I.
Joseph Harlan woke with puffy eyes and a scowl upon his face. It was a Monday and he was nearly in his thirties. He feared the end of his twenties like the plague, but he also recognized their inevitability. Some time ago, Joseph dreamed of becoming a family doctor. However, rising tuition costs and financial recklessness conspired against him. So for the last seventeen months, Joseph had been exclusively working for McDonalds. Monday to Saturday. Nine to five.
In fact, the twenty-eight year old had been hopping from one minimum wage job to the next ever since he was nineteen (almost twenty, he would tell himself at night). Regardless, out of necessity, Joseph had managed to restrain the semi-exuberant lifestyle of his youth and live out his days in relative poverty. A cheap, one bedroom apartment that was both homey and cramped. A steady diet of wieners and beans, canned vegetables, and rice. A refusal to attend any entertainment events. Joseph did not even subscribe to Netflix anymore. Oh! The horror!
These measures had built up a pretty sum in his bank account over the last year and a half. Joseph was proud of it, but he knew it was still nowhere near enough to go back to school. So he kept on with his routine, and shut up when a customer claimed erroneously that she ordered a cheeseburger when, in fact, she ordered a McMuffin.
It wasn’t always like this. Nothing ever is, but that's just the nature of life. Always fluid and malleable, completely and utterly unreliable. But Joseph was adjusting harshly to the changes. He had always been an optimist, even if he claimed otherwise in melodramatic proclamations to his coworkers. It was just hard for him to comprehend the fact that he might not actually succeed in his schooling, or in his love life, or in anything else of substance that he did. Failure lends only lessons for future successes. Right?
However, after more than eight years of monotonous poverty, that somewhat naive optimism burning within him had dimmed almost completely. He found himself reminiscing of better times. An age of innocence, unbridled joy, and a man named Rajeet Parker.
Rajeet was Joseph's dearest friend. They had known each other all their lives; their moms took them to the same playschool, and when the parents become friends, so do the kids. In elementary, they played tag together. In junior high they played video games. In high school, they talked about girls and studied together and still played video games. But it was the twelfth grade that Joseph kept coming back to, as the days at McDonald’s dragged on and Joseph’s self-respect became progressively diminished.
Unlike Joseph, Rajeet was a successful man. He did a two-year-marketing course at the University of Toronto and against the odds he had become a successful online businessman. He now had a massive company with twenty-seven employees and annual revenues in the millions. Rajeet had made it big, as expected. It was really the bare minimum; both Joseph and Rajeet were born into middle class Canadian households with loving parents; if they could not make it in a first world country with all the benefits afforded to them, then they were useless. At least that’s how they looked at it. And there was really no excuse for Joseph. None at all. He had everything that Rajeet had and more, because he was fully white. (Rajeet was born to a white father and an Indian mother.)
Yet Joseph was working at McDonalds and Rajeet was in Europe living the high life, working from online. Apparently Rajeet had been managing his entire company for the last six months from his luxurious hotel rooms in the plethora of cities he had visited. Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Florence, Rome, Istanbul, and Thessaloniki. Those were just the cities that Joseph knew about. He was sure there were others that Rajeet had failed to mention, or that Joseph had simply forgotten. The last time they had spoken was over the phone nearly three months earlier.
“A good city is everything,” Rajeet said at one point during the call.
“Easy for you to say, slumdog millionaire,”Joseph chuckled.
“The only slum I’ve ever run was our dorm in college,”
“That’s fair. How’s the food?”
“Better than my mother’s.”
“I’m going to tell her you said that."
“Go ahead, she knows. But to be fair to her, anything she cooks is still probably better than what you eat.”
“No, I actually eat really well these days,” Joseph said.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, I devote a lot of time to making a bunch of fancy recipes online.” Joseph lied.
“That’s good to hear. I actually can hardly cook, so I admire you for that”
“Thanks”
“Anyway, I wish you could come out here and visit me sometime—”
“Why don’t you invite me then? I barely hear from you anymore, and we haven’t met in person for years. I miss the old days.”
“ Yes, I miss them as well Joseph. Listen, I’ll call you in a few weeks and we can arrange something. I’ll get you tickets, don’t worry. I realize things are tough for you right now.”
“Love you, bro,” Joseph said.
“Yeah, yeah. See you later,” Rajeet hung up. He did call back a few weeks later, but only to tell Joseph that something had come up and that he would have to reschedule. They never talked again.
