Dangerous Distraction

Chapter 1

It was a dark morning, not quite unlike any other. Of course, morning usually is... dark that is. A dark morning to follow the dark night, but not quite as dark as its predecessor. And not quite as light as its replacement. The weather said it was going to be a beautiful day, a day full of summer greatness. It made me smile. As if someone could write a manual to describe something as unpredictable as the weather.

I got myself up, in the usual fashion, and made the bed. I usually walk through my daily routine in a kind of nonchalant daze. I start by eating breakfast, two eggs, wheat toast, and orange juice. I brush my teeth, and head to work in my slightly used Buick LeSabre. I turn down Madison Drive, and park behind Marjorie, my assistant’s red sedan, and step out into the smoky June air the fills the brunt of New York City. Day in and day out nothing changes. I take my coffee the same way every morning. And wonder to myself if even the sugar packets have the exact same number of granules in them. How ironic it would be if even my coffee saw no change. If every morning I put exactly one hundred thousand granules in my eight ounces of coffee. Maybe even my ham and cheese sandwich had exactly two tablespoons or one serving size of mayonnaise on it. My life, simple and pure, was in fact rather pathetic.

You see, I work in the accounting business. I help people manage money they don’t really have, all of it caught up in assets or stocks. In such a business not much ever really changes, the usual customer for the usual accountant. But like any of it mattered. After six years I have begun to mirror my work in my every day life. Maybe that’s why my wife had left me years back, maybe she needed randomness. Randomness I could not supply, differentials I could not improvise into my precise demeanor. Whatever the reason, I am now alone, and God willing it would stay that way. I wouldn’t admit it if you asked me, but I like having the same number of granules in my coffee. I’d count them if I could. But no one will ever ask, so I’ll never be forced to lie to them. Lying was another thing I hated. The truth was straight forward, and sometimes could be anticipated without a whole lot of forethought. But lies, lies spun an invisible web that happily entangled anything and everything it encountered, wrapping them up for careful digestion at a later date.

I hate lies, and I hate spiders… so it seemed practical to relate the two. But numbers, numbers never lied. They could be tampered with, or changed but it never took me long to uncover the truth. That’s why I had become an accountant, to uncover the truth (or my version of it) and put it out there clear as day for my clients to see.



It was a Tuesday morning, like every Tuesday, with the exception that a new client had been given to me. And though new, I saw it as routine. Every Tuesday I’m given a new one, to sort of “break them in” to how the accounting firm works. Later they are sorted out and filed away under separate people, but I’m the first one they met. I sat down at my computer with my eight ounces of coffee, and routinely reviewed the file. The name across the flap said: Kristen Anne Reynolds. A stereotypical name, but still pretty. There were probably fifty of them in the city alone, but this was the only day I’d have to deal with this one. The door opened, and perfume, like a midsummer’s breeze teased my senses, nauseated me. For a moment, I almost lost consciousness, and when she walked through the door, I swear I did. She was pretty, maybe beautiful. No, definitely beautiful, maybe gorgeous.

She sat down across from me, crossed her legs in a flurry of red satin, and adjusted her dress across her lap.
“Miss Reynolds I presume?”
“Yes, I’m Miss Reynolds, I’m here for my appointment, you must be Michael.”

The meeting, one that should have been routine like the turning of perfectly tuned clock gears, was fraught with frivolities and nonchalant chit-chat. When it ended, she left, leaving only the scent of her perfume to remind me of her, of her… presence.

I sighed, and sat back heavily in my faded leather chair. Sweat clung to my brow, and it had nothing to do with the heat. The climatically controlled office was more than cool enough. How could a woman possibly do that to a man? Completely screw up his mind? I had stumbled over words, dropped paperwork, and lost all sense of direction several times during the meeting. These were all things I had scarcely done as an apprentice, and now… who was this woman? Sighing, I shrugged off the shock, and with a flurry of keys, typed away double-time on the keyboard to catch back up with my schedule, one that had remained unbroken for what seemed a thousand years.

Chapter 2

Finished! I turned off the computer monitor, and packed my briefcase up for the day. Just another day, just another average day. I had to keep telling myself this, because to be frank I believed it was complete rubbish. She had been my day. All I could see was her smile, and all I could smell was that perfume. Like a poisonous fume arising from the easy chair that my clients sat in. I had tried using the Lysol I keep hidden away under my desk, but it was too late. It had been burned into my nostrils. Shaking my head, I grabbed my briefcase, and walked out to my car, still parked perfectly behind Marj’s red sedan. I placed my briefcase in the passenger seat, and started home.

