Bruce is made up of precise edges sharpened by habit. Where time attempts to smooth, he roughs himself against rigid routine the texture of sandpaper. There is terrible pleasure in it, though a numb sort of pleasure that is so familiar he can no longer sense it. Only through involuntary disruption will Bruce be forced to see. And what will he do with that seeing?
Bruce wakes mechanically at 6:01am. Round, whole numbers repulse him. Bruce dresses in gray slacks and a white button down, of which he has five of each–you get the drill. Bruce readies himself for the day as each day requires readiness.
At 6:32am he takes the 77 bus–double numbers are good, better if they’re odd. He rides for 9 stops and steps from the bus to the diner on the corner of Central and Jefferson. He says “Oh, hello,” to Patty behind the counter as though he is surprised to see her, as though they’ve never met, as though she knows not a thing about him. He buys one hot coffee, black, a sausage egg & cheese sandwich on a whole grain bagel, and one local newspaper. He sits in the same booth by the window, with the bus bench outside just so. If the booth is occupied, he stands and he waits.
The coffee he sips and the bagel he eats and the newspaper he reads with spit-licked fingers teasing the corners of each page. These are normal things to do, this is how Bruce behaves. If outside there are downy pigeons aflutter in drippings of sunlight or raindrops thrumming soft on vibrant leaves or couples fighting as they miss the bus, Bruce does not look. It is all he can manage to be near the daily motions. To look on it might turn him to salt.
At 7:49am he folds his paper down its crisp lines, tucks it into his messenger bag and walks down the street to work where he is paid to do his job and complete assigned tasks, which he does, no more and certainly no less. He takes the 5:07pm bus home, removes his shoes and also his socks at the door.
Up the stairs and directly across from his bedroom is one square room lined wall to wall with pale green industrial steel cabinets. Each drawer is carefully labelled with the year it contains, dating back to 1988, and within the drawer, small white tabs denote each month. In the drawer numbered 2025, he tabs through to October, removes the newspaper from his messenger bag and slots it neatly behind the previous day’s entry. Thus, Bruce catalogues the world.
Today is October 8th. Pale sky, eroding pavement, all the mechanisms of lives in motion. Today is another day. Today is the Bruce of yesterday and the day before and as far as he knows, the Bruce of tomorrow. There are things he does not know. He wakes, he dresses, he rides the dirty bus, he blinks and when his eyes open the diner’s tile floor drops out beneath him.
Patty waits patient behind the counter with her stacked blonde hair and simple, sweetly face. She awaits his “Oh, hello,” so that the day might truly begin. Bruce stands and stares. At the spot, at the vacant, ruptured spot. A hole in the fabric. The punctured universe.
“Bruce, honey?” Patty asks, nails strawberry red, nails that might be mistaken for blood-tipped, for clawing Bruce open.
Numbers tick and swirl round Bruce’s head. They don’t add up. The possibility that he’s fallen sideways into someone else’s life. He blinks and the desolation remains.
“Where are they?” he asks the absence.
Patty follows his gaze. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, they’re gone, honey.”
There is a definitive square on the floor where the newspaper rack once stood. All that remains is the impression it made, which will fade and fade. Bruce shudders, each node of his spine throbbing like a child falling from a ladder and hitting every rung on the way down.
“Well,” he says, “if they’ve been moved, they can be put back, can’t they?”
Patty smooths the folds of her apron–though it’s not an apron, Bruce notices now. Just a plain blouse tucked into straight leg pants. When did they stop wearing aprons here? “I’m sorry,” Patty says. “Papers don’t sell anymore. They’re not moved, they’re gone.”
The wheels aren’t greased. Bruce’s rough-edged thoughts stall and sputter. “You’ll put them back,” he says.
There is something in Patty’s eyes that Bruce cannot see. He is looking through her looking back at him. “Oh, I wish I could–”
“Why have you done this to me!” he cries out and forks clatter and heads turn and Patty’s hand covers her heart–pledging allegiance to who? Oh, this is not how Bruce likes to be seen. These are not the right parameters, not at all. How it goes: Bruce takes a paper from the rack and places it on the counter and he makes his usual order though Patty already knows it, has already punched her buttons and presented the total. She lets him recite his order and while he pays and while she pours black gold from its glass vessel, she names a date–February 26th, 1993–and Bruce shares a piece of news from that date, from that paper, from the words he imbibed and cemented on that very day. Not his favorite piece of news or the most important news from that date but whatever is first triggered by that sequence of numbers. The history of all the world is easier to recall than his own.
