He walked into the room-lagoon, archipelagoed with humanity. Floundered in the pool, scrambled quickly and shoaled himself on the shore-wall. Is this the line? This is the line. A circular line can’t be a good sign. Time moves but nothing else. He brought a book; he can bear anything. Cackling kids at the counter, silent kids sitting behind it fiddling lackadaisically with phones. What was private is now public; gossip is for all; each man is an island yearning for its continent. Is it the continent we drifted from so long ago, the gaping bay receding in the distance behind us? Or the other continent, the one heretofore unseen, with mythic mangroved deltas, brambled shores, the false hopes of pre-Columbian fecundity? We move in geologic time, yet we constantly see tragic tectonic drive-bys, boats missing their marks or colliding in bow-breaking storms of wood and metal, blood and bone. He hears it but half doesn’t want to, half more than most. He turns unread pages slowly, turns back in shame (or is it pride? Is shame pride?). Bells jingle and vacuumed wind whooshes. 

Fieldgaze thy tiny frow. An elderly lady walks in, dragging a squealing wheeled cart. Homeless? he wonders, half in fear, half in disgust. She signs her name to a clipboard on the counter, seats herself silently and respectfully. Not homeless? And is the clipboard the line? It’s the line. He’d’ve known by now if not for pride (or is it shame? Is pride shame?). He walk timidly to the counter lined with high stools. List on a wooden clipboard: name, reason of visit. Arnold Smith. Repair. How many ahead? Four. Walk back and sit down. Girl beside him, college-aged, frayed nerves. Cute? A little frumpy. A bike helmet laid against her bulbous white calf, explaining the rolled-up pant leg. Eyes sparkle with thinly if admirably contained panic. Mutual nausea is enough to create a kind of working sympathy, he read once. On other side of the bike girl a middle-aged black man sleeps quietly in his seat. On the opposite wall dapperly reclines a latino John Travolta. “I’ve been here since three,” he hears someone say to no one. It’s now around five, he realizes, and they close at six. Redness and sweat build up on his face. Fight or flight? Normally he’d fly, but when else is he going to do this? He could come back on a Saturday, perhaps, but isn’t it better to merely waste the rest of an already wasted work day? He brought a book, he remembers, he can bear anything. As if to remind him of the folly of that belief, his swollen bladder begins to press uncomfortably against his beltline. He is paying of the price for the beer he drank before he left the office, he knows, but also enjoying the benefit of the warm alcohol buzz which somehow is lending his circumstances a certain piquancy they wouldn’t soberly have.

The concrete room is sided with white-washed plaster walls, lined with yellow and gray streaks, tin ventilation guts visible hanging from the ceiling. Two walls are sided with flourescently lit glass cabinets containing fake-looking, disused wares. The entrance is all glass; surely meant to be inviting but conveyed only business’ appropriation of gawking, fishbowled pop culture. We are all Davids living in glass houses, gleefully slinging stones at invisible Goliaths, invincible Sauls, honest Jonathans, lascivious Bathshebas, innocent Uriahs, meddling Nathans, unaware that in this apocryphal world Absalom keeps his hair cut short and Joab’s knives are sharpened only for us.

What is worse, to feel horror as disintegration, as your world falling apart? Or to feel a pain of a constituent and centripetal nature, pain as integral?