D.W. Young lives in Brooklyn, USA. Some of the publications his work has appeared in are:
WordRiot, the New York Observer, the Muse-Apprentice Guild, Eleven Bulls, Exquisite Corpse, Cross Connect, Flak
Magazine, The Summerset Review, and Gravity.
|
I
YELLOW
Nobody understood traffic like Lionel Blumberg.
A gaunt, methodical man with unkempt brown hair and a trace of pockmark, he’d begun
his career as an entry-level paper pusher in the Transit Authority. At age thirty he was still there. Lacking
connections and disinclined to sycophancy, his prospects showed no sign of improving; his singular talents remained
latent and undiscovered; the days oozed past.
Lionel’s official job title was Claims Router but everyone just called them
“funnellers”. They travailed under the most oppressive bureaucratic conditions. Employee burnout and even nervous
breakdowns were common.
"It’s like being adrift at sea in a dinghy with a gaping hole in the hull,” Lionel
once related to his wife Ramona. “You can bail water fast enough to keep from sinking but never fast enough to
plug the hole."
But rather than rising water Lionel had rising paper to contend with. Each of the
eight and a half by eleven inch pieces of paper which ceaselessly crossed Lionel's desk required him to fill out
all sorts of additional forms with all sorts of inane requirements. Some of these forms were sub-divided into
quadruplicate sheets of coloured paper; some were catalogued; some were assigned eleven digit tracking numbers.
Eventually, the various redundant pieces of information would be transferred into at least one of several unlinked
computer databases, as well as noted down in a hefty set of bound logbooks which not one employee had found a need
for in over ten years.
Every aspect of the Forms Department was archaic. The furniture was frayed and prone
to collapse. The water cooler was rusty and over twenty years old. Deprived of internet access, the obsolete computer
on Lionel’s desk served little purpose; he dutifully stamped every single form he processed with one or more of six
different mechanical rubber stamps of varying size, heft and ink colour. The droning click and thud of the stamps'
arcing action (stamp paper, turn paper, press stamp to ink pad, return to paper, stamp paper, turn paper, etc) often
took on a soporifically rhythmic effect that left him daydreaming of extended midday trysts in posh hotel suites
with random, high-heeled women glimpsed on the street during lunch hour.
Lionel never planned to languish for so long in such a dead end spot. Struggling with
credit card debt and college loan payments, he’d initially taken the job out of desperation. As time passed and he
remained stuck in Forms, he never stopped promising himself that "one day soon" he would "make a move”. This mantra
sounded increasingly pathetic and he knew it. He despised his co-workers, went to lunch alone and avoided the huddled
packs of chatting, gossipy employees always smoking in front of the building. They included secretaries with tell-tale
white tennis shoes and garish press-on fingernails, unkempt clerks with blotchy skin and stained ties and the
occasional managers in cheap suits striving to maintain laughably authoritative demeanours while simultaneously
ogling every young girl in sight.
The wake up call to Lionel’s dormant genius, his dues ex machina, arrived on
a dim and sleety afternoon in November. Sick of working to the point of physical pain, every possible distraction
exhausted, he sat staring numbly at the thick, bound stacks of paper rising from his desk. After a while he picked
one out at random and began to read. He was only supposed to log them, never look inside, and risked a reprimand by
doing so. He didn’t care anymore. Entitled The Columbus Circle Revision Project (CCRP for short), the prolix
report detailed the city's plans to erect a new traffic system for the notoriously congested intersection. It should
have been tedious reading but Lionel found himself completely absorbed.
Everything about the plan was ill conceived. Lionel grasped this intuitively. Looking
past the abstraction of the assembled data, he divined the pandemonium that was bound to result: grid-locked traffic
honking without pause; spiteful pedestrians cursing crosswalk signals that ended too abruptly; buses careening around
partially obstructed corners with groaning brakes; fat old ladies with stubby, porcine legs vainly seeking to hail
taxis. Yet where others would have remarked only confusion, Lionel glimpsed an underlying possibility of order and
rhythm, envisioned a harmonious ebb and flow.
