Shoes

            “Bert,” said Molly from across the open floor, “shoes over here.”

            The thrift shop was really just an old three story home, shabby and dimly lit, converted years prior to sell useless throwaways.

            She uncaringly turned and waddled on, curbing her right hand around the bump on her abdomen as she went. Bertrand had dropped some book back into a blue plastic bucket and walked over to where she had been standing. He evaluated the pairs, picking up some to see the size listed in the inner heel.

            He sifted the boots and heels away, attempting to set some order to the chaos. His eyes twitched, and he rubbed his nose – he quickly devolved into throwing useless shoes over his shoulder as he went. Finally he found a shoe, his size and appropriate to wear at work. It took another few minutes to find the other of the pair in another box.

            The laces were worn and tattered to break, but otherwise the shoes were very plain and well: an uncharismatic dark brown. A sticker with the number “5” was on the left toe marking the price.

            By the time he had finished, Molly had waded heavily down the steps to the first floor. After tossing the rejects back into the buckets of shoes, Bertrand followed with his new prize.

            She had found some books and a wooden toy with different colored rings.

            As they checked out, Bertrand said, “I have to change the laces on these – how about I give you two dollars?”

            The cashier agreed easy enough, though Molly still patted her husband on the back with some feeling of pride, seeing the way he bargained. It helped that he paid for the toy and her books.

            She felt another swell as he stopped the car at the grocery store and went in to get new laces. How diligent he was, when his mind was set.

            At home, he laced the new shoes, putting them on afterward and walking about their two-bedroom apartment.

            “How do they feel?” Molly asked.

            “Good,” Bertrand told her. He gestured to his used pair in the corner: “Definitely better than those.”

            She smiled, but then looked back at her phone and made a kissing face as she took another self portrait.

            He picked up the old pair in the corner and exited the apartment, walking out toward the building’s dumpster.

            The parking lot lights hummed as he stepped through the twilit evening.

            At the bin he took another look at his old shoes. The heels had worn away, they now only blistered his feet around the Achilles when he wore them. With some satisfaction he tossed the pair up and watched them come down into the garbage.

            While walking back into the building he found himself staring into the skybluepink of evening air. The cluster of trees nearby swayed; a twinkle of light bled onto the grass, turning darker green in the fading hours of the day.

            “It doesn’t matter, I suppose.”

            He walked back to the building and into his apartment.

Bertrand and Molly spent the rest of the evening scrolling through websites and applications on their phones. He turned on the television and watched several episodes of a show. She casually gazed at whatever he watched, then went back to eying her phone, occasionally making a video or taking a picture, expressionlessly sending it into the looming dark surrounding their apartment complex.

            Soon night passed in the corners of the building and blotted out the small fragments of light, so all that remained was the luminous blue of the screens issuing into the faces of their watchers.

            Quite unexpectedly, the remote turned the living room to black, and the shapes of a man and woman rose and walked laboriously into the den of their slumber.

Bertrand felt a grip of thought; his left side uncomfortably warm, and though he moved his face to the other side, his mind would not settle again. Soon his eyes opened and he turned to his phone and began scrolling through news and social feeds. For twenty minutes he continued to look, occasionally petting Emily’s head when she would whinny an unconscious sigh.

            As he was almost halfway through an article about some politician, his alarm began. His phone only vibrated in his hand as he touched the end button on the screen.

            He rose and began his morning routine: showering, shaving, eating breakfast, and lastly putting his socks and shoes on.

            Molly woke to kiss him goodbye and lock the door behind him as he left.

            The drive was just long enough to chip the edge away from something in his mind; his shoulders became tense and his fingers often fiddled with the radio, never remaining on a station more than a few moments.

            He mumbled some inaudible word or sang along with some tune. But something had wilted by the time he turned into the parking garage and walked up the first flight of steps to the suite.

            His office was a bland room of an off-green color – one of the junior, windowless, inner-rooms of the firm. He had some corporate art on the wall beside his desk, a picture of a sail boat, though he had never sailed. Otherwise the room was rather drab.

            Yet Bertrand never seemed to suffer by his surroundings. He always kept himself busy with work, having an ongoing malleable list which he would follow, one project to the next.

            Not that he felt passionately for his job, but Bertrand could not stand the hours of idleness constantly creeping in, saturating the day with boredom. Doing something, anything, was better than watching a clock slowly tick the hours by.

            Most days he worked through his lunch with an inattentive drive to just keep doing something.

            And it was because of this ethic, if that is what it could be called, that Bertrand was often selected for coming ventures, usually a few steps above his position. His boss had even made public that he had recommended Bertrand for an upcoming promotion, though it had not been confirmed yet by anyone higher up the chain.

            “Bert – are you alright?”

            “What’s that?”

            “Are you alright? I just couldn’t find you after lunch.”

