Interlude.

                                           summer

exhale:           

Dehydrated and woozy, Caitlyn woke up with the sunrise the next morning. Nick was sleeping on his side, turned away from her, facing the window. She sat up. The sun was coming in muffled through the curtains, but was still bright enough to fill the room. It looked like an alarm clock to her. Nick’s back was drifting up and down with his breath. Wondering if he’d stir, Caitlyn gently placed a hand on his shoulder. He looked like he was about to turn his head for a second, but did not. She stretched her arms behind her and rotated to the side of the bed, put her two naked feet on the floor, and stood up carefully. She squinted around through red eyes and stepped gingerly across the bedroom, into the hall.   

            Entering the bathroom made her dizzy. The entire room was about six feet by six feet, with a toilet, a small sink, and a bathtub crammed next to each other. The ceiling, however, was about thirteen feet high. The change of perspective did not help her equilibrium; Caitlyn found herself becoming lightheaded. In one motion, she pulled down her striped boxers and turned around to fall on the toilet. Her feet landed on either side of a small baby blue bathmat. She raised her eyes to the ceiling, adjusted her feet, and looked around for a cigarette Nick might have left behind. She arched her back and heard it crack, twice,  then sank her torso into her lap, deflating with a heavy exhale.

            Her urination was lengthy and thorough so she decided to wait a minute and try and move her bowels. Caitlyn concentrated on taking a couple of deep breaths. She turned the faucet on and swallowed a cupped hand’s worth of room temperature tap water to get rid of some of the pasty funk in her cheeks that her tongue kept sticking to. She licked her hand and began to scrape away at her front tooth with a modestly chewed nail, biting under it, breathing.  Her muscles had relaxed a bit and she began to feel the first soreness, the tolerable soreness, that she hadn’t felt in two years. Did she?  Her chest sagged and Caitlyn felt the urge to just pull her shorts up and float back to the bed for another hour of sleep. The walls looked huge to her. The ceiling was sloped, she noticed. The top floor. She ran back the events of the bar in her head, quickly.

            Caitlyn remembered it all right. She remembered watching the last of the stragglers close down the bar. She remembered leaning her head against his door with the sound of jangling keys in the background. She remembered how he grabbed her, with a desire for her body she had not felt in a long time, how much she responded to it, instinctively. She remembered him howl when she told him that it was okay (it’s fine I’ll explain later) to cum inside her and he did. Her fingers traced that path with her and she could still feel it. She withdrew her fingers and put them to her nose and recalled another feeling of the prior night, one of warmth, one of, what was the word, she thought, her nail on her lip for the memory of taste, yes, she thought, one of pleasure, one of satisfaction.

Caitlyn tip-toed on the warm green carpet back to Nick’s room. Upon entering, she noticed a few rays of sunlight shooting across the room from spaces in the curtains. Specks of dust were made visible in the light. She stopped against the wall, her hand resting across her belly, her index finger tucked into her boxers.  The way the curtains shaded the sunlight gave the room an honest and almost earthy feel; objects like Nick’s bed, desk. sheets, even Nick himself were their proper complexion, exhibited under the confetti streams of the countless flakes of dust that would just enter the light, and leave, only to be replaced. It was an unending, continuous stream, flowing in and out of the picture, travelling up and down, going out, coming in. Caitlyn blew weakly at one of the sunrays. The dust particles scattered but soon enough, more simply fell back into the sunray, as if  the flow had never been disrupted.

            Caitlyn turned towards the bed to look at Nick. He had shifted position. He was still on his side, but was now facing away from the window, towards Caitlyn. She walked by the bed, grabbing a pack of Nick’s Marlboro reds, and went to the window. She took one smoke out and threw the pack back on the bed. It hit Nick in the back before dropping to the mattress noiselessly. He did not move.

            Caitlyn walked to the window, lighting the cigarette. She slipped her head in between the two curtains and looked down on Division Street. The only sign of life were two sanitation men on the corner of Division and Broadway picking up the garbage. They emptied two cans, hopped on the back of the truck, waved at the driver, and were off. Caitlyn watched the street for another minute, puffing at her cigarette underneath the curtains, just drawing it into her mouth and pushing it out, not fully inhaling. When the gathering smoke became too much of a problem for her scratchy eyes,  she grabbed one curtain with each hand and threw them apart. Sunlight filled the room like a gunshot.

