Thomas Preston Looks Up: Part 1

Thomas Preston wasn’t an unusual man. He wore medium-sized horn-rimmed glasses, dark blue jeans, sported a Grade 3 haircut, and kept a clean-shave—his wife liked his baby face unhidden by red scruff, and he didn’t mind the routine of a fresh shave in the a.m.

He filled the sink with warm water and shook the Barbasol until he felt the foamy contents reallocate themselves and equally distribute their weight in the metal container. His Razor sat in its holder on the sink until he grabbed it and dunked it in the shallow pool of water collected half an inch above the drain. Face evenly lathered; he applied the razor at an acute angle, 33 degrees, and slowly dragged the three fixed knives along his cheek and down his neck. He did this four times on each side before applying 10 light strokes above his lip. He dunked his razor between each swipe—the whole process took 7 minutes: prep time included. While he did this, his wife washed her own face and applied the various ointments and creams strewn over their dual vanity. Between her creams and his aftershave they could sell the tropics bottled; if only they could capture it and market it effectively.

Every morning, without fail, his Angie would hold his face between her hands and make sure he knew she loved him—taking full advantage of his helplessness; she kissed him: coconut-mango lips. Thomas always made sure not to rub the fruity concoction off on his coffee cup or through the natural course of the day; if she couldn’t be with him at work, she could at least linger on his lips so he could enjoy her phantom kiss always.

They parted too soon for their liking, but she worked as the head chef at a bistro downtown and he worked at the law firm between 1st and 2nd. Neither of them owned a car nor a motorcycle nor a moped; instead they biked together (she led the way) until their routes diverged on Crimson and Gold; just before the cafe where they sat, sipped coffees and shared a cinnamon roll every Saturday morning—each with their book of the week fresh in their minds ready to impart theories, and dual-synthesize the story they silently shared Sunday through Friday.

Friday the 13th of February was no different: Thomas and Angie woke up: 6:15, teamwork made their bed in under a minute (they were systems people), Thomas trotted downstairs to relieve himself in the half-bath while Angie did the same in the washroom connected to their bedroom, they rejoined at 6:19, Thomas brushed his teeth, shaved, Angie smirked at him, the washroom air sent them to the Keys, they each grabbed a breakfast bar from the cabinet next to the fridge, Thomas tightened Angie’s helmet strap (he meant to fix it last night—it’s fraying on the left side, bound to snap, but he didn’t get home till midnight from the firm. She would be safe, but he made a strict mental note to fix it for good tonight no matter what time he returned); they unhooked their bikes from the wall in the foyer and exchanged one last look before cycling away together—Thomas in tow. Angie continued down Sycamore St. as Thomas took the next left onto Elm. “See you at 4:30!” She shouted already halfway out of earshot. The air wiped crisply across his face. He could feel the minty lotion he’d applied after shaving push further into his pores. The day was listless, but he was vibrant with young love.

He greeted the red light in front of him with a deep exhale, rested his bike against the metal of the crossing pole and made a waterfall out of the water bottle wedged into the cage screwed into the stem of his bike connecting his handlebars to the wheel axle. His eyes greeted the sky as his muddy saliva diluted. Thomas indulged in looking up.

⟡⟡⟡

When he was a boy he and his father went on walks in the woods behind their house. Thomas would shuffle his feet while wishing his eyes could burn a hole into the ground beneath him so he might fall through and be dislodged from this misery—often bored with the activity and wanting to join the neighborhood boys in their baseball game. He played short-stop: a position you had to earn. He would run, leap and dive through the rough dirt—slowly excavating whatever fossilized bugs and vermin were buried within its soil with his cleats.

His father didn’t speak much, but during one of their walks he looked down at his son: hating the ground beneath him wishing he were anywhere else, and asked him what it was about the brown leaves and tree roots that interested him so much. Thomas said he wasn’t looking at “that stuff” he was staring at his shoes.

“Son, to look up is to live.” Thomas jerked his line of sight away from the leaves to his father—all he could see was the Adam’s apple in his throat stretching and cresting through his skin as he craned his eyes to the sky. His father knew a poet rested within his son’s heart; he would just have to warm him up with the hearth of knowledge: “What’s the point in looking up? It’s always the same,” Thomas sulked. His father untwisted his neck and the apple in his throat returned to its cave, “It’s never the same son. Right now I’m walking with my son in the woods behind our home, I’m the oldest I’ve ever been and so is he, the clouds above me aren’t cumulonimbus, or cirrus, or stratocumulus, they look to be altocumulus resting somewhere between 6,000 to 20,000 in the air, and in a moment they could alter. Where there was once a bunny hoping from patches of blue the wind could shift so the bunny flies away and a swirl of something new fills its wake. All of this is happening above our heads Thomas. We won’t know it exists if we don’t look.”