The success of Rajeet was really quite remarkable. He had launched his business long before his graduation, but it really took off a few months after he received his certificate. The massive and sudden rise in profits coincidentally happened around the same time that Rajeet was trying to get an actual job (he still hadn’t been hired with his business certificate.)
So the success came early in life and at a time when Rajeet needed it most. Joseph was happy for him when things first started picking up, and that happiness had never been dampened with jealousy of any sort; Joseph just wasn’t the envious type. Still, he thought of Rajeet and his luxurious lifestyle quite often. Joseph sometimes wondered what could be so wrong with him that he couldn’t even hold a steady minimum wage job or finish his undergraduate degree while Rajeet was jet-setting around the globe.
Of course, it's dangerous to daydream about hypothetical situations so radically removed from one's own reality. Some daydreaming is fine, of course. Without at least some degree of ambition, no one can get anywhere at all. But the grandiose visions of what could be are exactly what get so many well-meaning folks in trouble. Better to have a realistic, meagre dream. Not even a dream—a goal. A series of goals will get one to their own unique form of happiness, whatever it may look like; some climb those steps faster than others, but everyone has their own unique struggle. That’s what Joseph believed, anyway.
II.
Eight years became twelve, twelve became fifteen, and before Joseph knew what was happening, he had been working mostly minimum wage jobs for the better part of seventeen years. Rajeet was long out of Joseph’s life, a vibrant but ancient memory of a distant past. He met some new friends, and the city became smaller, even as they rapidly expanded the trams and suburbs and summer festivals. But nothing could compare to his exuberant youth.
The best part of this period for Joseph was his wife, Tessa. They met at a speed dating event, which Joseph had attended on the advice of his coworker at the sleazy mattress store. Coincidentally, Tessa was not one of the women attending the event; she had been one of the volunteers. Tessa was a small blonde woman with bad vision and a bland attitude.
She was drawn to Joseph’s dry humor and his restrained public persona. It was all quite intriguing to her. Joseph was just happy an attractive woman liked talking to him. He liked when she laughed at his jokes and really listened to him. Sometimes he couldn’t help but feel that his work friends, many of them now several years younger than him, merely laughed and nodded along at whatever he said. It’s not that Joseph considered himself to be particularly bright or profound. But there’s something to be said about deeply engaged conversations, and Joseph really didn’t have those anymore. There was no close circle of friends, no best friend to lean on. So when Tessa came around, he was overjoyed. And Tessa’s attraction to him only deepened as she came to know him. So they dated. Things became physical rather swiftly, and after a month they were two or three times a day. Three times! At Tessa’s insistence, they drank plenty of water, exercised, and ate healthy. So it was okay. But still impressive for a couple of thirty year olds! Old goats.
Joseph knew that he loved Tessa when she started putting Nutella on her pickles and instead of recoiling in disgust, he felt a warm burst of overwhelming affection. After that, he started noticing other things about her; he loved the way she smiled and did a scooby doo voice with their small little dog named Waldo, he loved how she trembled and cuddled him when she was upset, and he loved how she told him every little thing about her mundane life.
“I saw a rabbit today,” Tessa told Joseph one night over dinner.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes, it was dead though,”
“I see…did you kill it?” Joseph chuckled lightly.
“Of course not! What do you take me for?! A killer?” Tessa exclaimed.
“No, I suppose not,” Joseph replied.
“Good, I should hope not. Anyway, it was splattered all over the parking lot and I think one of my coworkers is responsible for this atrocity.”
“Good god! We are eating Bolognese! Have some restraint, woman!”
“Woman? This isn’t 1954, Mister.”
“Oh, I’m well aware. Men were much more capable back in the day. I wouldn’t have stood a chance against those buggers…they fought in Normandy.”
“You would have shit yourself in Normandy” Tessa grinned.
“Perhaps. Now, now. The real question…how did you know it was a rabbit?’
“What do you mean?”
“You said it was splattered all over the parking lot. How did you—”
“It was either a rabbit or a white cat. I pray it was a rabbit. Rabbits can be vicious creatures. Cats are wonderful. But I guess I just assumed”
“Fair enough. So…did you enjoy your day at work?”
“Yes, of course. Who doesn't love working as a mid-level manager in a stifled office environment?”
“Mm-hm. Did Phoebe raise any troubles today?”
