The Motions (An Echelon of Beauty) Part 4
Here we are, here we are.
As I opened my driver’s side door, I kicked something soft and round. Curious, I got down onto my hands and knees and peered into the cool shade underneath my vehicle and noticed that it had been an onion I kicked. I let me chest press on the pavement and reached for the onion, rolling it with my fingertips until I could grasp it firmly.
The onion was only slightly torn. The surface skin had already started coming off and I removed the dried, cracking first layer and tossed it into the road. The wind captured its thin wrap and carried it past the road, into the trees opposite the road. The rest of the vegetable had no smell so I tossed it into the passenger’s seat and started up my car, wondering vaguely if the farmer had dropped it on his way past, and if so, whether or not he had done it on purpose.
I’m not sure how I found my way back. It was one of those trips that I wasn’t supposed to come back from. Who knew that a human being could bury a God and then go straight to work? I realize that it has a lot to do with the fact that I was going to be serving scientifically enhanced food to a couple hundred people who hadn’t showered in days and could barely afford anything on our dollar menu. These people had lost half their teeth in an effort to bite down on the rope that their God was attempting to wrestle away from them and felt as though it was their duty to scrape by another day so that maybe, with some slight chance, their kids could afford them a tombstone that was larger than a shoebox. Something in this mesh of pure human nature guided me back towards my hometown.
For a while, the streets were long and monotonous. They looked all the same, mostly land marked by alternating short and tall trees and the occasional white house with a barn here and there. I took turns on pure instinct until I recognized a route I had arrived on, taking me through the center of a modest business district. The bank looked familiar and the people walking the sidewalks looked just depressed enough to be from the same place that I was. I could see inside the windows, the lines of people in monotonous clothing and fleeting haircuts and hoped that I might be lucky enough to drive past while the bank was being robbed. If someone had dropped their tan trench coat at that point, and brought a rifle up from the sleeve, I would have jumped from my moving vehicle right then, trying desperately to make it into the bank, to be a part of it. I contemplated whether it would be better to drive straight the bank’s windowed wall and knock the guy over with my fender, or to park on the side of the road and run through the front door, shouldering him like a football player. In any case, I’d either be shot, or successfully get the gun from him so that I could rob the place myself. I think whenever you’re robbing a business with a weapon such as a firearm you have to make some pretty demanding moral decisions. The temptation to end life is there, or you can just take the money. It’s like choosing between heroin and cocaine. You’ve already made the decision to get hooked, but which drug do you get hooked on? How do you weigh that kind of thing? I’ve never held that kind of decision, that kind of freedom. But it might be just the thing to make someone like me fall in love.
I passed twenty-seven stores and went through five green lights before it dawned on me that I was driving south along the same road that my Mcdonalds was on. My heart sank as I admitted to myself that I really was going to work, and that I had driven myself there on impulse.
I walked through the front door with my shirt still unbuttoned. I smiled at the janitor and he just stared back at me, an unrecognizing glaze over his 64-year-old eyes. His name was Harold and his background was somewhat of a mystery, the kind of mystery that gave rise to legend. Anyone who first saw the man would deduce from the blank stare, bit of drool forming at the corner of his slouching mouth, and the bend of his upper back that he was mentally retarded, working as a Mcdonald’s janitor through some fellowship retard clinic. He stank of toilets and sweat and rarely spoke. When I began my job two years previous, his silence and his stink intrigued me. I was told that he had once been a grade-school English teacher but had gotten into trouble with some unnamed little boy and was working as an ex-convict. Unfortunately, this story came from a twenty-year-old assistant manager who smoked a lot of weed and had a story for everything and everyone, most of which amounted to sorted piles of bullshit that you eventually learned to ignore. Further inquiries got me different stories, with similar details, and only when I superimposed all the fantastic bullshit that I gathered in my day to day life did I know the true story. As it turned out, Jimmy had been right about one thing, the man was once a school teacher, a high school English teacher to be more precise, with two daughters and a wife gone to some unknown place. Whether he was a passionate teacher who was respected by his students, no one seemed to know and I realized that I was the only one who seemed to care about that decidedly insignificant fact of the past. The only thing anyone seemed to care about was the fact that this man had lost his house, his daughters, and all of his possessions in a fire. The flame of Job had claimed another victim. ‘How did the fire start?’ I asked. Jimmy told me that the man had started it himself, abandoning his pedophilia bullshit for this apparently more exciting story. I asked him whether it would be just as likely to have been started by a crashing UFO and he agreed that it was definitely a possibility. The start of the fire was another useless fact that even superposition couldn’t bring into focus enough to deduce. After being raped by his insurance company, Harold had lost any interest in teaching children, reasoning to himself that one of his students would more than likely end up working for an insurance company and he would be damned if he was going to aid in the little fucker’s rhetoric and ability to softly explain why the company wasn’t inclined to help a client rebuild their life. It was never Satan’s job to corrupt Job. This was a task that his fellow human beings could do admirably. And now, Harold never cried, never smiled, spoke, and never swept the floor in less than three hours. His mind and emotions had all jointly agreed to give up.
