Ernest Living
Ernie Prescott drove the same stretch of interstate every day he was scheduled for work. It ran from where he had an apartment in the northwestern suburbs of Roc City down along the southern rim of the city, out to an office park in a town outside the city limits at the edge of the county in its southeastern corner. He disliked cutting through the junction that ran through downtown, preferring instead to drive a roundabout way that avoided the urban center. It may have been longer, but it allowed him the tranquility of listening to his compact disc of nature sounds. He enjoyed the ambient static noise of the waterfall track the most. It aroused in him images not of majestic natural spaces, pristine and untainted by the hand of man, but rather, he was imbued with thoughts of ceramic tiles. The sterility of a day spa or an in ground pool embedded into a patio landscape, absent of greenery.
His vehicle was a late model SUV, high enough to see over the concrete embankments that hid the views of the city from those in more stout automobiles. He passed over the golf course by the river. Its lush greenness was being manicured by the maintenance crew up so early. The pale blue dawn casting a shadow of the bridge over the back nine. But his eyes paid less attention to those vistas than to the parallel lines of the highway lane dividers painted on the concrete. They disappeared into the distance ahead of him, a distance he headed toward at a steady speed set on his cruise control. A distance that seemed unending no matter how long he traveled.
He drifted into the center lane to avoid merging traffic up ahead. His absentminded move cut off an old Chevy sedan. That driver laid on the horn, breaking him from his meditative state. He threw his head around wildly looking for where the other car was. It pulled into the left lane, the driver flipping him the bird as she passed. He could tell the driver’s gender from the black nail polish and rings adorning her fingers. Pewter skulls and onyx gems. The Chevy pulled ahead into the distance. He returned to his tranquil daydream of sterility. He could almost smell the chlorine.
Ernie pulled into an empty parking lot. The pole lights were still on, faint if not obscure in the growing sunlight. He walked into the two story building of the office park to where his cubicle sat in windowless silence. He turned on his computer, logged into the network, and began the day’s tasks of data entry and analysis. He worked for a company that ran reports for a market trending firm. The trends had to do with adolescent apparel and accessories. The firm supplied the reports to companies across the world, but mostly in the United States, by correlating consumptive data. It sent out scouts into youth culture to promote products and brands created by another division, and then gave the merchandise to the most influential of any given clique so the product would then be envied. The firm collected the date, sent it out to Ernie’s company to be correlated, and then sent back to verify its effectiveness. All of this information existed somewhere in his training manual, but Ernie never absorbed it. He went along with the tasks he was trained to perform without asking questions. He didn’t see the need.
His life was uncomplicated. His cubicle suffered from impeccable organization. He was unfettered in his daily routine in running the reports. There was seldom any interaction with other people in the office, if not altogether absent, as any report he ran could be sent over email to his direct supervisor – a man, or woman, he couldn’t remember, of whom he only met at orientation. The cubicle was in a call center that was staffed by overnight people, people he never saw as he would be finished with his work day before any of their shifts started. It was abutted to a wall, with two free standing walls pinned between adjacent desks, reminiscent of blinders for horses. While others had tacked cute images of Pac-Man resemblance charts and important call back numbers, Ernie’s desk was Spartan. He never needed to print paper, or call anyone, so little to nothing adorned his desk. In his drawers he kept antibacterial hand sanitizer, a box of tissues, and the lunches he packed at home into plastic containers. The containers held plastic bags. Inside the plastic bags there was typically a bologna sandwich he had slapped together that morning. It was a ritualistic performance each time he made one. A slice of white bread on the bottom slathered with yellow mustard, then a layer of bologna, then a slice of American cheese, then a slathering of mayonnaise, and finally, after placing the top layer of bread on the structure, it was cut at a diagonal.
Much of the things Ernie did followed a peculiar order of steps. In fact, the same way he made his sandwich was analogous to the rituals he performed in cleaning himself after defecating. Because of his fiber lacking diet, his bowel movements occurred only every few days, and the excrement was less compact than someone with a healthier lifestyle. The smooth muscle tissue of his intestines pushed out the refuse of food matter through his anal sphincter. Inevitably, there was residual effluvial matter which did not succumb to the force of gravity and muscle contractions. He had formulated a way to be as sanitary as possible in removing that matter from surroundings of his anal orifice. The origins of the technique were from a joke he heard once about how a man wiped himself after finding that there was only one piece of toilet tissue left on the roll. The joke went that the man folded the tissue into a square, tore a corner, opened the piece up and scooped the fecal matter with the tip of his finger. He then disposed of the tissue that protected his hand from collecting any feces, and cleaned under the fingernail with the bit he tore off. Ernie’s technique was nowhere near as grotesque. Instead of a square, he folded a single piece of perforated toilet tissue into a triangle. Using the tip, he scraped away any unwanted particles that didn’t make it into the toilet bowl due to their adhesive properties.