“No, she was good. No fuss from her. What a whiner. But Jack in finance was pissing me off a bit.”
“I barely know him…is he the one with dirty blond hair and those wiry glasses that look like they are from the 1930s?”
“No, that is Jackson. We call him Jack for short. No, the person I am talking about is actually just called Jack. Jack Richardson, from finance. He’s kinda chubby, balding, and no glasses. He likes wearing brown suits with coral ties.”
“Oh, yeah…Jack. What was Jack up to?”
“Where do I begin? I mean, the man does not understand the concept of deadlines! I wonder everyday how he’s managed to make it this far in a career without a basic respect for timelines. But today, it was worse. He was an hour late to work, and he forgot his papers for his budgetary presentation to the board!”
“What!?”
“He was supposed to present the quarterly budget to the board, and he forgot this presentation at home!”
“Isn’t he, like, fifty?”
“Fifty-two.”
“Maybe he has early onset dementia or something?”
“Unlikely. He said he was screened for it last year. Oh! And there was something else I wanted to talk to you about….” Tessa went on about her work for another five minutes, and then they finished up and did the dishes together while listening to some snoop dog. Hard to beat Snoop. Life with Tessa went on like that for a while and eventually Joseph couldn’t imagine his life without her.
He had already known for months that Tessa was the love of his life when he finally proposed in their favourite little Mexican restaurant (they were regulars.) She accepted quickly and the engagement lasted less than a month. Before anyone knew anything, they had their small wedding in a chapel out in the country and they went off for their three week honeymoon in South America. They explored the Amazon, Mayan ruins, and the narrow colonial streets of old town Buenos Aires. It was a trip full of wonder, passion, excitement, and education. Joseph always liked learning new things, and he figured that the best way to learn was to travel. At least that’s what his grandmother used to tell him. (He never questioned it, and now that he had traveled beyond North America, he decided that it was probably true.)
So the honeymoon was spectacular, and so went the first few years of the marriage. Every week they would go out with a group of friends and go bowling or just go to the bar. Tessa was quite well-off due to her occupation as a family doctor. Sometimes they would joke about Joseph being a gold digger. But it was certainly indisputable that being with Tessa improved Joseph’s life in more ways than one. His seemingly endless series of dead-end jobs finally came to an end and Tessa got her husband a job as a receptionist. The salary wasn’t much better but it came with great benefits and union protections that Joseph was previously unaccustomed to. Between that and Tessa’s direct financial intervention (with his protest) Joseph was finally debt-free. So those first few years were a time of new beginnings.
A time of novel financial freedom, intense and very physical love, and fresh friendships that seemed durable. They even considered having kids, but ultimately decided against it. Regardless, the two of them bought a five bedroom house in the suburbs just in case they decided to change their minds. Besides, it was nice to escape the urban sprawl, even if they only made it to the outskirts.
III.
Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever. After four years of marriage and five years of being together, Tessa screwed someone else.
“I didn’t mean for it to go as far as it did,” Tessa weeped during her late-night confession to Joseph. Joseph felt an urge to hit her, and he lunged forward as if to strangle her. But instead, his hands hovered inches from her neck, as tense as they could get. His hands were trembling violently, his teeth gritted as tight as his jaw would allow. Tears welled in his eyes, obscuring his vision, but he didn’t let them fall. He tried to hold them back. Tessa widened her eyes in fear briefly, but once she saw his intent wasn’t to hurt her, she sank to her knees.
“But it did,” Joseph whispered.
Blinded by rage, Joseph divorced her. One day she was there, the next day she wasn’t. She begged to stay, of course. And Joseph was tempted, because she was the love of his life. But he no longer believed he was the love of hers.
It was one thing that she had sex with someone else, but it was a guy in their friend group. The group they had been going bowling with. His name was Ben. So she knew him and they had been friends for years. Ben wasn’t some random hookup. And even though Tessa cut ties with him and promised to be faithful, Joseph just couldn’t look at her without thinking of Ben. He wasn’t angry, but consumed by pitiless sorrow. A complete lack of direction.
After Tessa, Joseph had no idea what he would do with his life. There was simply nowhere to go. Nothing left to do. He had found the love of his life but now they could never be together. Not because he didn’t want to forgive her, but because he physically couldn’t. Even just the thought of her made him sick in those early days. He could barely walk for months. His legs trembled as if he had a terrible fever and the thought of food made him nauseous; Joseph was forced to relegate his once vigorous diet to a single bowl of soup per day. This aversion to food lasted for five weeks.
