled the initial aggressors, often accompanied by sputtering and nervous laughter all around.
Largely, the genders of the players were of marginal importance. He found commonality in the encounters with extremely small variance when men and women were interchanged. The number of participants could embolden or weaken the rhetoric to a small degree one way or the other, he discovered, but this didn’t sway his ultimate conclusions.
Humans are collectors. They accumulate, and pay the premiums for the privilege of accumulation. It’s not the possession that brings the high. Once the object is owned, it is tagged, packed, and archived. Once the collector’s banner has been planted, the collector no longer needs to visit the landmark.
Perhaps more important, Lowell found, was the tendency for humans to celebrate the illusion of the potential to succeed, more than the actual potential to succeed. They could picture themselves in innumerable ridiculous situations: Sitting on a mountain of gold (that they couldn’t spend in a lifetime); Having sex with mountains of women or men (ignoring whether the mountains of men or women have any desire to have sex with them); Eating mountains of food (regardless of the disease and discomfort that habitual overeating can cause); Giving birth to mountains of children (that they cannot care for).
It was the illusion of the potential to succeed that kept them at their tasks. That, and the duty to bow to their unassailable compulsions. People are born slaves to sensation and spend their lives hiding behind weaknesses disguised as compensatory interests to avoid being seen as addic
ts. If a man cannot break his need to steal, he becomes a gregarious drunkard. And he’ll gladly spend his time parrying the accusations of friends and family pointing to the emptied glass in his hand, which he uses to deftly deflect attention from his other hand, dipping into the pocketbooks of his self-appointed saviors.
Tonight, the backdrop for Lowell’s review was Café Noir, a coffee shop on Gibbs Street, roughly one-quarter of the way from the office to Lowell’s apartment and still within downtown proper. He’d lucked out and snagged a table in the corner, farthest from the entrance. From there he could see everyone walk in and out. He could call the predators from the prey as soon as they wandered through the door.
He’d made a conscious decision to avoid further forensic investigation of the incident by the river for the moment. He suspected there was something in the details he’d glossed over that was causing the disconnections, but he didn’t have the energy to run the necessary diagnostic examinations. For now, he was Jane Goodall, embedded in the midst of a room of chimpanzees wielding cell phones like portals to more interesting lives than their own and fueled by caffeine and bullet-pointed pangs of existential torment.
The fact that Lowell was situated where he could see practically everything made Lauren’s sudden appearance directly in front of him that much more shocking.
[Eight]
“Hello Lauren.”
Lowell was cool, but civil.
He didn’t need to stay once she’d found him. He wouldn’t be able to keep up even a rudimentary conversation with her and sift through verbal debris gathered from around the room.
That he couldn’t simultaneously bend each ear in a different direction irritated him immeasurably.
“Hi, Lowell. I, uh… I didn’t exactly follow you, but I had a feeling you’d be here.”
She began to sit down, felt uncomfortable for having done so, then looked at Lowell for a hint as to whether she’d violated some code of personal conduct.
“Please.” He motioned to her seat.
She let her weight fall into the chair.
He kept his eyes on hers, but only with great effort, and it made her visibly uneasy.
“It’s alright. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have my own personal stalker.”
The unexpected levity encouraged her.
“Give me some credit here. If I was stalking you, you’d have found masterfully retouched photos of the two of us skipping through a field of sunflowers slipped under the front door of your house by now.”
“That would be some trick. I’m not sure there’s a human being alive who could accurately predict what I would look like skipping. Can you picture me skipping? Try it. Right now.”
She could swear the corner of his mouth twitched upward. Maybe just a millimeter, and only for a heartbeat, but it was there.
She pinched her eyes shut in a mock fit of massive mental gear shifting, then threw her head back and sighed heavily before nodding a resigned nod and squinting one eye in his direction.
“Okay. You win. I would put good money down that the odds of an army of the undead invading the city and demanding a sea craft made of chutney and happy thoughts would be shorter than the odds of you skipping voluntarily.”
“Without the smallest of doubts.” He sipped his coffee and set the cup on its saucer.
He noticed she’d loosened her posture and turned to face him in her seat. He guessed she was maybe five feet five inches tall. She had a light-medium build, large brown eyes, and wavy dark brown hair that hung to just below her shoulders. Lowell recalled her wearing glasses around the office occasionally, but she wasn’t wearing them now.
While he’d been more polite to her, he imagined, than he had to most others at the firm, he’d never gone out of his way to engage her. Lauren struck him as having something redeeming about her, but he’d certainly not taken time to decipher what, or why it might matter.
One point in her favor was her voice, which was one of the few he heard each day that didn’t rasp through his ear canals like steel wool.
She smiled and kept nodding for a few seconds, then focused on her feet and cleared her throat.
Lowell knew what was coming.
Lauren raised her head and steadied her eyes on his face. “Lowell, are you okay now? It’s not my business. I understand that. And I know you’re a private guy, but the way you looked today at your desk… You didn’t look like you even knew where you were.”
