Outside, he made sure to look far into the distance. If an acquaintance confronted him, started questioning him, he would have no choice but to run away. He sat in a dark area of Union Square Park.
He drank his tea drink.
He looked absently at the label. “2000 % Vitamin C,” it said.
In the movie theatre there were a few other solitary people. Some had a kind of space-time enlightened gaze, a beatific vacancy about their eyes that made them look very confident, but in a bionic way, as if they were truly — scientifically — simultaneously in the future, at home, eating something with a large spoon. The others, including Brian, blinked a lot. After each blink their focus would be on a different area outside of their heads. They looked as if under attack, which was because they felt as if under attack.
Brian went into the bathroom and stood in a stall.
He locked the door. He took his beer out of his bag, looked at his beer, put his beer back in his bag. He stood there until a few minutes past the start-time of the movie. He splashed water to his face, left the bathroom, went in the theatre, and sat in the back row.
After a while, he took his beer out of his bag and opened it. The beer said, “Kuhchshhh.” It was tall, silvery, and cold. On the screen, a beautiful girl who was Natalie Portman was taking an aggressive interest in a depressed, monotone man whose mother had recently passed away.
Brian almost shouted, “Bullshit,” but was able to control himself.
“My hair is blowing in the wind,” said Natalie Portman, whose name was Sam.
Brian began to think, “If I were as beautiful as her …” He stopped himself and drank his beer. His face soon became warm. There was an asphyxiative pleasure to it, like a kind of choking or crying. His heart was beating fast. The movie was wide and calm on the screen. Cool air was coming down. Brian leaned back into his seat and put his feet up. There were moments when you were not afraid of anything anymore. These moments it became clear that all things were arbitrary, that everything was just made of atoms, or whatever, and therefore everything was, firstly, one same, connected thing, a kind of amorphous mass wherein areas of consciousness moved from place to same place — or maybe did not even move, but, because all places were the same, were just there. Guilt, fear, meaning, love, loneliness, death. These words, you realized, were all the same. Everything was all the same. There was what there was, and that was what all there was; there was you, and you were everything. These moments would last seconds, minutes, or maybe an hour, and they were euphoric. They could happen from reading, looking at a painting, from music — from any kind of art, really, or from witnessing or experiencing something startling or strange; but never from other people. These moments you could almost cry. Life was simply, obviously, and beautifully meaningless.
Brian in the theatre that night, drinking beer, felt this.
These moments would end, though, when you realized that all that amorphous mass stuff was, well — bullshit. Was good on paper, maybe, but in real life was impossible. Unlivable. Something only a philosopher, a paid one — a philosopher that received cash for what he or she did — would benefit from. Things weren’t connected. Not really. You were one person alive and your brain was encased inside a skull. There were other people out there. It took an effort to be connected. Some people were better at this than others. Some people were bad at it. Some people were so bad at it that they gave up.
Sasquatch
Though she’d begun to get a bit fat that winter, it was in February, around when her father found a toy poodle (sitting there, in the side yard, watchful and expectant as a person), and adopted it, that a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood — an inside ventilation, like a bacteria of ghosts — and it was sometime in the fall, before her 23rd birthday, that her heart, her small and weary core, neglected now for years, vanished a little, from the center out, took on the strange and hollowed heaviness of a weakly inflated balloon.
This wasn’t sadness — there were no feelings of desperation or disaster, nothing like depression with its one slowed-down realization of having been badly and untraceably misunderstood — but rather a plain, artless form of loneliness; something uninteresting, factual, and teachable, perhaps, to children or adults, with flashcards of household items (toothbrush, pillow), coloring books of fleeting, unaccompanied things (hailstones that melt midair; puddles formed and unseen and gone; illusions of friends in the periphery), and a few real-world assignments (post-nap trip to the pet store in the early, breezy evening; Halloween night asleep on the sofa; Saturday night dinner in the parking lot, looking through the windshield at the pizza buffet restaurant you just got take-out from).
“I don’t want to serve those guys,” Chelsea said at Denny’s to her manager Bernadette. “You do it please?” Around a person like Bernadette, who once said to a plate of pancakes she was going to fire it, then went around telling everyone, including patrons, about that—“I fired some pancakes earlier, so watch out”—Chelsea could get pleading and playful a bit; around most other people she just felt surreally retarded or else profoundly insane all the time.
“I’m going to fire you,” Bernadette said. “Wait. I’m going to promote you.”
“Then I can fire myself,” Chelsea said. “Yeah. I’ll just fire myself.” She’d get a job wearing a hot dog suit, roadside — dancing, losing weight, holding up a vaguely controversial sign: Juicy, tender, cheap; so eat me. Teenagers would drive by and assault her. “But yeah; they went to high school with me. But we pretended no one knew each other. They wouldn’t look at me. Even them two pretended they didn’t know each other. That’s how bad it got.”
“You take big head, then. The big-headed guy. I’ll do the losers you went to high school with.”
“I hate it when people call people losers,” Chelsea said.
“Look at me. I manage a chain restaurant that sells pancakes at night. I tell my boyfriend he’s a loser every day. I did that today. Who wants to succeed in life? No one.”
“Um, I’m a waitress at Denny’s, and you’re my manager. And you’re like one year older than me, and way more successful.” Though she knew while saying it that it wasn’t going to make much sense, she said it anyway, with a sort of conviction, even, because she was not good at functioning in real-time, especially when distracted, like she was now, by how tiny and beautiful Bernadette was, like a child, almost, whereas Chelsea herself was homelier, medium-sized, and, in an obscure way that she sometimes — usually after coffee — thought, but never really believed, might be mysterious and therefore attractive, disproportioned, like a vitamin-deficient, softly-mutated, childlike sort of adult. “Why are you calling that guy ‘big head’?” she said.
Bernadette moved toward Chelsea — who, as always, when approached, began like a blowfish to feel growing and more sensitive — and hugged her. “Calm down, girl,” Bernadette said, and something behind Chelsea’s ribs that had been swinging, black and heavy like a pendulum, swung a little more, then detached and fell away, and in the unoccupied moment that followed — it was one of those moments you could go away from and relax a little and then come back as how you yourself wanted to be, rather than what the world wanted you to be — Chelsea had the thought that Bernadette was a good person, and felt like she might cry, or at least say something. But Bernadette stepped back and Chelsea hesitated, then went to the big-headed man and looked at him, the secret reality of his skull, thinking that if it wasn’t so large he would’ve made more friends as a child, wouldn’t now be eating alone on a Friday night. She took his order, wandered around — always felt like she was ‘wandering around,’ even at work, which seemed wrong in some deep-brained way — served him, and, while seating an elderly couple, then, watched as her old high school classmates left without paying.