The divorce was finalized quickly; Tessa felt enormously guilty and wanted to settle things as swiftly as possible. Joseph got half the money (about six hundred and fifty thousand dollars) and the house. Tessa insisted he take the house. Joseph felt guilty about taking so much of her money, but Tessa would have it no other way. He signed the papers, somewhat reluctantly, and that was that. Tessa came by their house a few months after the divorce, and she tried to convince him to forgive her. Joseph agreed, but asked for more time. Tessa agreed, saying that she would wait for Joseph to re-establish contact. She hoped that one day they could be friends again. But Joseph still couldn’t get the idea of her and Ben out of his head, even after significant time had passed. So after about a year, when Tessa still hadn’t heard anything from Joseph, she moved to the States to start a new life.
Ben never apologized or even acknowledged what he did. That whole group just cut off contact, choosing to stick by Ben. Joseph knew where Ben lived and when Tessa first confessed her infidelity, he had a fleeting urge to go to his house and beat him up or even just yell at him. But within a few hours, his anger had faded to an irrepressible sadness that would last for years to come.
The melancholic tendencies of which he had been so susceptible to in his youth had metastasized into full-blown depression. He knew he was a worthless fuck. He always had been, but at least with Tessa people could be distracted by that through the sheer brightness of her personality.
It can be hard to spot a slug when they were standing right next to one of the most pleasant people that Joseph had ever known. Pleasant, except for that one act. One mistake! That’s all it was, really. She had never done anything else to suggest that she was unhappy. Nothing. Which is actually part of what made the whole thing so hard for Joseph. Why would she do this to him? They were going to spend the rest of their lives together. Travel the world, retire, maybe even open a restaurant. Both of them loved cooking; sizzling meat on the grill was one of their shared passions. Now all of those years were a waste. A complete waste of his youth. Joseph was an old man—thirty-eight years old. His hair grayed, his eyes sunk into his sore skull, and his joints popped getting out of bed. Sure, he probably had many years ahead of him. But what women could he find that were his own age? And what women could ever measure up to Tessa?
So the future was uncertain at best, desolate at worst. It was clear that he had not been a good enough husband to Tessa. She was perfect in almost every way, and yet he allowed her to slip through his fingers. Maybe that one mistake was forgivable after all. Maybe she didn’t deserve such a harsh reaction. Maybe he could give her another chance. Maybe—
No, never mind. He would have to live without her. Life would go on, as it always does. Faced with an unpleasant present, Joseph found himself thinking back to his childhood with Rajeet. A simpler time. An era of sheer innocence and unfettered joy. Their most pressing concern at any given time was a bit of homework or perhaps some chores. Their parents did almost everything for them, at least until they were fairly well advanced into teenagehood; they cooked, cleaned, bought them gifts, and gave them consistent love and emotional support. It was the primetime of his life, aside from perhaps with Tessa. Now that his parents were gone, and his other childhood friends had mostly faded from memory and contact, Rajeet was the vestigial link to his formative years. Even though they hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade, he was the only friend from that time period who had stayed close with him well into adulthood.
Joseph remembered when they were ten they used to make fantasy-themed bakesales outside of local parks. King Arthur cupcakes, Dragon cookies, Fairy marshmallow sticks; stuff like that. It was exciting to them, the idea of making money. And they were good bakers, too. They charged fair prices and people came and helped them sell out. They only did it for one summer, but they made almost a thousand each, which was an astronomical sum for people of their age. However, they were always very honest with the way they earned their money. One time, someone gave Rajeet a ten instead of a five. The man was walking away, and he never would have know. But Rajeet ran up to him so they could work it out. Joseph would have done the same, but he wasn’t the one to have received the money.
Rajeet had always been honest and respectful, like Joseph. He called Joseph’s parents “Mr. and Mrs. Harlan," which they liked quite a bit. Unlike Joseph, Rajeet was also highly intelligent, successful, and straight-laced. It was tempting to resent Rajeet for his success, but Joseph couldn’t find the hate in his heart. He was proud to have known him. Joseph knew his intrinsic flaws made him who he was, for better or worse. Yet he lamented them all the while. He was impulsive. Terribly impulsive. If a thought came across his mind, and he liked it, there wasn't the God almighty that could stop him from acting on it. Usually his thoughts were decent enough that they didn’t cause much trouble. Often enough though, that wasn’t the case. So he had a drinking problem in his twenties. It was intense and more than a problem, but Joseph didn’t like to admit that. Occasionally the drinking would begin to affect his moral decisions; hence the hangover and neglect of that injured man on the street. He had gotten the alcohol under control after he met Tessa, but given the circumstances, it was tempting to return to old habits.
