As Ben rode the bus downtown to work his head was bouncing on the window. He stared out the window, fully aware of the great noise and pain the constant brutality the window inflicted on his head. Across the street were trash bags, men walking swiftly and women swishing carefully past each other. It was a little after ten in the morning, and he should have been at work already. Since he wasn't drinking, he wasn't hungover. He wasn't right though.
The rattling of the bus window in his scull became too much for him so he lifted his head. He drifted off in reverie. It was comfortable, more comfortable than imagining what it would be like to walk through the enormous lobby he had to get through to get into his office and what he might say to his director if he encountered her. Instead, he was sipping his coffee with Robert Downey Jr. His friend Jason International had become RDJ and they sat on the sofas in Jason International Downey Jr's. modest house in a small university town. It was small, and familiar. They were manning their battle stations, their respective sofas where they would entertain the hours with wit and semantics that for the most part only served to justify their wasteful ways.
Robert Downey International Charles said to Ben, "We have chosen to take the path of least existence." Ben liked the supposition of the wordplay. All of this was going on in his head, a reverie of solipsism on a bus with late morning sun fighting through the human oils on the windows. "You're an old deuce, my boy." Ben liked to acquiesce to Jason Downey International Jr., even though in most ways he was Jason's junior. The bus seemed to make every stop. It was the city, and if he really wanted to get to work he would have taken the train. The problem was that he was already late and he was trying to delay having to confront the spy of a receptionist or whomever else he might encounter on his way into his office late. The stops were welcome and the theater of his daydreams was a comfortable escape.
He didn't have a real reason for why he was late. The alarm had gone off after he woke up, but when he woke up he laid in his bed and stared at the ceiling. His heart was empty. Life had shown him some pretty amazing turns but he was more and more dissatisfied with himself, life, expectations, obligations, reputations, his occupations and preoccupations. The more he talked, the less be believed anything anyone said. The Village Voice seemed like it was written for an audience of another time, 100 years ago or 100 years from now. Television made him throw up. The only thing that seemed like the nectar and ambrosia that could satisfy him were cigarettes and red wine, or water and C13H16ClNO. What a fucker he was.
Ben loved when the bus sped up, the smoothness of the engine as it was summoned without the shrieking brakes. He thought of how much Robert International Jr. Charles wanted to punch people in the face. It made him smile. So this lost young man was smiling on a bus full of late morning riders in the city, late for work and in unironed clothes, and with an imminent embarrassment when he arrived at work to look forward to. He felt like punching someone in the face, just for the effect. Like he wanted someone to notice, he wanted to make a scene that the whole city stopped to stare at. The feeling of so much meaninglessness and loss of fear, hope, or ambition and all of the magical nights gone without potions and scrying glass plates, it was overwhelming and he needed someone to tell him that he was right or to tag him in the jaw and tell him what's what. The seeing-eye dog next to him across the aisle on the bus farted unusually prominently. It was very unlikely that Ben misread the source of the sound and the encroaching vapors, but it brought him back to the brutal reality of the bus so very quickly. The blind master of the guide dog flared his nostrils and turned his head. He probably had heightened senses of sound and smell.
The wind of a dog like striking Ben like a punch in the face had brought Ben out of his imaginary friend reveries and back to a grimy metal and glass flask of a bus, where he bobbed around in a funky float of brake screeches, vapors and hair greases, unnecessary barking voices, bulky and rustling plastic bags and discordantly choreographed passengers interfering with their own boarding and disbarking by their own selfish disregard for the rest of themselves. Ben sat there in the stench waiting now for his stop to come. For the wasteful way he spent his morning he now wished only to get to work and deal with that, because sitting there on a bus seat at nearly 11 in the morning for no reason other than it prevented him from getting where he needed to go made him more nauseated than television. He forced himself to fart when he got up in a tit-for-tat against the dog, and though it was stifled he saw the blind owner turn his head in his direction. Maybe he could get the bastards after all.