Finishing the report, Lionel trembled with excitement. He could save the day. It meant
taking a big risk though. But what did he have to lose? As it stood, there seemed less and less likelihood that he
would ever realize enough of those promises he’d made to Ramona to avoid becoming a failure in his own mind. If he
didn’t do something drastic soon she might easily begin to hate him for his mediocrity. More afraid of this than even
his own personal disappointment, he decided to act on his bold thought. Springing away from his desk, he travelled the
two floors up to visit the Transit Commissioner himself: Rudolph Malfenti.
Luckily, Lidia Benzinger, Malfenti’s notoriously sharp-tongued and callous secretary,
had left for lunch when Lionel arrived. Her boss, however, was in and even more fortuitously had left his door wide
open. Lionel barged into the corner office and boldly set the proposal down on Malfenti's desk with a big X rubricated
across its top page. "This is going to be a disaster," he declared. The balding, double-chinned bigwig, who had a
pastrami sandwich crammed into his mouth, looked up at him in disbelief. Ingesting this temerity faster than his food,
his gleaming little J.P. Morgan eyes narrowed and his face flushed as if he'd just swallowed a small rodent whole.
Either because of the pastrami in his mouth or the insistence with which Lionel rattled
off a succinct but quite convincing explanation of why failure was inevitable, the executive didn’t get in a rebuttal.
Lionel then elucidated his alternate proposal. He was shrewd enough to expect Malfenti to try and steal the credit for
his plan and withheld its most critical fixes as insurance. Trying vainly to remember his intruder's name, the sly
commissioner soon recognized the perspicacity of Lionel's arguments. Still eating sloppily, he let Lionel talk without
interruption. At the same time he began to plot all sorts of devious means of taking advantage of the magnificent
opportunity represented by the clerk before him, who seemed to be the rarest sort of windfall: a brilliant sucker.
“Ok, you’ve made your case. I want you to tackle this thing,” he finally told Lionel.
“I’ll bump you two pay grades and makes you a manager. Sound good?”
“Not really,” objected Lionel.
They began haggling over possible forms of compensation. Back and forth it went, more
like boxing than discussion. At one point things reached such an intense pitch that Malfenti actually shouted
instructions to Lidia Benzinger to allow no disturbances, 'not even if it's the goddamn mayor!" Lionel quickly
proved Malfenti's initial assessment wrong. Threatened and badgered by the unscrupulous, rapacious executive, Lionel
stood his ground for over three hours until he won most of the outrageous concessions he'd come asking for. 'You are
without a doubt the craziest clerk I ever met,' Malfenti remarked at the end of it all, stressing the clerk part and
getting one last jab in for having been denied the total victory he'd so greedily anticipated.
Lionel held onto those key, ace-in-the-hole details in anticipation of the moment
when everything would be finalized in writing, but he knew Malfenti's influence was great enough that his capitulation
meant victory. The rest was mere formality. Lionel went straight home without returning to his desk and the defiant
gesture filled him with elation. He and Ramona celebrated his change of fortune by running up a shocking tab at a
three star restaurant.
| "Every aspect of the Forms Department was archaic. The furniture was
frayed and prone to collapse. The water cooler was rusty and over twenty years old. Deprived of internet access,
the obsolete computer on Lionel’s desk served little purpose" |
The very next day Lionel's transfer to a new post directly under Malfenti went into
effect. His salary doubled and his hours were suddenly his to control. Transit went ahead with his revisions to
the CCRP and they worked flawlessly. Thereafter his services were in high demand. Late night hours at the office
became the norm as more and more projects were heaped upon him, but they brought a remarkable string of successes
too. Within two whirlwind years Lionel had acquired an impressively spacious window office, a six-figure salary
and a reputation as an eccentric genius.
Everywhere Lionel directed his masterful eye traffic conditions improved. Among his
most remarkable abilities was his unparalleled comprehension of jaywalking's disruptive effect upon traffic. Other
cities had solved the jaywalking problem with strict preventative measures, but in New York residents considered
the misdemeanour a civil obligation and consequently they required a more subtle approach. Always seeking diagonals
in the gridded city, they had to be turned aside at the most crucial junctures, for they could never be truly stopped.
