• Home

Analog

Posted on September 21, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

They called him ‘Analog’ and it should have been a joke but the name stuck and with it the implications. He didn’t mind. People had been known for much worse things and so they had been called much worse names. He was happy to be recognized as a throwback. Not that he really was one but he didn’t care to disabuse the flock of their notions. Every set of worshippers needed a God. If he could be the guiding light for the few who felt that he was cool for being a certain way, he was not about to tear down the temple and demand they use the space to solve the parking situation. He was not that much of a hero.

Her name was beautiful, as was her face. He chose to remember her by her face so the name got swallowed in the river of words that people think/hear in an average day. Before he could step on a high rock and catch a glimpse of it again, her name was gone; drowned in a cascading waterfall that he had no way of diving into and coming up unscathed. She probably suspected that he had forgotten her name because he called her ‘beautiful’ or ‘honey’ depending upon whom they were with. Honey always made him seem like a dirty old man though he was only forty and she was a respectable twenty-two. One time she introduced him to a group of friends with the words, “This is Adrian but everybody calls him Analog,” and one of her friends with the trendy glasses and haircut sat up and attempted humour, “Is that sort of like Kieslowski’s Decalog?”

He looked her in the eye and said, “Film geeks?”

Another woman answered. A woman with red ringlets and a face that could only be described as studious sniffed, “We prefer the term aficionados.”

He wasn’t in the mood to be nice, “I’ll bet you do. So hey, what did you guys think of Partner?”

The exchange of glances was surprisingly funny in the sheer panic it spread through the room. Just when the tide of ignorance was threatening to wash away and leave them capable of breathing again, he tossed another salvo in, “And how do you think it compares to Dhawan’s other work? And hey, do you guys think Overbrook has a chance?”

The roomful of Upper East Side kids latched onto the one word they recognized like the starving might stalk the only available loaf of bread, “Wait Overbrook, that’s Will Smith’s production company right?”

Another kid was already Googling the search words on his Blackberry and before two minutes had passed one of them was calling out to the rest of the pack, “Oh hey check this out. A Bollywood movie that ripped off Hitch. We should totally check it out!”

His eyebrows were so close together they looked like they were seeking the comfort of each other’s warmth against the cold ignorance of the people in the room. She smiled at him and he sighed, “Shall we go to my place?”

She took his hand and led him away and they were fucking like rabid animals less than hour later. When they lay in each other’s arms, spent and sweaty she asked him, “Why did you do that?”

“What? Was it bad?”

“It was very bad!”

He raised himself on one elbow, “You didn’t come?”

“Not that! Back at the apartment.”

“Oh that!” He fell onto his back and stared up at the ceiling where a spider web of cracks circled a dark centre. He frowned and she leaned in, exhaling onto his left nipple and sending a frisson of electricity up his spine, “What’s wrong?”

He pointed, “That crack. It wasn’t there this morning.”

She joined him in lying on her back and swept her hair off his face, stared up at the ceiling and asked, “Where?”

He pointed, “There, that black hole.”

She squinted and wrinkled her nose, “I can’t see that far without my glasses.”

He looked at her in surprise, “You wear glasses?”

She lobbed the surprise back at him, “Doesn’t everybody?”

He climbed off the bed and inched towards the hole at the centre of the crack, “I don’t.”

He didn’t see her refreshed look of surprise because he was trying to figure out what a round hole and a spider-web of cracks was doing in his ceiling and how it had all magically appeared while he was away for the day.

He felt the pressure under his foot before the glass broke the tough skin and shot a message of pain up to his brain. She actually got to see what it looked like when a guy’s testicles shrank and then he hopped around on one foot cursing. She popped over to the edge of the bed, both hands firmly planted like a medium-sized dog watching her master and wondered whether she should join in the confusion, “You okay?”

“Fucking hell no! I’ve got something in my foot and it hurts!”

He flopped down into a chair and turned his foot towards him, saw the tiny sliver of glass through the blood that seeped out every time he pressed the flesh on his foot, “Fuck! I got glass in my foot.”

She looked up at the ceiling, “How?”

He slid a drawer open and rummaged around. She tucked her hair behind her ears and sneaked in for a closer look, “You need to go to the hospital.”

He continued rummaging, “I’m a Do-It-Yourself kinda guy.”

His searching hand stopped and raised the tweezers out of the desk. With a perfunctory wipe of the tip against the sheets he squinted his eyes to focus on the shining yet elusive microbe of glass. After a moment’s tense weaving and bobbing he had it and held it up for her to see. She confirmed what he already knew with a sense of wonder, “It’s so small. And that’s a lot of blood.”

He waved away her concern, “It’s nothing.”

Some more rummaging, a pack of band-aids and he stuck one on, got to his feet and tried to stand. After a couple of ginger steps he seemed satisfied, “Not too bad. I can still walk.”

She continued to sit up like a cat watching a goldfish swim around in a bowl above her, “But where did the glass come from?”

“No id–,” he noticed the window and suddenly it all made way too much sense, “Holy shit!”

“What, what?”

“Check this out.” He stepped forward gingerly and pointed to the little hole in the window pane. They had been so intent on getting naked they hadn’t noticed it before. When he looked over at her she said, “Is that what I think it is?”

“Did you think bullet hole?”

She nodded.

“I think it is.”

She sat back on her haunches and took it all in – the window, the glass on the floor and the hole in the ceiling, “Drive-by?”

“What would they be shooting at, at this angle? Window cleaners?”

She shrugged.

They didn’t have anything to say to each other for the moment so they let it all sink in and then their eyes met and she smiled a crooked smile, “It’s kinda hot though right?”

She looked at his lap and licked her lips, “You want to go again?”

He covered the ground between them pretty quickly, “You only live once right?”

Comments