Good News and Bad News.

four hours in november.

Smoking Kills! looms in angry black over Dan’s head, punctuated by an angled white rectangle leaking black streaks of smoke. Those signs, stuck to chain link fences and outside of respectable establishments, have been blooming like springtime flowers, only, well, it’s November and gray and wet. He knows he should listen to them, and stamp out the Marlboro in his mouth on the gray pavement, but instead the signs just blur into his subconscious with the coke cans and spray paint.

 

He forgot gloves, and a scarf. Cold rubs at his naked skin. He doesn’t really want to work at this drugstore, but he can’t afford not to. He’s going to be a five-ten-twenty, there-you-go drone, and there’s no way around it. What do they investigate at interviews for this kind of thing, anyway? Will he have to pee in a cup? He doesn’t care.

 

Embers gnaw at the filter on his cigarette. It drops to the ground, and extinguishes by itself. Nothing hits harder than pavement.

 

Now he’s all coffee and cigarette ash. The tastes coat his mouth, and his fingers twitch for a toothbrush like they’d just done for the nicotine minutes ago. He’s made of fractional, fragmented want.

 

When he calls Nigel that night, there’s nothing to say.

 

 

 

Dan didn’t get the job. This doesn’t surprise him. It’s mid afternoon. He should get out of bed.

 

In a rare spurt of conscious self-loathing, he wonders where the hell his thirty-something years have gone. Therapy, education, community college, rent, food, capitalism, functional drug addiction and now some more therapy. He still has all his hair. There is hope yet.

 

He used to write letters to strangers. He used to ask frail, paper old ladies on the bus what their names were and carry orange-red daisies in his front pocket. Now he lurks the library, debates with himself about personal hygiene, and seeps life out of the microwave.

 

He used to have friends, too.

 

He tells Nigel all of this, and about the second consecutive rejection of employment letter. Nigel drags him out for bagels and promises to pay.

 

Now, lacing up his shoe with a toothbrush dangling from the left corner of his mouth, Dan doesn’t feel like his day has been a total waste. There’s a hole on the same side of his mouth as the toothbrush, from the piercing that used to be there.

 

 

 

Nigel buys him a gallon of milk, does not buy him cigarettes, and tells him not to join the military.

 

“Paint or something,” he rasps, in his sloping British lilt. “That’s what people do, times like these, don’t they?” His mouth is crammed with orange juice and egg bagel and regular cream cheese.

 

“Yeah. Maybe. Don’t buy me paints, though.”

 

Times like these. When people don’t know where the last two-thirds of there lives went.

 

“I’m not going to buy you bloody paints, you lazy b*****d. You need a job, is what.” Nigel is not that British. The mannerisms manifest themselves only sparingly. It should be mentioned, however, that he despises herbal teas of any kind.

 

“I have money.”

 

“You had money, once. You can’t get stabbed in the face again, Danny.” Nigel is referring to a settlement involving an AV-four wheeler and faulty springs, which combined to leave a three-quarter inch gash across Dan’s chin, and six thousand dollars in his bank account.

 

This was far more than a year ago. Neither Nigel nor Dan can figure out how it stretched that far.

 

Dan swallows the mulched-up raisin bagel in he’s been working on. “Maybe this is like, a midlife crisis or something.”

 

Nigel almost chokes. “This isn’t a midlife crisis. This is growing up, kid.’

 

It’s not unkind.

 

 

 

A Rent-a-Cop firm hires him. He feels itchy in his starched uniform. It’s got nothing to do with the cotton.

 

Seven hours skulk by. He does nothing more than smile at people richer and cleaner than he is and hold down buttons when Victor the Elder, his wiry white predecessor, instructs him to do so. Dan doesn’t carry a gun. Victor does.

 

For reasons unknown to Dan, Victor has called him Dan-o from the minute they met and off-handedly brings up his Vietnam POW experiences in conversation. Dan is fascinated with him.

 

When Nigel picks him up from work later on, they drive an hour and a half to a lake Dan didn’t know about and toss stones at black fish. This reminds Dan of when he used to spray-paint A’s inside of lopsided circles on sooty public walls, back when the thought he knew what that meant.

 

 

 

On his way to work the next afternoon, feeling particularly daring, Dan steps into a café that’s folding over itself at the corners. He hadn’t noticed it yesterday. He doesn’t realize the cello sounds aren’t emanating from over the loudspeakers, but from a slightly raised platform of a stage. It’s much redder than any cello he’s ever seen before, cradled by a girl with thin chords of black hair brushed out of her face, playing with indifference, because this place doesn’t pay very well. Their originality is manufactured. She reminds him of someone.

 

She reminds him of someone, and he can’t get it out of his head. At work, he listens to Victor the Elder with half of his attention, and drags the time along by mentally sorting through everyone he’s ever met.

 

 

 

Dan will end up in tears and broken glass. This is how:

 

Nigel tells him to shut up, and to clean his room while he’s at it.

 

It’s because Nigel is impatient today. He’s got important things to take care of, as he sometimes does. 

 

Dan listens, and sorts through dishes and laundry and surface things. He hasn’t got very many possessions to begin with. While he does this, Cello Lady’s face and hands weigh down his thoughts.

 

He doesn’t come across a photo album or a letter anything clichéd like that. While looking for the brother of an orphaned glove in a drawer of noncommittal objects, he discovers a cassette tape.

 

At last he remembers in full the person whom Cello Lady tugged from the recesses of his mind.

 

This tape was very important to him, once. Whenever it plays now, it complains in a high-pitched whine and replies with quick, high-pitched pants. Dan supposes that’s why it fell into disuse in the first place.

 

This tape was given to him by one Jeremy Dune when Dan was nineteen years old. Jeremy Dune wore leather jackets and smoked thin, fragrant cigars, and rode a racing bicycle with all the paint cracked off. Dan was twenty-four when Jeremy died. Car accident, of course. It was no one’s fault but the rain.

 

Dan doesn’t remember where he met Jeremy. He supposes he was in love, but that might just be his stupid heart making things up.

 

There’s an address on the inside of the cassette tape. The building has probably been condemned by now. Dan is going to send a letter there anyway.

 

For some reason, this thought, firm as it was, triggers his tear ducts to give way. It’s a twisted sort of relief. He takes the tape out of its plastic sheath; he’s got nothing to hide from himself. The broken glass is from a light bulb he’d dropped earlier.

 

 

 

When Nigel comes to pick him up from work the next day, there’s a set of twelve oil paint tubes, a thick pad of paper, and three mismatched paintbrushes on the vinyl passenger seat of his car.

 

“What’s all this?” Dan asks, collecting the bundle to cradle it in his lap.  

 

“Well, you were never going to get around to it, were you?” Nigel replies with impatience.

 

“I might have.”

 

“Your life is a spiraling series of ‘might haves,’ my friend.” Nigel has the capacity to be poetic. He chooses to exercise this rarely.

 

“Yes, but so is everyone else’s,” Dan tosses back.   

 

Nigel smiles.

 

Reviews

[NeverSurrender]

I like this story. It's pretty depressing though, Dan's pretty depressing. But the story is written well.

I find you a good writer :), the story was captivating.


Take care,
N.S.