Mike didn't know what it was about the video store's electronic door chime that caused his spine to rattle, but it did. Maybe the effect was heightened by the fact that he was trying to slip in unobserved, loaded as he was with three absurdly late DVDs. There was no drop slot, and so offenders had no choice but to face the wrath of the shop owner. He kept telling himself to switch to the big chain video store, with its slack-jawed teenage staff, who couldn't care less about your late fees, but he hated the crowds there, and it was just that much further away. And he was lazy. Lazy and forgetful. So here he was, steeling himself for the dressing down he would receive from Prakash, a man who seemed to be his best friend (when his account was in order) and his personal Spanish Inquisition (when it was not).
Just recovering from the auditory assault of the made-in-hell door chime, the first thing that entered his field of vision in the tight entry-alcove was the new releases poster. Dread as he may the upcoming verbal assault, some things were just habit, and he uttered school-girlish "Ooh" of surprise when he spotted an art-house flick he was eagerly anticipating on the poster. Two more weeks. Oh well: on to the gallows, he thought.
He pushed through the second door that brought him into the shop proper, and as he swung round towards the desk, a variety of familiar sights panned though his view: magazine rack, birthday card display, trinkets and tchotchke shelf, racks and racks of videos, gum rack, then, finally, the counter... His gaze dropped to the floor, and he tightened his grip on the late DVDs as he trudged up to it. When he finally lifted his head, his gaze was met by a man who was one hundred percent not Prakash.
In fact, this man could not possibly be more unlike the squat, jowly Bangladeshi. While Prakash was always well dressed, the man behind the counter seemed more fit for a funeral than the peddling of cheap entertainment, black sunglasses and all. Immediately, Mike thought of Tommy Lee Jones from the Men in Black movies, and then of Hugo Weaving, from the Matrix. He decided that if this man spoke in either a texas drawl, or the oddly affected accent from the Matrix, he would know that someone was having him on.
"May I help you?"
British... he was not sure whether this made him feel better or not.
"Uh ... well, I guess so. Um, where's Prakash?"
"He is ... indisposed."
The pause the man inserted here was the kind used in bad movies, when a genteel yet evil character was purposefully indicating that a polite word was being used to replace several less polite, but more accurate ones.
"Perhaps I may be of assistance."
"Oh. Um, ok. Well, I've got these videos, and they're a bit late."
Mike could not tell what the man's eyes were doing under the glasses, but there certainly had been a change in configuration in his brow. Mike felt as though he had suddenly spiked a fever, and his hands began to sweat onto the plastic DVD cases.
"If you would be so kind as to present them for scanning please."
Mike held them out.
"On the counter please. Side by side. Barcodes up, please."
Gob-smacked by this strange man, Mike did as he was told. And the man produced the barcode reader from beneath the counter. His arm moved in a wide, exaggerated arc, in order to place the reader directly above the barcode, articulating his wrist in a manner which was just, well, odd. This whole experience was, well, odd, he thought.
The man looked at the store computer and said: "Ah yes. Indeed. I see."
"What?" said Mike, sensing hope.
"May I see your card please?" asked the man. "Right, no problem," said Mike. He couldn't remember the last time Prakash asked him for his card, and he wasn't sure he would find it in the morass of his absurdly massive wallet, but after some time, he fished it out, "here you go."
The man walked two steps and placed the card in a shredder. Mike blinked.
"Mr Shibley," the man said, turning back towards Mike, "you understand that when you signed your membership agreement, you entered into a legal contract with this corporation?"
"Corporation?" Mike retorted, looking around the crammed shop, slightly bemused.
"And that the terms of this contract require remedy in the case of an account as ... unreasonably delinquent ... as yours."
"You mean, like, a fine? Or something? Of course, sure," Mike said, reaching again for the pregnant wallet.
"No, I'm afraid. At this point, the only reasonable outcome is immediate termination."
And with that, the man produced an outlandishly long and pointed knife, and thrust it with lightning speed and crushing force directly through Mike's sternum and into his heart, which valiantly attempted two more beats. The damage was done, though, and it stopped.
