Three

by Scott Becker

It was three thirty three AM in the morning and he was tired, very tired. He was
sleepless again. The wind that he heard on high outside of his bedroom window was
hushed but restlessly violent. It seemed to embody the atmosphere of frustration at
diminished expectation that papered over the current era. He rose unsteadily in the dark
avoiding each shadowy menace that presented itself in his overstuffed little bedroom and
teetered over to the small broken down couch by the open window. It seemed amazing
how in the end of October the tepid temperatures resembled weather of two or three
months previous. It was one of those mysteries that lurked in plain view that went
officially unanswered but whose presence was too significant to ignore.
His brain slowly spun into life as the circulation of his body took up a normal level of
flow and coherent thought once again became possible in his clouded mind. He couldn't
recall his dream but its presence was still with him. More urban wandering in the
darkness of guilty night, no doubt. Former friends as phantoms delivering enigmatic
speeches or out casting puzzling performances that seemed to have no apparent
relevance to his waking life. The article upon the Internet had claimed that a major war
was imminent. It was another such article that appeared increasingly upon a blog site
that had a tendency to be critically right in hindsight. The irony of it of course was that
the country that this threat of war was leveled against was one and the same as the one
that his former love interest now resided within.
The wind rushed by his window momentarily with the energetic vigor of a freight train.
His mother had always told him about her fear of lightning and approaching storms and
though a residual part of his animal nature was in sympathy with such sentiments he
always enjoyed the exhibition of natural drama that the weather presented. The cloudy
sky had the consistency of pea soup with the exception of a patch or two of dark night
that furtively poked through. His aging bladder nagged and he painfully arose and
carefully trod forth through the obstacle course again to the door which only opened part
way and sidled his way through it in the dun. Two darkened lumps, one straight ahead in
a chair and the other to his right in the bed, presented themselves to view. At one time
they had been his parents but in the slow inevitable eclipse of later life they had in many
respects been demoted to the status of borders that he shared this tiny apartment with.
He closed the bathroom door behind him and rummaged for the purplish root tuber that
perpetually served to drain his physical body of its watery residue and thus poised over
the open porcelain receptacle, waited impatiently for the dribble. His attitude of
indifference to the story and the earthbound ramifications troubled him. It was true that
all in his era had been institutionally threatened by the ruling structure with annihilation
for as long as he could recall. This seemed normal, almost expected as a facet of a
program that those in power routinely used to bind the masses to their rule. The reports
of the trillions of dollars of budgetary allocation that were disbursed to parties unknown
seemed to very reasonably correlate with a master plan of uncontrolled military
spending. So much wealth and resourced had been wasted in the course of his life span
upon the useless saber rattling that could have stabilized any given set of the world;s
problems. But that was not how the game was played.
A disappointing dribble of urine listlessly tumbled forth from the flaccid stump. No, the
thing that bothered him was how little he currently thought of her. It had been almost a
year since she had packed her bags with the excuse of a visit long overdue and then just
simply had not returned. He had suffered mightily at first from emotional angst of never
being able to see her again as they had spent over a year in each other;s constant
company as lovers. The slow process of coming to terms with her absence had as in
situations past left the inference of new emotional boundaries being wrought and scar
tissue being formed. Yet he had never expected that the reservoir of feeling, thus
dammed, would apparently run dry so soon. The fact of the matter was that he had lost
all sense of immediate empathy for not only her but humanity in general. The daily
purview of life encountered little beyond a weak attempt at routine. Nothing challenging
or long term in focus was taken up. Life was a blur living on the edge of a persistent
sense of forgetfulness that increasingly plagued waking existence. He could no longer
connect with any task at hand with the same wort of alacrity and feeling that he had
once customarily applied.
The walk back to the bedroom was swift and the coolness of the restless wind struggling
through the open window pleasantly refreshing . He sat back down into the awkward
slump of the broken down sofa lodging his back in such a manner as to insure the least
amount of discomfort. The original mattress was long gone and the placebo of the notion
of the physical support of his frame had accompanied it. He stretched out his arms along
back and bolster to support a portion of his frame and thought back to former times in
decades past. He had once made a habit of visiting foreign lands on a regular basis under
the excuse of showing his own intellectual work product. Some countries that were as
overtly affluent as his own had once been and others not. Had it been a possibility that
he had taken some of their tarnish with him at each successive return? It was equally
possible that his choice in women had been affected by these journeys as he had
seeming favored females from distant lands over ones from his home region. Age and
routine had of course diminished his appetites in that regard in recent years. Yet the
appearance of this last one had seemed both unorthodox and very special. The fact that
the foundation of the bond between them had so abruptly disappeared and the fact of
same had left him so unexpectedly deeply affected in such a manner that after a
moderate span of bitter suffering he simply ceased to be aware of it at all seemed
strange.
Was this part of the natural healing process? Or something more significant of incurable
distress. He just could not bring himself to care if she was incinerated within a nuclear
fire. The attempt to thing of this kind of scenario only summoned a blank space. The
stark contrast of the wane of strong emotions from those of the previous year to the
present was the only thing that in any way jarred him. The wind outside raged in the
haphazard rise and fall of rushing windy isobars. It seemed to evidence the physicality
of violent events both big and small and combine them into a chaotic symphony that
calmed at one instant and then threatened in the next. He took a deep breath into the
cavities of his collapsed lungs and felt an interlude as a sense of refreshing coolness
descended into the darkness of his own physical being. What pronouncements could he
make about the coming events that seemed routinely destined to affect his life in the
near future? Though the article seemed confidently explicit in its conclusions he knew
from experience that life in general did not work that way. History at that point were
possibility congealed into the approximation of an appreciation of events just recently
transpired was an incomplete vehicle. No one knew how these sorts of external
occurrences would leave them. They only could surmise from their own storehouse of
past experiences about how they were likely to react. This was society.
The coffee was bitter in his mouth. Almost as bitter as the illuminated version of day
that presented a more tempestuous tableau of massive columns of water vapor fallen
upon their sides and darkly undulating. The earth as a whole seemed up in arms that
morning. The drive to the loft was spares and barely interrupted by either traffic signal
or contested by competitive rush hours drivers. He struggled to heft a box of
photographs whose aged cover seemed on the edge of blowing off and releasing its
contents to the insatiable winds. The traverse from the parking lot through to the
corridors of the building up to the third level was just as equally bereft of any human
presence as had been the ride into town.
©Scott Becker, "as artist"