This often required they remain unaware they were being denied access. If you challenged their authority, you risked
inciting them to aggressive and intentional disobedience capable of wrecking even the best of plans.
Lionel's methods could be counted on to be both pragmatic and daring. His techniques
worked in easy concert with their surroundings. Sometimes he merely changed traffic light timing; sometimes he
demanded major construction and sometimes merely the removal a distracting billboard. Traffic fatalities citywide
fell 30% and in those two first years alone he managed to unclog three of the city's most infuriating congestion
points.
An uxorious man of mostly simple pleasures, Lionel remained content to be thinking
creatively and saving money assiduously. He also became a minor celebrity. Local newspapers often sent reporters
to interview him and he acquired a knack for quotable banter. Still, he prided himself on his lack of hubris and
he couldn't stand the outrageous airs many of his high-profile colleagues assumed and he never lowered himself to
their practice of continually slandering one another.
Nine years after his overnight ascension, he achieved the highlight of his career
with the bold, irrefutable Third Avenue Bridge Fix--or, TABF for short.
Initially derided from nearly all quarters for his designs seemingly mad series
of raised and interconnected ramps, Lionel had pulled strings at every juncture to make the project happen. The
daily papers, gleefully anticipating a disaster, lampooned him in cartoons and editorials with titles like "Bridge
to Nowhere?" and "Burning His Bridges?" Ever two-faced, these same papers were equally pleased when the plan went
into effect and the infamous logjam cleared up. The Mayor even created an entirely new, plenipotentiary Special
Position for Lionel as a reward for his accomplishment– and its campaign value.
The Special Position marked the advent of Lionel's battle with implacable
discontent, which was set ruefully into motion by his divorce from Ramona in ugly, money-disputed circumstances.
They were on vacation at the beach when he first stumbled onto her baffling adultery with Cole Cibber. She refused
to break off the affair, so he hired a lawyer and a lisping private detective named Dimax Wilder who took many more
explicit photos of Ramona and Cibber together in bed than Lionel could stomach and whom he always suspected of
playing both sides of the case. In court Lionel ruthlessly fought to prevent Ramona from receiving a penny of his
carefully hoarded and now sizable assets. For her part, she stridently maligned his character and marital habits
and contradicted every point in his testimony in order to insure herself a favorable settlement.
Cibber was a professor of English and one of the country's most commercially successful
poets. Ramona had met him at one of his readings. The poet dressed almost exclusively in dark grey and preferred to
match well-tailored but conservative tweed jackets with more fashionably cut designer shirts. He never wore a tie
and his dandy's shoes were always scuffed just enough so that he remained plausibly academic. But the component of
Cibber's outward appearance, which nettled Lionel most was his wavy silver hair, every single strand of which
remained perfectly in place regardless of gale force winds, torrential downpours or tropical humidity.
Cibber attended the divorce proceedings, conspicuously and possessively holding
Ramona's hand whenever he could. In his hard wooden chair, Lionel doodled violent and increasingly bizarre
stick-figure deaths on a scratch pad. Since becoming aware of his rival, Lionel had read Cibber's poetry obsessively
and beyond merely boring him to no end, it had created in him a tremendous but unsatisfying disdain for the intellect
of a man who would publish such doggerel, as he always referred to Cibber's verse.
Adrift in his newfound discontent and unabashed self-pity, Lionel went so far as to
vengefully copy down a particularly odious passage from Cibber's most famous work, The Leave-taking, hundreds of
humiliating times in order to memorize it. He then took to reciting it to people with an inflection and pace that
highlighted all the work's awkward wordings and laughable comparisons. The passage ran:
a white lily played a part
a passionate pallor
brazenly plucked from a neighbourhood flower box
on a prior night's
slow-doomed walk away
from reconciliation;
a white lily with gentle, tactile petals,
(you would not put it in your hair
though I asked, pleaded, and there's
no harsher sign of love's extinction)
–this white lily is what I remember,
nothing like the sterile of absence of colour of
the envelope discovered, after
waking startled and alone
on a rainy holiday morning,
carefully placed on the kitchen table
like a plate for an important dinner guest,
white against cruel white and
filled with proclamations of
the inevitability of our sundering.