            Caitlyn turned around to find Nick looking at her, feeling around the bed. He saw her point,  sat up and rubbed at his eye with the base of his palm, yawning.

Inhale:

The walls fit. But they’re only part of it. I know them well enough to realize that it’s all inside here. I tap my forehead saying this, looking out the window. It’s morning again and it’s hot, probably the hottest day of the year. Summer’s only started so I probably shouldn’t complain, but knowing the days are only going to get longer and hotter fills me with slight dread. I’m in my bed now, and it’s early. The sun is about an inch off the horizon and I wish I knew what time that meant. I know it means it’s early enough for me to try and decide whether or not I want to go to work, still early enough for me to call in sick even though I’m not sick. I know. I feel sick, but I’m not actually. Like I said, I could say it’s the walls, I could say it’s the result of the fan shorting out, I could say it’s Kat not coming by any more, but in truth it’s something else.

            It’s a problem with motion, rather than motivation. It’s not laziness. It’s difficult to explain. You know how writers get writer’s block, how they’ll sit for hours and not write anything, or lose the desire to write, not write anything for months? Well, that’s me only I don’t write. I sustain and live. Liver’s block? I’ve lost the will to live, but I’m not suicidal. I’m not empty or null or a shell or anything, I want to see tomorrow as much as anyone. I’m full, if only of memories and what those situations could have turned into if she would only come back.

            I had my last drink last night. Don’t ask me how I know. I used to drink every night. I don’t want it anymore. Something is wrong with me. My soul is molting. I’m exposed to the walls, the light and the way the dust comes in. I sit on my bed like this morning and think about the dust in the light. The sun shines a ray into my window, see. And my bed is parallel with the window pane, on the other side of the room, so all I have to do is tilt my head and I can see it. But it’s on my face and also for a yard above my head, the light of the ray that is, and it’s a pretty stark contrast, I guess because the sun is so low and the ray comes in sharp. But there’s all this dust, and you can’t see it unless there’s that sharp angle contrast. It’s in the ray, hundreds of little dust specks, moving all kinds of ways with a total disregard for gravity. Well I see one, and it floats up out of the ray and it’s gone. Same things for the ones that fall down. My apartment can’t be this dirty. Maybe they all go to the fan. Maybe if it hadn’t shorted out it wouldn’t attract so much dust, maybe it would spatter some against the walls, shove some under the door. There are two forty bottles, old and empty, upright, and next to the fan under the window, three beer cans, like their children.

            I can’t yawn. I’ve tried and I almost yawn, the noise comes out, and even all the air that would normally come into my lungs during a yawn comes in, but there’s no resonance, no deep lung relief, no moisture gathering at the corners of my eyes, no rumble in my ears, no sparkle on my eyelids. This is the start of something else, I feel.

            It all comes at once. I’m on my bed. I pull up the blanket though I’m not cold. I can’t stop seeing. Even when I sleep or close my eyes to sleep, to get some relief from sight, all I’m doing is looking at the back of my eyelids. Sight doesn’t shut off. Consciousness shuts off from total boredom. It’s nothing to do with lack of input. The noise from the street. The blips of satellites overhead. The breathing. The complete and inescapable noise of breathing. I keep it up. I don’t know what to do. There’s a pack of cigarettes on the table by my bed, a little table, a shade taller than my knee, bed height, at my feet (I’m stretched out and completely still. My head is no longer tilted at the window. I am looking at dusk specks, now darting from side to side, in and out of the sunray and I notice they are totally disrupted by even the slightest breath and I try not to take notice, even though the knowledge is already there and inescapable. I try not to notice it further. But there they are.) and I’m afraid to pick them up and smoke them because if I can’t take a deep enough breath to yawn now, how will I after inserting more tar into my lungs?

            But I think that somewhere I read that if you take a couple of deep breaths in the morning, or cough on purpose a few times, some of the (dust or dirt), some of the stuff is just build-up, you know, and I’ll be able to breathe today, come on, I’m being silly. I have to pee. I grab the cigarette pack and head to the window and open it, and it brings the sanity of the morning and a slight breeze into my empty room and I am thankful for it. But I have to pee and pee bad and I head to the bathroom with my smokes, because if I’m smoking I’m breathing and even though I have to keep it on my mind, it’s there and it’s okay.

