A Man Without Thought

A Brief Introduction. . .

There is a man sitting at a desk. He is trying to think of something to write about. He is absorbing the world around him, but it is not enough. Not the world that he is in, anyway. This reality, the world he feels stuck in, does not give him the fuel to start the burning of his life’s inner fire. Doesn’t aggravate the beast inside who racks its brain daily over ways to get out, ways to find that sweet release and finally just explode.

He needs more. He needs satisfaction, and he needs it in the form of the written word. Thousands of words, on hundreds of pages. Endless pages with seemingly endless adventures, and readers who want more because the pure joy and absolute terror cannot be let go of, they cannot have enough of it.

He needs a story. His story.

It’s a validation for him. A confirmation that he is more than just a capable tool used by the system in which he has placed himself. He must prove he is more in order to prove that he is still alive. Still linked to the safe reality that he knew as a younger man and a child, the naïve innocence of youth still the inspiration for most things in his life.

In this relentless pursuit, he must walk among the people and the things around him and absorb something more. Something intangible, yet fiercely powerful.

Hundreds of pages. A tale of the most beautiful things, in the most beautiful places. Or of the most terrible things in the darkest of places. Just a story.

But he is a man without thought. And this story, this tale of the world, is lost, because he is lost. And his story may never be told. . .

Chapter One:

The Day Nancy Sells Saved My Life

                                                                                   





I had hope once upon a time. Once upon a time I believed in the possibility that everything really is going to be all right. I believed in the power of a new sunrise, along with a fresh new day, in a world of endless possibilities. I could stare into nothing and see everything. A plain white sheet of paper had the stories and tales of life waiting to be told through it. Paper is life itself, isn’t it? Wood, destroyed and reformed into paper. A sad tale of life destroyed by us. Only to be reborn and used to create life again. Amazing stories of fantastic events and people and places. Of life and death, love and hate, happiness and sadness. All on paper.

         I cannot see these things anymore. There are no more other-worldly parallels where opposites attract and become one on a two dollar and ninety-five cents stack of recycled wood pulp. I am an empty man who feels like he has nothing left to give. I dream of ending it all. I will do it. I am going to do it. I just have to be ready to do it. This is how I feel and I’m convinced I can do it.

         I’m sitting at my desk. I’m staring into absolutely nothing. I’m in a cubicle. A professional, career man’s domicile. My paper is neatly laid in front of me, over my desktop calendar. My file folders are laid separately, by category, into a file shelf to the right corner of the cubicle desk, which is inlaid onto the carpet-like walls. They’re grey walls. My pens and pencils make their home in an old coffee cup in the middle corner. My cheap, work-purchased computer sits to my left, on the extension of my inlaid desk. Next to that, in the far left corner, are more files, neatly laid away in another storage shelf. Everything is neat. This is my place of work. A paper factory. And I am a paper salesman.

My name is William Howard Williams. My coworkers call me Bill. There is no chaos here. Only in my soul. Only where my soul should be.



         I do not dream of nice things. But of creating nice things. Or terrible things. Or things in general. I work at a paper factory. I sell paper. And I don’t think I’m very good at it. Lately it seems like I’m not very good at much.

         The plain white sheets in front of me are screaming. They’re on fire, wasting away in a dance of torture and mayhem on my desk. The crumbles of their burned remains float in a dark mess around my desktop calendar. It’s making a mess. The papers are upset, you see. They wish to have a purpose in this world. But there is no purpose for them. Not with me. The papers come from a two dollar and ninety-five cents stack of a hundred sheets, able to be purchased at any of your local office or school supplies stores. Rite Aid, Office Depot, Staples, pick one. You’ll see my paper there. Sidney C. Kensington Paper Products, referred to as “Kensington Paper”.

         These crazed sheets, these lost, hopeless landscapes of emptiness are a plague; I cannot give them a purpose. I cannot seem to give anything a purpose. But the sheets, the beautiful, clean, crisp paleness stacked neatly on my desktop calendar are Hell to me. I look up from the sheets finally.

         Susan Johnson is walking by again. Susan from Customers. Rolls upon rolls pushing through her tight, form fitting purple sweater and black skirt. She will never realize how much cheaper it would be just to go to a gym or take a walk instead of continue to shovel hoards of nasty foods down her endless gorge. She’s a nice woman, though. Made me a small basket last Easter.

         Thomas Allen. Straight-necked pencil man, the lead account manager in sales, stands at the end of my row of cubicles, shooting it with no one who really cares. Large, horn-rimmed glasses, short, neatly spiked hair, and an extremely large stomach. A man who most likely hasn’t seen the broad side of his shaft in at least ten years. He’s not so nice. He and Susan are having an affair. I watch as she walks by, ogling him with not just her eyes, but with her rolls, too, as he responds with a large, bushy mustache smile of cigarette and coffee stains.

