The sun outside was setting, casting blazing yellow shafts of light through the dingy apartment window. A one room studio situated in the middle of an ancient apartment complex on a block of buildings that was teetering on the brink of collapse.

Meir Reznick looked out at the street below. A failure, Meir didn’t expect much from the world, he expected nothing in fact, and was still routinely disappointed.

He had attempted to draw, that was a failure. Act, paint, dance, all failures. Writing, that was the most monumental failure of all.

He was twenty and aside from having a job he hated, he was proud of the fact that he was a solitary man. By that, he was free of the bonds of family and friends, free to hate from the comfortable distance he had established for himself.

Meir took a drink from the beer in his hand and suppressed a belch. Then, realizing he was alone in the apartment, he let the belch out. He walked from the window and sat in the ratty easy chair that was the centerpiece of his apartment, the dust erupted in waves from the chair. Looking up, he attempted to stare holes into the ceiling. Failing at that, Meir paced towards the window again.

He looked and looked and looked. Finally, there she was. Mrs. Random. Meir called her that because he had built up a whole back story for her. A loving tale of an upbringing fraught with sexual escapades of the most depraved sort.

Meir dropped his jeans and his boxer shorts. Sitting bare-assed on the dark vomit colored carpet, Meir watched Mrs. Random, with her long black hair and pretty face with deep brown eyes and began jerking off.

The back-story that Meir had set up for Mrs. Random involved her being a teacher, an English teacher specifically. Meir was close now, closer. Every second.

The sweat was building up on his forehead, won’t be much longer. She was a bad English teacher. One who kept certain male students after class and showed them whole new worlds. Made these certain students feel like real men.

Meir was now on the cusp, the very pinnacle, the pins edge of ecstasy.

He came.

Wadding up tissue from a nearby box he cleaned himself up and slipped his jeans back on.

“Shit,” he muttered to himself. For a few seconds he felt like the greatest living creature on the planet. He felt like in those few seconds he could’ve accomplished anything, had any women, written any book, defied genre, boundaries, nothing mattered, everything mattered. But just as quickly, the feeling faded away, replaced by the lead weight of his normal emotions. More and more with each passing day he felt like an invisible dead weight was growing in his mind. He was weighed down, about to be dragged towards something he couldn’t possibly foresee or understand.

Or so he wondered anyway.

Meir went to the sole bathroom of the apartment and washed his hands and collapsed into the easy chair again. Glancing towards the ninja/samurai clock on his wall he counted away in his mind the number of hours of freedom he had left before starting work again. His job, at a twenty-four hour grocery store where he was bag boy, consisted of bagging groceries, cleaning floors, stocking shelves, and listen to people (both coworker and customer alike) prattle on about the inanities of day to day living.

Meir blinked. He blinked again. Something was stinging his eyes. Salty water began to drip from his eyelids and down his cheeks. He was crying.

It was rare but sometimes the thunder preceded the lightning.

Meir realized what was wrong. He had disgraced his name, again. A process he had been repeating pretty much daily since he was at least thirteen. Or rather, that was when he was sure he was conscious of his name shaming. Meir was named after a famous Rabbi, a militant man who stood up for what was right against the tyranny of his own people’s fear and apathy

Meir was not this man and through his actions constantly reminded himself of this fact.

“I am as He made me,” Meir rationalized. He was tired. He didn’t want to work, didn’t want to socialize with people he couldn’t stand, the situation and circumstances could change irrevocably but talking with people was such a painful action, even more so than being alone.

He got up and proceeded to his CD playing radio. Beethoven’s Ninth slowly came on and he walked towards the bathroom. This was as routine as showering and brushing his teeth, just staring right into the mirror. Bloodshot eyes burrowing into their reflected counterparts. He would just stare, appraising what he was seeing.

“Write something positive, something life affirming, why can’t you do that?” he asked his reflection. “Because that’s not how this shit works.” he argued himself.

“You can say whatever you want when no one’s listening, remember that, remember Orwell man, they can get you here.” Meir said gesturing to his skull. Taking the finger he used to point and making his hand into a fist, Meir punched a hole into the plaster wall of the bathroom. Now he had something new to stare at. Meir wondered if this action was now somehow expected on his part. As if something far above in the clouds was watching him with a sickly grin. Meir hated.

He stared into the hole. Black, apparently his fist has penetrated deep into the wall, he strained his gaze looking further and further into the darkness until it enveloped his entire range of vision.

Getting dizzy, Meir shook his head and walked towards the front door. He suddenly remembered why writing was such a monumental failure, so much that it was in his mind, obviously no one else cared, or even could care.
Writing was pain. It’s something hard and real even if it’s fiction. Writing is a part of your all but physical body that you rip from yourself and attempt to shape and form with this limited and weak little thing called language.

Looking into the hole in the wall had reminded Meir of the invisible thing inside of him. The blockish all reaching ever consuming creature that sat on him and prevented him from killing himself but on the same token kept him from creating. He hated it, hated it more because he knew whatever it was it took pleasure in his hating of it.

The alarm sounded off. Meir looked up. Had that much time gone by already? Work is already upon him. Of course. Didn’t Meir yet realize that time is a subjective creature enslaved by some and controlling of others?

Slowly, Meir dressed in his uniform. A brown shit colored shirt with black slacks long dirtied by wear and labor. Uncomfortable ebony loafers that were code of dress for the grocery store and its eight hour shift.

“Be thankful you have a job, a guy like you can’t be choosy,” Meir said to himself, repeating the words his parents had said to him before he left home. He had had the job when he lived at home and had kept it when he departed. It made him feel like he was still living under someone else’s roof, like he was still an inconsequential child whose voice and views meant nothing.

Meir was now fully dressed. Nametag in place, styling gel in hair.

Now in the kitchen, Meir opened the utensil drawer and took out a gun.

He put it between his lips.

“Come on, don’t fucking puss out,” he mouthed over the pistol. An old .357 snub nose. “Die holy, die a virgin. Do it!” he yelled, his voice garbled by the gun. A knocking thundered from below his feet.

“Shut the fuck up there!” the voice from the room below his said. Meir blinked and sighed, removing the gun from his lips he set it down back in the utensil drawer and closed it.

He bet against all odds that he wasn’t late for work at this point. That his luck wasn’t this bad, that the Lord on high couldn’t possibly not care about his existence so much as to make him late for a job he hated after a near suicide attempt. There was no way. No possible way. There’s hope for redemption. For everyone. Even for Meir Reznick. Right?

Meir locked the door behind him, ignoring the clock that was squatting on the edge of his vision, daring him, wanting him to look, lusting for him to pick up the pistol and do something, do ANYTHING.

-
2008

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