Apotheosis

Apotheosis



Part One: Can You Smell the Reality?


Three gods sat around the table. They talked, the discussed, they harangued. In the pathway of their speaking, the universe came up.
         “When dreams become reality are dark times,” said one. He smoked a long pipe that extended from his hunched mouth over the small table. His eyes were deep with time.
         “When reality becomes a dream, that is what scares me,” said the second god. He had long grey hair that wisped around him the breeze of that afternoon.
         “Reality,” said the third. She was young and full of curiosity, for the yolk of man had just recently been shorn from the backs of women. Her hair was golden, her eyes  suns. She provided the light for their game.
         “What about reality?” said the pipe-smoker?
         “It scares me,” replied the radiant god.
         “Why is that, younger one?” asked the grey god. None of them were newborn.
         “Who else put me here but the real?” She blinks For a moment, there is an eclipse.



1. How About the Coffee?


6:25. That the godforsaken number that blinks, red, across that plastic relic of the Cubist movement claiming to be an alarm clock.
         “Oh, god.” The world always seems to wake me up too soon, too early to be comprehensible. If it could wait, just a moment, perhaps we’d all be ready for it when the bell rings. But no, here I am, groping for the snooze button atop this wretched black contraption. And, of course, before I hit it:
         “Finally,” she says from down the hall. Her voice would echo, if the hall was longer. “Come in here—there’s coffee.”
         “I know. I can smell it.” I go back to bed.



7:00. Out of the shower, hair wet. I comb the so-brown-it’s-black curls away from my eyes, always curious of that dashing, Old World look I know the public will disdain.
She’s gone now, although the smell—and taste—of the coffee remains. And some of her hairs, too, on the comb that runs through mine. Blonde doesn’t mix well with brown—I pull them out as they go by.


8:15. Where I need to be; where I don’t want to be. That’s the way of things, now. A sleepy dose of awakening juice again greets me with its mellifluous odor as I walk in the door of the office.
         “Hello,” he says, always too cheery. Goddamn caffeine. Or companies-that-know-it’s-addictive-and-habit-creating-damn caffeine. His fat hand points, holding the coffee in remaining fingers.
         “You got something in your beard.”
         I grab, tussle, scratch, and remove another of her blonde hairs.



10:22…and a bit, but you can never catch the second hand when you need to. Computer’s down, again. Something to this, I think; every day it seems that they go down, not at the same time, but by the same interval of time each time. I didn’t notice it at first—its just about a second. Not that I could time that with the moving hand, but mathematically:
         If when the computer first failed it was 9:55, and it’s been 540 days since then, it’s failed at least three seconds later each day. Including weekends, which means the bastard somehow found a way to crash to zero even when it wasn’t on.
         I told the tech-guys this. They said I was crazy. I said they were right: who in their right (or left) mind would count all the damn days?


12:00. I’m supposed to go to lunch now. Instead I’m reading a book.