A middle aged man wakes in his modest studio apartment wakes to an alarm which he lets buzz for about three minutes.
Harlan walks into a diner and sits to across the table from his friend, already halfway through his modestly sized pot of 'Morning Bru' coffee.
"Lucky they forgot lock up last night. Just about everyone's quit their job these days." Harlan says
His friend smirks. "Y'know Harlan, you say that every day"
They both laugh.
Harlan, a broke sports journalist started yesterday morning watching the highlights of the college football. Yesterday was a very long time ago.
"What are you doing today, old friend?" Harlan asks.
"Sitting here, watching people out the window. The usual" the old man says blankly.
A tanker crashes aimlessly into the paper mill next door to the diner. The driver climbed out of the cab and set her broken body on fire with a gallon of gas she had to hand. She screamed of course, but it started as a laugh. Yesterday she spent the day watching over her sisters toddler aged children. Yesterday was a very long time ago.
Harlan and the old man shrug off the screaming.
"What was on the morning news this morning?" asked the old man.
"The anchors had sex in front of the cameras again, they do that most mornings" Harlan sighed.
"She has nice breasts though, doesn’t she?" the old man smiles, his face a million wrinkles, like a medieval map of the world. "What did you bring us today Harlan?"
Harlan never really drank to get drunk until today, but he made sure to go to the liquor store early to get the good booze before the place got looted thoroughly. He had grown tired of the aged whiskey he was saving for his daughters wedding. He pulls out of a large paper bag a bottle of whiskey, wine and vodka. Harlan took little stock in the name brands recently and more or less looked for alcohol with interesting labels.
“I’ll take the wine Harlan; I’m not much for that hard stuff.” The old man smiles as he runs his fingers through his soft white beard. He pulls out a cigar from the front pocket of his dark coat. Harlan follows cue and pulls out his pack of light cigarettes. The white cigarette hangs from Harlan’s lips and smells dirty. Harlan coughs uncontrollably as he tries to begin smoking it. Hacking up phlegm he self consciously tries to conceal with his palm, the old man says: “someday, that’s going to kill ya, kid.”
They both laugh.
Today Harlan is driving the ’57 bel air he stole this morning. His situation, as everyone’s situation, is conducive for learning new things. He’s found carjacking to be a useful skill.
One of his simple pleasures is driving a new car every time he wakes up.
Harlan drives down Main Street in an old and takes a left at fifth. This leads him to the mall. Taking a right at fifth would take him to the bar and strip club part of town, which today would be a mistake. The mall is where the looting takes place, which is usually a jovial affair if not almost an art form.
Everyday the mall is renewed and unguarded: a fresh canvas for all that is living to destroy. Some people favor stealing electronics for the day, others steal fitness machines they’ll never use, CD’s that will be gone at nightfall, all put back in its rightful place when the day is over. Some people graffiti the place, which Harlan appreciates more. Something about denouncing such a vulgar place in this manor seems almost poetic.
SAME DAY DIFFERENT SHIT is spray painted on the wall above the book store that Harlan enters. Harlan moves to the back of the store. In the fiction section, third bookcase third shelf down, fourth book from the left, is a copy of
Sierra is sitting in a loveseat opposite the solitary chair Harlan usually occupies.
Sierra is a mousy twenty year old who used to work at this bookstore to pay for the college tuition that her generous scholarships didn’t cover. She chose to wear dark stockings underneath her skirt, a blouse revealing an almost distasteful amount of cleavage and a pair of reading glasses sexually let three fourths down her nose. She isn’t wearing underwear.
Harlan wonders why she even got dressed at all.
Harlan is the opposite of sierra, he is middle aged, overweight. His pectorals, once his greatest selling point during his football playing years had began to sag a decade ago, his hair is thinning and a dark gray, his face red and tired, but Harlan is absolutely certain that he could have sex with sierra anytime he chose.
He hated this the worst about sierra. The fact that she had let her obvious intelligence slip was one thing, but to be such a whore was quite another. Harlan couldn’t even really be sure anymore though. He might just have hated the fact that he was determined to be faithful to his wife. It was perplexing to him why he even came to this particular bookstore.