The hostile trial dragged on and included contradictory and often embarrassing
testimony from mutual friends and relatives, as well as from Lionel and Ramona's respective private detectives
and psychiatrists. In the end she won one third of his money, the car and the dog. From that galling moment of
defeat onward Lionel never spoke to her face to face again. What infuriated him most was not her leaving him, or
even her leaving him for a poet, but rather her having latched on to such a despicably second-rate one. A genius,
any kind of genius, that would have made sense– he could have born that.
Two hard years passed. Lionel was unenthusiastically engaged in a reassessment of the
intersection at West 82nd street and Columbus Avenue when realized he was inadvertently trying to kill Cibber. The
poet lived just three blocks away from the busy corner and crossed it regularly. Always methodical in verifying his
intuition's presumptions, Lionel made a thorough review of his diagrams later that evening. The office had emptied
out and only the cleaning crews remained, hunched figures quietly ghosting down the hallways past the one desk light
gleaming in his otherwise darkened office. He quickly confirmed his suspicions. A malicious, potentially deadly trap
lay buried within the obscure details of his design. Lionel laughed aloud, a brutal, bitter sound. Without ever
consciously intending to, he'd undermined all his best intentions and turned the corner into a deathtrap. And he'd
almost never realized it! How many people would he have maimed or killed on the miniscule chance Cibber might be
one of the unlucky ones? Leaning back in his chair until he was shrouded in shadow, he ruminated over the
implications.
The hidden threat lay in the timing of the intersection's traffic lights and
crosswalks and, more specifically, the aggressive driving of New York taxis. Their penchant for speeding through
yellow signals before making swerving left hands turns onto Columbus Avenue made them the perfect weapons. The
city’s belligerent pedestrians could be equally counted on to jaywalk about thirty feet down the street from
the actual crosswalk. Here cars hurtling around the corner could easily fail to notice anyone afoot until the
very last second. At the same time, the pedestrian, falsely secure thanks to the still blinking signal and his
own hindered perspective, would let his guard down. Lionel's new timing sequences increased the danger several
times over.
Unaccustomed to violence or the machinations of revenge and possessed of conventional
moral tenets, Lionel instinctively recoiled from the prospect of causing the death of innocent city residents.
Killing Cibber was another story. That didn't give him any qualms; getting caught and tried for it, however, did.
He had to admit this wasn’t likely– no one else understood his work well enough to discern the mere existence of
the trap, let alone the details. Still, prison was the worst hell he could imagine and not worth risking for
anything.
Turning on all the lights in his office, Lionel set to work revising the plan and
reinstating safe parameters. As he persisted into the night he couldn't help but wonder whether Ramona might not
actually return to him if he were to remove Cibber from her new life. There would have to be an interim period of
mourning and uncertainty, but maybe death's stark intrusion into her affairs would force her to reassess her
priorities and rediscover those affections he couldn't quite believe she'd entirely dismissed.
Yeah, right. If, maybe, if: what a load of crap.
II
RED
That the end should have come about by the sea, in his most cherished place, would
only compound the rancorousness at the heart of Lionel's recollection of the event. Nearly the entire two weeks
of the ill-fated vacation had passed tranquilly and, blinded by his desire for enjoyment, Lionel hadn’t once
realized anything was amiss. Later he would often wonder just how long things might have gone on and under what
other awkward and painful circumstances they might have ended if he hadn't made the discovery when he did.
