THE MAN WHO AVOIDED EVERYTHING
He pulled the curtains closed. The sun was too much. The trees were a lie. The birds existed to mock him with their feigned joy and their robotic bobbing heads.
He avoided his own name, because the last had only a history of failure, and the first had been used to address him by his parents, whose crimes he could never forgive. He signed all his letters “me.” He avoided capitalization.
He
sent letters of outrage into the world, letters he spent hours typing on a 1924
Underwood Standard Typewriter No. 3. It was nearly a hundred years since that
machine had been built, and some new technology had come into vogue in the
interim, but one could still just make out the words the keys impressed through
the Underwood’s fading ribbon, so why complicate matters.
Letters were inserted by the postal service through the slot in his door and they dropped directly into a cardboard box that he put out for recycling each week. He was terrified of seeing the responses to his own posted expressions of bombast and dissatisfaction about the government, the recent change in recipe of his favourite morning tea, failed relationships of years past, inhumane methods of capital punishment, and the unacceptably late hour in the afternoon at which his mail was delivered.
There were no lengths to which he would not go to avoid conflict, even if he had started that conflict himself.
When the phone rang, he did not answer it. He had been meaning for years to have the service disconnected, but he hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about it.
Several times a year, there would be a knock at his front door. Two sharp raps at first; a pause; another emphatic bang; the sound of his doorknob being twisted and jiggled; a few hopeless taps on the small opaque window in the door; then silence.
He felt something brushing against his ankle and looked down. It was his cat, Albert Angelo. He knelt down and ran his fingernails through the fur on the back of the creature’s neck. Albert Angelo purred.
“I’ve been thinking about words today,” he said to the cat. “Specifically, filibuster, spelunking, and fisticuffs.”
“Is this toward your novel?” asked Albert Angelo.
He hated when the cat brought up his novel. He would have preferred if Albert Angelo brought up hairballs.
In his small office, he looked at his writing desk. The Underwood Standard Typewriter No. 3, manufactured two years before his father’s birth and five years before his mother’s. His parents, both dead now, had bought it for him fifty years after it was manufactured. An empty space glowed on the desk beside it. It was like the broad forehead of Christ. That was where he would stack the pages of his novel as he wrote them. Right on Christ’s head.
He shuddered at the thought of the novel, of actually sitting down to type a sentence, or even a single word. He knew that if he began the writing, it would eventually be finished and then he would need to think of something else to do.
He watched as Albert Angelo’s sleek and tiny pink tongue flicked in and out rapidly, drawing up drops of cool water from the bowl with his name on it.
Sometimes at night, he and his cat would hear scuffling and scraping from within the walls of the house. A mouse or a squirrel. Or his parents checking in on the progress of his novel.
Letters were inserted by the postal service through the slot in his door and they dropped directly into a cardboard box that he put out for recycling each week. He was terrified of seeing the responses to his own posted expressions of bombast and dissatisfaction about the government, the recent change in recipe of his favourite morning tea, failed relationships of years past, inhumane methods of capital punishment, and the unacceptably late hour in the afternoon at which his mail was delivered.
There were no lengths to which he would not go to avoid conflict, even if he had started that conflict himself.
When the phone rang, he did not answer it. He had been meaning for years to have the service disconnected, but he hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about it.
Several times a year, there would be a knock at his front door. Two sharp raps at first; a pause; another emphatic bang; the sound of his doorknob being twisted and jiggled; a few hopeless taps on the small opaque window in the door; then silence.
He felt something brushing against his ankle and looked down. It was his cat, Albert Angelo. He knelt down and ran his fingernails through the fur on the back of the creature’s neck. Albert Angelo purred.
“I’ve been thinking about words today,” he said to the cat. “Specifically, filibuster, spelunking, and fisticuffs.”
“Is this toward your novel?” asked Albert Angelo.
He hated when the cat brought up his novel. He would have preferred if Albert Angelo brought up hairballs.
In his small office, he looked at his writing desk. The Underwood Standard Typewriter No. 3, manufactured two years before his father’s birth and five years before his mother’s. His parents, both dead now, had bought it for him fifty years after it was manufactured. An empty space glowed on the desk beside it. It was like the broad forehead of Christ. That was where he would stack the pages of his novel as he wrote them. Right on Christ’s head.
He shuddered at the thought of the novel, of actually sitting down to type a sentence, or even a single word. He knew that if he began the writing, it would eventually be finished and then he would need to think of something else to do.
He watched as Albert Angelo’s sleek and tiny pink tongue flicked in and out rapidly, drawing up drops of cool water from the bowl with his name on it.
Sometimes at night, he and his cat would hear scuffling and scraping from within the walls of the house. A mouse or a squirrel. Or his parents checking in on the progress of his novel.
