Day 172: Je Ne Regrette Rien

A police detective knocks on Dan's door

approximately 1350 words

"La Patte de Desie" 
Day 172
Je Ne Regrette Rien

After a restless night, Dan woke at four with an urgent need to take a leak. When he returned to bed, he tossed and turned for an hour before he gave up and headed to the kitchen.  His envelope with the day’s assigned websites wouldn’t arrive for another two hours, so he started a loaf of pain de campagne, having found the recipe in the assignment for day 158. 

         Even Monsieur Désespoir seemed fussy today, or at least needier than usual. He ignored the pate that Dan put out for him. Instead, he seemed focused on killing Dan by tripping him.  After the third stumble, Dan knelt to scratch the cat’s chin while cooing, “Yeah, you like that, don’t you? You just wanted some attention, didn’t you, fella?”

         Desie just closed his eyes and looked indecently pleased.

         Dan let a wan grin bend his lips. “Maybe I should change your name to Monsieur Sous les Pieds. What do you think?”

         Desie opened his eyes and gave Dan a cool once-over.  Who knew what he was thinking, assuming cats thought at all. If he was thinking, it was bound to be all about his own needs and desires.  Desie, like the rest of his breed, was the epitomy of narcissism.

         Cats. 

         Dan shut off the stand mixer which had been whirring away kneading the bread and turned the dough into a bowl he’d greased with butter.  He set the speed oven to “proof,” put the bowl inside, and headed to the living room and the TV.  He settled on a re-run of Columbo.  Desie nestled in his lap, chewed on his paw for a bit, then fell asleep.

         Two hours later and Columbo solved the murder just as the timer on the oven dinged. Time to punch the dough down.  Dan decided he must have fallen asleep, since the envelope with his assignments was half-under the door. He retrieved it and headed to the kitchen.

         Soon after he was in his office, sipping his morning latte, and  scanning the day’s assignments.  The lead one looked especially crappy, maybe the most craptastic ever. He tried to concentrate, but his mind kept wandering. Obsessed, he glanced at his watch. 9:36.

         He chewed his lower lip. His routine had already turned to shit. He’d thought his mind was made up, but maybe he should get dressed.  Just in case.

***

         By noon, the smell of freshly baked bread filled the apartment. Dan buttered a fresh slice and returned to his office to start his daily summaries. 

         It took an hour to confirm that the top item on his list was the crappiest website he’d yet been asked to review.  That was quite an accomplishment, considering. 

         He spent thirty minutes typing his summary and stopped to read the text.

Bell, Sartre, and Piaf: Unwinding the Golden Braid.
Summary. The title of this article is a reference to the book Gödel, Escher, and Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, an obvious and rather pathetic attempt by the author to make himself and his ideas seem smarter than either really are. In any case, the Bell in the article’s title is a mathematician named John Bell, Sartre is some French dude who wrote a bunch of opaque and unreadable books in the 1940s and 1950s, and Piaf is a French vocalist named Edith Piaf, also from the 1950s. 

The article attempts to thread together two profoundly unrelated works, namely an inequality Bell published in 1965 and Sartre’s 1943 tome, L'Être et le néant.  The author proposes a syncretic amalgamation of these two works into a philosophical system in which only the present exists and the past and future are illusions.  The author calls this new system phenomological non-locality and posits that Piaf’s signature song, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” is really a ballad, not to nostalgia, but to this new and supposedly profound philosophy.  The illogic of the proposition that a song from the 1950s is now always has been a ballad for this dopey, brand new “philosophy” seems to have not occurred to the author.

Clear thinkers (it goes without saying that this group does not include the author of this article) will recognize that the only thing profound about any of this is its stupidity, to say nothing of its moral perfidy.

         

         Before he could make editorial changes, his doorbell chimed and sent an electric thrill jittering down his spine. After day four, Mrs. Dalloway had always made certain that deliveries were just dropped off in the foyer outside his apartment. No knocks, no chiming doorbell.  His doorbell had been silent for months.  She was the reliable guardian of his privacy. Of his solitude.  Of his security.

         The doorbell chimed again, followed by pounding.  Dan called out, “Just a moment.”  He took a deep breath and, as casually as he could, strolled to the front door. He peered through the peephole, but all he could see was a middle-aged guy in a cheap suit.  “Who is it?”

         “I’m Sergeant Frederick Wilson with the Tulsa Police Department. I’d like to speak to you, Mr. Black.”

         Police. That opened a ball of ice in Dan’s gut.  He took another deep breath and opened the door.  “What can I do for you, officer?”

         “That’s sergeant, Mr. Black.” He flashed his badge, then continued, “Thank you for taking time to speak with me, sir. This is just routine, and I promise it won’t take but a minute or two. You may have noticed a commotion this morning, around ten?”

         “Not that I recall. What happened?”

         “A guy committed suicide.  Jumped off the roof.”  He held out a sheet of paper with a photocopy of a driver’s license. “You recognize him?”

         Dan accepted the sheet of paper and scrutinized it. The license read Charles Milverton. “Sorry, no, the face isn’t familiar, and I don’t recognize the name.”

         Wilson shrugged. “Yeah, it was long shot. We’re checking with all the tenants. Thing is, we don’t know who this guy is. That ID is fake. No record of anyone with that name living in the state. All we’ve got is a dead body.”

         Dan handed the sheet back to the sergeant. “Sorry I can’t be of assistance. He jumped off the roof, you say?”

         “Yeah.  He had a suicide note in an envlope in his pocket, too.  We checked the security cam for the tenth floor lobby, and it shows him getting off the elevator at 9:57 and heading straight to the rooftop. He ignored the warnings and stepped around that little yellow barrier thing. We also know he had to have been alone on the rooftop.  The only other person in that lobby today was a delivery guy slipping an envelope under your door at 7.38 this morning, and he was there and gone in less than a minute.  Except for the dead guy's real identity, it’s pretty open and shut."  Wilson shrugged.  "Any idea why the rooftop garden’s closed?”

         Dan paused to consider his answer. “None.  It's been closed forever, or at least since I moved in. Mrs. Dalloway would know why.”

         Wilson pulled a notebook and pencil from his rumpled suit coat. “Who’s she? The owner of this place, maybe?”

         “She's the concierge.”

         Wilson’s shoulders slumped, and he put his notebook away. “Oh, yeah. The Iron Lady. She ain’t no help. I’m surprised she let this dude get by her.”

         Dan permitted himself a small grin. “She is quite efficient.”

         “You got that.  Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Black.  If you think of anything, here’s my card.”

         Dan accepted it without reading it. “I’ll do that.  Good luck with your investigation, Sergeant Wilson.”

         “Thanks.  You have a good day, Mr. Black.”

         Dan waited and watched while Wilson entered the elevator and departed. He closed the door, leaned against it, and heaved a deep breath.

         Monsieur Désespoir curled in a beam of afternoon sun and placidly chewed on his paw, inscrutable as ever. For all Dan knew, he might be musing about the moral consequences of phenomological non-locality.  Probably not, though. He was too practical, or at least too self-centered, for that.

         Cats.

         Dan hadn’t thought of it before, but they were a lot like people.