67. A short story primer before returning to the novel "The Secret War between the U.S. and Canada . . ." (although it should not be assumed that the former has anything to do with the latter, but you can always assume what you want--I'm not going to stop you)

American Routine

WQKS AM Drive time Commuter’s Car Radio Station: Coming to you live from SkyCam Eye in the Sky--Expect long delays today between Highway 37 and County Road 25. It’s a real mess down there—entire road is blocked at the Crosstown Junction. Find alternate routes, if you want to save a WHOLE LOTTA aggravation. Looks like a school bus may be involved . . . Let’s hope all the kids got off safely. Back to you-

Ready for Work

Bob gets up at 5:55 a.m. after five reminders from the alarm.  His head hurts. He hates getting up, although he’s been  awake  since     1:47  a. m., according to the faint blue light of his INDIGLO watch, insomnia his longest, most steadfast nighttime companion. His two kittens are asleep at the foot of his bed. They're his new companions. When they're not fighting with each other, they're attacking his toes, sometimes drawing blood.

A British voice on an NPR station describes the latest killing in Syria and a bombing in Turkey. Her voice is pleasant enough. She’s professional, detached, slightly sly. As she talks authoritatively, Bob’s mind wanders to the next-door neighbor—about whether he may be plotting against Bob, considering Second Amendment solutions, a term in vogue in an American political season. A few days back, the neighbor received a citation;  Bob’s complained too many times about his dog to the local police department. (The dog, the now popular pitbull, once charged him like an Aleppo militant while he was mowing a clearly defined border between the two yards.) Bob wonders whether a $100 citation would push the blue collar, unstably employed neighbor into an act of extremism.

It’s still dark outside. The fan next to Bob’s bed is whirring and oscillating; it’s supposed to screen distracting noises to help him sleep, although he still heard the neighbor’s car start before 5:00 a.m. and his dog’s earlier barking around midnight. Bob wonders how well versed his neighbor is in plotting a car bombing; Bob’s bedroom window is only feet from the neighbor’s driveway, separated by a flimsy peek-a-boo fence. He imagines that a small car filled with C-4 and propane cannisters could create a reasonably large mural of his blood and bits of brain and bone splattered, Jackson Pollock style, against his bedroom wall. He thinks about his kittens, how a bomb would mingle their little furry bits with his, fusing their DNA; a larger bomb could reduce Bob to a vaporized memory. Bob wants to suffocate himself under his pillows, to grasp a few more fleeting moments of freedom against the chains of responsibility. He wonders who will take care of his kittens if they somehow survive--the nine lives thing and all.

Bob’s been awake for hours. He does however slip back into the land of nod for a few minutes at a time. He awoke from a dream-filled sleep at 3:47 a.m.—he remembers the time because he religiously checks his watch. Bob remembers only parts of the dreams: In the latest one, he was returning from work only to find his garage had been emptied, the doors left open, and his kittens nowhere to be found. In other dreams, people are trying to shoot him or he’s trying to outrun tornadoes. Sometimes his dreams morph into nightmares. This morning, Bob confronts a man, holding his severed head like a basketball at his side. He's wearing Bob's favorite T-shirt, now splattered with blood and hot dog mustard. Bob has never cared for mustard. He'll eat hot dogs to be polite. The head of the man looks despondent, hopeless.

On the previous Monday morning he awoke at 2:15 a.m. and never returned to sleep. His body, tense and stricken, tells him to be ever vigilant. Its inner voice cannot be ignored. Routine. This morning, now Tuesday, he gets out of bed, feeling somewhat more rested. The dread, well, that’s a sticky partner who gives him a break on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes, though, the dread stays with him, like an unwanted tagalong, sweating, as if after a long jog.

Bob almost thought long job. It’s been 17 years; he wonders how long the remaining three years will linger until his twenty-year pension. 2021—that’s his goal. To survive his neighbor. His pitbull. His potential Improvised Explosive Device.  Bob hopes to avoid ending up disfigured or incarcerated or lodged in a wood chipper . . . And his job, he never wanted it, but applied for it out of a lack of better options, then accepted the job offer, and grew through complacency and hopelessness to accept it. He also hopes, before wholesale layoffs or arbitrary firings, his job will survive long enough to allow him to cross the threshold of minimal pension security.

