Redivider

The darkened room had an aura of disintegration that wove a spell around Linus so that he sat confused and surprised while the long hours that had unwound into minutes and then seconds, co-mingled and found partners, joining themselves to once again tally time, just slightly out of synch with their progenitors. The armchair was worn through to wood, here and there, but his mind's eye couldn't discern the direction of the decay. Beside the chair was a squat table, too low for easy use, that was covered in tinfoiled packages of meat, mashed potatoes and peas with knives and forks jutting out at angles that suggested mathematical anomalies to him, as he drifted in and out of sleep.
It was there, in the dark, that he was confronted with the ghost of his father, whose hard and expectant looks made him feel unmasked and at a loss for words. It was there, in the quiet, that he found pieces of some old ceramic bowl, painted garishly to imitate Klee's whispered secrets, shattered into fragments reminding him of fishing lures and then a cottage hidden from view by the trees, over grown and contemptuous. He shrugged these off, wishing for sweeter dreams than these and decided it was time to clean up the apartment and, maybe, go out for a paper.
It was early and the streets were still crowded with the weekend tourists who filtered into the Market for a glimpse, from a safe distance, of the wilderness of human activities that skyscrapers and all night restaurants couldn't disguise. During the day it was quaint and enough to titillate them and slightly rancid with smells that they could take home to frame beside their memories of Europe in '82 and Mexico the year before. Linus didn't smell anything but asphalt and confused it for nineteen ninety six and the road crew that hovered in front of his apartment for three days catcalling anything that moved while waiting for the horn of the lunch truck.
He paused at the entrance of the smoke shop as three young children confused their exit and tried to attach flags to each others backpacks normally reserved for school books and home-made lunches, emptied now for cheap Peruvian treasures and a pamphlet on how to care for their newly applied Henna tattoos. He picked out three newspapers to add to the pile in his apartment and a pack of Marlboro Lights to keep him company and stood patiently behind a woman who had heard that you had to haggle with street vendors if you wanted them to take you seriously. She wore a wildly coloured shawl around her shoulders, crocheted with thick wool, that presented Linus with a blackboard full of potentials created by the shifting angles that her gesticulating arms brought into existence. He resisted the temptation to wipe it clean and start over again and when he looked up she was gone.
He held the plastic bag tight to chest, on the return trip, careful not to bump these cultural interlopers, afraid of the strange viral infections he believed they could pass on to him and held his breath until the elevator doors closed behind him and his ascension was begun. As he shut the apartment door on the noise and the human pollution he registered his anxiety and dutifully waved it off. In the bathroom he stared deeply into to his own eyes, breaking the number one rule of neurotics and laughed to himself while he created the revised eyebrow ballet. In the kitchen he practiced standing absolutely still while his dinner warmed and then he poured himself a glass of milk, even though he hated it, and at last he turned out the light.
And in the living room he settled into the mottled armchair, turned on the t.v. and opened the foil-shrouded Roast Beef Deluxe on his knee as the day, the hours and the minutes, bored by their cohesion, dissolved into their component parts and hid themselves in the darkened room, playing hide-and-go-seek without flashlights, giggling out loud when found and wondering how long they could stay out and play.