Mouth agape, Mike looked down at the hand that had just killed him, then up at the face: impassive. As the man released the knife's handle, Mike toppled backwards, stiffly, like a felled tree, and he landed on the chewing gum display. His head came to rest pointing directly at one of the shop's four fluorescent lights. "Cliché," he thought, "but I'll take whatever I get, at this point." He heard someone calling him. Calling his name. It was Alyssa, his fiancée. "Crap," he thought, "she's come to rent season 2 of Deadwood, and she's gonna find this..."
"Mike!"
"Michael, wake up."
He opened his eyes. He saw his bedside lamp. Or rather, was blinded by his bedside lamp.
"I'm late already, so I'm on my way out. Don't forget to mail the insurance, and can you pick up a card for Jason and Andrea?"
"Ummm...", his hand went to his chest, and finding no murder implements there, continued upwards, where they settled upon rubbing his eyes. He was still recovering from the dream, and could not quite yet cope with Alyssa's hyper-organized morning routine.
"Yeah, right, just, uh ... leave me a sticky note on the door as usual, ok?"
"Ok, sleepy head," she said, kissing him lightly on the head, and strode for the door. She stopped and turned, pulling something out of her bag.
"Oh, and could you return these to Prakash's?"
He focused on her now.
"They're brutally late, and you know how he gets. Thanks!" she chirped, tossing the two DVD's on the bed and continuing her exit.
Slowly, Mike picked up the cases and looked at the titles: "The Matrix" and, "The Executioner".
He dropped them back on the bed, laid back down, and stared up at the ceiling, one hand idly scratching his breastbone.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Meditation redux
[I'm re-posting this here, which was already posted to my 'acting' blog, just because I want to have all my writing stuff in one place. So the cops know where to find it, you know]
A Meditation on the Pushing Around of Little Old Ladies
As I entered the main lobby of the Riverside clinic, my eyes adjusted from the brightness outside. An assortment of mostly non-ambulatory, mostly elderly, patients waited with their wheelchairs, walkers and canes, to be picked up by someone. It had been almost 6 years since I last came here, and so I couldn't remember where to go. I walked up to the "You are here" map, and started looking for radiology. A little voice from off to my right interrupted: "Excuse me?" I looked over, and down, to see a little old lady in a wheelchair, looking up at me with wide eyes. "Can I ask you a little favour?". She was West Indian, so it came out "kyan ah ask you for a little fay-vah?". She was so tiny, pushed into her wheelchair by the weight of two big purse/duffelbags in her lap. "Sure," I said, and bent down so we could be face-to-face-and-handbags. "I need someone to push me to physiotherapy..." She was contrite, her voice so low as to seem conspiratorial. "Oh, no problem!" I said, straightening to find physio on the map board. "But..." she said. I turned back to her, an eyebrow raised (or at least that's how it felt to me).
An aside now: what sort of shitty world do we live in, that at this point, I started to feel like I was about to get a pitch for some sort of rip-off? That I actually began steeling myself for what would eventually end in "that's why I need twenty dollars, dear". I feel like a complete and utter ass, now, for having felt that way then, but that's how I felt. In retrospect, it's absurd, ludicrous, that I suspected, even for a moment, that this frail little septuagenarian was some sort of ruthless charlatan, a calculating mountebank performing con-artistry in the halls and waiting rooms of the city's healthcare institutions. In any case, she completed the sentence:
"... But I'm starving and just want to get myself a sandwich in the cafeteria first, could you push me there?"
Shame ... Relief ... Love... all at once. I think the end result was that I smiled. Of course, I felt like bashing myself to death with buddy's walker for being such a cynical jerk just a second before, but that was in the past, and I now had a mission to complete: "Good Lord, of course, no problem. Where's the caf?", I said, already craning to check the bloody wall map again. But she was now all smiles herself. It was as if I'd just offered her one of my lungs. "It's right over there. God bless you, you're an angel. Oh my..."
I had to start pushing her or I was going to get weepy...
