A man, happily married, fantasizes about making love to a woman other
than his wife, while stuck in the morning commute. The fantasy is a pedestrian,
even a perfunctory one; he makes a conscious effort not to embellish his
fantasies. By restricting them purely to the realm of physical sex, he feels
he is being more faithful to his marriage. An attempt at a more elaborate
fantasy, with more of a "story," would be, in his opinion, the
first step in charting an escape from his fidelity. At the very moment that
he reaches the climax of his fantasy, involving a red-haired woman who has
just passed him in the carpool lane, his wife, 20 miles away and traveling
in the opposite direction, towards her job, brings herself to orgasm on
a plastic bus seat, which is vibrating with unusual force.
There is a terrible falling out between two friends. They have an argument
on a bridge, after which they will never talk to each other again. One friend
is returning five or six records he has borrowed from the other. After the
argument is over, the friend who has returned the records leaves. The other
stays on the bridge with his records. When his friend is out of sight, he
slides the records from their sleeves, one by one, and sails them off the
bridge, like frisbees. Three shatter on the same tree, and the pieces of
the records hang in the wiry branches like black christmas ornaments. Years
later, he reads a book in which there is a scene exactly as this argument
transpired: two friends meet on a bridge -- one returns some records to
the other -- harsh words are spoken -- the owner of the records, suddenly
left alone on the bridge, throws the records over the side. Reading the
book, he thinks, at first, that the writer must have observed him and his
friend that day, and then used what he had seen for his novel. When he looks
at the copyright date of the novel, however, he realizes that this is impossible
-- the book was written four years before the argument took place.
A young woman works at a group home for autistic children. The child
she is most drawn to is a twelve-year-old boy who is obsessed with electric
appliances, particularly digital clocks. He always has four or five of them
in his room, bought from the thrift store. Each clock is always set to a
different time, and none of them are ever the correct time. Sometimes the
boy will sit in his room with the face of the clock pressed up against his
eyes, as if he were looking through a pair of binoculars. He will sit that
way until one of the numbers changes. The last image of this boy that the
young woman takes home with her every night is of him lying in bed, snuggled
up to one of the clocks as if it were a teddy bear, its red numerical eyes
glowing in the dark. After a few months pass, the young woman finds a more
lucrative job. She tells the autistic boy she is going to be leaving the
group home, but she can't decipher his expression when she tells him this;
he is completely nonverbal. Driving home from her last night of work, she
shuts off her car radio because all the news depresses her, and she isn't
in the mood to listen to music. When she arrives at her apartment, and opens
her bedroom door, she sees that one of the legs of the endtable by her bed
has given out, pitching her digital clock onto her pillow.
A woman's son is called to serve in a war overseas. She is a patriotic
woman, and proud of her son, whose sense of character and self-worth has
improved with his time in the military. Nonetheless, when it is time to
see him off, a tear falls from her eye, despite her determination to suppress
it. The tear does, however, give her son the opportunity to appear gallant
and strong, wiping it from her cheek protectively, in a gesture that reminds
her -- almost unbearably so -- of the boy's father, who is long dead. In
a moment of strange clarity, she realizes she is risking the loss of two
men in this war. After her son has gone, she tries to submerge herself in
her daily routine, her work and her household chores. One morning, as she
puts on her earrings and bracelet, she feels she can't have metal touching
her body. The sensation repulses her. She removes the jewelry, and even
her wedding ring, though she knows the other women in the office will notice
this. Several weeks later, when she receives the letter, she finds out that
this is the morning her son was killed.
A man's daily morning ritual is to pick up his paper, then go to a bakery
around the corner from his apartment and skim through it over a cup of coffee
and a pastry. Though the bakery has a wide variety of pastries, he always
has one of two kinds, either a chocolate donut or a cheese danish. His morning
mood can thus be classified through a simple binary code: chocolate donut
/ cheese danish. Fortified with information, caffeine, and sugar, he feels
much better prepared to face his work day. On a chocolate donut morning,
though he is not an obituary-reader, he notices his own name on the obituary
page. The first thing he thinks -- rather irrationally -- is that it is
a joke one of his coworkers has played on him. As he reads the brief description
of the deceased under his name, however, he realizes that it is in fact
a completely different person, who happened to be born with the same name.
The obituary mentions that the deceased had lived in the same city as the
man for his entire life. And in fact he now remembers having once looked
at his name in the phone book, only to see it doubled. He had entertained
the idea of calling his doppelgänger, but quickly dismissed the impulse
as childish -- what, after all, would he have to say? After that morning
he lost his taste for chocolate donuts, and when he wasn't in the mood for
a cheese danish, he would order a bear claw instead.
_____________________
Chris Lanier is a writer and cartoonist living in San Francisco. His latest
graphic novel, Combustion,
was published in 1999 by Fantagraphics Books. He currently writes and animates
a weekly cartoon on the internet, Romanov, which can be found at
wildbrain.com.
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