flickering

Thomas was the sort of man to turn the lights off whenever he left a room. However, he was not a particularly environmentally conscious man, largely because he considered most of the people who are a bit off in the head. He did not buy organic produce, asked for plastic bags from the boy who bagged his groceries, and left the water running while he brushed his teeth – but without fault, Thomas always remembered to turn off the lights when he left a room.

In the very rare occasions that other people were in his house, usually workers, as Thomas had never really had any friends, he would follow them about and make sure that they did too. His salary allowed him indifference towards his utility bills, and the figure hardly ever changed as Thomas was consistent in taking seven-minute showers and hardly ever had enough dishes to warrant using the dishwasher – Thomas simply turned the lights off in a room because he had left it. The room was empty without him in it. That was that.

He woke one day and felt morning press against his body like a curious animal, warm and clean smelling and cautious. He left it in his bed, ate, showered, dressed without ever really watching where his hands went or what they picked up; he found himself at work in what seemed just a moment later, with the vague feeling of not knowing how he got there, although he could, from his office window, see that his car was in fact parked in the lot across the street. Work was a vague blur too -- he felt as if he were drifting through the day and as he drove home he could not for the life of him remember who he had talked to or if he had even met any clients, which was extremely troubling, as he was an insurance broker and clients were very important -- making the right impression was crucial. He remembered only one conversation, which was gnawing at his stomach and made him grip the steering wheel quite a bit tighter than usual.He had briefly left the blurry state of the day to find his boss sitting at the desk opposite him, asking if he was alright or if he needed to go home. While his boss seemed genuinely concerned, drawing attention at all from him did not reflect well on Thomas. Even during the conversation, he remembered saying very little, distracted by the man's enormous, bristly moustache that he was so famously proud of. Seeing that Thomas was usually an incredibly focused worker, the fact that he had walked through that entire day at work like it was some unattached dream was deeply disconcerting. He needed to be focused if he were to be considered an asset at work -- if he didn't want another visit from his boss under very different circumstances.

When he got home, it was dusk and the house was dark. The front door loomed over him as he approached it, like it was the entrance to an unfamiliar place that carried an unpleasant history with it. He reached into his pocket, found his keys, and began searching for his house key, which was old, rust-colored and scratched. While Thomas could find about a dozen small silver keys, sleek and shiny and moving as fast as fish in his fingers, the house key seemed to be largely missing. With a great sigh, he bent down and slipped a hand under the grey doormat for the spare key. The edges of it were sharp and cold, and as he unlocked the door, it bit into his hand, hard enough for Thomas to check if he’d actually managed to cut himself on it. As the door swung open, there was the stomach of his house: completely dark, and musty smelling, as if it had been uninhabited for years, and for what was not the first time, Thomas wished that he did not live alone.

Dinner was a process of dicing and stirring. He had the hands of a surgeon, despite doing paperwork in an office; they were methodical and careful to a point, hardly ever wavering. People often complained that they were clammy when he went to go shake hands with them, but Thomas rarely shook hands with people in general. As they chopped onions in deliberate and heavy moments, Thomas reflected on the oddness of the day – the vague blur that seemed to have replaced his normal routine. The memories of it already seemed to slip away even further, falling from his head like an unimportant dream. The heat of the stove and sound of the wooden spoon against the metal pot did little to counteract the chilling quietness that lingered in the house like a fog. When dinner was done, eating was mechanical: jaw clenching, unclenching, food that tasted like fork, hand up and down like a lever.

After dinner, he dumped the dishes in the sink for another time. Usually, doing dishes was something that Thomas rather enjoyed; the warm water and circular rhythm was soothing, serene, something he only ever found elsewhere when he closed a deal at the office, but today, he was exhausted. He went to his room to get ready for bed, flicking the light switches on and off and on and off as he entered and left each room. He gently shed his suit and folded it to be washed later, neatly laying it on the chair in his room. He always did this, with all his suits, as he hated, the epitome of unprofessionalism. And yet, for a brief moment as Thomas got into bed, it looked nothing like a suit at all; it was a shed skin, paper-thin and fragile. Thomas rolled over, and as he settled into bed, the complete darkness of the room, the house in its entirety, seemed to settle into itself too.