In the kitchen, Bob switches on the coffee maker with just enough water for half a cup.  That’s all he can handle—just enough caffeine to sharpen his thinking without sending shudders down his spine. His breakfast consists of six or seven sugar slathered wheat biscuits drenched in milk. Blueberry this time. Sometimes, strawberry. Or vanilla. It doesn’t matter. Bob pushes down his pills with the milk and biscuits; they mix into an artificially flavored, pharmaceutically fortified wad of morning routine. Now awake, his kittens climb up his t-shirt and jump on the kitchen table. Bob’s already thinking about the commute ahead. His stomach gurgles.

Commute

Twilight dimly lights the neighborhood. Feeling the chill of an approaching autumn, Bob scans the front yard, the taller shrubs; he listens to the blue jays, surveys the neighbors, their cars, their TVs flashing early-morning cartoons from their living room windows. It has become something of a self-protective habit to assess his surroundings, to listen for possible changes in the birds’ or squirrels’ chatter. Bob feeds them every day, spending a fortune every year on sunflower seeds, peanuts, and suet blocks. At first it was just a harmless hobby. Now he thinks the routine, and its early warning system the blue jays and gray squirrels and even the chickadees provide, is well worth the expense. Their self-protective surveillance and Bob’s well-being create a symbiotic relationship.

Then, it happens, the explosion of a villainous, unchecked exhaust system violating the morning calm. Besides Bob’s neighbor on the north with the pitbull and a festering vendetta, across the street to the west lives a felon, shaven head, body tattooed--a Harley rider, a noise terrorist, a catalyst for jangled nerves. His hog often scares Bob’s kittens into a retreat under the sofa. He revs it, incessantly, as if flipping the neighborhood an early-morning bird, then explodes up the street. Bob listens to the shifting of gears as the cycle merges with traffic on the main highway. The felon is heading back to the County lock-up, where he spends his working days, his productive years, behind bars. Bob wonders how the felon will ever collect Social Security, whether such a possibility is a moot point. Bob wonders whether the homegrown felon ever thinks about him.

Before leaving, Bob double-checks the door lock, then takes a long, uneasy breath. He’s considering installing surveillance cameras for when he or the critters aren’t around.

As he drives up the street, he notices the neighbor to the south has violated the territorial integrity of his yard. He mowed his yard yesterday, bullying his way two or three feet beyond his property line. What’s more, he blew his loose grass clippings into Bob’s yard, like a beach bully kicking sand, extending his own territory at the expense of diminishing and vandalizing Bob’s yard. Is this a challenge? Is this a red line by  a blue collar Putin? How should Bob respond? The neighborhood to the south, clearly economically disadvantaged, seems to be exerting his dominance—a bulky, unshaven brute who drives a flatbed truck, which, at some point in the near future, could accidentally lose control, knocking over the power pole  separating their yards. The pole then crushes Bob’s car and the high-voltage currents send him to a horror-movie-like-death—which is even worse than getting sand kicked into his face. Bob plays out these scenarios routinely; maybe his mind is infected by all the nightly media images, if not in the movies then on CNN, his imaginings just a tiny cell of a growing national neurosis—Paris, Nice, Orlando, Istanbul, San Bernadino, etc., etc., etc.

His imaginings, he also assumes, mean his breakfast concoction has failed to adjust the chemical levels coursing through his limbic system. He should probably make a U-turn and call in sick.

Instead, he takes the usual route, heading east, the sky still clotting the rising sun. Usually, the rising sun challenges him to forfeit his daily commute, its light burning stringy webs of red lines in his eyes, its glare sometimes erasing the highway ahead. Every weekday, the beautiful burning ball of billions of hydrogen bombs welcomes him to pull the covers back over his head, to soak in the sweaty comfort of his unwashed sheets—if only.  

He’s in a convoy of commuters, all in a rush crowding him. He thinks about the kittens—from a rescue shelter, undocumented aliens, perhaps little terrorists in-training. Who knows their lineage? They like to attack his hands, feet, neck; he’s covered in shrapnel wounds from their razor-like canines and claw attacks. Will they assimilate? Will they take on his peace-loving, bare-foot-at-home lifestyle? A car honks because Bob won’t risk pulling out into speeding traffic; the car continues to make his point by tailgating Bob, mile after mile after mile. His shoulders and neck stiffen; his blood pressure surges, overriding the effects of his meds. This day is not off to a good start, but it’s also routine. Routine. From the night before—having a drink that turns into two drinks. Mixing alcohol with diphenhydramine, swimming in its own alcohol. The grogginess will last until about two in the afternoon; it’s replaced by a slow dying off of hundreds if not thousands of neurons. Bob can feel himself grow duller. Routine.

