Unfinished and Untitled

The glass fell off the table, because it had been placed far too close to the edge. It fell headlong towards the floor, but Scott practically dove to save it. He was standing about five feet away from where it was about to hit the floor. Having seen it as it happened, his eyes widened and with a gasp he lunged downward and threw his hand under the glass. He couldn’t catch it, but the cup hit his hand just an inch from the ground, then bounced off and hit the floor harmlessly. Scott closed his eyes, then opened and rolled them with disbelief. For Christ’s sake, he thought as he got up.

It would have shattered all over the place. Scott realized he made that tremendous effort to save the glass not because of its sentimental value, but because of the cacophonous shattering that would have resulted. He dove to prevent himself from having to hear and watch it break, and to save sweeping it up afterwards. That shock to the senses could ruin his day, because that’s just they way Scott was. He knew it too, and commended himself for it. At least I know myself, he reflected boastfully.

Scott placed the glass down in the center of the counter deliberately as if to say “stay”. He smiled wryly at it, and at himself. He began to ruminate. Unlike some people I know, at least I know myself, he thought, and he flicked on the TV. He let the remote control fall to the couch simultaneously with the seat of his pants. He sank into relaxation.

The TV quickly bored Scott, however, and he held his eyes wide open with his head pressed against the back of the couch, as the ennui of the evening washed over him. The air began to burn his eyes, so he blinked a few times quickly, and exhaled and let his shoulders slacken. He flipped the channels. So many commercials! It’s a conspiracy, he thought. I’m not allowed to watch anything tonight, I guess. He rotated his head clockwise, and his neck cracked audibly. Something hit his air conditioning unit that was set in the window, and landed on the fire escape with a clang. He flipped the channel and arrived on a game show. No one was fairing all that well. Negative six-hundred dollars for Billy the telephone company technician. “Quit while you’re not ahead!” Scott scoffed aloud.

Scott got up, and walked toward his refrigerator as he eyed the window. The phone rang, and it came as an intrusion into his quiet evening, it was so loud, and abrupt. “Whaaaat?” he whined into the receiver.
“Scotty, beam me over!” came the deep, but somehow shrill, grating voice, which no matter what was going on, Scott decided, was entirely too excited.
“Up.”
“Mm?”
“Up!” Scott yelled as he held the receiver away from his mouth. He shouted down into it as if pouring the words from his mouth into the phone, through the cord, and down through the building where they would come out and hit the voice in the face through the intercom, were he standing too close. Which he was, Scott reasoned by virtue of his familiarity with the person the voice belonged to. He hung up in disgust. Nincompoop, he fumed. He walked over to the door and slid the latch out of the locked position, leaving it swinging back and forth. He strode, genuinely angry, toward the window, as his mood declined further after knocking his knee into the key stand, which in turn spilled the majority of the contents onto the floor. With some difficulty, he slid or rather shoved the window open.
He began to peer tentatively onto the black, rusted iron fire escape below the window ledge. But he heard a loud and somehow awkward sounding thud against his front door, and turned his head to address it, his body still facing the window. As he did so the door actually opened, and in burst a rather disheveled looking Captain Kirk.
Scott immediately advanced across the room toward Jeff with an accusatory pointer finger outstretched. “Drunk! Owwwut! Get out!”
“Not drunk. Not, Scotty, not….ha ha ha, HA!” It was a quirky yet sincere laugh, in a low but strikingly smooth voice, and it made him sound younger than he really was. Jeff bobbed back and forth, propping himself up on the door frame. He stumbled into the apartment with a big, dopey grin on his face.
“Cmon’. In all seriousness, Jeff. I’m not going with you. Sit…sit down,” said Scott with marked resignation. He cared about his friend. He wouldn’t let him walk home like this. “You seem to have made it here ok, though…,” he added aloud to his train of thought.