            Isn’t it?

exhale:

When Caitlyn walked in the first thing she noticed was that the air was clean. Normally, when she would walk into her and Gina’s apartment after a night away, upon entering the apartment she would get hit by an odor immediately. That odor being, of course, nicotine, marijuana (mostly from the plants, about three weeks away from harvest, which reeked, at least in her room), carpets stained with spilled beer, and, if she had been feeling generous lately, oil paint and turpentine. Though even she, who hated admitting defeat ever, preferring to let it be what it was and move on immediately and without pause, she, if asked (and he did didn’t he she thought and I said it then too) would say that she hadn’t been feeling generous at all, had she; rather stingy with her talent, as she liked to say. Rather stingy about what she would let the world see of her. 

            She thought for a minute that it was just her relaxed, released body adjusting to the walls and the pressure of a sunrise and bright seven o’clock daylight that made her feel clean, but a peek into the kitchen showed her that indeed each the bathroom and the kitchen sported open windows and the fan (already?) that Gina had removed from the back of the top shelf of her closet the other day was on and oscilating. She closed the door quietly behind her and peeked into Gina’s room. Gina was fast asleep, her lamp and computer still on, an electric hum filling the room despite the occasional whoosh of a car going by, coming in from the street through her own open window. She backed out and pulled the door towards her until she heard a sharp, low click, turning her head back into the living room, where the fan blew at her and the wall, making her New York City collage, which hung loosely from the wall, wave at her. It seemed to be greeting and beckoning her at the same time.  As it hovered away from the wall she could see the holes in the shadow that indicated the blank spots in her collage. There were not many, and Caitlyn knew that a lot of them had been deliberate. She had left space for things she still wanted to add. She had had the collage for over two years now. It had more or less been completed that first night, in the span of an hour or so of scotch-taping (not counting all the hours she had spent cutting pictures out of magazines and trimming photographs), but she had added other pictures occasionally. She hadn’t added any since Gina moved in, but wondered if Gina suspected anyway that it was still a work in progress. She probably didn’t, Caitlyn thought, as she sometimes forgot it herself.

Caitlyn entered her room, flicked off the light, took her wallet out of her back pocket, counted thirty three dollars and tossed it onto her dresser. She crossed the room and sat down on her bed, whimpered, raised her ass up, reached into her front pocket for her keys, grabbed them and lobbed them towards her night table. They landed fine but the momentum carried them over the side. They snapped to the floor. She undressed, drew herself under her blanket and prepared to get three or four hours more sleep under the mid morning sun coming in shaded through her own curtains. There was no draft. The fan inside her closet buzzed away, though. She thought of them quickly and felt confident that she would remember to water the plants, some of them as big as six feet tall now and the whole marijuana plant scene that her beautiful walk-in closet had been for the last six months simply ready to blow up,  she’d water them, but she’d do it as soon as she woke up. They could wait, this rest couldn’t. 

inhale:

            See this is what I do. It’s ten thirty and I’ve done maybe three pages. I can do three pages in an hour, less, if I try hard. But things haven’t been going to well today. I’ve had three cups of coffee and I had to take my cigarette break early today. Sometimes at this place I just stall, and can’t do anything.

            I come in late every day and today is not exception. Well almost every day, I have to be honest, there are some days when I’m here on or before 8:37 (we’re technically allowed to be seven minutes late) , but it’s once, maybe twice a week at best. Once this month I got here at 8:22.  I sign a time card every week and I just end up putting down the same shit for every day, every week, eight thirty to five, half hour lunch, 40 hour week, thank you very much, same every week, right, so there was no point to me coming in early but it felt good, if only for a minute. It felt like what I’d just done was a step towards feeling I deserved the paycheck they gave me every week.  But after a while, not. It was just the same after that, half hour later, because I was awake and eating my bagel and drinking my coffee in my cubicle like every day, going over pages and pages of addresses every day, like I always do.

            She, Sarah, just signs the time card every week. I don’t even think she knows when I come in. I rarely see her come in. The earliest I see her is nine or so. Some mornings she hasn’t come by the desk until like ten thirty, when I’m usually either going to, coming back from, or or recently returned from my first cigarette break. Sometimes when I’m really late one day, say close to nine or a little past, I’ll put nine, or eight forty five on the time card, just to do the right thing, and she won’t even bat an eye, won’t even comment. And I’ve lied on them before, come in at nine and know nobody (well no managers) saw me and put eight thirty on it and gotten the time card signed. See all I really got to do is get the card signed because from there it doesn’t go to the company, it goes to the temp agency. I like this one. Ever since I got laid off from the construction gig I needed ten bucks an hour so I brushed up on my keyboard skills at the library for a week and took this temp agency’s data entry speed test, got a good mark and got set up with a cushy job about a week later. Check this out:

