Calendar Year

I don’t have a calendar. I don’t have a calendar and usually I’m fine with that. I walk out of the house armed with the day of the week and sometimes even the time (though never with a watch) and if I did for some unfathomable reason need to know the date, I’d ask. I don’t even really subscribe to the lunar calendar, though I haven’t thought about it extensively enough to formulate a coherent reason, maybe because I’d rather stay in the shallow and agnostic end of the pool than wade into the dark and deep waters of contemplating real things. But I’ve been waiting for a while now, and it’s difficult to wait for a day that feels like any other day, a day you wouldn’t know from any other if you woke up in it, without keeping track of the date. It took me two weeks after I started scheming to succumb to buying a calendar, to which I involuntarily gravitated each morning in the hopes of having slept through more than just one night. It was so grueling and so corrupt of my character that I threw it out ere another two weeks had passed. The agony of waiting didn’t lessen as the months went on until I glimpsed the screaming headline of some no-name-newspaper at a rusty newsstand for a split second on my walk home from my hell job last month.

My boss and my co-workers and my clients and the endless lists of hollow tasks I’m meant to fulfill every day drain my soul. They shriek all day, picking hungrily at my very innards, flocking to me only when the opportunity arises to exploit my working flesh. I’m the ever-pleasant fool of which anyone can ask a favor because I’m also the ever-pleasant fool that pours every last drop of my ensuing anger and bile into fulfilling each favor. Never a trace of affectedness to compromise my glowing mask. But today is the day I make a fool of all of them. After having survived a scathing summer and a long winter, a pleasant first day of spring (and its headline) signaled the arrival of April. I’m aware of how silly it is to put this much weight on a few practical jokes, but I’m past the point of worrying about silliness. April first would be my day of nemesis. Today is April first.

I didn’t expect it to be such a burning day, but even if I had dressed in lighter clothing I could not have been shielded from the sun’s inferno. With every weighted step I became more and more soaked in my sticky sweat as the pearly beads of salt raced down my back and stuck to my shirt. I walked through an almost entirely shadowless city, but I wasn’t all too absorbed in the surreal and video-game-like world around me. Before I entered the brutalist building, I made the stupid mistake of returning the suns glare, upon which ensued about two minutes of unthinking blindness and playing the fool for what I knew would be the last time. As the white blanket on my vision slowly slipped away, I focused on a nearby dog by which to measure my recovering vision, which in my state appeared to have three heads at first. It reminded me of the dog I had as a child, though unpleasantly, as I was forced to recall the horror on my mothers face when she discovered me on the driveway, cradling a motionless dog and pushing back my hair with the bloody hand I had minutes ago used to throw it from my windowsill onto the scalding pavement, thinking that the crying dog would, at the last second, fly away like I believed it would. Now recovered, though in slightly lesser spirits than before, I turned and pushed through the heavy revolving doors into the cool, near-empty lobby. It’s almost like a haven today.

Ah, but the first shrieking greeting. A new face by the front desk that I’ll soon be accustomed to and inevitably running errands for. Still a look of surprise as I introduce myself and wade through some spectacularly dull small talk. I struggle to keep my laugh internal as he stutters, and though I’d rather not exert any restraint on my gleaming day, I know I shouldn’t make him even more nervous on his first day. I don’t recognize the face behind the desk either, I realize and dwell on for an instant before suppressing any memory of the insignificant lives I just barely grazed upon. The sweat from the outside is still wet on my hands, I notice, as it drips onto the shiny elevator floor in satisfied and fat droplets. I’m still wiping my hands on my handkerchief when I step out onto the office floor, sneering at the lingering filth. Frustrated, I toss the piece of cloth into a nearby trashcan and look up, ready for the shrieking and picking and flocking to commence, this time prepared with my magnificent prank. To my surprise, I’m greeted by a sea of faces I don’t recognize, who mirror my grimace. I step back into the elevator and glance at the floor number on the encrusted arc. Floor 8, I’m in the right place. I step back out and look at the expectant faces. Is this some kind of sick joke? 

The bloke to my immediate right by the thirsty office plant drops his cup of coffee. I watch it plummet towards the dirty floor and snarl. Not because the porcelain shatters in a piercing and explosive feat of gravity, but because the tiles look so greasy and so dirty that I can taste them. I can taste their yellow tinge and feel their cracks and scratches on my tongue. Suddenly a dull pain in my face emerges from the dark and extinguishes the revoltingly sour taste of floor by replacing it with an even sharper and grueling pain that emanates from my throat as it washes through my body. It’s accompanied by a crisp wave of consciousness that makes me aware of the syrupy liquid caressing my palms. If it’s still sweat, it’s the most crimson sweat I’ve seen in my life. A ringing in my ears as I whip around my aching head in search of an answer but see only a blurred tableau of baroque faces, gazing at me as if it were my life's work to paint them, waiting for me to return from my delusional artistry to the realm of unclouded lucidity.

I try to focus. In my wake lies a wet trail of red, in the elevator behind me a motionless woman. The oil-painting-faces still swarm around me and bathe me in their noisy warmth but I look up and see the cherry red also in the lobby, where the new faces lie still. I glimpse a bit of the outside through the heavy revolving doors above, where flashing red and blue lights and the sweet song of law enforcement conquer the stage for what would have been my elaborate drama. I never got to lift the curtain. More scarlet as something is torn from my white-knuckle grip. I hear it slice through the tense air as the knife enters my field of vision. The poor man grasping it wipes the beads of sweat from his forehead, revealing the leathery red complexion that lies beneath his worried expression. I must be sick, maybe with a fever. I try to speak to him but the vermillion is reaching me, too, slowly engulfing my sight as I sink into the floor and my restless and ever-waiting sleep takes me hostage again. April second. Another year of waiting for me. But I know I’ll get them all next year.