A DAY IN THE LIFE
A Day in the Life
By Jacob Austin
Pete can never decide if the gossamer substance begins its emergence from out of the dark while he is still sleeping, or if an elliptical void hovers over him and something within waits until his eyes creak open before stretching two long, wrongly jointed legs from out of its hole in the air, and, with them, leverages itself out to begin its work.
The grey web papers shut the windows, turning the new day to a mash of word strings and images backlit by a dull orange. Pete’s own hands are at work, slimy yet hard with the flour paste, pressing strips of newspaper to the glass and stroking them flat. The paste puddles beneath his palm as he strains the excess from the coverage. He feels it building until it drips white ooze from the window and onto the wall where some of it dries, and the rest drops with a splatter to the floor. Though he feels himself to be no more than a vessel through which this work is done, he is as comfortable in the act as those animals who build with their own secretions, it being the only way he has greeted the day since his boyhood. Chrysalis construction, he sometimes thinks of it, as if he is disappearing within, disembodied and unarmed, but that would require a metamorphosis, a transformation, an evolution to a higher form, but no such thing takes place. Rather, his work manages to block out the world using its reflection. The world, so desperate to get in, can only whine at the window and read cut-up literature of itself, pressed up against the glass, meaningless.
Once the windows of his bedroom are crusted shut, Pete moves to the next room. He lives alone in a moderately stylish apartment which costs him a larger fraction of his paycheck than he has been told is correct to spend on rent, but he cannot take a roommate, not with his habitual morning routine. To accommodate, he saves where he can, goes out only rarely, and dines like a monk.
The bowl of flour paste and the morning paper, already torn into neat strips, await him in the next room, sitting upon the small table off the kitchen, teasingly similar to a cup of coffee and a prepared breakfast. It is the entity’s little joke, he thinks, as if it were a doting mother who arose before him and had breakfast ready. He moves to the table and dips the first strip of paper into the bowl of paste. It is slightly warm and clump-free. Pete knows not from where it originates. He has pressed it to his tongue, a small taste, and found that it is bready, a little tangy, with a hint of salt. The papers are always that day’s, though sometimes they differ in origin. The local rag still puts out a small print run for the town’s elderly, but more often it is one of the national papers, and, most rarely, some foreign one, sometimes in languages Pete cannot read. What is most shocking about these are the images. Often the papers will be reporting about his own country, but the images of familiar government leaders are astonishing, hardly recognizable in a way that Pete struggles to understand, and must ultimately chalk up to inferior camera technology. He does not have time to investigate. Even if he could make sense of the foreign languages, the pages are torn into strips only a few inches wide and rearranged, so that to puzzle the paper back together would be a Sisyphusian affair.
His hands go about their work. Dipping and stroking, blotting out the day. The windows of this second room are those of glass sliding doors, so that the collage, in the end, is both taller, and wider than himself. It towers before him like a revered art piece in a stately museum, but he has no time to take it in. There are other, smaller windows that need covering, and other bowls and pages are waiting throughout the apartment.
Wars, humanity’s triumphs and tragedies, election results, obituaries, weather reports, natural disasters, sporting results, genocidal tendencies, movie reviews, restaurant openings, financial reports, scientific discoveries, strange occurrences, celebrity profiles, medical breakthroughs, foreign death rates, and anything else considered newsworthy enough to justify the ink comes into the apartment piecemeal, already half-digested, and Pete smears it to the window against the rising sun. At times, there are pieces left more legible, more in-tact, or else certain things are referenced often enough across a range of papers so as to begin to solidify into a signal through the noise, and Pete wonders if there is an intelligence attempting to communicate with him through the endless schlock. At times, he has devoted considerable energy to decoding the messages. After all, they might be important, and he some sort of prophet receiving word from God or else tachyon bombardment, messages sent backward through time meant to guide the present towards some specific future, a long and desperate towline suspended through the cosmos, destiny’s searching tether. He has spent afternoons sitting lotus before the big glass doors in his kitchen, letting his eyelids droop down almost entirely so that he cannot focus his vision. He has tried to let the message constellate before him, focusing his mind into a satellite able to pick up the slightest synchronicity, but all efforts have failed him. Even those which, for a time, struck him like a bell, and with which he ran, sometimes for a long while, as if he held in his hand the secret and had only to deliver it to someone at the end of the hallway, some authority figure who could do something, even if that was only to affirm it. He thought he held the secret, but he still felt himself a powerless custodian, and, as he ran, the hallway stretched on with no end in sight, so that eventually he tired and stopped, dropped the note, and forgot its message, and still, he was in the hallway.
