Stunning

Why would Ultisyn wish him to go to McColoughey’s? He knew why, he knew the exact reason and feelings propelling that very state of mind. But he wouldn’t address what he knew to be true initially; he hated the thought of charity in any form. He ran through all possibilities in his head, turning them over and over again, wondering if an ulterior motive sat behind the inanity of it all. But alas, none awaited him, and he knew that his boss did indeed pity his current state of livelihood and wished it to change. He felt slightly insulted. No, he thought as he once again became fixated on the stapler, he was just reminded of the seclusion he chose.

In any case, he would go. He braced himself for a damnably awkward affair, one spent in agony. He would spend every moment in silent plea for the cessation. A pressing sigh spilled from his lips, deflating his body and acknowledging the mental defeat. Tonight at 7, he thought.

The stapler stared back at Aiden blankly. The paint gleamed back at him in a crisp sympathy that he appreciated.

Not to worry, he thought to the equipment. It will all be over by 8.

The days at work were always long but never painful. Aiden lost himself most of the time, dazing at the fabrics and colors that floated about him. He would sigh and continue to fill out the paper work, wondering why daylight savings exists or some other enigma of the sort. The mystery of daylight savings had puzzled him for ages on end. Nighttime falls upon the inhabitants of earth much earlier in the winter, which means that it’s pitch black at seven when it wouldn’t usually be so until 8. Why then, he wondered, do we “fall back”, so that it would be pitch black at 6? Wouldn’t it be much more logical to gain an hour, so that it would be pitch black at 8 and still light at 7? You couldn’t say “fall forward” and “spring back”, of course, but surely a society wouldn’t let a witless adage such as those appointed to the conundrum of daylight savings be the deciding factor is such a ritual. That would just be silly. But this country, he reminded himself as he gawked stanchly at his stapler, is not a normal one.

“Aiden! What are you doing?”

Aiden jolted in his chair. Being wrenched out of his reveries was the most frightful thing to him; usually he braced himself when he knew he would he would have to talk to another; he would think about what he would say and how he would carefully form the words. When such a thing was launched upon him unexpectedly, however, he shook with anxiety and unease.

“Paperwork,” he finally stammered back in response.

“Paperwork!” His boss, Mr. Ultisyn, barked back at him. “You didn’t look half awake! How could you be doing paperwork?”

“Excuse me, I’m sorry. I just…very, very pensive at times, this must be frustrating to you, I understand, do excuse me.”

“It’s alright.” Mr. Ultisyn responded. Aiden had always been treated very delicately by Mr. Ultisyn, like the frail son of a manly father, hearing his father’s sharp compassion as he stumbled through life. Mr. Ultisyn boomed out his desires in a military manner, but his sentences always ended softly with Aiden. “But even if you are great at staring into space that’s not what I pay you for!”

“I realize that.”

“Get that to me by 3, would you?” Ultisyn said, referring to the paperwork Aiden was busy neglecting.

Aiden nodded slowly, glad the conversation was almost over. Ultisyn waited for an additional response from Aiden. When it didn’t come, he slapped Aiden brusquely on the shoulder and stalked down the row of cubicles. Aiden let out a sigh and glanced down at the papers in front of him. He didn’t know what it was; he wasn’t afraid of Mr. Ultisyn. He wanted to avoid disappointing him, but why couldn’t he talk to him casually? Well, he couldn’t talk to anyone casually. Sometimes he would stammer through the thoughts he was trying to convey so disjointedly that people would just laugh nervously and walk away. He could rarely say what he wanted to perfectly, although it all flowed fluidly through his head. There was a problem with how-

“Son, what’re you doing tonight?”

Heavens! Ultisyn was trying to kill him! He straightened up, curious as to why the man was here yet again.

“What, tonight? Would you, well, like a layout of my precogitated activites? Exactly, I don’t, exactly what are you endeavoring to find out by asking that particular question?”

It was an odd question indeed.

“Jules and Addie are going to McColoughey’s. I want you to go.”