“Ha. Oh Kay, Scotty.” His speech was slurred and drawn out, naturally. But this last remark had a sobriety to it, tenderness through the veil of inebriation. He looked down at the carpet as he spoke, with a hint of a nostalgic, warm smile, and made his way to the couch. He landed on it rather than sat, and both his legs stayed dangling over the arm on the left side, from the knee down. It was all that was visible of him from behind the couch, and this was what Scott spoke to for the next few minutes. The couch was as old as the hills, Scott realized as he assessed the situation, with the stuffing seeping from too many places for him to care. He resumed the window.
“Hey, somethin’ came smacking into my air conditioner. Sounded…”
“Hey, Jeopardy,” Jeff interrupted, oblivious.
“…like it landed…”
“Final Jeopardy, here we go. Category: …,” Bing!, “…American Sports! I bet a billion dollars. Ha ha ha, HA.” He threw his right hand into the air above the couch and left it there in a “do you believe this?” gesture. “Just my luck…I was on last night. Scotty. D’ya hear?”
Scott was outside. “Yea, you were on Jeopardy,” he answered back, poking his head back inside. It was a newspaper that had landed there, still wrapped in plastic, unopened. That’s an inconvenient place to throw a free trial newspaper, he thought while wearing a look of puzzlement on his face. His brow was furrowed, and he stood motionless on the fire escape four stories from the street; as a breeze blew him onto his toes from behind, he held the paper with both hands and stared at it. I didn’t ask for no paper…

He climbed back in, one leg at a time, still staring at it and holding it in both hands. “Hey, I didn’t ask for no paper.” A car honked its horn forcefully on the street below. Scott processed it this way, too, “a car honking its horn…” A car horn honked, he corrected himself. Can’t honk itself, someone’s gotta press it. He squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head back and forth. He brandished the paper for Jeff who he knew wasn’t looking. “They, somebody threw it up here. Random, huh?”
“No, you moron!”
“Huh? You know why…”
“Joe Namath…yea, ha, Montana won Superbowl III my ass. Over my dead bo…”
“Jeff.” He stood over the couch with his arms out to the side, palms turned up toward the ceiling, expecting an answer, the paper in his right hand.
“Talkin’ bout’ the show…What? What?” He pulled himself up to see over the back of the couch. “The paper, you got a paper, what?”
“Yea…” Scott trailed off. He went and sat down at the table, and began to pull the paper out of the plastic. He opened it, some daily he’d never heard of. “Brooklyn Tribune?” he said aloud, quizzically. The phone rang. He looked up, at nothing in particular. Scott gazed at the troublesome glass from before. For some reason he felt a little nauseous, and he even forced his throat to swallow, from anxiety, still looking at the glass. He realized that he was somehow acting in this melodramatic, overly conscious fashion, and he shook this off, too. “You heard of a…” He held it away from him and drew his chin close to his chest to get a broad view of the front page, as if he were nearsighted. “….the Brooklyn Tribune?”
“I don’t read papers, you know me.” Scott twisted himself around and put his elbow on the chair.
“You read the paper,” he said, correcting an obvious mistake.
“If by read, you mean steal the Times’ Sunday Sports section, then yea, all the time. All the time.” This was followed by deep sigh, and a yawn. Jeff was talking while watching TV. He’d brought his legs in and was settled comfortably on the couch. Scott couldn’t see him at all.
“Hmmph.” Scott wrinkled his forehead to accommodate the information. He turned halfway back around with his arm still on the chair, and faced the wall across the apartment, near the door that led to his bedroom. “Sober?”
“Ya. From five minutes ago.” Suddenly he leapt up in one motion from the couch, which was comical because of his size, and his drunken, googly-eyed visage. Jeff was striving for two-hundred pounds, and was evidently concentrating on the belly region first. Scott expressed his amusement by staring at him stoically, following his movements with his head. “Let’s go! Get cha coat, nevamind I’ll get it for you. C’mon, to the bar!” he said, finishing with a flourish as he opened the door while putting on his coat. He left the apartment and closed the door behind him. Scott just looked at the door, with no trace of a smile on his face, but no annoyance either.