Later, too, he would be horrified and abashed by the fact that, bolstered by his
swelling (but not yet burst) happiness and affection for Ramona, he'd been on the verge of proposing they conceive
a child together. This was a subject they had discussed occasionally but uncomfortably and one, which, in
consideration of money and career and personal liberty, they'd always relegated to the easy top shelf of "future
considerations." What would trouble him most, though, about his near blunder, would not be its hilariously
misconceived timing but rather the gnawing, ulcerous doubt it prompted that perhaps Ramona had never intended
to have children with him and consequently never really been the person he'd believed her to be.
He could accept her falling out of love with him; he was wise enough to recognize
the frequent inevitability of this occurrence. He just couldn't accept feeling like an absolute fool. Even afterwards,
when his feelings for her persisted, albeit with a more contradictory passion, he couldn't stomach the prospect that
Ramona, for at least some part of their marriage, hadn't matched the intensity of his conjugal affection.
They were staying in an ant infested and permanently damp bed and breakfast called
The Leeside Inn. Their cramped bedroom's single window overlooked a modest, hedged yard, most of which was
taken up by a sprawling, overgrown garden. Its towering weeds and long abandoned flower beds surrounded a rotting,
paint chipped wooden trellis that threatened to blow over with every gust of wind. The Leeside lay off the
main strip in his favourite small town on the Cape ("under the elbow", as he called it), and the nostalgic, heavy
scent of the hedgerow’s densely clustered honeysuckle would drift up through the window carried by the late
afternoon breeze as Lionel and Ramona readied for dinner, mixing with the inevitable, pervasive brininess of
the nearby Atlantic and the clanging noise of the buoys and spars in the harbour and the occasional booming horn
from a ferry entering or leaving on its scheduled route. To Lionel these sensations were the antithesis of the
city and he enjoyed savouring them with his head thrown back and his eyes shut and his nostrils flaring in a dreamy
state that Ramona claimed terrified her and which often caused her to leave the room in disgruntlement.
An old widower named Mrs. Percival ran The Leeside in perfect picaresque fashion.
She had the irksome tendency of intruding in her boarders affairs at every possible turn, doing things like waking
them for breakfast at seven thirty a.m. without being asked to and chiding them for not attending Sunday church. Mrs.
Percival made up for her eccentricities by charging an irresistibly reasonable rate that led the ever bargain conscious
Lionel to kid, "she must be senile and living twenty years in the past with these prices."
Most of Mrs. Percival's seemingly boundless free time was spent sipping well-iced
glasses of vodka and cranberry juice, which she referred to as her "refreshers", while seated on a thickly-padded
rocking-chair on her front porch. Age, infirmity or perhaps a youthful accident had given her a game leg and she
limped about when she walked, her large, heaving frame leaning heavily on an exquisitely engraved silver-handled cane.
It was her only tasteful adornment and had belonged to her late husband Rufus, a consummate gentleman in every regard
save for his taste for cavorting licentiously with unshaven sailor boys down at the local bar. Other than the cane,
Mrs. Percival favoured only gold jewellery, which she wore in the form of numerous rings, bracelets, earrings and
chains, which all looked fake against the baggy clefts and rises of her sun ravaged skin.
It wasn't until the last day of the trip, when he'd come to settle the bill, that
Lionel stumbled across the evidence of his cuckolding. Returning from his customary morning round of golf, his bag
of clubs strung over his shoulder and his cap set jauntily atop his head, he came upon Mrs. Percival seated in her
habitual position drinking one of her equally habitual refreshers. The odds of it being her first of the day were
long.
“How are you today Mrs. Percival?” he inquired.
| "He could accept her falling out of love with him; he was wise enough
to recognize the frequent inevitability of this occurrence. He just couldn't accept feeling like an absolute
fool." |
“Oh I can't complain, bad leg and dead husband notwithstanding.” She paused to scratch
vigorously at the web of varicose veins twisting about her right ankle. “So you're leaving us this afternoon?”
It sounded more like an accusation than a question. Hoisting the refresher to her lips,
she drank greedily.
“Yup, we're leaving, I'm sorry to say.”
“Indeed. I've seen you run off to play golf every morning. Your wife doesn't mind?”
He didn't like the insinuation in her tone. “No, not really. She knows how much I
enjoy it. Besides I never get the chance to play this regularly. That's what vacation's all about right? The pleasure
of otherwise impossible routines...”