Aiden glanced down the way. Julius Clamer and Addie Brown were employees of the other sector at the plant. He knew of them, but doubted he had said more than 10 words to Mr. Clamer. Why on earth would Ultisyn wish him to associate further with them? And, to further analyze the curious request, why would he wish him to go slosh about at the local pub with them? He had many questions, but he could only summon up one, for the time being.

“Why?”

Ultisyn frowned.

“Come now, I’ve done plenty a favor for you, boy, and you can’t go denying that. I just want you to go for a beer with some coworkers, get to know some people better, that’s all.”

Preposterous.

“Why?”

Frustration began to tear at Ultisyn.

“Tonight at 7, I want you to be at McColoughey’s. If you’re late, you’re fired. If you don’t show, I’ll fire you. Just show up for a beer and I’ll give you a raise.”

The man briskly fled the scene, once again walking down the row of cubicles. Aiden looked after him, drenched in confusion and fear.

Preposterous!

Although he was unlike the majority of the people he was exposed to, he wasn’t disturbed or gloomy. Existing as an unusual being pleased him to some extent; the vast variations between his life and the life of others only promised the presence of innovation in the hand that had created him. Because of this necessary innovation Aiden did not let the identity of this hand’s owner puzzle or bewilder him; he didn’t care much about the technicalities of the divine. Many might view this as a mentality lacking religious belief, but he believed in a supreme deity, he simply didn’t care about the ethos or the culture or the demands that surrounded it, whoever he or she was. He had yet to worry about being stricken or smitten or incapacitated because of his apathy towards religious conviction; certainly an all-powerful being capable of forming an earth such as the one upon which Aiden walked had better things to do than make sure his or her followers attended church and told the truth and so on and so forth. If such a being truly had nothing better to do why would he want to labor towards worthiness to enter into this being’s presence when it didn’t endeavor to utilize its supremacy to the fullest extent?

3 months after moving into his apartment he had attempted to explain this belief to his neighbor Mrs. Wright, and the woman had smacked him for it. Sitting at the bus stop, he smiled to think about the incident. The episode hadn’t really amused him, but he was tickled by the fact that he had actually been slapped for vocalizing that he saw no need to sit down and define God when he had a full time job. Upon stating this he looked Mrs. Wright straight in the eyes and waited for a response. He was quite taken back when it came in the form of a slap across the face.

“Why Mrs. Wright, I understand our opinions differ, but I see no need-“

“For anything at all, apparently.” She had snapped back at him. “I told Suzie, I told her it would come to this. First they let Catholics work at the plant and now they’ve hired an atheist. To think that Suzie’s very own husband owns it! His taste in employees never did impress me but this is quite shocking to say the very least.”

Surprised at her anger, he replied: “I’m not an atheist, Mrs. Wright. I believe in a deity, just a different one than you do. At least I think they’re different, I honestly don’t know. I simply don’t concern myself with it, you see, I don’t see a reason to.”

“What blasphemy. You believe in God, you just don’t see a reason to concern yourself with him?”

“Well,” he said, slightly annoyed, “no, I don’t.”

After casting him a dark look she rolled her eyes and rolled up her shirt sleeves.

“I s’pose we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I’ve got company at seven and the bathroom needs a scrubbing. Hurry down to your apartment, Mr. Jeduce, and don’t you be talking to my kids about your abstract rubbish. It’s hard enough to raise a child properly without the atheists tryin’ to convert ‘em.”

This had been the first and last note-worthy encounter with Mrs. Wright. Carefully distancing herself and her family from him, she found ways to bump into him only when convenient or necessary. Aiden was perfectly fine with this; he found ways to bump into her only when it was physical impossible to do otherwise. Generally he saw her once a week; Aiden had thought and pondered and tried extremely hard to summon up an evasion technique with which he would avoid her completely, but to no avail. Every Friday the woman took it upon herself to water the flowers she placed in the hallway, and encountered him every week as he walked out his front door to saunter down to the bus stop. Her thin lips would pull into a polite sneer, spreading apart to talk so little that one could barely believe that it was her who was indeed speaking. She would tilt her head up ever so slightly and raise her eyebrows as high as humanly possible, transforming her face into one that reminded any other individual of superciliousness and pomposity that was sprinkled here and there with the faintest tint of obliviousness and pampered confusion. She would force out a “How do ya do, Mr. Jeduce?” or and occasional “Why Mr. Jeduce, it’s been a while. Not tryin’ to disappear, are we?”. Aiden would nod and respond quietly, every time, with: “Mrs. Wright, it’s very nice to see you. The flowers are beautiful.” Mrs. Wright never thanked him for this compliment, although he uttered it every week without fail. Quite on the contrary, Aiden always found her reaction to be aggravated. Squinting her eyes, she would tilt her head to the left and offer a final, slower nod, every week.