A few moments passed. He came back in and stood at the threshold with a feigned expression that asked if Scott was indeed coming, or not.
Scott stared with congenial contempt. “Ok, asshole.” he quipped, still seated. Jeff had walked back to the couch as if it were his right, and was lying down by the time the insult came. “I was just asking.”
“Not my fault your poor.” Scott wasn’t offended.
“Well, yea, but you got the car…”
“And the license, friend.”
“Yea,” he said matter-of-factly.
“We could go, ‘round here.”
“Nowhere.”
“What?! Raff’s.”
“Rafferty’s.” He paused. “Is such a blast.”
“Well, this show blows that’s on now.”
“Well, you’re not staying here,” said Scott with no hint of determination or malice. In fact he said it almost absentmindedly. He looked vaguely in the direction of the front door. Jeff was nevertheless somewhat hurt by the comment. He was silent, watching the show he attested to loathe.

Inexplicably, his request that Jeff not stay the night unresolved, Scott rose and walked into his bedroom, and closed the door behind him. His room was small, but not excessively so. Adequate, he thought now to himself as he stood silently with his back to the door, breathing. He undressed, got under his comforter, and closed his eyes. He did all this without thinking about anything in particular, but had an air of quiet consternation about him, not unlike a very light headache. This subtle unease, that he himself barely even discerned was there, stayed with him right up until he slipped out of his consciousness, and into the miasma that would envelope his dreams, and his waking moments in the coming hours.

* * *

Scott’s apartment was in New York City, in the borough of Manhattan’s upper west side, closer to downtown than the Bronx, and was on the fourth floor of an inexpensive building, but it was not a dump. Just a few steps from the elevator, the kind where you slide the door open yourself to get in, it was apartment 4D. Across from the front door and a bit to the left was the door to his bedroom, with about fifteen feet in between.

The walls all the way around, where wallpapered, were a light, non-distracting bluish tint. There was one picture, a tiny one in a frame, of a sailboat with the sun peaking from behind it, hung on the wall to the right of the front door. It was in the center, about two-thirds of the way up that wall, which was otherwise unadorned, and with no furniture or anything pressed up against it. It was the largest, unobstructed (save the picture) section of wall in the residence.

To the left of the front door a coat hanger with three prongs, and a mirror about three feet high, hung about four feet off the floor. It had a fancy looking casing, with patterns and curls in the woodworking. The television, on top of a low wooden table, was also to the left against the wall, with the couch opposing it. A coffee table with one pane conspicuously missing lay in between. Behind the couch was the kitchen, and directly behind was an oval throw rug, with fringe all the way around. The kitchen was open to the rest of the apartment, starting and stopping with a section of tiled floor. There was a Spartan but pragmatic round table, with two chairs that were more expensive, wooden dining chairs, pushed up next to it. A gas stove to the left of the table, the refrigerator to the right of that, with counter space in between. Cabinets were above and below. An emptier space with a lonely looking couch against the wall was behind the kitchen. The sole window was on the small back wall, and the bathroom through a door to the right of that. It formed a small “L” in shape, the whole apartment.

His bedroom was quite literally a cube, with only the one door. The head of the bed where he now lay was up against the right wall, in the middle of the room. On the far side of the bed was a nightstand with a drawer and a lamp on top. His dresser was on the left wall, opposite the bed. There was a long mirror in the center of the wall with the door in it. His bed was a double.

The apartment was never really messy, and there weren’t often things lying around for long. He kept it clean, and mostly quiet, except of course when people were there. In his early thirties, (he did not often think of his age, in years, so there’s no point in mentioning it exactly) Scott enjoyed a nice group of friends and acquaintances. He had little extended family, but maintained good contact with his mother and father, still living, who lived far from him, but within reasonable driving distance. He had one brother. Scott worked from nine until five, missed work only occasionally, and was employed in a job with room for growth. He was not thin, or the least bit overweight, but not in any particularly great physical condition either. At about five foot ten, he had relatively short, light brown hair that always seemed to grow long in the back, and light brown eyes. He dressed casually but not sloppily most if not all of the time, and he enjoyed his apartment, and kept it the way he wanted it. He was pleasant towards his neighbors. It was a dignified place to live.


Scott was sleeping. Jeff was as well; he had turned the TV off, and was dozing peacefully on the couch. The door to the bedroom was closed, and it was stifling in the room; not oppressively so, but enough to make Scott uncomfortable, so that he tossed and turned and woke up momentarily, from time to time. He had carried the disquiet into his slumber, unwittingly, and his forehead was tight with his unconscious fears and quarrels. It was creeping up to around one A.M., but there was no clock in Scott’s room.