⟡⟡⟡

Just as his tongue stopped feeling like sandpaper the bank across the street released a screeching alarm. Thomas’ gaze returned to earth and his awareness found its focal point, the crosswalk said “GO” so he went. It was turning into one of those weird mornings where you got up at the usual time and left home in the usual way, but something’s different—everything’s tilted, slightly ajar. The roads were too empty, like half the people knew to stay home or at least delay their start. Everyone present appeared unphased by the blaring alarm screeching soundwaves in a radius of who knows how far—Thomas was right next to the bank and he thought of the cliche, “too loud to think.” He surveyed the area one more time and realized no one was looking up. Why isn’t anyone looking up? Biological? Phenomenological? What the hell was the matter with everyone, and where on earth were the police? Or a firetruck? Or something—anything!

Thomas wasn’t a fan of mysteries. Anything that was unknown to him—he determined himself into learning its core as quickly as possible. He was like that as a child and all the way through undergrad; it’s the defining feature of his that enticed him into law school at 23 years old, and it’s what led him to his Angie. So when he cupped his hands around his eyes and leaned against the laminated glass he went against his better nature.

Empty. No tellers behind the front desks, no customers in line, no fire, no man with a gun—just a red strobe light accompanying the urgent screech siphoning any sense of peace from his body. Thinking he carried the only pinch of sanity in a 5-mile radius he wrapped his hand around the door handle and pulled himself into the Bank’s alcove. Now it was just him and the ATM—which usually displayed a colorful screen saver of some far-off mountain landscape or winding river, but was currently filled with static: millions of grey and black pixels shaking next to each other as if huddling for warmth, or to find meaning.

He walked through the second set of doors into the main lobby. The glare from the sun hitting the floor-to-ceiling windows hadn’t created a mirage of nothing: there truly wasn’t anyone there—just Thomas and a crescendo of worry. He was starting to feel like some sorry sap written into an especially cruel Stephen King tale. He didn’t doubt a theatre full of people would be cursing at him to get out, but something was luring his instinct to help—pulling him further into the bank’s shroud.

A flush light ceiling mount flickered overhead. Thomas gave its misbehavior a glinting look—you don’t mean anything, he thought. He recessed further and his ears picked up on a faint hum before his brain could connect any meaning to the sound. It was—a woman’s voice? He floated closer to the melody then paused in front of an awkwardly large brass door when he realized she was singing a lullaby—one he recognized:

The song melted away as the mystery woman’s voice shuffled into tears. A man growled, her sobbing halted, Thomas listened ear to door: locked. “I’ve been more patient than I should be.” Footsteps. A second man’s voice walked along the tide of the mystery woman’s soft tears; the two felt connected—in cause? Thomas—a soul ready to help, but stifled by the locked door between him and them, surveyed his environment. There was of course the door in front of him (useless), no municipal help in sight (still), and a whistling air vent above him: no one’s coming to save us. Without thinking too long he MacGyvered his way up into the air ducts and began to crawl. As he wormed his way through the tunnel system the trio of voices oscillated between piano softness and forte crescendos. 

“Don’t tell me that Henry”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Henry, Henry, Henry” the man tis-tsked, “you and I and this little lady’s baby here all know that assistant managers have most, if not all, of the capabilities as fully fledged managers. The only discernible difference between the two is the pay.”

“Look man, It’s not like that here. They don’t give us access to the vaults. I don’t even know the code!”

The man cocked his head to the side and gave Henry the once over—salvia pooling under his tongue.  “You don’t know the code Henry?” Pause, shift forward, deep breath, exhale.

Thomas shimmied his way through the ventilation system thanking whatever god would listen, for his wife’s insistence that they bike to work over the last year—he was the slimmest he’d ever been. The voices regained resonance the further he pushed his body where it never intended to go. 

“Now I think you do know that code—no, I know you know that code.” Thomas’s claustrophobia started to feel less like a “phobia” and more like a reasonable sensation. Almost there.

“You want to know how I know you know that particular code, Henry?” Thomas shimmied— 

“Because you know a code exists. Not a key, not a thumbprint, or a hand or retina scan—but a code.” Thomas halted when the voices ceased. He was hovering over the man now peering through the grated ventilation system: burning a hole in the top of his head with an acute glare.