            “Yeah, my head was hurting, so I went outside and sat down on the bench and, I must be tired or something, I think I fell asleep.”

            “Oh,” his assistant Jess said, “well that’ll only get worse after you have a kid.”

            “Yeah, I must be on autopilot or something, I don’t remember coming back inside.”

            When Jess left his office, Bertrand took a bottle of aspirin from his desk and swallowed several tablets without water. He then massaged his temples for a time, staring into his motionless computer screen.

            After a little while, he began working again on some line item automation for a coming presentation.

            “You’re home. Why are you so early?”

            He looked at her with a vacant gaze. Silently Bertrand walked to the sofa and sat down. Molly rung her hands watching all the while as he unlaced his shoes, taking them off and holding them out as his elbows rested on his knees.

            “What’s wrong?” She moved closer and sat next to the silent creature, gripping his exposed wrist where his sleeves were rolled. “Are you OK?”

            “What was that?”

            “Are you alright?”

            “Yes, I’m fine,” Bertrand said, blinking and looking around the room. He slowly put the shoes on the floor. “I’m sorry, I must be out of it.”

            “Is something wrong?”

            “No,” he mumbled, scratching his face, “I, uh, I don’t know. It feels like when you get into the car but can’t remember the drive home. All day I’ve felt like I have just been going through the motions.”

            “Well, Mondays can be like that, you must be tired.”

            He glanced out the window and something caught his attention which he could not precisely see.

            “Yes. You’re probably right.”

            The couple ate dinner and she spoke about her day, but his mind kept moving elsewhere and his attentiveness to topics waned. There, a spot of mustard color in the carpet; the window and the leaves outside, still green, though turning. When finally she would go quiet, he would mechanically say:

            “Yes,” or “Yes, dear.”

            But plainly there was something else he was trying to grasp, which simply was not present in the one-sided conversation.

            Molly kept talking, unobservant of his internal plight. She went on, complaining about her day, her mother, her pain. It was not enough to say “good” or “bad” – details had to be given, inflections had to be made.

            Could she not see him, wandering away into the recess of some dark thought – perhaps trying to summon his own inward sound?

            “What would you like to watch?” she finally asked as they both sat on the sofa.

            “It doesn’t matter, I suppose.”

            So she chose some show which they let play on loop, episode after episode.

            Molly played on her phone while Bertrand continued to absently gaze in a direction – off center from the screen.

            And though they eventually went to bed and she turned off the lights, he stayed awake for several hours, tossing and turning on the pillow before finally closing his eyes to sleep.

He woke groggy and exhausted, following his morning routine with the power of habit rather than thought.

            The dark pools of coffee seeped into his body without much effect. The burnt edge of some toast sat on his plate emotionless to his existence.

            “You better go, or you’ll be late,” Molly said.

            He looked up as if the words had not reached him. Then some recognition changed on his face and he said, “Oh. Shoot, what time is it?”

            “Almost 7:15”

            “Oh, I better go.” He packed the last bit of himself to go before saying, “I’ll see you, duckie.”

            When he returned ten hours later his eyes were just as vacant and ringed with darkness as they had been when he woke in the morning.

            Bertrand did not toss about again in the night, but instead remained awake, staring into the whirling pools of the colorless, dark room.

He blinked, staring into space where their sofa was, then in his windowless office at the chairs across from his desk.

            Was that enough to know what had happened between the moments? He had disappeared and woke somewhere else.

            What day was it?

            John stepped into his office, knocking on the ajar door. “Hey Bert, how’s it going?”

            The body of Bertrand mumbled an “oh” sound.

            “Look, I know you have been under a lot of stress here, and at home, but look, you need to be more careful with these long breaks for lunch – I know you’d never do the firm harm, so this is more of a formality. But hey, if you can’t be here the whole day, it’s going to make things complicated. I’d hate to see anything jeopardize your standing here, you know.”

            Unfortunately though, Bertrand’s work only became that much more erratic. The consistency he once demonstrated only eroded, and he would either deliver nothing at all by deadlines, or else submit false and fallible models. His scripts seemed only half finished, with abundant and egregious problems.

            Jess once opened his office to find him staring into the manila-colored walls – she spoke for some time before he finally acknowledged her. But even as he spoke, there was something different in his voice, something not quite there.

            People said it was the stress, that he was losing too much sleep and his orientation to detail was becoming askew. Things would get better, they said, after Molly had the baby and he had some time to rest and come back.

Molly asked when a good time would be to go to the hospital.

            “I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

            “Well, if we go on the 15th, you could get the extra days for Thanksgiving.”

            “Yes.”

            “You’re right,” Molly continued, “we can talk to the doctor first, but I think we can make it work.”

            He stayed silent, scratching his face occasionally.

            “Still, it would be nice to have the extra days off.”

            He looked at her with a lackluster expression.