"What is your name, my angel?" (Picture now, a 6'1", 210 lb guy, pushing a 90 lb old lady, blushing like an embarrassed private-school boy). "Eric. What's yours?"
"Oh," she laughed girlishly,"I'm black Mother Theresa." I chuckle back. "Fine, I'll just call you Mother."
I guide her to the sandwiches and help her pick out a vegetarian wrap, after sizing the alternatives. "Have you eaten, boy?" 'Boy', she calls me ... From 36 to 11 in the space of one word. "No ma'am," I don't know where the ma'am came from, reflex, I guess, "I'm ... uh, well, I'm here for a CT scan."
"You're here for what?"
"A Cat-scan, and I can't eat beforehand."
"oh, I see..."
We get to the front, and I pass along her request to have her wrap warmed. One of the ladies peers around and recognizes her. A brief, warm exchange follows, in which the most-used personal pronoun is "Dear".
"And how much for a chocolate bar?", she asks the cashier. Old ladies, I think with a smile, they sure like their sweets. Some confusion ensues, as 'Mother' doesn't have a chocolate bar in her hand to ring up. I intervene and ask the cashier to ring one in, then we'll go and pick one out. Mother is a bit befuddled by this exchange, but we straighten it out, and roll over to the 'chocolaterie'. "Oh, just pick any one out," she says, with a wave of a hand, still stashing change in a handbag cavernous enough to consume me whole were I silly enough to lean too far over it. I pick a Dairy Milk and present it for inspection. Now the accent comes out: "An WHY you wan' go an' pick a SCRAWNY little 'ting like 'dat?" ... Ok, I now love this woman. I scuttle back to the display and find this big caramel-filled Aero-bar thing. I hold it out, and don't even look up, 'cuz I don't want to see the handbag coming if it does. I will meet my maker wincing. "Dat's bett'AH. Now ... that's for you, for after your scan-thingy." "But..." she stops me mid-stammer: "Don't argue. I will feed my angel! And that is that." To argue at this point would be to risk handbagging: "Well, thank you very much, then," I say.
"No, dear, thank you, and God bless you," she says, patting my arm.
Her wrap emerges from the warming process, and now we're faced with what to do with it while we roll to the physio waiting area. I suggest that I can hold it and push simultaneously. "But you don't have five arms!" she protests. "Don't worry, Mother, I can push you 'round with one hand." We chuckle at this, the lamest joke ever. But what can I say, it's a friggin hospital, you take your humour where you can find it.
She blesses me in the name of God, again.
"Oh, Chris..." she says, distractedly, I think she means me, but am not sure. "Err ... who's Chris?"
"Well, aren't you?"
"Uh, I'm Eric."
"Well, who's Chris then?", a bit like this was all my fault.
"Um, I don't know..."
If Mother does indeed have some form of dementia, it's well hidden, as this exchange is just mildly funny, like she was caught pulling a name from out of a reverie. There's a moment of silence as we roll on down the hall, she moving her baggage, and me craning to read signs.
"Well, Eric," she emphasizes my name, "have you ever noticed how we all have angels looking out for us?" I smile again, and decide to myself that I can infer the broadest definition of "Angel": "Yes, I've noticed a couple here and there. And ... I guess, there were probably some I never got to see."
"Oh my, yes," she laughs here, and I just feel happy.
"Well, here we are," as I roll her up to the reception desk, where a young staffer in scrubs looks up to see us: "Hi there, you have an appointment with..?"
"Let me find my yellow thing," Mother answers, mumbling, into the chasm that is her bag-of-holding. Now, I'm not often accused of being a genius, but I can tell she's looking for an appointment card. Clearly, miss scrubs-and-lisa-loeb-glasses doesn't get this: "Do you know who you're here for?", she intones, using that condescending yelling-for-the-elderly voice. "Well," Mother answers, "I'm here for the person I'm going to see, of course."
Boo-ya... I would have high-fived her but for the risk of breaking her hand.
Blondie is taken a bit aback, and is about to patronize some more, when Mother finds her appointment card in the 4th sub-level of the East Wing of her handbag: "There, dear." Blondie is now all contrite smiles, and announces to someone over the PA that her 1:30 is here.