            So I’m late every day I said. Sometimes I’m late in spite of everything I do because I just have to get a bagel from the shop, which is about half a block out of the way. The eight sixteen bus gets me to the Plaza at eight twenty six (and you are constantly reminded there are big digital clocks everywhere)  so if I get it I can get my bagel and make it there, depending on the line at the shop, between eight thirty five and eight forty. But the eight twenty-one bus gets me to the Plaza at eight twenty-nine or thirty depending on the lights so I have to speed walk down the block, pray there’s no line (sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t) and I’m usually there at eight forty one to eight forty five. When everything in this later scenario works and clicks I can make it before the eight thirty seven mark. But I try and make the eight eleven always.

            I walk in the door at eight thirty seven and head straight to my cubicle. It’s cool since I never had a cubicle before, but even though it’s mine now it’s only mine temporarily. I’ve been at this particular company for two months now. The way they tell it there’s about another month or so of work for us (the three of us, the guys in data services) so we’ll be updated. But for now it’s great. I haven’t put anything up in the cubicle and probably won’t, but it is nice to have your own space in which to work at your pace. So the first thing I do is shake the mouse a bit so the computer comes out of sleep mode and restarts itself. I take my coat off, put down my bagel, and head straight for the coffee machine. Four times out of five there’s coffee made. When there is I can pour my cream in, lid it and be back at the computer just as the start menu programs have finished

loading. and I’m ready to go.

            The first thing I do (it’s usually about eight forty five by this point) is check my e-mail. I won’t respond unless it’s important and it seldom is. I check the news, the weather, the sports, you know, basic shit, if there’s something interesting going down I’ll follow the links and what have you, but it’s mainly dicking around until I’m done my bagel. I’ll close Explorer and load up the database (it’s usually about eight fifty five or six now) and go through a couple of lines on the pages, maybe twelve, and then it’s around nine fifteen and usually before I finish the first page I’m ready for my next cup of coffee.  After I finish that cup of coffee it’s usually around ten (because at that point I start doing some actual work, so I’m not just drinking coffee and surfing the net) and I have two choices: I can get another cup of coffee or I can go to the bathroom and get a candy bar, or I can go smoke a cigarette. A lot of it depends, see, because what I want is just the day to be over. I am a clock watcher and there is a clock at the bottom right hand corner of the screen, and even though I’ve hid it, first with post-it notes ( my co-workers would be all light about it; all I wanted was for them not to bring it up) and then I finally found out about this option on the computer where you can hide the clock on the toolbar. It makes me think of it less, think of the time less, but then, because this place is an international communications company, there are clocks everywhere, on the computers, on the walls, different clocks for different countries in different time zones. The strange thing is, none of them tell the same time. Maybe two of the fifteen or so clocks have the same time, a pair of them, but there’s always at least another pair that have the same times, however that time is sure to be about five minutes off of the other pair, and the other clocks, they too are all off, anywhere from one to ten minutes off either the real time or the other clocks. And sometimes it seems like all the clocks in the plaza are off too, deliberately, no, actually not deliberately, not always, but at the same time I sometimes get the real time off the radio but I set my clock ahead ten minutes because I like not be late but I have a hard time waking up in the morning so so it works, psychologically, most of the time.

            Like I said, it’s a bad day. It’s like almost ten and I already want a cigarette. I want one and at the same time I know that I can’t smoke one. Not these days. Because the cigarettes are next to go. And it’s been a few days since I’ve been running early enough to stop for a bagel in the morning, so I’m starting to get rotgut from all this coffee I’m drinking because it’s on an empty stomach. Three cups already. Plus I haven’t been sleeping or feeling well, but that’s a whole nother thing. It’s getting harder to concentrate. A lot of these other jobs I’ve done, I got weary of it about three weeks into the assignment, but I always get over it. But this time it’s gotten worse with her, making me want to think about stupid things like anniversaries, about my family and Cait especially, but it’s all shit, and I can’t even deal. It’s out, it’s out. It’s nine fifty nine, not even ten, and already I’m breathing with great difficulty, just like yesterday.

            Kat what are you doing. Don’t you know we can’t make the world full. Not this blood and now not a chance. Kat you’re not giving up. You want to stick around to see me get worse, I fear.