         Clarabelle Akers. Dark hair, dark eyes, and unassuming attire. A new young woman working in the office. A mail management clerk, for now. She’s very quiet. A small, slender figure, she’s the object of all the older, disgusting men’s attention. Men old enough to be her father. I’d be more like an older brother to her, and I’m not even remotely interested. I made it a point long ago to never lower myself to the level of dogs.

         In this mess of people is the chaos. A numbing sensation tingling through my spine and brain and place where my soul should be. Living life unaffected by the people and things around me. A jerk to most people. Nice enough to others who deserve it. A woman from shipping called me sweet once. It wasn’t flattering, though. Only empty.

         I will do it. And I know exactly how I want it to go. In my mind the one thing I can imagine is how my life ends.

The actual view from the top of Liberty One, I’m sure, lets a person see the whole city, from Old City to the Greater Northeast, and everywhere else in between. The people and places, much like the view from an airplane, wouldn’t look real. They’d be like funny little dots, or like ants, their homes and cars like Matchbox and Lego’s. The silence of being so high up, so far removed from the barrage of harsh noises that reverberate from building to building and street to street would be, or is for all I know, peacefully serene. And then I would jump. That first moment of hesitation, stunted by the inevitable onset of vertigo, but then… beautiful release. Swift silences as I float down. Down, down into heaven. A loud, rushing waterfall greeting me on the way there. Heavy waters pounding at my face. Deafening roar of the tide and then splash. Instantly over. The chaos and the anarchy are gone. The terror that’s been tearing at my heart, the black void that’s been burning at my chest. All of it gone. Over. Beautiful rainbow life, marred by a beautiful, black death.

And the procession to follow would be a parade. Years of wondering and waiting and thinking I might do it would be over. It would be done. Distant relatives would then wonder at the parade just how fucked up their family over on the East Coast really was, while immediate family would ask themselves, ‘Why? What have we done to deserve this?’ and then the girls I knew way back when would do their best to play the part of the ‘Inconsolable Loved One,’ tortured by the tragic, yet inevitable, death of the only man they thought they would ever really love. And all the while I’d be in the corner of the room, secretly laughing to myself. Smiling that this is what it’s like in the end, not so bad after all, rather entertaining actually, and damn it sure sucks that I’m not actually around to catch the show. Maybe they’ll be playing reruns later on.



         The papers in front of me are still blank. They are still waiting.

         I look at the clock at the top of the wall, in the fore front of all the cubicles. It reads 8:30 a.m. The scent carries. It’s that time. Something to pass the time. Coffee.



         The office, or rather, the Sidney C. Kensington’s Sales and Customer Relations building, is a dark tan affair situated in the industrial part of the city off of Thompson Street and Richmond Avenue, in a mainly Irish part of the city called Bridesburg. Its neighbors are the Bridesburg Boys and Girls Club and a 7-Eleven. Row homes occupy most of the streets in the neighborhood, along with an impressive number of Irish pubs and old bars. Outside the office is a large parking lot for employees, and a factory area behind it belonging to the Rohm and Haas Industrial Complex. A coffee smell always lingers in the area. Makes days at the Boys and Girls Club purely enjoyable, and life at the Sidney C. Kensington Sales and Customer Relations building unbearable. I always want coffee. A strange side effect of the locale.

         My cubicle is the center cubicle in the back of the sales room, facing the clock on the wall. I walk around the other cubicles toward the doors underneath the clock. Sometimes they’re like prison doors. When closed, it seems like the workers who are in the office during the day are shut out from the rest of the world, save for a window to the left, right, and rear of the room. But these windows are fenced in. I know that someday, though, there will be a prison break. Someday the people will declare they have had enough. A leader will stand. Others will follow. Molotov cocktails will be thrown. Riots will ensue. Sales men and women will jump over their desks and tear down the walls that cage them.  Clouds of smoke and flame will engulf the whole affair, and it will conclude with a mushroom cloud explosion, as all the best of the workers have left, watching from afar, laughing with beers in hand, while the jail men that keep us dance and burn in the flames, cursing their horrible crimes against humanity and their fellow man and especially to salesmen – persons.

         The coffee is cold. It’s been sitting overnight. No one has bothered to make a fresh batch. This should be a federal offense. I would kill a person for this.

         The break room is to the right of the coffee stand, which sits in a centrally located stand just outside the sales room, on the main customer relations floor, which, of course, is near the entrance to the office. Quite typical, really. Put the ‘people’ people near the entrance, and the runners in the back, hidden from plain sight. Such is my life. In the break room is a sink and more coffee and water.

         I’m halfway through making the coffee. I’ve cleaned out the pot. Cleaned out the grinds holder. I just have to add water and more coffee grinds, and presto, fresh coffee brewing. Then I smell something an infinite number of times better than the fresh smell of a fresh cup. As I turn to look out of the break room, I’m not the only one who smells it.