IV.
Amid all of this crushing misery, he went back to the bar for the first time in nine years. After all, where was the real harm? Joseph was a grown man. Grown men drink all the time. Didn’t mean anything awful would happen. He had gained a lot of control since his drinking days. He was mature, properly grown. Perhaps a little more tired, and maybe the melancholy had come back stronger than expected, but alcohol would fix that up real nice. Nothing like a rum and Coke to dull the senses. He loved the feeling of the blurry indifference that accompanied drunkenness. The lack of anxiety, or self-awareness. Those things were far too common while sober. No need to face them every hour of every day. One must have some sort of escape from the relentless squeeze of mundane melancholy. Mr Mundane melancholy! That's alliteration, isn't it? What a poet he thought himself to be. If only his English professor shared that opinion all those years ago. Maybe then he wouldn’t be where he was now.
Joseph decided to go to a dingy drinking establishment downtown. Inside, the warm air was thick and stunk of cigarettes swirled with the stench of old, sticky liquor. There were about eight people in the bar aside from himself and the bartender. Three old women, their rough-looking biker husbands, two sad male loners like himself, and another loner that happened to be a woman. Faded neon signs from sometime in the eighties burned on the beige walls. He was where he belonged.
“Do you go here often?” the female loner asked Joseph after he sat next to her and ordered a rum and coke.
“I’m afraid not,” Joseph replied.
“That’s a shame.”
“Why?”
“If you don’t go here often, then that means I won’t see you again.” The Woman said with a sly smile. Joseph was mildly surprised; women rarely hit on him anymore. Maybe in his prime, but not anymore. He was a tired old man. But he engaged in the flattery, happy for the attention and the joy of a willing conversationalist that he had never met. He talked about his work, which was boring, so the conversation began to die out until she brought up the past. She asked him about his favourite memories. And of course, as the sentimental man that he was, Joseph had plenty to say. And so did the woman. It appeared that they both longed for the faded memories of what once was. They talked for a couple of hours, and after she squeezed his thigh, Joseph knew the conversation was over. They fucked.
The next Friday, Joseph returned to the bar. He had toiled all week and was ready to enjoy another week of relaxation in a dirty, busy bar. Joseph would drink by himself if it was socially acceptable, but it wasn’t. And internalized fears of alcoholism ran deep for Joseph, so he feebly countered his self-suspicions by drinking with strangers. Never with friends. He didn’t drink around those people anymore, and he didn't really have any true friends left anyway.
“Back again?” The Woman spoke in a slow, measured manner.
“It sure seems that way,” Joseph replied with a half-smile. He was truly enamoured with her; The Woman was not particularly attractive in the conventional sense. Her cheeks were perhaps too full, her nose was out of proportion, and her skin had mild blotches of redness. But her confidence was magnetic, and she seemed so free. The Woman did not have any weight on her shoulders. No heavy rocks tying her down; she lived in the moment and Joseph could admire that. He figured that he might learn something from her. The carelessness and utter disregard for social norms and conventions. Liberation! While he doubted it was a sustainable way to live for any long period of time, Joseph could appreciate her choices. And, of course, they were his choices too. She didn’t seduce him. Regardless, it was clear that the woman was to lead and Joseph was to follow in feeble pursuit.
The Woman’s name was given and he gave his name to her but neither of them really cared about that. To him, in his mind, she was a Woman and in her mind he was a Man. He objectified her and she objectified him. There was no emotion. Not a care in the world on the part of either of them. Joseph and The Woman talked about generic life topics such as traffic and drunk stories and college stories. The college stories were exclusively told by Joseph, since The Woman did not go to college. An informal tradition began to take hold. They met four more times after that first meeting. Every Friday around eight-thirty they would meet at their usual spot at the typically empty bar table.