On the Monday he had driven in, he had taken a morning constitutional before getting in the car. He also did this before making himself his daily bologna sandwich for lunch. While conducting the cleaning ritual in the bathroom, he had managed to lodge a small amount of fecal matter underneath a fingernail. It was unnoticeable and evaded the antibacterial purification of hand soap while washing his hands after the act. In making the sandwich, a glop of mayonnaise collected on that finger. Without a napkin or towel at the ready, Ernie Prescott placed the tip of his finger in his mouth, sucking the condiment off. The vacuum that action created dislodged the feces trapped beneath his fingernail and began its unholy journey through his digestive system. The procreation of bacterial colonies not native to the upper digestive system set his homeostatic balance out of kilter. He was not affected for the rest of that Monday, but the visceral reaction came in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
The work day ended, he drove back home amidst the midday traffic, drifting blissful in daydream as he drove home of the imagined spa, ignorant of the machinations of bacteria multiplying in his belly. His apartment was as nondescript as the office building where he worked. A small one bedroom, it held all the trappings of a typical bachelor – a television, a VCR, a new device called a DVD player – most every electronic device needed to sate tedium or slough off boredom. He entered the apartment and washed the container from his lunch. When he finished with that, he put in a movie he had rented from the video store down the street. The movie was of a man who suffered from insomnia and formed a split personality after a subconscious realization that his consumer lifestyle was unfulfilling. Ernie couldn’t relate. He was content with the material things he collected. He fell asleep halfway through the film, woke up at the end of the movie. Buildings were collapsing as the main character watched over the orchestrated destruction. He stopped the tape, turned off the television, and headed to his own bed for the rest of the night.
Ernie had a dream that night of a memory. It was one from his childhood when his parents took him out for Chinese food for the first time. The restaurant was new as was the suburban strip mall plaza within which it occupied. Chinese lanterns hung above each table. Strange characters of a language he did not understand adorned the thin paper veil at the table where he sat with his mother and father. He was there for his birthday. He had ordered something off the menu that he didn’t know what it was. It contained seafood, something of which his body was unable to tolerate. Neither he or his parents knew this when their server – a pretty girl that made his cheeks turn red whenever she came by to refill waters – came over with a slice of cake with a candle. His stomach was already turning itself over and over, as if tying knot after knot on an unending string of dendrites.
He was sure he was reliving that moment over and over. The edge of oblivion would be an inability to keep half digested seafood from covering a cute Asian girl. The sight of panic in the eyes of his parents as they realized the inevitable moment of bodily fluid percolating up his esophagus onto the unsuspecting waitress…
He awoke sweating and nauseous. The nerves in his intestines were twisted barbs. He barely made it to the toilet in his apartment’s bathroom to expunge the contents of his innards from both ends. He spent an hour confined to the small space, the expulsion of bodily fluids finding an amplified resonance in the wave type frequency of convulsions. When the urge to vomit and defecate subsided, he managed to retrieve anti-diarrhea medication from the medicine cabinet. By this time, he was already late for work. He logged onto his computer at home and sent his supervisor what he thought was an eloquent email stating that he would be unable to make it to work. A simple reply of OK was received soon thereafter. Feeling his stomach settling, Ernie went back to bed to sleep off what he could of the remaining agony that churned behind his navel.
It wasn’t a long sleep. He awoke to an absence of pain, the days light filtering in through Venetian blinds. He went to the kitchen and decided it would be worth the attempt to put down some cereal. He ate at his kitchen nook – a folding table and a pair of chairs abutting a wall. He finished the meal, put the bowl in the sink, forgetting to fill it with water as he usually did so that the dehydrating proteins would not adhere to the glass. Time passed and the bowl would cake with that inevitable milk ring.
He went into his living/dining room and turned on the television. The cathode ray tube let out a bass note as static snapped and an image came to life. The electrons being forced in different directions to hit the phosphorus mesh behind the glass let off x-rays in the tangential direction of their electromagnetically manipulated paths. At first, he thought he had left the tape running in the machine, that maybe it started playing after he hit the rewind button the night before. But the math didn’t work out, unless it had rewound and played over and over. Even with that theory the tape would need to be in the machine, which it was not. It sat atop the VCR in the plastic rental box. No, these images were something else. Something familiar but out of place. The camera panned out to show the skyline of a large city. He recognized it from the training manual. It was the same buildings that housed the market trending firm. One of them was on fire, billowing dark ash into a cerulean blue sky. He couldn’t hear anything. He just saw the images on the screen. He had left the audio on Aux for the movie being played through his surround sound transceiver. He grabbed a remote and flicked over the audio to the television. It was still too low to discern anything. Words were scrolling on the bottom of the screen. Something about an attack.
He was about to sit down, but his body was frozen as his eyes remained affixed on the images being projected on the television. He stood suspended above the sofa, bent slightly at the hips, but not far enough for gravity to take over. His ears were registering nothing but the lub-dub thud of his heart. Acids in his stomach dissolved the proteins and carbohydrates of the cereal. It was a heavy stone in his torso. As he watched the cameras cut between vantage points, collecting more and more perspectives of the buildings, a plane coming from the edge of the screen cut into view, then disappear. It made a silhouette of itself into the side of the building not on fire. Glass erupted outwards, loose papers precipitated from the heights onto the tallest buildings in the skyline and crowds below. His insides wrung out the breakfast he had just finished moments before.
Ernie stood staring at the screen covered in bits of bile, his mouth agape. A trail of spittle dangled from his lower lip onto the floor. His body gave way to gravity. He watched from his living/dining room sofa as the two buildings did the same….
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