Mrs. Percival scowled at him, as if to say, I don't care for that sort of city repartee.
“Well, we better settle up then. Like my husband always said, no bill is a welcome
bill.” She paused for a moment on the brink of actually rising. Lionel wondered if she expected him to lend a hand.
He made no move to do so and instead headed into the house. With a loud, self-pitying sigh, either in response to
his lack of aid or from other sources of weariness, Mrs. Percival heaved herself out of her chair using her cane
for leverage and followed him inside.
Everything in Mrs. Percival's otherwise hodgepodge living room shared one quality:
lopsidedness. Nothing was straight. The lamps all leaned or were bent; the picture frames and mirrors hung aslant
in varying degrees; the couch was sunken and where one leg was missing it had been propped up with a telephone book.
After some rummaging about in a massive, warped antique desk, she produced Lionel’s paperwork. Gesturing for him to
take a seat on the sofa, she lay it down on the coffee table before him.
While he glanced over everything, she plopped down into an armchair. After a moment,
she began rhythmically tapping her cane against the coffee table's edge, much to Lionel’s annoyance. The bill was
handwritten, which struck him as quaintly preposterous, and he'd almost finished checking over the additional
expenses when two short but costly phone calls to a strange area code caught his attention. He'd definitely never
called there.
“Uh, Mrs. Percival I'm afraid we may have a mistake here.”
Mrs. Percival arched a skeptical eyebrow over the rim of her hoisted glass (from which
she continued drinking all the while).
“You see these two calls here,” he said, pointing at the bill to direct her attention.
“I never made these calls. I'm pretty certain my wife didn't either.”
Ms. Percival unleashed another weary, whooshing sigh.
“Mis-ter Blum-berg,” she said, enunciating each syllable of his name curtly, “these
phone charges are all calculated electronically by the phone company. I have nothing to do with them except to read
them straight from the meter. Are you implying that I made them up?”
“Of course not but...”
“Mis-ter Blum-berg, the answer is obvious. Your wife must have placed these calls. Why
don't you check with her before you start throwing accusations around like confetti at a wedding hmm?”
She took a long, and, to Lionel's eyes, self-congratulatory drink from her glass.
“Fine,” he grumbled, resolving to throw the matter back in her face as soon as Ramona
verified his claims.
* * *
She wasn’t in when he reached their room. Nothing stirred except the sun-bleached
window curtains, which swayed susurringly in the ocean breeze. Her suitcase lay on the bed, already packed. Lionel
swung his golf bag off his shoulder and rested it against the wall. Seconds later, as he looked around for a note,
it fell to the floor with a resounding thud.
“Shit!”
He kicked it angrily. Where the hell was Ramona?
No note was to be found; typically inconsiderate of her, he decided. If she'd headed off
to the beach she wouldn't be back for several hours. He was certain of one thing: he couldn't bear the prospect of
going back downstairs and capitulating to that old lush’s phoney charges. It didn’t matter that it was a relatively
trivial sum in dispute. He hated to be swindled and would go to inordinate lengths to avoid it.
He decided to call the number in question and see whose it was. It took him three tries
on the room's archaic rotor phone to finally dial it right. The call rang unanswered seven times and he was about to
hang up when someone finally picked up.
“Hello?” A man's voice spoke, deep and educated, with what sounded like an affected
hint of Englishness to the pronunciation. All of a sudden Lionel realized he hadn't thought of anything to say.
“Hello?” the man asked again.
Lionel tried to formulate a non-incriminating response but was too slow.
“Ramona is that you?”
Lionel’s thought process choked. What? Who?
“Ramona darling can't you talk? Is he there with you? I know it's you my peach; I
have caller ID remember? Ok well call me later and we'll make plans. I'll be back in the City on Monday. Ok? Ciao
amore.”
The line went dead. Lionel’s muscles stopped working; the phone remained stuck to
his ear; his eyes focused on a blank spot on the wall with painful force. Very slowly and tentatively he attempted
to find a plausible excuse for the exchange. But it was pointless. Who was he kidding?