The sex was hollow and numb and empty like everything else during those weeks. It felt so good but at the same time it really didn’t. Joseph knew that it was merely a vain attempt to destroy the ever-encroaching misery which seemed to consume anything and everything Joseph did. Sometimes, while in the act, he would close his eyes and imagine that Tessa was The Woman. But when he finished and opened his eyes, Joseph was consumed by an oceanic wave of disappointment, followed by intense shame and disgust with himself for treating a fellow human being as a mere instrument of his animalistic desire. A plaything for his filthy mind. An object to unload all his crassness and filth upon. He was an evil piece of shit.
But The Woman seemed entirely content with this arrangement. She showed up every Friday for the entirety of the month. The Woman did not issue any complaints, only suggestions. To suggest that she was anything but kind, eager, and open-minded would be a disservice to her character. Occasionally, brief glimpses into her other life would present themselves for a moment. One time, she got a phone call from her brother. It sounded like he needed The Woman to take his son, which would be her nephew, to chemo treatment in a few days. A sadness, foreign to Joseph, briefly slackened her face. IHer gaze had a faint hint of sorrowful resignation buried deep, almost imperceptible to the naked eye. Joseph recognized the pain in her eyes only because he saw it in himself when he looked in the mirror. He noticed it before he overheard that phone call, but he was even more aware of it after that. But Joseph never again saw the same despondency he had seen painted on her lively face that night when she received the call; they hid their humanity from each other as best they could.
Joseph had never been a hippie or a sex fiend. But he could feel the excitement building over the course of the week as he imagined what might happen the next time he met the mysterious, lustful woman from the seedy bar downtown. No matter how many times he found himself filled with disappointment and shame, Joseph kept returning to The Woman. What did that make him? Joseph often wondered those types of questions late at night.
Work was consistently awful. Financially, however, Joseph was truly doing better than ever. After his marriage and divorce with Tessa, Joseph had emerged as a financially stable middle aged man. Regardless, it was all just so insufferable. Caroline Bennett with her three kids, always showing pictures of those ugly toads to unsuspecting victims in the elevator. Jimmy with his incessant whining. We need better pay! We need longer vacations! My uncle’s cat died!
Fuck your uncle’s cat, Joseph thought. We have better things to worry about, like the job at hand. Joseph understood the tendency for small-talk, but people were so bad at it that he just couldn’t be bothered anymore. And the manager, Sheila! Officious prick.
Sheila fired Gerald from accounting right after his wife died. Gerald’s wife had died suddenly from a pulmonary embolism and Gerald was devastated. Sheila gave him two weeks of personal time, but Gerald didn’t come into the office until the third week. His desk had already been cleared and his job had been replaced by Sheila’s nephew. Gerald was a grieving man in his late fifties…he was too young to retire! He had been the most efficient accountant in the office, and had been working there for nearly twenty-five years. Joseph was disgusted by it all. He could hardly stand talking to people anymore. There were just more Sheilas than Geralds in the world. A sea of snakes slithering through the filthy weeds of gossip, pretending to care about your problems. The only thing holding the world together was fear. Joseph became more and more sure of this as he grew older.
Of course, there were some gems in the storm. Rajeet, Gerald, Tessa. Yes, even Tessa.. Sometimes he would lie in bed and imagine that she had never slept with that snake Ben and all would have been well. They could have had children, and they would have been beautiful. Just like her. A son to make him proud. A daughter to take care of Tessa and him when they grew old together. Typical, stereotypical daydreams. They did not mean anything, because he knew he would never have children now. Whatever he could imagine was nothing compared to what reality would have been. It would have been wonderful, and terrible, and frustrating. But it could have defined his life. What defines his life now? A failed marriage? A career given to him by his ex? A failed education? It was a legacy of disappointment.
V.
Rain descended upon the sullen city. Joseph was drenched. His long, black trench coat was soaked, his toes already forming blisters. His stomach was weak from the long night before; vomiting and weeping were a cruel combination. Joseph knew a couple hours of sleep were hardly sufficient for his grueling headache.
The streets were still mostly empty, with only a few stragglers. The dawn was just rising, and soon the morning rush would begin. Sometimes Joseph wished he was back home. Back in his little town in rural Alberta where everyone knew everyone. In these big cities, no one recognized him. No one cared about his day, or whether his grandmother just died. The world went on without him. And that was fine, but sometimes Joseph felt that the lack of community was ultimately just detrimental to society. It was bad enough that most people were snakes, but what about the rest of them? The poor folks that were just trying to survive in a cruel world, who had no one to turn to? Should they just be ignored? Perhaps conversation, even if it is usually under false pretence, is a better alternative to neutral nothingness. Joseph strongly believed that the more complex a society became, the more impolite and unempathetic the people within that society would become. Detachment from those around oneself was a dangerous situation that seemed to be inevitable in these big cities.