~

The next morning was less a curious animal, and more a bitter drink, washing down his throat in some choking, necessary manner. Thomas found a new suit and blearily tried to fit his body into it. His eyes kept closing of their own accord and what was usually a ritual seemed a puzzle, square arms trying to fit into circle sleeves. He looked forward to work, where there would be order and discipline, where he could escape whatever weird mood held him.

When he arrived, the great slate grey building looked down at him like a crack in the cement, but the glass doors swung open easily enough, and Thomas took the elevator up to the fourth floor, which seemed to be filled with strangers. It wasn't until he had left the elevator that he realized they were the people he had worked with for years: Karen and Wallace and Jim, all who had smiled so kindly at him in the hallway. Thomas did not often speak with coworkers, or anyone really, but he could remember Jim congratulating him on some of his bigger sales, and Karen sometimes smiled at him when they were both at the water cooler. Names he should definitely remember considering his general lack of human contact.

When he got to his office, Thomas felt claustrophobic. Usually his office was a comforting place, a temple of productivity, success, and efficiency. Problem cases came here to be solved, and problem clients came here to be managed; Thomas was the worker who outshone, outdid, and outworked all of his coworkers. Today, however, the glass walls seemed cold. All of the lights on the floor shone in to glare at him, spotlights for the stacks of paper mounded up on his desk like cliff sides, for his surgeon hands which trembled and shook. And here, Thomas encountered a feeling he had never before experienced in the workplace: inadequacy. Thomas thought back to the bulky body of his boss pushing its way into his office, and was determined to live up to his normal standards of work. This was the place where he could shine.

Clients came in and out all day, and Thomas felt as if he were in a fish bowl, muffled and swimming in circles. He was still unsteady – he felt ignorant under their singular wanting stare, as they looked him with more and more questions and insistence that he could not seem to answer. Words rattled somewhere in the back of his head, words he needed but could not pronounce. At one point he was talking to a woman representing some company, who had tiers of wrinkles hanging from her face. She talked for what seemed hours and at the end, Thomas simply asked what “annuity” meant, and she promptly picked up her bag, papers, and left. Thomas kept a collection of notes, congratulations, and gifts from superiors in his company commending his good work, all proudly displayed on his desk and walls. He was known for being informative and articulate with clients, if a bit cool at times. This was unheard of; something was wrong with him. He could not think and it seemed that the morning’s bleariness had never left his body.

As he gathered up a pile of papers to take home with him, a coworker approached him. She had dark hair, a pencil skirt, and the chemical smell of perfume without the pleasantness of the perfume itself, and Thomas, for the life of him, could not remember her name. She invited him to go out for dinner and drinks with a group of the other workers, which he quickly but politely declined. Even if his day hadn’t been so utterly odd, he did not know what he would even drink, not considering the fact that he could not remember their names, and did not have topics appropriate for small talk at hand. He could hardly talk about folding suits and chopping onions. The drive home was long.

When he got home, his house seemed even more foreign to him than the night before. He was exhausted – not in the dead tired sense of the word, but pale, wan, ready to sleep for weeks. The entire house towered above him, stretching up into the sky only to glare down at him. He was not a small man, but he felt childlike under its gaze, a son standing before a stern father once again. For a brief moment, Thomas considered driving elsewhere to sleep, finding a hotel, a roadside inn, before he realized he did not have a reason to. If someone were to ask why he had done such a thing, what could he possibly answer?