“I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I’m really very tired.” He took a sip of coffee and held the cup up in both hands for emphasis.
“Hmm.” She cleared her throat again and tucked her hair behind her ears. “No, Lowell, that wasn’t ‘I’m tired.’ That was ‘I’m an old man and I’ve just been found wandering around I-490 in my rocket ship boxers at eleven p.m. in the middle of February, telling police officers I’m looking for my sister Margaret’s church shoes, even though my sister Margaret’s been dead since 1978.’”
“I don’t have any siblings.”
“Lowell! Come on. I’m worried about you. I know that is a stalkery sort of thing to say, and I don’t know why I’m worried, but I am.”
“I don’t know why you’re worried either. Even if I had something more complicated going on, that’s my concern.” His voice never rose above the calm he began the conversation with—the same way he spoke to everyone in almost every social situation. It could be off-putting, but it was usually taken as a show of incredible self-confidence. “Mosquitoes.”
“Mosquitoes? What about mosquitoes?”
“That’s why I haven’t been able to sleep.”
“Hmm.”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” She raised her eyebrows in disingenuous defiance.
“Hmm.” He knew beyond doubt that his Café Noir vantage had been erased.
His alternatives were to find another observation platform, although most spots would be crawling with people by now, making it unlikely he would find a location allowing him the greatest potential for avoiding direct interaction, or to stay at the café with Lauren.
Somehow, the latter option didn’t seem such a stressful one. He could see himself across the table from her, trading sarcasm while parrying inquiries into his state of mind and general well-being.
But he was tired. His mind was sluggish, grinding.
Lowell pulled the last sip of coffee from the cup, replaced the cup on the saucer, and looked back across the table. “I have to go.”
“Really? That’s a shame. I was about to blow your mind and give you an in-depth description of every pair of jammies you’ve worn to bed over the last couple of months. I’m especially fond of the purple flannels with the little pink hearts and stars on them. I love a man who can inappropriately grope his feminine side like that.”
“I don’t wear flannels. I wear nightgowns.”
“Even sexier.” She reached into her coat pocket for her wallet. “I’ve got your drink, Mister Nightie.”
“No thanks. I appreciate the offer, though. Have a good weekend, Lauren.”
“Yes I will, Lowell. Do me a favor and have a good weekend, too, okay?”
Lowell watched her face for a moment, gave her a subtle nod, turned to walk away, then stopped and turned back. “I will, but only if I can find my rocket ship boxer shorts in basement storage.”
She smiled.
Lowell continued, “It feels like the perfect sort of night for a jaunt on the Inner Loop. Until Monday, then?”
“Until Monday it is.”
She saw the backs of his pea coat and head as he maneuvered to the cashier within the buzzing crowd around the coffee bar in the café’s center, and shortly after toward the door.
He glided through, and immediately disappeared into the night.
[Nine]
Rather than turn left down Gibbs, Lowell banked sharply to the right from the café’s exit, then right again into a covered walkway through an alley th
at terminated on Swan Street, thirty feet from a pedestrian egress of the East End Garage.
Humming fixtures on the outer surface of the structure vomited sheets of amber light down the rough concrete walls and weakly onto the sidewalks below. Inside the garage, long strips of fluorescent bulbs tucked between ceiling beams radiated onto, and illuminated every inch of, the garage’s innards, bleeding beneath parked cars and around intensely yellow pylons to floors beyond.
The light was violently bright, and Lowell squinted as he walked through the first level of the cut-across to East Avenue. It probably added thirty more steps to his travels than if he’d taken a left turn out of the café and continued to East from there, but this way gave him the opportunity to catch something, anything, to disassemble and study over the course of the next few days.
Usually by this time on a Friday night, the garage was full, with a low turnover rate on the first two floors in particular.
The building was close to restaurants, bars, clubs, and an indie theater, so suburbanites staked their spots early and got their maximum fees’ worth.
Around nine o’clock, the older couples started returning, passively aggressive and swollen. They never opened car doors for each other, rarely paid compliments unless to those not present, and often gave the impression that they looked forward to spending time with anyone other than whomever they were with.
Some smoked, many times lighting up within a few feet of a ‘No Smoking!’ placard. Well over half wobbled as they approached their cars, leading Lowell to assume a fair number of them were one arrest away from having to commute to work by bicycle.
At half past ten, the younger crowd began straggling through, singles first, wagging their bitter, drunken heads, slamming car doors, and squealing away after paying their parking penances.
The groups and couples followed, boisterous and stupid. They were as inconsiderate to each other as the older couples, but it was all shrugged and laughed off, put down to protocol for their demographic. What good is recounting a nauseating story about your latest sexual conquest or successful scam to pocket cash from the bank drop bag at the end of your shift at the mobile phone kiosk at the mall if you can’t broadcast it at high volume in public places to the universal acclaim of your drooling audience?