I hadn’t for a long time looked outside the small window of road I surveyed while driving home, but today I allowed my mind a little leeway. I watched the signs fly past, the different restaurants and shops all intricately arrayed as they had been for nearly five years now. The McDonalds on the corner of Pleasant and Madison followed closely by a Burger King and a Wendy’s… almost a tangible epitome of poor health and obesity. The sign on the street corner should have read Heart Attack Lane, and High Cholesterol Ave. What drama society had created, and like always they were still striving to find a quicker more efficient way to make food when the answer was simple. Just add more fat and preservatives. I passed the 7-11, which used to be a Five-and-Dime when I was a child, remembering the spring strolls there to buy penny candy on my way to Adam’s Park which lay the other side of town. Yes, everything was still as I remembered it, as I had filed it away and categorized it in my brain. If anything, the only difference I could see was the astute decay of the fragile framework that the social classes had established here. The blacks and the whites, the gangs and struggles. Not noticeable to a complete stranger, but to me, I could see it in every brick. Every rusted pipe on the fire escapes, every piece of graffiti on the library sign, every cigarette butt on the ground near the street lights, they all told a story as old as time, a story about the perversion of society.

I hadn’t allowed myself a glimpse of this entropy in quite some time for one simple reason. It made me think; sometimes that thinking required stepping out of the box into the unknown. That was scary, I liked the known much more, I can test it, bend it and ply it to my needs without worrying about grasping at straws and slipping out of sanity. Even if it was for a millisecond, my strict life couldn’t afford that slip. But today, since my mind had been expelled from the box by that woman, I might as well dive in with both feet. I was already swimming, might as well let myself get wet. Finally, I pulled into the long driveway that led to the garage next to my house, and got out of my car. I walked up the steps, still thinking about entropy and blondes in red satin dresses, and slipped the key into the lock to let myself into my house. For a moment I just stood there, relieved to be back home where I could finally rest. It was five, and due time to eat dinner, but for some strange reason I wasn’t hungry. Somehow the one hundred thousand granules of sugar, and the ham and cheese sandwich were enough to fill me up for the day. Odd that… I was always hungry around five, always hungry in the same way. I pulled off my shoes and socks, and left my briefcase on the landing. I padded up the stairs barefoot to my bedroom and pulled down the sheets, and passed out in exhaustion. But I had forgotten to turn on my alarm clock. Something I almost never do, wait… Something I never do. The alarm clock was my life, the start and end of every day’s schedule. This time I just didn’t give a damn about my schedule… So I didn’t reset it.

The next morning was hell! I awoke hours late; the alarm clock made sure of that. There had been dreams of fire, dreams of chaos and disorder. I had dreams of the absolute destruction of everything good and holy. Yes, I had dreamt of her, and such dreams that a confession might not be such a bad idea. Such a personified plethora of propaganda had never before been bent against me, tormented me, and made me want something more than life itself. I cupped my eyes in my sweaty palms, and rubbed the sleep from my lashes. Then, with all the strength I could muster, clambered out of bed towards the bathroom for a long, hot shower. The water wasn’t quite as hot as I’d like it, I still had to get the tank replaced, but it was soothing nonetheless. It took away some of the frustration last night had instilled in my bones. I finished washing clean my salt encrusted form, and deemed myself ready for a new day. After drying off, and dressing meticulously I made my way downstairs for my keys and jacket. I never ate breakfast at home anymore; in fact I almost never ate at home. That made me smile, the other day I had taken a bowl out of an overhead cabinet and had to wipe dust from its interior before pouring a can of soup into it. I stopped everyday at the Dunkin Donuts up the street near Cholesterol Ave. to pick up a blueberry muffin.

After adorning my coat, I stepped out into the warm and slightly humid air and locked the door behind me. I drove, the usual way, to work purposely ignoring my surroundings, and found the spot behind Marj was already filled by a rather impressive looking Mercedes convertible. Quite perturbed that my routine was once again thrown out of whack, I circled the block, and parked some three buildings down from the office.

No one spoke to me on my way to my office at the back of the building; they all knew that I was never late. Therefore, between the fact that I was now atrociously tardy, and had a look that could melt stone, all of my colleagues steered clear of my path. I sat down in that brown faded chair again, and threw my briefcase onto the desk overturning a mug of perfectly arranged pens, and strewing them across my keyboard.
“Fuck!” Darn, maybe a little too loud, and it was certainly too early to begin cussing, but it was too late for that. I gathered up the pens, and nonchalantly shoved them back into the mug.

