If you wanted to you could flip a switch and open all the big, electric garage doors at once. Instead, it’ll stay trapped behind closed doors until the day after next, while the hours pass away and the early summer light, filtering down through the fiberglass panels overhead, reveals the room in more and more detail, and it’ll be forced to navigate in a closed space, like a fly trapped in a shed, you think, as you ride your bike (and watch for stray scraps of iron in your path) toward the last station key, which you turn in a clockwise direction (and which results in the ubiquitous creakcreak). You open the heavy metal door (it’s almost identical to the one you entered by, although this one is located at the far end of the hall), and lift your bike (with difficulty) over the threshold. The door slams shut (it’s a loud sound in the silence, but not quite as loud as it’ll be inside the building itself: you imagine the trapped bird fluttering back and forth in terror as the thunderous echo rolls away and dies). You’re outside, the weather is mild, you smell wet grass, the day will be cloudy, but even so you can still tell that, during the short time you were in the warehouse, it’s gotten lighter out, the artificial lights are in the process of weakening, it’s gotten so that beneath the streetlamps you and your bike cast sharp shadows across the asphalt; you forgot to turn it off. That’s a bad sign. Once again, you’ve left the light on while you slept, and once again, you’ve managed to sleep with your eyes open part of the time, part of the time with your eyelids drooping, but in any case with eyes that are swollen, heavy, and exhausted, though the minute you close them the room will begin to spin like a wheel of fortune (no, like a wheel of misfortune), it’ll spin uncontrollably with the lights on, the curtains drawn, the closet door half open, your socks strewn about, the whole room a centrifuge with you in the middle, and bile rises in your throat like water being pumped, or rather regurgitated, out of a washing machine, that’s exactly how it is, you think, and it’s only by keeping the light on and forcing your eyes to stay open that the spinning can be stopped, or rather braked, held at bay anyway, though as usual you’ve somehow managed to sleep, so to speak, with your eyes wide open, starring stiffly out into space like a manikin.
Your arms are covered in white. A white shirt, which you can see to the extent that you’re able to keep your (squinting) eyes open, but you realize that it’s unbuttoned at the throat and that you’re apparently missing a tie; at least you’ve managed to keep your pants on (a brief glance confirms this), and both, or actually, one black shoe; this latter realization is made possible by the fact that the blanket, which should’ve covered you, is lying like a heap of mashed potatoes on the floor. After a moment’s hesitation (a frozen gesture), you reverse the direction of your hand, reverse the painful, unfinished gesture toward the light switch, and it feels like a metal grill has slammed into your skull, when you instead stretch your upper body toward the blanket, grab it by one end and haul it, little by little, toward you; although it feels as heavy as a bag of sawdust or sand, you finally manage to somehow pull it onto the bed and up over your body. You don’t know if today is bleak and gloomy, silent and snowy, or ice cold and clear, but nonetheless you scowl at the new morning, you despise the thought of a new winter’s day, of a new day in general, there’s no way you’re just going to let yourself be wheeled into a new day, like they’d wheel you into an operating room, where a painful and debilitating surgery is waiting. You fall sleep again.
The next time you wake up, it’s light enough to see the numbers on the alarm clock: three minutes after eight. Did you remember to go shopping? You might as well get up. Is today the day they’re launching the campaign for the new retirement accounts? You don’t remember. What you do remember are those bank employees in their bleak gray or midnight-blue suits, those dour, obsessive-compulsive, humorless, bean-counting, anal-retentive pricks, arriving at the office and clutching their coffee mugs with grave and arrogant expressions, while they stuff their faces with free pastries, only theoretically able to find even the slightest bit of humor in his proposed newspaper ads, but definitely capable of worrying about how much the campaign will cost, whether they’re being scammed, whether corners can’t be cut, whether a cheaper medium can’t be found, those puritanical penny-pinchers, those fossilized calculators, holdovers of old-school capitalism’s pray, work, and save philosophy (like the bank president’s inevitable story about his father, the man whom “waste not, want not” made rich, who’d find used nails, straighten them out, and put them in a special box for a rainy day, the same way he stuck every fucking spare shilling in the bank he’d one day be president of, feeding an account that grew, bit by bit, into a gigantic, glittering load of dough, a constipation of cash, a horde of money he could loan out to desperate farmers and broke businessmen at interest rates that amounted to highway robbery, until his account was bursting at the seams, until it had swelled to monumental proportions, until it was a golden erection pointed straight at heaven, and all the while he continued to pick up used, even rusty nails, straighten them out, and put them in a special box for a rainy day); you remember those bank employees and their mind-numbing ad campaign, and still you get up, pressing your hand to your forehead, like that’ll help, only to find it’s covered in sweat, even though you’re freezing. You use your feet to feel around for your slippers. They’re not where they should be, but then again they never are (she always managed to keep them corralled). You eventually discover them way back under your double bed, you can’t possibly reach them without half-crawling underneath, something the throbbing in your head and the stiffness in your arms makes impossible; you look for a tool of some kind and find an old-fashioned wooden hanger (the name and address of the clothes store it came from are stamped symmetrically, heraldically to both the right and the left, and you remember reading a long time ago that some animals, chimpanzees to be precise, use tools, like plant stalks or sticks, that they can poke into anthills, encouraging the ants to march up the stalk or the stick, while the ape, or rather, the chimp slowly pulls the tool out, licking off the ants and swallowing them). Although it takes a monumental effort, you finally succeed in coaxing out your slippers with the help of the hanger: they seem to have accumulated a beard or lichen-like ring of dust on their yellow, suede skin.