The Confidant (Part Two)

Apr 22, 2008 - 01:48 AM PST

Boss was stirring. “What time is it?” He barked his words like an angry dock-worker. I think he maybe overcompensating for a listless lifestyle.

“Five to five.” I replied with a smooth indifference, maybe even placating the boss a little.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“I’d like to thank you boss, for letting me use your phone. You didn’t have to be so kind.”

“Leave Eli.”

“Sure thing boss.”

Spring is heeding ground to summer and I get to walk in daylight to the bus stop after work. And when I walk away from the boss’ house I’m struck with a feeling of happiness. Knowing that I’m leaving while people like the boss are returning home, that I’ll be on a bus for the city while they drive window display imports into three stall garages, it lightens my step. Those are the emotions to be trusted, the amorphous dialect of guts and spines, pre-lingual sensations that can’t be explained. Why else would virile heartlanders with a choke-hold on the American dream need white fishnets to prance around in when the Mrs. is out with the kids? Do the Mr. Banisters of the world reason their way through my transactions? No, fuck no, the human being is a misologist. We hate reasons. Reasons end marriages, they reject students, make people quit smoking. Logic is a mind-fuck game we all play because we think calculation elevates us above the street squatters who now all happen to suffer from mental illness. Reason didn’t tell me to pull Miles Turner off the street and I’ll wager reason didn’t tell Miles to hand me his business card either. Lies, lies, lies form the mask of reason used to cover up the embarrassing truth that we act in accordance with primordial emotions just like cousin monkey. So I ride the bus home a happy man and I don’t ask my self if I’m right or wrong. I just am.

I don’t trust rational faculties, because, well, they fade. I’m realizing this now as a vicious stretch of insomnia has kept me up for the past month. Or better put, Miles Turner is keeping me awake. I lay in bed with an alert numbness produced by a general wonder about the man whose life I saved. And without sleep the workings of the world slowly start to unravel. Time becomes useless. Intervals lose their definition and I can’t recall the transition between days or weeks. The events that make up my life aren’t connected anymore. From one sale to the next, or bus ride, or morning stroll through suburbia, they all blend into this stew that doesn’t follow a chronology or obey the laws of cause and effect. Reason fails when sequence is dismantled by sleepless nights and all I have left are those momentary stirs of aversion or acceptance. I’ve become completely dependent on impulse, trusting perceived inner voices and spur of the moment sways. Miles Turner has turned me into an amoeba moving only towards or away from light that regulates my optimum surviving temperature. I need to see him, I need to know who has the audacity to call himself a Confidant and not even say a word to the person that kept him from becoming morning fodder to the number six. I need you Miles.

I’m sitting in my apartment forcing down a pastrami on cracked wheat, heavy on the spicy mustard, because my body is telling me to do so. Insomnia also takes the sensuality out of dining. Food becomes a means to an end. I know I taste the bites but the mastication is mechanical, efficient. The phone rings. I pick up and an androgynous voice starts speaking to me in an equi-syllabic droll. It’s the voice from Mile’s automated machine reminding me I have an appointment tomorrow at two in the afternoon, it gives me the address. Five weeks have gone by and they may have well been an hour, a day, a year. I hope my meeting brings some sleep or I’ll turn fifty without knowing. I call the boss to tell him I’m taking a personal day. “Okay Eli,” he barks, “you’ve been looking like shit anyway, get some sleep.” Thanks boss, I’ll try.

After the phone call I finish my meal and flip through the channels from moment to moment, not really knowing how long I spend. I settle on a biographic piece about Anton Dvorak, the scenery was intriguing so my gut told me to watch. Did I even like classical music? After the special, or before, or during, I clip my toenails and draw a stick figure rendering of men and women dancing about in a concert call. I called it, Frillings and Dashings to the New World Symphony. During all of this I manage to lay out a wardrobe for three possible occasions: formal, casual, and hot damn look at that stud, he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. The insomniac is an odd creature. But in the melee of my hand movements and fuzzy thoughts there has been one constant, a static reminder of my current situation, the business card. It’s stuck to my fridge, wrinkled and discolored from the moisture of my hands working it and leaving it to reform in different shapes. I wonder if its geometry still remembers the form of a rectangle or if I have disfigured it beyond all resemblance to its once perfect symmetry. I wonder about these things now that I’m not sleeping. Before too long, or maybe after an eternity, a clock tells me it’s noon. My mind can’t remember how to put distance and time together so I leave because I think punctuality is something to be admired by the rest of the world.

I can’t even judge the people walking past me down the streets of Chicago. Some might be old, some might be young, I think they all are in a hurry because I’m definitely not keeping up with the pace of the city. News stands make me wonder how so many magazines can survive in a capitalist economy and coffee shops have removed their winter windows, letting me smell the inside of their establishments. Something tells me coffee is a good idea right now and I know not to ignore the message. Then I walk, knowing exactly where Mile’s office is nested but not knowing how I’m going to get there, sipping today’s house blend. The coffee helps because now I feel like my muscles can control my eyes. And before too long, or too soon, I reach the address given to me by a preprogrammed machine. I know I’m here because that fucking moniker is taunting me in italic engraving above the lock of a black gate guarding a pristine brick row home sitting in a micro-jet stream of lake air wafting off the shore. Confidant. I’m here, I’ve been coming here, I was here, I will be here. I’m filled with desire. The gate buzzes and that calculated voice, meant to be comforting and familiar, tells me the two o’clock appointment is now ready. Someone, or maybe another machine unlocks the gate. No bells, no angelic choirs, no celebrated symphonies, the answer to my waking dreams has been answered by a metallic ‘click’ letting me know I can enter the office of Miles Turner.

-smd 2008