In what was a late, deep stage of sleep, (after he’d managed to stay asleep long enough to reach it) Scott began dreaming. Not the trivial flutters of image and color that inhabit the borderland between resting ones eyes and dead to the world, these were the dreams of a man long since dead, in that nightly, passing coma we all endure. In that coma, and in the cocoon of his cubical room, embedded within the crawling mass of the metropolis, he dreamt.

His eyes flitted twice quickly, remaining closed, and if he were awake he might have felt pain deep within them, for they were weary from the day of use. But they were also reacting to the story unfolding, like people also talk in sleep to their phantom relations, that no one else can see or remember, or like dogs flail about, chasing ghostly cats, and cars.

He sank downward, or had the feeling of it, like falling through a mist, too slowly for it to be gravity. More like floating then, he thought. He could see the mist, too, composed of water, but somehow unreflective, and dull. It wasn’t enveloping him, he fell through light shrouds of it, and the space all around him was of a light, bluish hue, in all directions. There was an unpleasant odor, which was growing stronger. Then, presently he was in a bedroom. He knew things about it, like dreamers often do, that weren’t discernible from what he saw in the dream, or from what he would recall afterwards. Visually or contextually (by way of other information), he had no way of knowing, but innately he knew that the room was meant to be both his room, where he slept in the apartment now, his childhood room, where he slept for so many years on the second floor of his New Jersey home, and a third room, that while he felt he’d never been there before was unnervingly familiar, and known to him in some way besides experience. There was a shaking to the whole event, as if when he moved, his eyes came out of focus like a film projector might; although when his eyes quaked like this it felt not like dizziness, but like the whole room was shaking, though he was not tossed about by it, it was an illusion within the dream. And whenever it happened, when the frame of his vision seemed to quaver, for a fleeting moment he could only see in different shades of grey, from dark to light, and only when the shaking stopped did the color return. It would last a few seconds each time, and it grew more disturbing to Scott as the dream wore on. The room was moderately lit, and he stumbled around it at first as if the ground were a trampoline and his legs very tired. There was music playing in the room, but it came from nowhere, and although he listened he did not bother to look for its source. It was like elevator music, but more manic, a quick, scattered succession of high, chiming notes. Happy and frivolous elsewhere, but here it frightened Scott. He held his arms out to the sides, as if to get his bearings, and stood still there in front of the door, his legs spread apart in a semi-squatting position, like a primeval hunter listening for a deer to rustle the underbrush. Scott did not feel like a hunter. He was almost lucid in his dream, almost in the moment, comprehending his situation. But he was not master of it, could not conjure pleasurable things, because this seemingly was a nightmare. He felt fated to something here. The room got smaller all of a sudden, the wall coming to meet Scott from behind, and the other three following suit, accompanied by a loud grinding sound like the moving of some massive piece of furniture. He jumped and turned around, eyes wide in horror, and he leapt to the center of the room, and then spun around to accost each wall. The music then changed, or rather flowed into the sound of a police siren, as if it was part of the composition. The wail of a fire engine was incorporated into the symphony. He looked up in awe at the whole thing. It grew and grew to involve many sirens. He thought that such noise would have to be for some cataclysm, something with long term economic and psychological implications for the community where it occurred. For the world, maybe. The cacophonous fleet of vehicles moved on, and there was stark, eerie silence. The sort of silence, in fact, where one can hear the flow of blood pounding past the ear. Scott put his hands on his face and rubbed harshly under his eyes. “Ohhhhh,” he bellowed, but softly. He began to feel this was darkly comical, and laughed inside to assuage the terror; there was no door out of the room anymore. But he was also suddenly no longer afraid, he became calm, and then began to be overcome by a sense of dismay. He turned briefly to see where he was, then stepped back and seated himself on the bed, and held his face in his hands. He peered over his right shoulder, and sure enough saw his sleeping body, which was not there before, and turned back around, paying himself no mind. He felt an impression of Eternity in the room. The ceiling was painted with clowns, but only in spots, a mishmash of the images he’d stared at for eighteen years. They’d never repainted his room, at home. It was just a place to sleep, they’d reasoned.