Evan and the e-mail epiphany
Thousands of emails stacked up in his in-box. Offers of no-money-down mortgages and discount Viagra; online catalogs for Oregon pears and solications from the panty-of-the-month club. These adverts, along with the unread newspapers piling up in the grey carpeted hallway of his Jersey City rental and an over-stuffed mail chute were the only clues that our hero might be missing.
Evan’s life had been unencumbered by the complications of connectivity from friends or family for quite some time now. He worked at home and so he could count on no cubicle playmates or lunchtime colleagues to fill his day with friendly interactions. His disappearance from the real world was gradual like the tide; and his leaving went seemingly unnoticed.
After coffee and his morning constitutional, Evan’s days were spent banging away at the keyboard – sending and receiving scores of meaningless email correspondence; surfing the internet for news and porn; and mostly building an alternative life online at virtual community Second Life, whose tagline ought to read: For nerds who don’t have a first life! Evan could relate.
Living in the greater New York metro (having lived two decades inside the five bouroughs of ’the city,’ he hated to admit he was now from Joisy) it was easy to be anonymous. There is no loneliness more complete than the solitude of being alone in a crowd. All around you people gabble away. They sit at tables stuffing their cheeks full of fast food and mocha lattes, juggling cell phones and laptops and hurry like mice. Kids too big to be in strollers being pushed by passive aggressive matrons over the heels of the inattentive; huge waisted shopping bag people meandering slowly through the congested mob muttering obscenities; subway cars stuffed with teenaged girls wearing too much musk and hair gel; dirty sidewalks clogged with Eurotrash tourists staring stupidly star-ward toward tops of Chrysler Building, Empire State, and downward where once Twin Towers stood. Ground Zero, packed now with Cops and Military and vendors selling broadsheets about “Trajedy” and “Conspiracy.”
A hole where once the World Trade Center sprawled, where construction just now starting in earnest seven years after the fall. Took time for the politicians to divvy up the spoils and agree to the terms of construction corruption.
Commuters scurry through security checks like rats down a drain pipe, protected and directed by bullet-proofed Police with automatic weapons. Homeland Security Men in stenciled flak jackets patrolling conspicuously past pictures of the dead and missing.
“Metro. Get your free Metro,” hawks the crackhead newspaper vendor, “Read it on the train, take it on the plane.” A rhythmic chant punctuated by the staccato of jack hammers and the burst of demolition horns, “Fire in the hole.”
So when the time came, it was easy to just slip away. To leave it to the crowds to thread the Path Station gauntlet to subways, sidewalks and work. He had other plans — off the grid.
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Zenith’s Freefall. A short story.
I. Life as a Timeline
Eager to be scientific, Zenith drew a timeline.
Carefully manipulating his protractor, he labeled the starting point “Birth,” and the endpoint “Death.”
Sitting back hard enough that the red chair-back wheezed white foam, Zenith surveyed his work. Neat, geometrical, nice.
He picked up a rule and measured his life in centimeters. Carefully manipulating his mechanical pencil, he plotted his progress, tabulating his time spent.
Zenith postulated. At 45 there was still a ways to go before he reached his biophysical midpoint, his spiritual summit – his zenith – wasn’t there? Certainly he hadn’t already climaxed. Surely, everyone’s life had its inherent drama, pits and plateaus, peaks and valleys. According to his graph, Zenith figured that he had at least 40 years to go – nearly half of his time remained. No, Zenith was sure that if life indeed offered a high point, he had not yet reached it.
Hope remained; he was counting on it.
II. Kink in the Chain Link
Now Zenith was no dummy. He knew a thing or two about a thing or two. Take cars, for instance. Zenith knew the underbelly of an automobile better than most men knew the soft spot of a steering wheel. Mufflers were Zenith’s particular métier. He fixed them, fitted them, filed and fiddled with them, but the thing that Zenith liked best was selling them.
More than likely, if you and your machine happened into his shop – with a carbon cough or a toxic tailpipe, a smoky emission or a mere suspicion – chances are that before you’d left Zenith would have persuaded you to let him “put her up on the lift to take a look.” Well sir, once Zenith got underneath your ride, he wouldn’t pull out of there without putting in a new pipe, catalytic converter, or at the very least, tightening the nuts and securing the screws.
Yessiree Bob, he could close a sale. Always could and always would. Perhaps it was that Quaker Oats smile or his by-golly style, but Zenith was at his best when he was shooting the breeze with just plain folks.
His love of motors began early. He was twisting the spokes and greasing his sprocket before the other boys were playing pocket pool. Ever since his mama could remember, Zenith had preferred the cold honesty of mechanical bodies to the warm uncertainty of human flesh, and that as they say was the kink in the chain link.
III. Living in Licum
While his career curbing cars accelerated smoothly – ramping up from hyping hot rods to high schoolers to eventually cornering the local classifieds market – Zenith’s emotional motor sputtered, stuttered and stalled at the starting line.
Zenith once again regarded at his lifeline.
At 45 he was the proud owner of Zenith’s Zeibart Muffler Mart; a successful entrepreneur, capable mechanic and active member of the Lion’s Club of Licum, Indiana. On the surface his life read better than an Oprah Winfrey selection, a regular Horatio Alger American Dream come true.
But, pondering the points, our Hoosier hero concluded it simply wasn’t enough. All in all none of it meant diddley squat. Zenith had rung the bell at the county fair and walked away without his Kewpie Doll.
He picked up a ball of foam from inside the torn chair-back and rolled it slowly between his thumb and forefinger like a booger of rubber cement. As he considered his work, the ball became tighter and harder. At last he made his decision: Zenith would take a wife.
Wiping his sticky fingers against the crusty legs of his Big Yank overalls, Zenith made a vow, “By God,” he decreed, “I’ll get me one if it’s the last thing that this ol’ boy does! I’m gonna get me a wife.”
So be it.
IV. Zenith in Heat
It would prove to be a paramount task, but Zenith was prepared for the challenge. Finding a mate would not be easy, but Zenith was psyched. In typical fashion, he scotch-taped his resolution to the refrigerator door, next to the Red Barn Pizza take-out magnet. It read in bold Dale Carnegie style: “Must Couple.”
A simple reminder so that each day as he fed his face he would not forget his other haunting hunger. Every day in every way, it gets a little bit better.
Zenith reflected on his image in the chrome toaster. Straightening his name tag and wiping a bit of butter from his lip, he planned his strategy.
Just like daddy used to tell him every morning before he boarded the Trailways bus that took him from his home in the trailer park in Licum to his job on the line at the RV plant in Crown Point, “Son, you’ve got to plan your work and work your plan.”
V. The Women on Zenith’s Horizon
What to do was never as hard as where to begin.
Now a woman is nearly as complicated as an automatic transmission, with even more restrictions than California’s got laws on polluting emissions – so Zenith has his work to do. Verily.
He was a machine man, as I’ve already mentioned, no naturally the gal for him would be equally attracted to precision, high performance and most-importantly, speed. Where to look. Online? Nah, not his style. In the personal ads in back of the Licum Tattler? What would he write?
No, like Wanda the Good Witch told us all as children, “There is no place like home.”
Zenith thought about the girls at the office. Pam at reception, with the bad perm and the heavy hips?. Val, at the counter, snapping gum and trading dating stories with the boys in the warehouse? Lauren, the divorcee CPA? As he thought about the candidates, he was reminded of his of his favorite country & western singer, Slim Pickens. Yee Haw.
Decisions. decisions.