He held this frozen stance for an indeterminate time, until the insistent beeping
from the receiver finally budged him. Putting it back on the hook, he yanked his golf bag off the floor and set
it back against the wall with shaking hands. Out in the hall, he heard the bag come crashing down again. Was the
whole goddamned house lopsided?
Arriving downstairs he paid the triumphant Mrs. Percival in full.
“You see,” she declared, “the phone company is never wrong. Hell, I bet they know
everything we say. Probably have every single conversation on file somewhere on some computer. They can do that you
know.”
Lionel didn't comment.
“May I offer you something Mr. Blum-berg? I'm having another little refresher myself.
It's especially hot today, wouldn't you agree? The breeze helps to be sure but still...”
* * *
Despite his frantic state, he refrained from bringing the matter up until they were
in the car headed home and he could hold back no longer. After he demanded an explanation Ramona apologized for not
acting sooner and then asked for a divorce.
“Fuck you,” he replied. To infuriate her, he sped recklessly the entire way back but
it provided little consolation; the drive was the most unbearable four hours of his life.
The next day he bought a copy of Cole Cibber's latest volume of poetry and went home
to read it in bed alone.
III
GREEN
Double parked in his unmarked, grey department car at the corner of 82nd and Columbus,
Lionel made few last adjustments to his plan. Tweaks, he liked to call them. He often spent hours on site like this,
soaking up the particularities. There were simply too many contextual nuances to be taken into account to try and do
everything from afar. Quirks and Vibes, as he described them in his ever-expanding frame of reference, his need to
name and thus validate the details and practices of his esoteric line of work. Around the office everyone poked fun
at his eccentricities; they'd even taken to writing down his jargon in a little dictionary they passed around for
laughs. Inevitably, however, his colleagues had also begun to adopt many of his terms for themselves.
A city bus rounded the corner with a seemingly impossible arc. Lionel jotted a note
down in his logbook. He kept a different one for every project and was highly secretive about their contents. Outside
it had just rained and the sidewalks were dark and slick. Lionel thought only of the increased braking dangers these
conditions incurred. Nearby, rain water clung in small dripping pockets to the summer-lush leaves of the trees
surrounding the Natural History Museum; then the sun returned from behind a bank of clouds and spread an iridescent
sheen across the museum’s lawn. A police siren pulsing in the distance kept the scene from turning too idyllic.
Lionel reached over to the passenger seat for his thermos– a gift from Ramona– and took a sip of lukewarm coffee.
A few yards in front of his car a young mother in a baseball cap led two grinning little
girls, each with a hand in one of hers, across the street. The girls' pigtails flopped about insouciantly as they
half-skipped past, a tiny pink backpack strapped to each of their backs. To Lionel's satisfaction, his expert eye
roaming about for signs of potential danger and miscalculation, the crossing went smoothly. Definitely a Milk Run,
he decided. It never ceased to amaze him just how many potentially fatal threats people faced on a daily basis. It
was a wonder anyone reached adulthood– an old thought but one he found an odd degree of comfort in, one he defined
the parameters of his existence by.
Lionel was now ready to close the project. A bit of a grin--a mere curl of the lip
and quiver of the cheek--snuck into his otherwise stern demeanour. This was top-notch work, some of the best of his
career. Turning off his blinking hazard lights and putting the car into drive, he was just removing his foot from the
brake when he saw her. As always it was her hair--straight, sleek, panther black--and her long yet unhurried stride,
which stood out. Many times in the past he'd kidded her about that walk and how distinctive it was. I can spot it a
mile away, he'd boasted. Today she wore a gauzy, blue summer dress with a subtle pattern. She was tan and laughing
and Lionel knew without hearing it that there was a slightly husky timbre to the sound. He groaned aloud. Nothing
about her had changed. She was still achingly desirable to him.