“Give me the fucking code Henry!” Baby crying, Thomas plummeted from the ceiling on top of the man, Henry cowered in the furthest corner of the room, and the mystery woman sang:

 And if that diamond ring turns brass,

Mama’s gonna buy you a looking glass…

Thomas woke up to the worst headache of his life. 

Test A Complete.

⟡⟡⟡

His current headache was only rivaled by one he had his freshman year of law school. He’d had them as a child too but none of those compared to this. He’d just moved out to Chicago: alone, no meaningful amount of money, but housing taken care of by various scholarships and stipends. When he wasn’t in class he was in the library studying, and when he wasn’t there he was either working, eating, or sleeping (the three pillars of survival). He had some fun too.

He was part of a book club on campus run by the library: that’s where the killer migraine crept in. He’d felt pangs earlier that day, but brushed them off because he spent the week looking forward to this particular club meeting. The group had just finished Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and he couldn’t stand the thought of missing out on the final discussion. So, he popped a couple Excedrin, grabbed a latte at the coffee cart in the book store, and went for a short walk around campus to pump some blood through his system. It didn’t really help, but he convinced himself it had. When he looped back around to the library’s entrance he saw the usual attendees filing in: Sarah and Jonathan, the couple of the group (they were sweet, but Thomas couldn’t figure out whether he found their public displays sweet or irksome), then there were the two Emmas and Emily: they called themselves “triple E” a curious choice Thomas thought, then there was Angie. She wasn’t a club member because she didn’t attend the university—instead she ran the group as part of her duties as resource librarian. She was working her way through culinary school, and Thomas would have done anything to endear himself to her. He waved at her as she entered the building, but she didn’t see him, or she was avoiding him: he couldn’t tell, and he was desperate to change the mystery of their relationship, or lack thereof.

He made his way into the upper mezzanine: club room 2. Everyone was in their usual seats—they were waiting on him. He took his seat on the left side of their oval and pulled out his copy of “The Martian.” Sarah and one of the Emmas were already arguing over whether the bacterial state of the sand on Mars could have actually made Mark Watney the first to colonize Mars through his potato growing botany skills. Jonathan played mediator (as usual), “Yes, scientists discovered a deadly bacteria in Mars’s dirt. No, Andy Weir couldn’t have known that because it hadn’t been discovered when he wrote the book. Have you two ever considered that you’re both right?”

“No!” they jeered in unison like mind-melded twins.  Tom was far more fascinated by Watney’s unrelenting resilience than the specificity of sci-fi facts: a sort of oxymoron anyway.

Eager to join the heating up discussion he bent over to grab a pencil from his bag so he could keep track of everyone’s thoughts in his usual way, but once he got down there he found there was no way for him to return right side up. It was the revenge of the migraine. He’d denied its existence for too long, and now he was too dizzy to do anything but freeze. Shit. He felt a hand wrap around his back and hug his shoulder: slowly, he was lifted upright, but if anything he felt more wrong now than he had keeled over. The pain was a machine gun and there was nothing he could do but endure. “Thomas? Can you open your eyes? Thomas, are you in there?” Angie was holding him steady, she was far stronger than he ever figured—he had zero resources within him to imagine supporting his own weight. “You with me Tom?”

“It’s Thomas, not Tom.”

“Ahh I see you have enough strength in ya to tell me it’s Thomas not Tom, but can’t find a way to hold your own head up, huh?” She was holding his head up, wasn’t she, and smiling about it too. That explained how he was looking into her hazel hues. “What can I do?” she asked.

“I don’t know. This hasn’t happened in years. I’m not sure if what worked then would work now.” He didn’t realize it was possible to feel your inner ear do a summersault, until now.

“Well we won’t know if we don’t try. Tell me what helps.”

“Well,” he began to slump over but Angie caught him, “My Mum would take both of her hands and press her palms into my forehead as hard as she could. I don’t know if it relieved any pressure, or just caused more pain than it promised to solve, but either way it did something that eased the whole thing off the gas. But I have to be lying down for that—” Angie nodded, very focused: earnest in a way he had never seen anyone before. She went to lie him down, but hesitated after bending her knees ready and straightening her back. She called Jonathan over to help. Together Jonathan and Angie softly lowered Thomas to the carpet—she cradled his head in her hand while Sarah took her sweater and folded it into a pillow for Thomas. Angie knelt beside him, “Ready?” Thomas nodded slow and small. “I’ll start soft and you let me know if you need more.” She inched a little closer to him for a better angle. Her hands were warm and velvety against his forehead, but the moment her palms brushed against him his eyes darted open. “Angie?” She pulled her hands away.

