After a while, people stopped saying hi to him.
The work atmosphere became foretoken and noir, like a Batman movie.
Most days now Brian didn’t say anything out loud.
He took to sitting in parks. Observing people. Sometimes he would see a girl and a boy holding hands and it would make him happy. “How nice,” he would think. “How nice it is for them.” Though most of the time it just made him jealous. He imagined the couples coming up to him and patting his hair, slapping his cheeks, like a baby. Laughing into his face. He would dare them to.
He bought encrusted nuts from the “Nuts 4 Nuts” people, who were nice people, if a little doomed-seeming.
He made it a point to say thank you and goodbye whenever buying food or other items.
Have a good day. Goodnight.
One day he didn’t go to work.
And then it became so difficult and useless to go to work that he stopped going.
There were moments when you knew for sure that you would never be happy. You thought, “Nothing’s going to happen this year. Ten years, sixty years. That’s right. Of course.” And you felt all those years, there, inside of you, wandering the institutional corridors of your bones, playing ping-pong in the unkempt game-room of your heart, not keeping score, not even using the paddles — but playing stupidly a kind of handball-table hockey. But not even doing that, really. Just standing around. All the years, just standing there. Waiting to happen.
You thought, “Well, then …”
And you imagined being dead. You imagined it might be something like a gasp. A normal gasp, but sustained, and forever — and maybe outside of you, sucking at your air, the suffocation and discomfort increasing without end. The mouth-faced animal of death — flying, taking, wanting always more, like something intelligent and sane, but delinquent and two-years-old. The mouth-headed gliding lung of death. “Of course,” you thought. Because these things were possible. They were. There was even a thing called anti-matter, Brian knew. And black-matter, which was invisible. Eighty to eighty-five percent of all matter was actually black-matter. Brian had read that in a book. There had been an enormous question mark on the opposite page.
For a long time, there was the sensation of life becoming smaller.
Life lost gradually the things of itself. The peripheral items wandered amnesically off, and then flew away, not amnesic at all, just too optimistic and quixotic to stay. You became meeker and less opinionated through all the small maintenances of yourself — the self-aware, mid-day toothbrushing, the splashless handwashing. And the one eye of your soul — the angrysad Cyclops of your soul, with its spiked club, its dark and forsaken cave, its island routine — began to squint, to slowly close.
Life became a puny, disassembling thing.
Something that needn’t be paid any attention to — that you could just leave there.
Brian found that he did not need much to get through each day. Decent Chinese food, a Jean Rhys novel, iced coffee. That was enough for one day. It helped if he stayed in his room and slept more than 14 hours a day, which he did; the peculiar, detached success of being in bed — it was like the padded practice of a thing before the real hurt and triumph of the actual thing.
His fantasies became less masturbatory and more about time-travel and childhood.
He grew content in a leveled and agrarian way, like a grass.
Still, though, once, unable to sleep, he had, in one dilapidated night, allowed himself to search out an adult store and buy two porno magazines and some other items. He read them front to back, stopping carefully for the photos. Later, he looked in his bathroom mirror, pointed at his reflection, and said, “Born alone, die alone.” He was giddy with shame and despair after that. Then he wasn’t giddy anymore, and he went to sleep. When he woke, it was night again. He wrapped the pornography and the other items in three plastic grocery bags, tied it up, put it in a Mercer Street Used Books bag, tied that up, carried it six blocks in a direction he hadn’t been before, and shoved it in someone’s trashcan.
It was important, he knew, not to become one of those irrecoverable persons.
One day he was looking out his window, staring at people who were climbing onto each other’s backsides laughing — and he began to think that if he got a job, he could meet people. He seemed to realize this. He needed a job. He needed also to join clubs. Water polo, yoga. Bowling.
In Manhattan, he had a coffee.
He walked up Sixth Avenue. He turned toward Union Square. The streets seemed to have recently been blasted clean. “Nice job,” Brian thought. He was impressed. He felt good. He went through the park, looking and smirking — not in an unfriendly way — at people, and continued uptown.
Around 33rd street there was a strip club or something. It had a sexy-lady sticker on the door. It said, “Live Girls.” Brian thought of maybe going in. Maybe not, though. He would no doubt affect gauntness, perversity, desperation, and condescension. The other patrons would somehow affect virtue and dignity, a kind of Nordic diplomacy. They would be enterprising and pressed for time.
Brian walked into Times Square.
There was a Brazilian steak place here that he liked. He used to go all the time with Chrissy.
He walked back downtown. He didn’t feel at all good anymore. “Because of the coffee,” he thought. The caffeine was no longer doing what it would do. He sat in Washington Square Park. He had never liked Chrissy, he guessed. Had never really liked anyone, probably. “That’s it,” he thought. His shoulders and neck were cramped from trying too hard for good posture, which he knew was important for confidence, bones, self-esteem, mood, attractiveness, etc. A young man wanted to sell Brian some drugs. Brian shook his head, and looked at the ground. The young man stayed to talk. He sat. He made some distinctions between psychologists and psychiatrists, and then complimented Brian’s teeth. “He says that to everyone,” Brian thought. Next, your teeth would be pulverized to a fine powder. “Thank you,” Brian said, and the young man left.
It had become very dark outside.
Brian stood and walked in some vague direction, into a bookstore.
He moved himself around the aisles. He tried not to look too lonely. He opened a book but could not concentrate. Everyone else, he felt, was on a choicer plane of existence. They all seemed very confident that the world was a good and auspicious place. Brian’s face had gone hot and severe. The clam-meat of his face. People could see. His neck tremored a little. That kind of inchoate weeping that would always happen to him if he stayed in public too long, it happened now.
“This is … unreasonable,” he thought.
He bought and ate a cookie the size of his hand. He felt like vomiting. He went out into the city. It seemed louder than before. Trucks the size of small buildings were coming consecutively down the street. A team of men were jackhammering the street. There was a group of drunken people with glossy heads.
Brian walked slowly around, then came to a stop. His mind went blank. Time moved around him, like a crowd. “Walk,” he thought. “Move, go.…”
He thought that he would see a movie, then.
He bought a ticket for 12:45 a.m. at the Union Square Theatre. He had one hour. He walked in a direction, but saw an acquaintance across the street and turned and walked in another direction.
From a deli, he bought a 16 oz. beer and a soy drink that was also a tea drink.