It began with
the descent of a coffee bean. In the green of Owen's eyes, there was another
man overlapping his actions: a vivid deja-vu. His knuckles slept, digging into
his chin and throat, his thorax leaning heavily over the steaming mug on the
counter. Across the room, the apparatus gurgled stubbornly into the torrid soup
and spat its creature into the coffee pot with bitter hisses and snarls. The
dull repetition of these sounds was drawing Owen back through the eye of the
needle into the warm smallness of sleep. He closed his eyes momentarily,
allowing the weight of his head to fall, before blinking his way back to the
present where a tiny clattering had tickled his ears. Reaching his hand down to
the white tile floor, Owen captured between his fingers a bean, a coffee bean
that had lost its way.
The back of
Owen’s neck twitched, his brows flexing as he turned the black speck over,
concentrating on something very far away. There was an itch somewhere in his
brain, a small uneasiness that threatened to rise up, to disrupt the quietude
of Owen’s inertia. From somewhere, he saw an image of himself, shaking his
head, pursing his lips, pinching his nose, and his fingers raking the back of
his neck.
He
shook his head, pursed his lips, pinched the bridge of his nose, and his fingers
raked the back of his neck.
The motions had
occurred as if beyond his control. For a few moments, he was lost in a
contemplative fog, baffled by the accuracy of his deja-vu. The similarities
suggested premonition, but Owen was not a spiritual man, and thus began to be
haunted by the idea of such coincidence. His eyes were gaping, still dilated
and encrusted with the sands of sleep. As he sighed into his coffee cup, his tongue
seizing the inky heat, he mulled over the thought of deja-vu, thought about it
deeply; dissected it and forgot its meaning, all the while rolling the little
black dot between his fingers.
The
coffee-maker uttered a relieved sigh and quit its regurgitation, which jerked
Owen back into his morning habituals. He glanced at the clock above the stove
across the room from him, putting down his coffee mug as he realized with
remarkable indifference that he was probably going to be late for work. With a
bitter moan, Owen reluctantly allowed his legs to carry him out of the kitchen,
through the living room, and down the hall to his bedroom.
It was often
necessary for him to function in this perfunctory manner, because unlike the
monotonous moles whose cubicles surrounded his tired work-space, Owen had
dreams. He laughed at the thought of calling his occupation "work."
All day, he sat at a desk accumulating paper, stacking it neatly in trays
(supposedly to assume the appearance of organization, Owen often theorized);
and throughout the day, various individuals would arrive to remove chunks of
his white, rectangular mountain. He sometimes thought that if, one day, no one
were to come to his desk to chip pieces from his ivory tower, that it would
bridge the gap between the earth and moon, and that he could walk on it
indefinitely, perpendicular to this disgusting routine, straight to that
beckoning orb.
Owen
often went to the moon. He would lie on his back on the floor of his cubicle,
his feet secure against the infinite reams before him, and walk up. Defying
gravity and all semblance of reason, he would walk the entire 238,900 miles, in
silence. His office shoes, brown loafers that were conveniently comfortable,
kissed the edges of memos, faxes, announcements, reminders, clip-art birthday
party invitations, and printable coupons from the coffee shop that no one
liked, but that everyone went to because the good coffee shop was expensive and
all the way across town. But Owen made his own coffee at home, and so the papers
kept piling up until he was immersed in them, and could not breathe for fear of
getting paper-cuts in his throat.
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