Thomas unlocked the house quickly, as if afraid someone might see his odd hesitation and think him less for it, and turned on the light before even looking around the room, as if afraid of what he might find. In a fit of something, Thomas could not say what exactly, he began to rush into all of the rooms, flicking all the lights on as he could defeat or dispel the strangeness of the day by breaking his own habits, furiously filling his house with light as if to conquer it, expose it, bring it under his control. When he finished, he stood in the middle of the living room, barren walls illuminated, front door still half open, chest heaving as if he had just accomplished some great athletic feat. He felt as if he stood alone in a museum, but the blank walls of his house were utterly devoid of art: faceless as a dream, cold as his fish-like keys, stark and bitter and empty. Thomas imagined his life like that -- bare, pushed under an interrogation light for examination, a bristly moustache twitching this way and that with each question. A shudder unfolded up his back.

Shoulders collapsing back down into his natural state of slouching, Thomas dropped his briefcase on his plain red couch and slowly crossed the hall to his room. His suit fell as he undressed, fingers crossing and uncrossing and when he climbed into bed, he looked back at it on the floor. It looked less like a skin, this time – more like a crumpled body waiting to be used again. Something with a substance of its own. Thomas lay in bed staring at it, wondering what the word annuity meant, wondering how in the world his mind could be so empty of anything at all. He lay there for a while before realizing that he was not falling asleep. A quick glance at the clock showed that it was only 9 o’clock. He had gotten home around 8, skipped dinner, skipping everything but trying to sleep, but he had no interest in doing anything else. At this moment, however, Thomas realized he had left every single light on in his entire house. It was glaringly bright and open, and he felt exposed.

For the first time, Thomas wondered if he had OCD. Surely leaving the lights on shouldn’t cause such nauseous worry. Surely work shouldn’t be dominated by thoughts of office lights. Regardless of whatever was causing it, the lights were on and he felt like a ghost in his own house – transparent, as if the different rooms had turned their great pale faces towards him and were staring at him from every direction, the intensity of their eyes reducing his body to something less. The floor was cool under his feet as he went through the house and turned the lights off, body seeming to grow smaller and smaller which each room despite his feelings of transparency before. Thomas climbed back into bed and stared at his crumpled-body suit. Sleep was not easy coming. There were shadows moving in the dark.

~

The next morning, Thomas woke and did not move. Morning lay on him with all the weight of the house, and Thomas’s lungs did not move to breathe. He began with hesitation – unsure if his chest would move at all and upon finding that it would, taking great, gulping gasps of air. His clean suit hung in the open closet, a dark figure wanting to be given life again. Thomas stood up with great reluctance, and showered. Feeling a bit more awake, he dutifully made eggs and toast, and then approached his bedroom once again. Putting his suit on required more effort than it ever had before. His fingers fumbled on the buttons at least four times, his pants were crosshatched with wrinkles, his socks were missing, and his shoes didn’t want to lace . . . Thomas was ready to return to bed once dressed. But, remembering the steadiness of his own father, who’s only missed day at work that Thomas could remember was the day of his heart attack, he knew that returning to bed was not an option.

In driving to work, Thomas encountered two problems. The first was a streetlamp on the end of his street, flickering on and off. Thomas stopped and sat at the intersection right next to it, transfixed. His stare was broken only when a car rolled up behind him and its very angry driver started honking. The second was that Thomas did not seem to want to go to work. His trembling surgeon hands led him on three wrong turns while his mind was elsewhere, and even when he began to focus, he found the turn signals more and more difficult. He rolled into the parking lot hours late, but hardly noticed. When he got upstairs, his boss was waiting for him in his office.