“What are you reading, Harlan?” Sierra asked flirtingly. Stupid question really, he’s been reading the same book everyday for the last thousand years.
Yesterday, Harlan’s wife went on a business trip. She took their daughter and all of the money. Yesterday was a very long time ago.
“
“
Harlan felt an excruciating pain in his soul. One, Sierra’s ham-handed segue between classical literature to his penis was always a painful one and one she tried often and two, he was actually considering fucking this woman for a second.
“What do want from me, Sierra?”
“What do you mean, Harlan?”
Harlan stands up and lunges at Sierra, his left hand clasping her arm and his right grabbing her hair, forcing her to make eye contact with him, his breath still smelling of alcohol. “Don’t play fucking games! What the fuck do you want from me?” Harlan screams.
As she begins to cry: “I want to be with you!”
Harlan lets go. He quickly fumbles for a cigarette and lights it. Still furious, but at least posing calmly he asks, “Why? What’s the point?”
“Wh- what do you mean?”
“What kind of future do we have?”
“Fu- future?”
Harlan raises his voice again, “Yes, future, we get a mortgage, mini-van, we have kids, have grand kids, get to live happily ever fucking after”
she looks at Harlan, teary eyed
“We don’t have a future, Sierra.”
He leaves Sierra on the floor crying, she’s crying so loud he can hear her as he walks out of the book store and past the couple fucking against the window of a chucky cheese.
Harlan hastily drives past main street and doesn’t realize he’s driving towards the bar and strip club part of town until he’s there. As he sees the bars and strip clubs, the dive casinos, the pawn and gun shops, he can only imagine what kind of horrible shit is going on behind those thick, steel plated doors. He hears the sound of possibly 30 or 40 couples having sex coming out of the catholic mission on eighth, and hears the muffled screams of women and children coming from O’Malley’s, the sports bar.
He sees what he would swear was a priest trying to mount a dog.
When Harlan reenters the diner drunk its already late afternoon.
“You know how many times I’ve lived this day? This same day, on repeat, over and over and over and over again? How many times I’ve killed myself and woke up this same goddamn morning? Surrounded by these people who just fuck and steal? Do you know what its like to know that nothing you do matters? Did you know that my wife stopped calling me decades ago? I bet my daughter doesn’t even know my name anymore.”
“Why? You old fuck!” Harlan slurs. “Why?”
“You know why, Harlan”
“God damnit, you old bastard!” Harlan runs over and grabs at the old man and by the wrists and holds them up. His hands are a tapestry of a million little scars, culminated in a square one, about half an inch wide on both wrists.
“What the fuck were these for then?”
The two men share a silence that seems like it lasts forever.
“You have a warped sense of humor” Harlan finally speaks up, his voice hoarse.
“I died for you true, but you screwed it all up” The old man says sadly as he lights another cigar. “I kept giving you chances, and you screwed them up too. It got so ridiculous that I decided to give you infinite chances. One after the other”
“I didn’t fuck this up! What am I supposed to do? What about, y’know, sending the bad people hell and the good people can-”
“It don’t work like that kid. Being good for fear of hell’s no good at all”
“What am I supposed to do?” Harlan asks, crying.
“Suffer, kid. Suffer”
Harlan sits at the booth and opens the bottle of aged whiskey he was saving for his daughter’s wedding and drinks it silently.
Night falls on the tanker wreck outside, still trying pathetically to stay on fire. Harlan, still a little drunk looks into the eye of the old man. The old man eyes are wet and tortured, a contrast to his face blank and broken.
"When are going to stop this?" Harlan asks. knowing the answer he has been given for too long.
"Whenever it stops, it’s up to you."
Harlan gets up, weakly and walks out of the diner, "see you later my old friend"
The air is cold and smells like gasoline.
Harlan walks into a diner and sits to across the table from his friend, already halfway through his modestly sized pot of 'Morning Bru' coffee.
"Lucky they forgot lock up last night. Just about everyone's quit their job these days." Harlan says
His friend smirks. "Y'know Harlan, you say that every day"
They both laugh.
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