         Walter Rowan, the supercharged Jolt nerd who works two cubicles over from me is already out of the jail room, fresh can in hand, sipping senselessly as he stares at the doorway. Mary Winkler, a mouse-faced, plain brown haired kiss ass who works in Customers takes the phone away from her ear and stands, sneering at the doorway. Thomas Allen and his fat, belching belly protrude from his office doorway, bushy smile and all as the rest of the employees glare in a amazement at something I still cannot see, but can imagine is amazing.

         I step out form the break room. And I see her.

         Nancy Sells.

         Her eyes, I cannot describe them. Green pastures, never letting you have a chance to look away, locking you into their gaze, promising you more. Her hair short brown curls of brunette silk, gracing the face of beauty with its presence. Soft, tanned skin, so heavenly.

         Nancy Sells rolled through the door, a picture of perfection, weakening curves commanding the attention of every man and the hate of every woman. Her open red blouse revealed Heaven’s greatest gifts to man. Shear perfection. Absolute amazement captured everyone, whether they wanted it or not.

         “I said hi, William.”

         The water was spilling halfway down my shirt before I noticed Nancy talking to me. I looked around quick and saw that Walter had never opened another can of Jolt, not for something that wasn’t computer-made anyway. Mouse-faced Mary had never spared attention for anyone. And Thomas never took the time to leave his comfy office chair. There was only Nancy and myself, and the water making its way down to my pants.

         “Oh, Nancy. Hi. Hi. Nancy.  Wow, wow, um, this, this isn’t what it looks like,” I replied like an idiot, knowing she knew that, but wondering if I really didn’t fill the cup just for her.

         “God, William, you gotta be more careful. No fresh batch made this morning?” Nancy asked me. Nancy. Nancy Sells.

         “No, no, I was getting on that right now. As you can see by my shirt and my, um, my pants.” I am a bumbling idiot. A cause of imminent danger and death, waiting for my turn to bite the big one, hoping I don’t take anyone else with me. Except maybe for Mary.

         “Well, give me a holler when it’s ready. Big day, huh? Gonna make a solid deal with the school district. Kensington paper in every school. Bet Mr. K’s gonna be real happy about it. I know Mr. Allen is.” And she was right. Tom never shut up about it, in between ogling and secret flirting with Susan, Tom would not shut up about ‘his’ big deal with the school district.

         “Yeah, no, he always goes on about it these days. Glad to see it will finally be over,” I said, stepping back into the break room and using a cleaning towel to dry my water soaked shirt and crotch. I am a genius and an idiot in one complete, totally screwed up package.

         “Yeah, he’s gonna be happy. Are you going to the party tonight?”

         Party? What party? I know nothing of any party. I know nothing of any social event going on anywhere around me. Only the dismal, useless abandon of my worthless efforts to break out of the steel cage I’ve trapped myself in. Only my inability to prove I’m worth more than the ten dollars an hour and sales bonuses I’m paid.

         “No, party? What party? I wasn’t told about any, any party.”

         “Yeah, it’s for the school district deal? The deal being made today?” she replied bewildered, reaching past me to the cabinet behind me. She pulled away a piece of paper.

         “It’s been advertised in the office? At least here in the break room. You mean you haven’t heard a thing about it?” she questioned me, holding a piece of paper that apparently advertised the party for tonight after work.

         “No, sorry. I can’t say that I have. But it sounds interesting.”

         “Anyway, I was wondering if afterward, you wanted to head over to the P.O. for a drink? Nothing too much, just a quick drink and maybe a game of pool.”

         Nancy Sells asked me on a date. On a date. It was amazing. It was a spectacular event that held promise for  - for very good things to happen between her and myself. I’ve been in love with Nancy Sells for a very long time.

         But I couldn’t do it. Not the party. Not the Post Office, an amazingly down to Earth local pub across the street. I couldn’t do either. I had to go home I had to try to start over. Or I couldn’t go on any longer.

The amazing need to write, to find some measure of fulfillment was overwhelming. I felt drowned in the desperation to create life and stories and tales, hundreds of pages, thousands, no, millions of words, all on the neatly stacked pages sitting on my desk at home, waiting for me to come back to them. I had to tell Nancy no. The stories are what mattered. I had to write the stories.

         “Um, I’m sorry, Nancy, but I don’t think I’m even going to stay for the party. I’ve got a lot to do and I want to get home and get started on, on the lot of things that I have to do. You know what I mean?” I deserve a swift, painful death. Who would turn down the object of one’s own affection, directly to her face, and so idiotically? I would. I had to. The papers were torturing me here and at home. I had to give them a purpose.

         “Yeah, no it’s cool. I was just, I was just wondering if you weren’t busy if you wanted to, you know, hang out. But hey, it’s cool. You got stuff to do.”