The coffee pot had exploded. Or so it seemed given the trail of grounds wending its way like a tributary off the counter across the small kitchen floor and under the refrigerator. Though a mere trifle, the fact that it had traveled so did not bode well for the condition of the living space that he now occupied. One might find that the stove which had been installed some twenty years earlier was now at a cant of some few degrees forward. The exterior walls at a different height than the inner columns. A subtle difference perhaps. But one that weighted the occupant down with an additional concern. Would the whole damn place collapse around him forcing him to abandoned the same without anything more than the clothes on his back.
That is of course, if he didn’t fall down to the pavement along with it! He dared not imagine it! A lifetime of memories. Everything from his past. From the legacy of his deceased parents gone. He knew that if he was evacuated out of the damaged building having been condemned that the reigning authorities would never allow him access again. Would not even allow him to pick through the rubble to search out the merest of trinkets. A total disaster. It seemed funny how one little disaster would invariably harbinger a much greater one? Universal chaos one might have supposed? The halcyon of a era ruled by fears.
Should he move? The thought crossed his mind. But to where? He was a pauper. Or at least virtually so. Too old to find work in a society that might value anyone. That was his prevailing mindset. As long as they were twenty or so years younger than he was. Older people were screwed! That was the underlying message by inference. So it was better as usual to try to put it out of his mind. In his case he was very successful at the same. His fears, real or not, were salved quickly by the diversion of online programming. Stories of old Hollywood stars in equally unreal situations. Fictions overlaid with fantasy yet again. The rise up and the enforced ignorance in the possibility of a fall.
The dream best recalled from the previous night seemed cautionary at best and something more grim when examined too closely. A four lane urban highway in the middle of town. Its gravel gray sunlit concrete pierced by several oblong openings uncharacteristically large running crosswise from his side of the curb to the other. Some indescribable entity whispering that they should be avoided as the outstretched arms of the many tenants hidden within were wont to pull passersby into the grave-like fosse. Perhaps a haven for the damned though not so obvious as to sprout flames or volumes of brimstone heated fumes. Still ominous none the less.
The choice of three films to bide the persistent bottomless headache of the night before being a formerly popular tale about Utopia. One that was conjured far before the notion of him had even crossed his mother’s head as an imminent possibility. Funny how when scratched the surface of every want and desire around one there seemed to be a derivation of a movie script lurking somewhere? The thought those phalanxes of hands grabbing at his ankles if he were so wary to travel too close across the road gave him pause. The gods were no longer favorable in his case. And like some anti-hero caught malingering by the snitches of Mount Olympus he was beginning to suffer increasingly from them relating tales of his ongoing hubris.
This land was governed by fear alright! Too many were ready to confess. Maybe that was the real reason his neck would ache and the resultant unrelieved tension would advance up the cords of his neck like a dagger to the right temple of his skull case. Maybe that hellish grin of death so famous throughout all time was naught but a migraine? Could it not be so that so much thought over what was inevitable was a wrecking ball of its own? Considering that there was a consistency to his existence that unilaterally concluded imminent collapse it seemed likely that this brain aneurysm was a mechanism of his own devising. A diversion as well as an excuse.
Sympathy? The worst companion anyone could invite into their lives. Better to pet a rabid rat! The view from above tended to focus people’s attention downward or towards a horizon. Was it lost as the film suggested? Or just a question of misdirected focus? After all tension bespoke obsession at the very least. And obsession suggested leaving out the proverbial frost for the sake of a morbid fascination for a single representative tree. The mechanical nature of habits making the abnormal seem happenstance at times. He could obsess on the presupposed meanings of his dream or conversely chase the lingering feeling about the foggy portions of his inner being.
The cards of the Tarot came to mind. The thirteen card harvesting number sixteen. Rebirth leading eventually to collapse in what might be reckoned a recycling scenario of contiguous existences. None being the same, but markedly similar. Movies actors spoke their lines. The memorable ones, those that could marshal the best approximation of what was indisputably true emotion reaching down within and jerking a tear. And in advancing years of those suffered by the more elderly segments of the audience doing so most reliably. Utopia seemed the name of another ocean liner gone off into the fog to find its lost sister, the Titanic.
There was something significant in the lava-like grounds that had flowed earlier. A quality that like tea leaves could suggest the future to those who were experienced in reading such things. The meander across counter and floor so curious as to inspire the trailing garment of a ghost having come to visit. A reminder of the past for the querent who like the character bestowed with his lantern upon the ninth of the deck. The seeker like the movies main character stalwart in his quest to look across the mountains for his Shangri-La. The path was now cleared away. But the stain of its travel still lingered clearly seen and waiting within him.