I wheel her over to the seating area, and help her set up so she can eat her sandwich. I wish her well, and she grips my arm as she thanks me again, invoking the deities and all.
As I'm turning to go, she calls: "Oh, and don't forget!", I turn back, again with the perceived eyebrow raised. "Mind you eat something with that bar. You can't eat chocolate on an empty stomach!"
She's too bloody priceless for words. "Don't worry, I won't. Take care, Mother."
She chuckles, and adds: "God bless you."
"God bless you, too..."
I turned, and left.
And I thought: God bless her.
A Meditation on the Pushing Around of Little Old Ladies
As I entered the main lobby of the Riverside clinic, my eyes adjusted from the brightness outside. An assortment of mostly non-ambulatory, mostly elderly, patients waited with their wheelchairs, walkers and canes, to be picked up by someone. It had been almost 6 years since I last came here, and so I couldn't remember where to go. I walked up to the "You are here" map, and started looking for radiology. A little voice from off to my right interrupted: "Excuse me?" I looked over, and down, to see a little old lady in a wheelchair, looking up at me with wide eyes. "Can I ask you a little favour?". She was West Indian, so it came out "kyan ah ask you for a little fay-vah?". She was so tiny, pushed into her wheelchair by the weight of two big purse/duffelbags in her lap. "Sure," I said, and bent down so we could be face-to-face-and-handbags. "I need someone to push me to physiotherapy..." She was contrite, her voice so low as to seem conspiratorial. "Oh, no problem!" I said, straightening to find physio on the map board. "But..." she said. I turned back to her, an eyebrow raised (or at least that's how it felt to me).
An aside now: what sort of shitty world do we live in, that at this point, I started to feel like I was about to get a pitch for some sort of rip-off? That I actually began steeling myself for what would eventually end in "that's why I need twenty dollars, dear". I feel like a complete and utter ass, now, for having felt that way then, but that's how I felt. In retrospect, it's absurd, ludicrous, that I suspected, even for a moment, that this frail little septuagenarian was some sort of ruthless charlatan, a calculating mountebank performing con-artistry in the halls and waiting rooms of the city's healthcare institutions. In any case, she completed the sentence:
"... But I'm starving and just want to get myself a sandwich in the cafeteria first, could you push me there?"
Shame ... Relief ... Love... all at once. I think the end result was that I smiled. Of course, I felt like bashing myself to death with buddy's walker for being such a cynical jerk just a second before, but that was in the past, and I now had a mission to complete: "Good Lord, of course, no problem. Where's the caf?", I said, already craning to check the bloody wall map again. But she was now all smiles herself. It was as if I'd just offered her one of my lungs. "It's right over there. God bless you, you're an angel. Oh my..."
I had to start pushing her or I was going to get weepy...
"What is your name, my angel?" (Picture now, a 6'1", 210 lb guy, pushing a 90 lb old lady, blushing like an embarrassed private-school boy). "Eric. What's yours?"
"Oh," she laughed girlishly,"I'm black Mother Theresa." I chuckle back. "Fine, I'll just call you Mother."
I guide her to the sandwiches and help her pick out a vegetarian wrap, after sizing the alternatives. "Have you eaten, boy?" 'Boy', she calls me ... From 36 to 11 in the space of one word. "No ma'am," I don't know where the ma'am came from, reflex, I guess, "I'm ... uh, well, I'm here for a CT scan."
"You're here for what?"
"A Cat-scan, and I can't eat beforehand."
"oh, I see..."
We get to the front, and I pass along her request to have her wrap warmed. One of the ladies peers around and recognizes her. A brief, warm exchange follows, in which the most-used personal pronoun is "Dear".