My computer always took millennia to boot; I liked it, because it gave me time to arrange my paperwork for that day’s appointments and entries on my desk. When I discovered something, something I had not wanted to find, but should have known it would be there.
A manila folder lay upon my desk with the words “permanent client” written across its front. A folder that had not been there when I had left the night before, but fate or perhaps chance had dropped it there this morn. There was a name penned in on the top edge, a name that I hated, a name that brought back scents of nightshade and lilacs. The name made hair on my arms stand up, made me shiver, and I knew that I had to get rid of that folder before it was too late. Before I couldn’t save myself from its icy cold grip of fate. I knew my life would lose all rhythm, all off the “usual” would become unusual and I would loose my direction. The folder read my death warrant to me, Kristen Anne Reynolds. I was doomed.

Depression seeped into my soul like a black cloud of destruction. It overtook every inch of me making me want to cry out in pain. I couldn’t take it. The thought of having to smell that perfume every week, having to control my emotions when she aroused them so easily, nauseated me. I had to brace my head in my hands to keep myself from falling off of the chair, had to close my eyes to keep the room from spinning. I took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly through my teeth. Somehow I would pull through this, damned if I knew how, but somehow I would.

Chapter 3

Friday! At last the day had come, the end of the week, he beginning of the weekend when I could finally relax! The day when I’d drive the Buick down to the old bowling alley on Park Street, and indulge myself in a few strings. After that perhaps I’d get a slice of pizza across the street at the Italian restaurant. I parked my car in front of the building in my usual spot and headed in, carrying my shoes to the counter to pay for a lane. At the counter I stopped and closed my eyes, exhaling a sigh of relief. Such a Utopian atmosphere of equality could not exist anywhere else in the town. It was a land of milk and honey buried beneath the suburbial refuse of crumbling factories and cheap prostitution that had crept in slowly around it. Only here could a man stand on the same level with all his fellow citizens, and forget petty nonsense like women and perfume.

I played one game, then two. After a while the balls just seemed to flow, flow like red satin down the lane, and with a crack send pins scattering in all directions. I couldn’t help but remember her, remember how she had lounged there in the evening chair. Laughter like the soft tinkling of wind chimes in a cool autumn breeze echoing off the soft walls of my office. I found myself remembering that soft graceful neck and those smooth ivory hands folded neatly in her lap. She was ecstasy, an opiate for the senses, a drug for the mind. I finished my third game and walked back out to my car. I started the engine, and put the car in drive. Even while bowling where all my concentration was taken up by the knocking down and resetting of pins she had cunningly dominated all of my attention. That whore! Before she had come, my life had been perfect. No distractions, no variations from the norm. It began to rain, and light silvery drops illuminated by headlights trickled down the windshield. Quickly erased, and then replaced again as the windshield wipers did their solemn duty.

I began to shake. Never before, even in marriage had I been so overly obsessed over a woman! I let people go, I forgot about them. I didn’t really have a reason for doing this; it was just what I did. Like brushing my teeth, like the sugar in my coffee, it had become routine and I liked I that way. Slowly my foot pressed down harder on the accelerator as frustration rose like magma out of the depths and took over. I began to speed, hoping to make it home and go to bed before it got any worse. It always started that way, just thinking about things and maybe losing a bit of self control, but then things bad things happened. So many times I scared myself into a sort of daze, a subconscious coma that took days to recover from. So I needed to get home quickly and take something, anything to put myself into a deep sleep. Maybe I would wake up and find it all to be just a dream… that she was a dream.

The car sped down the rain slick road, taking lefts and rights, rain falling like stars onto the windshield making it hard to make out what was up ahead. Then without warning a deer jumped out in front of the car, and I slammed on the brakes. Swerving to the right, the car moved off the road and towards the tree line. The squealing of tires, the crunching of steel and the sudden jolt as the now rolling car hit the tree. That was all I remembered… The pain was all I remembered. The blood flowed like red satin across my visage, flowing warmly down my neck. And then, blackness…

I awoke confused and alone in some black hospital wing. I couldn’t see anything, but the faint aromas of antiseptic, and the constant beeping and ticking of life support told me it was a hospital. I had been there many times before to talk to clients, and to visit my dying grandmother for the last month or so of her life. There was just pain. All that mattered was the insanely severe pain that coursed through my body. Every pore, every tissue ached in agony, screamed for an end to the suffering. The medication must not have been strong enough, either that or that had not expected him to wake up so soon and hadn’t administered any as of yet. Nevertheless, I was alive, and lucky to be so after that crash! It had made up my mind about one thing though, I had to see her. I had to visit this goddess of temptation that had lured me into my current predicament. I had to see her and tell her that I loved her, tell her that I needed to be with her. I had to, or I would surely die, the crash had proved that much at least. I was in love, and for the very first time, it wasn’t with my job. For the very first time I was willing to step out of the box and take control of my life. I would grab onto her and never let go. But this was just the beginning… Tomorrow, maybe I'd put a little more sugar in my coffee, it was always a bit too bitter anyways.