“Did I hurt you?” Tom just stared: more unsteady now than he was moments ago when the room was swimming around and through him. How did you do that? he thought. All of his symptoms ran away to some other dimension when she made contact.

“I’m feeling much better actually,” he sat himself up—hands behind his back. “I think I just needed to lie down for a moment.”  

“Yeah some moment” Jonathan sneered “you were down there for two seconds.”

Angie redirected, “Well I’m glad you’re feeling better Thomas,” she reached out her hand, “can I help you up?”

Thomas took her hand, “Thanks.” She nodded one of her nods, and they all carried on discussing and debating the tribulations of the Martian Mark Watney. Angie offered to walk Thomas to the health center but he felt fine, better than fine. He was quieter than he meant to be, but he felt renewed in life and didn’t know what to think of everything that just transpired. He didn’t even have that typical migraine hangover—nor a feeling of relief. It was more like it never happened.

Angie was certainly looking at him now—more worried than she had been when he couldn’t hold himself upright.

⟡⟡⟡

He found himself in his workshop at home with a strange memory of a man, an air vent and a song swimming between his ears. He was sewing the final frayed edge of fabric to Angie’s helmet strap. How did I get here? A relentless ringing filled his head so he hummed while he worked:

And if that looking glass gets broke,

Papa’s gonna buy you a billy goat…

The only thing was; Thomas wasn’t sewing the final frayed edge of his wife’s broken bike-helmet strap, he wasn’t sitting in his workshop in his Chicago apartment, he wasn’t even in a house. Thomas woke up in a room of white softness—softness on his back, his head and softness filling his eyes. Around him were four cushioned white walls, and in his hands was string he pulled from the stitching that grafted each cubed cloud of crazy together. Thomas looked up from his work now—fingers tired but fueled by sanity. He sat in the center of the room and invited the braided string to trail behind him on his way to the door: an unpadded slab of unforgiving metal riveted together amateurishly. He chuckled in preparation; sanity dwindling—he imagined the ludicrosity of this scene if viewed from a ledge of omniscience. Will this work? He wrapped the string around a loose bolt joining a small rectangle of glass to the riveted metal. He tied the other end around the door handle, took three steps back, greeted the white sky below him for a final time, breathed in, breathed out and launched his foot at the tightly bound braid with enough force to leverage the loose bolt out of its joint. It made a thud on the clouds below him.

A “fuck yeah” grin overtook Thomas’s face as he untied the string from the handle and threaded it through the hole where that blasted bolt used to taunt him. He picked it up from the inverted sky and used its ridges to saw away a section of the skin of his foot. The skin was already dead and flaking. Out of his pocket he pasted a small mound of spit and earwax he’d been collecting for what felt like weeks and smeared it on the face of the threaded side of the bolt as a natural adhesive. Bolt—> natural adhesive—> dead skin—> Now all he needed to do was tighten the hangman’s knot around the bolt and lower it to the key pad—the glass. You have to break the glass for the wretched thing to fit through. He made exaggerated wrinkles with the palm of his right hand, wedged the bolt in there good and steady, channeled all his force into the center of said hand, and made short-lived contact with the glass before it shattered and fell into a collected heap on either side of the door. Careful not to step on the shards, Thomas threaded the bolt strung by the hangman’s knot with dead skin glued on there with his earwax and saliva coconut mango, through the 8 x 4 gap and lowered it to the key pad. You know the combination Thomas…

Test B Complete.

⟡⟡⟡

Thomas’s eyes were still closed but he began to whisper blinks under the shells of his lids. He went to open them but a “shhh” filled his head.

“Keep them closed.” Angie? “Don’t speak, don’t move.” A coconut-mango ghost brushed by his face. “You passed their test, but they’re taking too long. Good job by the way, that dead skin thing was supremely gross but very effective.” Thomas couldn’t even remember getting to use his device—was that even real. “Yes it was real.” She responded to his thought. “Well as real as anything can be I suppose.” He was thoroughly confused now and tired of forcing his eyes closed. “Just hang on a minute while I go see what’s taking them so long.” Who is she talking about? “My people Thomas.” She left, his eyes remained as they were, he was helpless, but for some reason his Angie was there and she was looking out for him.