            Could she not see he was suffering with some twisted thought inside? Something wholly different from the awkward questions she posed again and again to his uncaring body.

He splashed water on his face.

            At work again.

           He wiped his eyes with a paper towel and threw it away. Then he took a cup from an open box on the counter and placed it into the coffee machine.

            There was something soothing in the sound of the water being drawn from an unknown source and slowly heating. But the hose-like whine it gave as coffee trickled into the paper cup was less calming.

            He tasted the black water, and one of his eyes twitched.

            “Oh, hey,” Jess said, entering the empty kitchen.

            “Hey, what’s up?”

            “Not a lot. I just… ” She paused for a moment. “I could have gotten you that.”

            Bertrand laughed: “I can do things by myself too, Jess.”

            “I didn’t know you drank your coffee black,” she said.

            “Yeah, I usually don’t. My dad used to drink plain black coffee like water. I don’t know; worth trying something different.”

            The two smiled at one another, and Jess said, “I know things will get better soon.”

            He looked puzzled.

            “I mean, just what people are saying; I know you will bounce back.”

            “Yes,” he sighed, “well, I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

He did not have much involvement as Molly packed her bag; Bertrand stood in the doorway with another bag, already full.

            “Is work so bad?” Molly asked.

            “Yes,” he said, somewhat surprised at the direction of the question. “It’s just a lot to get done.”

            “It will be good with the extra days off. I’m glad doctor Rhoads could squeeze us in.”

             He remained silent in the doorway.

            “We should go then,” Molly said, “I’m almost done.”

His wedding ring rattled on his finger, contained only by his unchanged knuckle. Bertrand twisted it around his skin, watching the gap between his finger and the metal.

            When had he eaten last?

            His eyes moved again about the room. The window whistled with the pass of cars from below. The chair in the dark rocked gently back and forth. Hollow eyes pierced the shadows, like a cat’s eyes, though without color, moving this way and that, and stopping, blankly penetrating.

            A thought wrinkled and fell from the mind, colorless and ugly. The dead thoughts of once owning a home, of once being promoted, of a life of luxury never to be realized, malted away in a decay of the motionless vessel.

            It had taken so long, and his attention waned. But then it happened, there it was. Its small hands. He was still somewhat surprised how unclean the whole procedure had been.

            She had already taken a picture and sent it away to the dark chasm surrounding their existence. She must have thought he was amazed with it, but there was some glimmer of feeling behind his blank eyes which was not of the caring kind.

            Most do not recognize it. It is avarice, cloaked as amazement when the vessel of man is silent.

            The gaze continued even now to move over the small limbs and small nose of the weak thing, unaware and unbeknownst of the universe it had been born into.

The first night after they had returned to their apartment, she stirred in an empty bed, looking around bewildered. The covers had been left off and the door to their bedroom stood ajar.

            The baby lay unaffected in the crib as Molly walked out into the living room.

            She found Bertrand at the dining table, his palms facing down on the wood. His eyes moved and his body rocked gently back and forth. His lips moved slightly as though he read an unknown, inaudible incantation from an invisible book. It did not appear as though he noticed her walking up next to him.

            She grasped his arm and his lips and eyes stayed for a moment. He turned his head slightly and his eyes looked up to her face, but they also seemed to look through her without recognition.

            She spoke a hushed sound of a question.

            “It’s not something you should worry yourself about.”

            But his voice had changed, as though some darker presence had grasped his vocal cords.

            Molly took a step back, confused at the way her husband was acting as he turned his head again to the table. A moment of lull passed between the two of them interrupted only by her asking:

            “Why are you wearing your shoes?”

            “It doesn’t matter, I suppose.”

            “Bert,” Molly said, lifting the crying baby out of the crib – she looked at him, aghast. “How can you act like this?”

            She tried to soothe the child, but failed to alleviate the gathered cry of exasperation. Bertrand sat unmoved, staring at the two with his odd, laconic gaze.

            “When are you going back to work?” she asked.

            He turned his head to the side and looked out the window of their apartment. He let go a heavy sigh, but said nothing.

Bertrand’s eyes stared apathetically over the disheveled apartment. His chest rose and fell with each heavy, asthmatic-like breath.

            Some noise rattled and echoed in the prison of his bound thoughts.

            His mind and body were no longer connected, nor were they under his to command. He was no longer the master. Someone, something was there, moving his body, clogging his mind with darkness.

            It moved him about the apartment, settling in their room and sitting on the edge of their bed, staring unemotionally at the helter-skelter mess. The closet left open, the drawers flung out with clothing strewn about the floor.

            Her shoes had been taken.

            He sat there, perhaps for hours, staring at each fallen and hollow item.

            A dark shadow began to grow over his brow, covering the dark rings of his eyes and crook of his nose, finally touching near the top of his lip where his mouth began to curve into an ugly, inhuman smile.

            “It doesn’t matter, I suppose.”