The sensation reactivated his dormant envy. Yes, she still walked with her back
straight and her arms motionless by her side, as if she was balancing a textbook atop her head. And her nose was
still thin and just ever so slightly crooked, which in truth he couldn’t see firsthand but which his mind had
already observed in memory's effortlessly embellished close-up. He briefly wondered if Cibber had ever noticed
this slight flaw but then he was on to Ramona’s lips, which were full and indolent, and always a little bit
truculent, always working in marvellous tandem with her thin, perfectly arched brows to give her the look of
a chess opponent who, watching you make your move, seems to be asking: are you really sure you want to do
that?
Then Lionel realized Cibber accompanied her.
“The bane of my fucking existence,” he muttered.
The poet, ever so dapper in a cream linen suit, was speaking quickly and gesticulating
emphatically with his hands. He glanced directly at Lionel's car, but the sun's glare prevented him from seeing
through the window-shield. Lionel tensed, his hand gripping the wheel with furious force. His gaze followed their
path as, arm in arm, they jaywalked the avenue right in front of him. They might as well have been mocking his craft.
An oncoming taxi forced them to dash across the last few feet of street and Lionel began laughing wildly at the sight.
He was keeping their miserable lives safe and they would never even know it, never even thank him for it. Christ, it
would serve her right if he killed that bastard. A healthy dose of deprivation was just what she deserved. The old
eye for an eye. No good as a general social code, of course, at least not since Hammurabi, but on the personal level,
well, who the hell wanted to be a saint? Forgetful, Lionel turned the key in the ignition, which ground noisily. He
smacked the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. Wrath surged up; his blood felt like it was pushing at the
walls of his skin, aching to erupt out of its channelled course, to spew venomously forth into the oxidizing light
and leave his frame behind slackened and jumbled in the front seat.
Breathing heavily through his nose, Lionel surveyed the intersection once more. In
the process, a fatalistic sort of calm descended upon him, along with the belated realization that he’d determined,
a few, vague seconds earlier, to go through with his mad, murderous original plan. He was going to kill that
motherfucker Cibber.
Terrified but also elated, his hands numb against the wheel, he pulled out into
traffic and headed back to the office. If the bastard's verse were any good whatsoever, he told himself, then there
would be no question of such an action. But there was no doubt on that end--Cibber was guilty on all counts. So
there would be no loss to humanity. Nobody could ever blame Lionel for diminishing literature or the beauty of
the world. Back at work, he informed his bewildered staff that the project had hit a snag and they were all going
to have to prepare for a Major Rewrite, the most dreaded term in his little book. Nobody understood the decision,
but they'd grown too accustomed to similar erratic behaviour from him to question its motives.
* * *
Six months later a speeding taxi smashed into Ramona and killed her as she jaywalked
the intersection at 82nd and Columbus. Despite a string of recent accidents at the corner, no one suspected Lionel's
involvement. Ramona’s sister Elaine, who had never liked him and clearly resented the obligation, broke the news to
him.
Dazed and nearly incapacitated by guilt, Lionel promised to attend the funeral. Over
the next several days he functioned somnambulantly. The ceremony was small and Cibber didn’t cry but Lionel did. It
wasn’t until he was driving out of the cemetery that he understood with a start that her death was exactly the outcome
he'd been secretly hoping for all along. At that moment nothing felt right; the world turned ethereal and vague; alien.
Driving purely by reflex, his drifting thoughts skirted the host of uncertainties he suddenly faced, while a pervasive
listlessness seeped into his bones.
He flipped on the radio in the hopes of finding something familiar and reassuring,
something classic (any form of distraction welcome at this point) but nothing satisfied him. He was still futilely
scanning stations when, without warning, the car in front of him braked to a screeching halt. Coming up behind it
inches short of a collision, Lionel closed his eyes with relief. When he opened them he noticed for the first time
that everybody else on the freeway was immobile too; he was caught right in the middle of a rush hour traffic jam.
Had he been paying attention he never would have taken that rout. Now he was trapped. Soon the inevitable, impatient
honking began, and as it reached its furious crescendo as more and more cars joined in, so too did Lionel’s urge
to scream.
* * *
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