Silence left Aiden with a copious amount of time with which to think. Because of this a pensive and relentlessly meditative demeanor developed and had begun to define the boy to those who surrounded him. His coworkers christened him “the dreamer”, smirking every time he passed. Aiden was much too harmless a creature to stumble upon cruel treatment from these people, yet they remained too perplexed and bothered by his curious character to find him endearing in any sense. Noiseless yet sharp, Aiden was quick to respond in his muted voice, though he on no account ever made an attempt to initiate a conversation or topic. This made any dialogue held with him an awkward one; his gaze was one people squirmed under, one that fashioned any type of communication in such a way that it existed solely to end.

Excitement for his new job had dwindled before he approached the bus stop to start his first day; the air didn’t seem so fresh and the surroundings less and less foreign. The people in Raleigh City seemed oddly alike all those he had ever encountered, which, upon taking his long-felt desire for innovative personalities into consideration, can be viewed as a universal tragedy. Aiden’s narrow compilation of acquaintances stroked him blandly, coming into contact with him only when the tedious communication pressed upon them as a desideratum for propriety. He had learned to be strategic in his movements and activities so as to prevent an occurrence as catastrophic as inadvertently bumping into one of these plaster contacts on the street or around the neighborhood, and his observational nature assisted him in doing so. The sight of Aiden Jeduce, therefore, was a rare one indeed.

Though happy to rid himself of the obligation of listening to the mind-numbing chatter that streamed from the mouths of such persons, Aiden realized that he was slowly falling from contact with not just the petty inhabitants of his apartment building, but with humanity in general. The intervals between actual conversations held with another human being swelled, he found himself going for days without uttering more than the grunts and murmurs necessary to get him through work. The true annoyance that vexed him was not this, however, but the fact that complete lack of interaction didn’t bother him at all. He enjoyed the freedom of spending most of the day lost in his thoughts and drowning in his own calm voice; the bounds of anxiety that wrapped around him every time he spoke with another were broken and laid on the ground beneath him when he was alone. There were times when the extensive solitude discouraged him, but he never endeavored to change this simply because it was a challenge for him to talk to those around him; he feared this now as he had feared this his entire life. People generally liked him, though thought him to be odd. The masses seemed to accept him and the individuals followed accordingly. He had ceased trying to conquer his shyness; he had learned to accept it as a silent yet beautiful way of life.

The sound of rushing cars enveloped Aiden, folding over and gradually saturating him in the fluid glory of the city. The day promised to be another standard July day. This didn’t bother him; he enjoyed July in Raleigh City. The weight of the humid, sweltering air only burdened him until he sat down at his bus stop and allowed the synthetic breeze of the busy street to fan and pacify him. He sighed and dropped his clammy hand to his side to swing limply. Biting his lip, he stared into the sea of steel and hastening glass that flowed majestically before him. The penetrating sunlight, ever-present in every other corner of the city, danced when falling upon the street, only to be caught by the windshields of the cars and the glistening of the metal. It was as if the activity of the street shunned and attempted to hide the light, only allowing it to gush through at its weakest points. The light, for the most part, was thwarted by the pursuit of this commotion; one didn’t notice the blistering heat when it skipped upon the surfaces of the quickening automobiles. When the light shone through, however, it ruptured forth from the faded paint and smeared windows with a blinding luminosity too vivid and intense to be gazed upon by the naked eye.

This was observed curiously by Aiden, who had marveled at this very battle time and time again. This scorching Tuesday was not the first time he had allowed his mind to dwell on the thought; it was the very first detail to clutch his attention when he first sat on this green bench 7 years ago.

Part I: The Absensce