What to do without a paper and its printed words and its fresh baked scent. The rest falls away. There is no reckoning with this collapse.
“I told them not to,” Patty says. “I told them someone would miss it.”
“Why have you done this to me,” Bruce says again, quietly now, unhearing of himself through the wind roaring in his ears. Dates flying by, memories scattered like pages sinking into puddles in the street, further flattened by the bus’ always spinning wheels, round and round as they are meant to go.
Patty reaches for him, her hand the only form of comfort she can offer but he’s turning and he’s leaving. She calls out after him, she shouts a date that does not reach him. The numbers drop like birds being stoned. Maybe if he’d listened, the routine could have been righted. Perhaps the rough edges could have realigned. But the stepping stones that stabilize a day are sinking one by one into the murky waters of uncertainty. Bruce splashes his way home, calves sinking full into fear. He feels it, he believes it, he must have done something wrong to have been struck down like this. To have the rug pulled out. He thinks back to the day prior. Patty’s soft smile. She’d given him a date, as she always did. June 3rd, 2003. How had he answered? Annual Tri-State County Fair Expected To Bring Much Needed Boon To Local Economy. Yes, that was the news, what he’d said at least, but had he been wrong? Had he been wrong? Was that a falter in Patty’s grin? Just now–she’d frowned at him, hadn’t she? All those heads turning to face him. They saw his flaw, chewed it ragged like a dog with a bone. The flaw must be rectified.
Bruce forgoes the bus in his hurry home. Faces flood past, their worried glances smudged by relative velocity into wicked reproach. This is not normal behavior. Bruce takes the bus. Bruce takes his coffee black. Bruce goes to work. Bruce does not jog in dress shoes. Bruce does not bead sweat on his brow, does not blink away tears, does not wonder when it all went wrong, was he always so fragile. Bruce fractures.
He leaves the front door yawning, dislodges dirt from his shoes on his way up the stairs. The cabinets open to the pull of his thick, unmanicured fingers. Decades of days at his disposal, and each day the same save for the events of other people printed on the page, and where is Bruce’s reward for living faithfully, in commitment to structure? Where is the evidence?
Bruce throws wide the window into the backyard and drawer by drawer he loads the dry lawn with the events of a thousand lifetimes. His throat burns and his breath pounds like a tantrum in his chest, like a child neglected. Gray and black pages sift and scatter into disarray, an early autumn flurry packing the dirt. It takes some time, and many nearby curtains are drawn tight in the process, but Bruce empties his collection blindly from its prison. He can hold it no longer.
The sun is fleeing toward the horizon by the time he makes it out back and shuffles the pages into a haphazard pile, misshapen and dirty like a parking lot snowbank. He lights a match. He remembers Patty’s face, what could have been concern but was surely pity. Isn’t that all anyone’s ever had to offer him. Loveless pity.
It is 6:39pm when Bruce drops a match to that life, which he has already disowned, which he no longer loves. The heap laps greedily at the first flames, licks them quick into hot spires spouting black smoke and charcoal confetti, rising and then falling on the stiff breeze. And Bruce stands and Bruce watches. The years burn away and Bruce watches ‘til his eyes go dry from the heat and he watches without blinking and he watches the way he’s watched all his life go by: detached, removed, a non-participant. The fire needs no encouragement. The fire eats. The sky goes dark and the ashes begin to scatter like ants.
Bruce wakes mechanically at 6:01am. Bruce dresses in gray slacks and a white button down. At 6:32am he takes the 77 bus 9 stops to the diner on the corner of Central and Jefferson. “Oh, hello,” he says to Patty, wide-eyed little lamb with her stacked hair. “One hot coffee black, one sausage egg & cheese sandwich on a whole grain bagel. Please.”
Patty blinks. There is bewilderment in the crannies of her eyeballs. She blinks until it is cleared away. And then she goes about her business. Food order for the kitchen, coffee moves from one vessel to another. She holds the steaming paper coffee cup out to Bruce and says, tentatively, “December 11th, 2010.”
Bruce accepts the cup with a frown. “That doesn’t mean anything to me,” he says. And so new edges are cemented as the old ones are chiseled away and he is smaller now than he was before–but just as sharp. He finds today that his booth is occupied and so he waits, and he waits.
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Bruce vs the chaotic universe. At least Patty is trying to figure out his rules. What a portrait!
Bruce Burns it All Down and Yet Keeps Going. There's a little Bruce in me, there's a little Bruce in many of us, I expect