"Thomas. It's 1 o'clock, Thomas, did you not notice?" Thomas could not remember his name. "We had complaints from several people about you yesterday." Thomas shifted in his chair and tried to remember yesterday, and couldn't. "Rather unusual, if you ask me." His boss paused, as if waiting for Thomas to say something, anything in order to defend himself. Surely he, one of the firm's best, could not have become defective in such a short period of time. Thomas remained silent, afraid that if he opened his mouth, he might scream, shriek, that his mouth was only full of trembles and lights and exhaustion; there might only be mechanical noises from a mechanical mouth and that would surely frighten the man. His boss sighed. "Thomas, do you need some time off? Do you want to go home?" Thomas felt like a child sticking his tongue out in a nurse's office to have his temperature taken, only to have the nurse say that he didn't have a fever, would he like to go home, they could call his father who would not leave work or pick him up and Thomas would sit on the curb for hours. He did not want to go home. He shook his head hard, mouth tightly shut and eyes downcast. "I'm trying to make things easy for you, you know, why not help me make them easy for you. I know you're a hard worker, what's going on?" Silence. "Why don't we move to my office, there's a bit more privacy there." Thomas followed him into his shuttered office and sat in the plush chair opposite him. His boss began talking, talking, talking, there was a mention of holiday time racked up over the last 8 years, which Thomas had never taken, an old woman with tiers of wrinkles who had dropped their company, hours missed, and Thomas heard very little of it. He stared at the light hanging from the ceiling. It buzzed. It was an old model of something that was not quite a chandelier, but grand and gold. It flickered, and Thomas stared. He wondered if it would tip one direction or the other, life and death and fullness and emptiness; the light flickered, and for a moment, Thomas did not exist.

A great sigh from the man opposite drew Thomas back, from what might have been years. He was in a large room, lined with bookcases and neatly stacked documents. The man across from him had a great big mustache, an angry nose, eyes that seemed to beg Thomas of something though he did not seem to have anything to give. He looked down and his hands were empty. Wordless, Thomas looked up at the man and back at his empty hands, and deciding that he had nothing at all that the man could want, left. Once out of the building, he noticed there was a tinny noise coming from his pockets. He emptied them out and found keys. But what were keys for? He walked, and walked, familiar roads leading to familiar roads all the way back to his house. He found home from its hostility. He gladly walked into its stomach.

The house did not have any lights on. Light streamed into through the windows, just barely, as it was still overcast outside, but Thomas was disgusted by it. He went through the house closing all the curtains, blinds, blocking himself into the solidity of his house, which became heavy and full in the light's absence. Too heavy. He quickly darted from room to room, turning on each light, exposing each room which held too many secrets for his liking. The fullness dissipated under his careful eye.There were no shadows hiding behind the bare furniture; the only monsters here were his plain red couch, his bookless shelves, his wrinkled pants. Upon seeing his disheveled state, Thomas threw his clothing from him, ripping the fabric of his jacket in the process, stomping on his heels to rid himself of these shoes, and sat in the middle of the living room. It seemed to sit up and watch him.

Thomas sat for a long while, wondering when was the last time he'd felt so thin, malnourished, anemic; the suit across from him seemed to have a fuller frame than him, to straighten its back into some classical Roman arch. Then, he could hear something moving from across the house -- the spare room, as if someone was sitting in there, whispering. Concerned, he crept closer to the door, needing to know what lay behind it but afraid of what he might find. The closer he got, the more he heard; it was a man, softly crying to himself, not speaking, but whimpering. Soon the whimpers turned into racking sobs, but when Thomas opened the door there was nothing -- a small storage space that he had never really used, an empty room with nothing but a leftover desk to fill it.

Then Thomas heard it --this time from his bedroom. There was a cry, a choked sob or scream coming from his room. Thomas ran over and searched his room for the source like a lost prize, his house key, the name of his boss that escaped his lips so constantly. Someone somewhere was heaving and retching and sobbing in his room. Thomas ran in, ripped open drawers, threw his closet doors off their hinges, tore his bedding away, checked under the bed and found nothing and no one. He ran throughout the house looking for the source of the noise which seemed to move from room to room like a ghost for what seemed ages, before realizing that he, Thomas, was the source of it; his hands were clawing at his face, blood ran down his ruined nails that he had once kept so clean. He was exposed under all the lights, all of his flesh had been torn from his body and there was nothing left. He stumbled and his hands groped the walls like a madman, a starving man looking for a promised feast, an escape from these angry lights that searched him for fault, only to find too many for counting. He sat down in the middle of the living room, facing a blank wall which was white, white, white. His suit sat opposite him, looking disapproving and hungry. He stared up at his ceiling lights, and they stared back.