"And how much for a chocolate bar?", she asks the cashier. Old ladies, I think with a smile, they sure like their sweets. Some confusion ensues, as 'Mother' doesn't have a chocolate bar in her hand to ring up. I intervene and ask the cashier to ring one in, then we'll go and pick one out. Mother is a bit befuddled by this exchange, but we straighten it out, and roll over to the 'chocolaterie'. "Oh, just pick any one out," she says, with a wave of a hand, still stashing change in a handbag cavernous enough to consume me whole were I silly enough to lean too far over it. I pick a Dairy Milk and present it for inspection. Now the accent comes out: "An WHY you wan' go an' pick a SCRAWNY little 'ting like 'dat?" ... Ok, I now love this woman. I scuttle back to the display and find this big caramel-filled Aero-bar thing. I hold it out, and don't even look up, 'cuz I don't want to see the handbag coming if it does. I will meet my maker wincing. "Dat's bett'AH. Now ... that's for you, for after your scan-thingy." "But..." she stops me mid-stammer: "Don't argue. I will feed my angel! And that is that." To argue at this point would be to risk handbagging: "Well, thank you very much, then," I say.
"No, dear, thank you, and God bless you," she says, patting my arm.
Her wrap emerges from the warming process, and now we're faced with what to do with it while we roll to the physio waiting area. I suggest that I can hold it and push simultaneously. "But you don't have five arms!" she protests. "Don't worry, Mother, I can push you 'round with one hand." We chuckle at this, the lamest joke ever. But what can I say, it's a friggin hospital, you take your humour where you can find it.
She blesses me in the name of God, again.
"Oh, Chris..." she says, distractedly, I think she means me, but am not sure. "Err ... who's Chris?"
"Well, aren't you?"
"Uh, I'm Eric."
"Well, who's Chris then?", a bit like this was all my fault.
"Um, I don't know..."
If Mother does indeed have some form of dementia, it's well hidden, as this exchange is just mildly funny, like she was caught pulling a name from out of a reverie. There's a moment of silence as we roll on down the hall, she moving her baggage, and me craning to read signs.
"Well, Eric," she emphasizes my name, "have you ever noticed how we all have angels looking out for us?" I smile again, and decide to myself that I can infer the broadest definition of "Angel": "Yes, I've noticed a couple here and there. And ... I guess, there were probably some I never got to see."
"Oh my, yes," she laughs here, and I just feel happy.
"Well, here we are," as I roll her up to the reception desk, where a young staffer in scrubs looks up to see us: "Hi there, you have an appointment with..?"
"Let me find my yellow thing," Mother answers, mumbling, into the chasm that is her bag-of-holding. Now, I'm not often accused of being a genius, but I can tell she's looking for an appointment card. Clearly, miss scrubs-and-lisa-loeb-glasses doesn't get this: "Do you know who you're here for?", she intones, using that condescending yelling-for-the-elderly voice. "Well," Mother answers, "I'm here for the person I'm going to see, of course."
Boo-ya... I would have high-fived her but for the risk of breaking her hand.
Blondie is taken a bit aback, and is about to patronize some more, when Mother finds her appointment card in the 4th sub-level of the East Wing of her handbag: "There, dear." Blondie is now all contrite smiles, and announces to someone over the PA that her 1:30 is here.
I wheel her over to the seating area, and help her set up so she can eat her sandwich. I wish her well, and she grips my arm as she thanks me again, invoking the deities and all.
As I'm turning to go, she calls: "Oh, and don't forget!", I turn back, again with the perceived eyebrow raised. "Mind you eat something with that bar. You can't eat chocolate on an empty stomach!"
She's too bloody priceless for words. "Don't worry, I won't. Take care, Mother."
She chuckles, and adds: "God bless you."
"God bless you, too..."
I turned, and left.
And I thought: God bless her.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Last Job
"It was a dark and stormy night," he thought to himself, chuckling audibly. It was funny because the cliché was true. The driving conditions were miserable: pitch black, clouds hiding even the moon, driving rain, heavy winds. He kept below the speed limit on this winding country road, as logging trucks often occupied the oncoming lane (and, as often as not, some of his) and maniacs hell-bent for their cottages blasted past him from the other direction. The only reason he was out here was that the alternative was worse: his screaming one year old son waking everyone at their cottage, depriving everyone of a Good Night's Sleep. His wife was still back there with their four year old daughter. He wouldn't have wanted her out in this crud, and fortunately, she wanted no part of it either. Eddie had stopped wailing moments after his father steered them onto the highway, the rhythmic thumping of the wipers adding to the already hypnotic combination of road noise and car vibration. Never at a loss for backup, he added a CD of lullabies to make for a knockout punch the little one simply could not fight.