Workday

At work, thoughts about returning home to his kittens consume Bob. At lunchtime he wanders the halls. Coworkers have conspicuously avoided sitting with him in the break room. They’ve concluded that he may well be among the others. Single women look away or giggle to each other; married women treat him like a eunuch. Men just grunt, openly speculating about whether he is a eunuch. It’s easier than to view Bob as a threat. 

To while away the hours until he can exit the building, walk across the parking lot, get into his car, sigh a long sigh of relief, and repeat the commute home, he keeps a little notepad on his desk and periodically records notations in it, a sort of countdown, with a variety of different numbers on it. His countdown has four columns: first, a column to indicate the current time; then a column with hash marks to indicate the number of hours left in his day. To make his measurements more interesting, Bob then translates the hash marks into numerical representations of the remaining hours. Finally, in the fourth column, he translates the hours into minutes. When the final column is down to two digits, he feels his spirits lift; when it’s down to one digit, he’s giddy—the suicide bombing of another day of corporate drudgery. Occasionally, he adorns the numbers with little sketches of kittens. Bob repeats this ritual every day, out of sight of other employees who might question his focus and allegiance to his job. 

It's unlikely Bob will ever be promoted.

Home from Work

On his way home, Bob is tranquil, expectant. Bob sets the cruise control and starts to unwind, surrounded by cornfields drying like crackling paper, curled like unread reports. He’s thinking about his kittens. Bob wonders whether they will come to life from their slumber and meet him at the door. They usually do. He counts on that. It’s become a routine. Bob’s thinking about the yard that needs mowing, and he’s thinking he likes to cut grass. It shows that he’s accomplished something. Yardwork gives him a greater sense of accomplishment than his nearly twenty years on the job—yet Bob’s also anxious about whether his neighbor in his sweaty neon t-shirt will surveil him as he re-establishes the boundary line with his riding lawnmower. Another border war in the making.

He listens to the radio, NPR, already well into a discussion about a student’s anxiety. The moderator probes the subject, clinically.  Some days, according to the student’s parents, they have to put a red sign in the window. It’s a signal to the bus driver, and it means he’s too anxiety-ridden to leave his bedroom and face the world. Bob listens intently, hoping to hear solutions to the poor boy’s problems.

The commute would be relaxing if it weren’t for the MACK truck edging closer, nearly tailgating. It’s been following him for miles, at first maybe 15 seconds behind him, then maybe 5. The truck is now just a second or two behind Bob, menacing.  Up ahead, Bob sees a mini van parked at the end of a driveway off to the right. It must be waiting, he thinks. Two golden retrievers dance and spin near the parked van. As he watches the dogs, a bus pulls out in front of Bob from a side street and stops almost immediately, its flashers on, its STOP arm extended. Bob brakes hard. A little girl dives off the bus and hugs the dogs.

The MACK truck fills Bob’s rearview mirror. It encroaches, crowding the mirror, the MACK emblem growing, growing—its air powered horn blaring like a thousand angry pitbulls, smoke pouring from its seized tires. Bob grips his steering wheel; the face of the MACK driver comes into view, a stogie stumbling down his Al-Baghdadi face. He’s waving his arms and cursing. Momentum carries his gravel load over his hood, crashing down like a breaker against molded metal and asphalt. Bob closes his eyes, his hands clenching the steering wheel. His kittens are bounding for him as he enters the living room, their backs arched, ready for battle, already lunging for the newspaper dangling from his hand. One pounces on his loose shoelace. When he discovers he hasn’t been crushed or buried in gravel or burned alive in a fiery crash, Bob opens his eyes and exhales.

When Bob gets home, he treats his kittens to an extra-large can of beef and gravy, food that he’s been saving for himself, along with a baked potato from his own garden. As the kittens eat, Bob cleans their litter pan. Routine. Every day. Then he sits down and watches the news. The multi-vehicle accident leads. Bob watches intently as the Sky Cam Eye in the Sky video footage shows a mess of cars in the ditch and the MACK truck rolled over, its contents sprayed across the roadway. Bob’s car is at rest behind the bus. Neither is damaged. The reporter notes no one in the ditch was seriously injured, students had already been unloaded from the school bus, and MACK Al-Baghdadi was cited for speeding in a school zone. Bob switches the channel to CNN screaming "Breaking New!" in the background: More dead, more wounded, more bombs, more ghastly images--repeated on a loop.

Bob turns off the TV and plays with his kittens. They bite his hands, a little too hard. It’s the best part of Bob’s day . . . He looks at his watch--only twelve hours and thirty-seven minutes until it all begins again, his routine, an American routine.