Just the other day, Joseph saw a man writhing in pain on the side of the road. He was bleeding, blood everywhere. Someone had stabbed him in the gut. In the two minutes that Joseph stood there, in shock, not a single person had stopped to help the bleeding man. Not the joggers with their AirPods and their expensive outfits, not the twenty-something college students in their button-up shirts, and not the group of five construction workers heading to a job site a block away. They did nothing! Nothing.
Joseph didn’t help either. But it was surprising that no one stepped up. Usually there was that one individual who makes the decision to help out and spend some of their time undertaking a selfless act. Someone probably did stop, eventually. But it wasn’t Joseph; he was too hungover for that. A shameful thing to admit, but then Joseph’s entire life was shameful. So he accepted it, even if he did lie awake late at night.
Now, walking through the streets of this pitiful city, Joseph found himself thinking about how similar that day was to all the others. The mutual indifference was stark, but so common that it shouldn't be surprising anymore. People want entertainment. They like drama. They love using big words like catastrophic or collapse or devastation. These are the words people love to use. And then they cheapen words like love when they love a Mars bar or love their favourite television show.
If most of the world is like this, then why shouldn’t he enjoy what little he has while he still has it? Who cares about morality? There is no morality. There is only strength. The better liar, the better lover, the better conversationalist. That’s all anyone wants. Entertainment is the engine of the world, and boredom is the ultimate enemy. Joseph would let wild horses maim him into four quarters if he could one day escape from this eternal tortuous existence from which he had been so cruelly subjected to by whatever malevolent force had willed him into existence. But as far as anyone knows, it just gets worse from here. At least in this level of Hell, Joseph could eat tasty pasta and fuck and share some hollow laughs with the young folk in his office. We go to school to work, we work, we retire, we die. That is it, that is all. Everything in the middle is all lies. Lies! If everyone is trying to maximize their pleasure, then why do it the respectable way? What makes the seedy, unethical path to happiness any less legitimate? It is all the same! Joseph could never be a cruel person, but he also knew that he was not as good as he used to believe. What even is goodness, anyway? A social construct based on selflessness. But most people don’t deserve selflessness. Better to be honest with yourself and with others rather than pretending to be something you are not in the name of image. Fuck image!
Joseph finally reached the apartment building The Woman had told him about during their last encounter. 8079 Wilcox Ave. It was a tall and dreary building, much like the rest of the city. The architecture long ago went out of style. What a fucking ugly piece of brick and glass! It was something out of the Soviet Era or something. Brutalist piece of trash! He rang the buzzer for apartment 1467 and a muffled voice let him in. He went into the dirty elevator and began his ascent. Joseph had never done anything like this before. The fears of sexually transmitted disease and social ostracization had long since faded away. Disease would be a mercy…an excuse to avoid work. And as for social embarrassment, Joseph had no friends anymore anyway. They had all left him. Too bitter, they said. Too bitter! Joseph was a pleasant man. He knew it. They were just snakes. If they were real friends, they would have stuck by him through his troubles. Instead they jumped ship at the first sign of fire. Perhaps they aren't quite snakes. No…rats! Rats are a much better metaphor. Jumping ship like the filthy rats they were.
He could feel his heart thundering in his chest like an Oneida war drum. Tremors wracked his body, and his legs held him rather weakly. His face was warm, almost hot. His wet head gave him a bit of a headache. His nose was red and runny, so he wiped it on his soggy sleeve. The door opened, and a long ugly corridor awaited him. Near the end of the hall, there was an inverted pineapple situated on a stool outside an apartment door. It was apartment 1467. Joseph walked down the hall, half-erect and half-terrified. He arrived at the door, and he could hear the laughs and moans from inside the room. He could smell the apple cinnamon…candles? That must be candles. Just before knocking, Joseph considered walking away. Why should he do this? It was a terrible mistake, he thought. What would his parents think? What would Rajeet think? Or Tessa? But at the end of the day, he knew he had to make a change in his life. Perhaps some casual hedonism wasn’t such a bad idea. So he knocked. But instead of The Woman or a random swinger, a disheveled and diminished Rajeet was the one who opened the door.
Comments