After a while, traffic in both directions subsided, and the road lost its will to snake quite so violently, uncoiling itself to present languid, rolling curves. For a moment he felt truly at peace, happy. He made the mistake of looking at the digital clock in his dash, then cursed whatever sadistic part of his brain it was that chose this moment to remind him that tomorrow, at exacly this time (if all went as planned), he would be killing the Azeri Minister of Information.
He knew that fighting it was useless, so he took in a final breath of the quietude that was, and gave himself over to reviewing his plan. He was going over codes and signals when he heard a whimper from the back of the car. They passed a gas station just then, and enough light bathed the interior of the car for him to see a pair of open eyes in his rearview. Those eyes were themselves reflections in a large, gaudily decorated baby-mirror mounted above the back seat headrest so the driver could see the occupant of the rear-facing child seat. A couple of plaintive phonemes confirmed that "the cargo" was stirring. His right hand located a fish cracker in the coffee cup holder, which he awkwardly snaked behind him to present to his slumber-resistant charge. His contortions were rewarded, though, as he felt small fingers pull the prized snack from his grasp. "He could almost put me in a half-nelson from here," he thought. "God, wouldn't I be proud..."
The absurdity of having these thoughts share the company of the ones immediately preceding was not lost on him. "What the fuck am I doing?" he muttered to himself. Kids had never been part of the plan, but he knew better than anyone that plans need to be flexible. And he had flexed. He had also given himself a timeline for getting out of the business once he knew he would be a father. But that timeline, like his wife's belly, had stretched by an order of magnitude. Or two. Like the pregnancy, though, it had to end.
This would be his last job, he told himself.
This would be his last job.
After a while, traffic in both directions subsided, and the road lost its will to snake quite so violently, uncoiling itself to present languid, rolling curves. For a moment he felt truly at peace, happy. He made the mistake of looking at the digital clock in his dash, then cursed whatever sadistic part of his brain it was that chose this moment to remind him that tomorrow, at exacly this time (if all went as planned), he would be killing the Azeri Minister of Information.
He knew that fighting it was useless, so he took in a final breath of the quietude that was, and gave himself over to reviewing his plan. He was going over codes and signals when he heard a whimper from the back of the car. They passed a gas station just then, and enough light bathed the interior of the car for him to see a pair of open eyes in his rearview. Those eyes were themselves reflections in a large, gaudily decorated baby-mirror mounted above the back seat headrest so the driver could see the occupant of the rear-facing child seat. A couple of plaintive phonemes confirmed that "the cargo" was stirring. His right hand located a fish cracker in the coffee cup holder, which he awkwardly snaked behind him to present to his slumber-resistant charge. His contortions were rewarded, though, as he felt small fingers pull the prized snack from his grasp. "He could almost put me in a half-nelson from here," he thought. "God, wouldn't I be proud..."
The absurdity of having these thoughts share the company of the ones immediately preceding was not lost on him. "What the fuck am I doing?" he muttered to himself. Kids had never been part of the plan, but he knew better than anyone that plans need to be flexible. And he had flexed. He had also given himself a timeline for getting out of the business once he knew he would be a father. But that timeline, like his wife's belly, had stretched by an order of magnitude. Or two. Like the pregnancy, though, it had to end.
This would be his last job, he told himself.
This would be his last job.
Copyright/Disclaimer/Warning
These fictional scenes are all property of Eric Schmidt. As such these scenes can not be copied, distributed, or used in any way without the expressed consent of Eric Schmidt.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Ok, frig...
After much hounding by Claudia. I have joined the fray.
Officially, my first entry was already posted on my regular blog.
Henceforth, anything new will follow...
E
Officially, my first entry was already posted on my regular blog.
Henceforth, anything new will follow...
E
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