This Guy

By James Lewelling

It’s about this guy who wakes up one morning in his shitty little room with a complicated and evil scheme all worked out in his head. It’s about unconscious tics and Secure Containment Devices with Multiple and Recursive Feedback Loops. It’s about being haunted by old geezers and derelicts passed out on the sidewalk. It’s about trying to recall all the features of any one human face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Lewelling
• Release date: Jun 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458126894

James Lewelling

I’m just starting with ebooks and self publishing. A print version of This Guy, was first published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2006. A print version of my second novel Tortoise, was published by Calamari Press in 2008. I’ve been writing fiction since 1988. To this end, I have worked in every menial position available in the food service industry, have tended bar at the second smallest pub in London, The Swan, lost and found files for the Bank of Paris in London, taught Berbers the Beatles on the edge of the Sahara, taught immigrants of all stripes the present perfect in Chicago and Milwaukee, been mistaken for a computer whilst conducting phone surveys, been mistaken for an asshole whilst answering complaint letters for a health insurance company, taught writing, creative writing, business writing, developmental writing, reading, Russian literature and on one occasion, algebra. I am currently house-husbanding and teaching The Art of Fiction at the New York Institute of Technology. I live in Abu Dhabi with my wife, the poet, Lisa Isaacson, and our two lovely daughters, Frances and Cecily.

Book preview

This Guy

By James Lewelling

Published by James Lewelling at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 James Lewelling

 Short fiction adapted from this novel has appeared as "Everything

Included in Word Riot and as Chicken"

in The Evergreen Review.

Table of Contents

Part I

Part II

Part III

About the Author

His Sundays were difficult to get through.

---Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham

I

It was the very next morning that this guy conceived of his evil scheme to get even with this other guy (Ned). Though complicated—involving multiple phases and elaborate preparations for each phase—there it was the very moment he woke up, all worked out in his head, glinting in the darkness behind his eyelids like a metallic, freshly-oiled, spring-driven device.

Lying there in his boxers on the mattress in the shitty little room, this guy knew before he had even opened up his eyes that this was going to be a truly unusual Sunday.

(Just to give you an idea--normally on a Sunday, this guy would remain lying on his mattress (or occasionally crawl over to slouch at the table by the window, or more often, roll onto the floor to lie flat on his face) for as long as he could stand it, procrastinating the simple acts of bathing, dressing, and eating in a futile bid to avoid acknowledging the day had begun at all. In fact on the previous Sunday, he had managed it—not setting foot to floor for the entire twenty-four Sunday hours—to rise on Monday and go to his shitty job at the normal time just as if Sunday simply hadn’t happened—a perfect wash).

But on this Sunday—the Sunday on which he had conceived of his evil scheme to get even with Ned, this guy rolled right off his mattress, hopped (literally hopped) over to the bathroom where he brushed his teeth (vigorously), shaved, showered and toweled off without pausing between tasks or even lingering in the shower until the water got cold.

What’s more, he jumped naked right into the closet without giving the matter a second thought, dragged the full length mirror out of the back (he had removed it from the sliding door shortly after he first moved in) propped it against the wall, jumped back into the closet and rummaged around until he had obtained a complete set of the cleanest clothes he could find (black polyester pants, blue blazer, white button down shirt—a combination of his work and interview clothes; he even considered putting on his interview tie but somehow chicken grease had gotten all over the end of it) which he donned forthwith.

Examining his reflection (for the first time in quite a while), he had to admit that though the outfit lacked style (in fact, the combination of black pants and blue blazer looked a bit weird) he was pleased with the overall effect—so neat and clean, even respectable as if the lack of style were the result of a conscious choice rather than necessity.

He turned, giddy and fully cognizant of how portentously the morning had begun (even if he were to call it quits here, return to his mattress and lie there for the rest of the day, inert in his clean clothes, he would be able to do so in the glow of what had already turned out to be a truly great Sunday) and grabbed his keys and wallet from a pair of pants crumpled up beside the mattress, scrupulously transferred them to the pockets of the pants he was wearing, patted the thigh pocket to hear the keys jingle (he didn’t want to get locked out), strode over to the front door, opened it, and stepped out into the hallway.

I’d be careful of that, said Ned, who happened to be stepping out at the same time. You were whistling just now, and you probably didn’t even know it. You ought to watch that. I know what I’m talking about. Ned was dressed in a green jumpsuit with white rubber boots that came up to his knees and holding a shiny new gardening trowel up in his right hand.

Hey! Did you see that guy yet? The specialist? About the muttering? said Ned. Probably not, huh. You probably figured a specialist like that wouldn’t be available in the middle of the night on a Saturday. I certainly wouldn’t try seeing a doctor in the middle of the night on a Saturday even if I were desperate, which I probably would be if I were like you, muttering to myself all the time without even knowing it. But it’s not exactly the kind of thing you can take to the emergency room, is it?  Get yourself locked up that way. People just don’t understand. They don’t understand problems like that. But you could’ve gotten a hold of this specialist. He’s a regular Dr. Kildare. He’s on a mission.

This guy just said, Sure, Ned. Bye. Take it easy, pulled the door closed until he heard the lock click, and brushed past Ned, heading for the steps. In truth, this guy wasn’t even listening to Ned. He was thinking about his evil scheme to get even with Ned. He was thinking: Here’s Ned, my future victim, twittering at me in the hallway, thinking he’s being friendly, thinking he’s trying to help me out. But I’m not listening to a word he says. That’s pretty rude, this guy was thinking, but compared to what I’m going to do to Ned, rude hardly counts.

Sure, said Ned, to this guy’s retreating back. But actually, today I’ve got a lot of work to do. Hey! Aren’t you even going to ask me about this trowel? But by that time, this guy had reached the bottom of the inordinately long staircase. He crossed the vestibule, resumed whistling (on purpose) and bumped out the front door into the weather.

It was an unseasonably beautiful morning, a fall day in winter.  Autumn sunshine tinted everything yellow and orange, and the air felt cool but not enough to be cold, warm with just enough bite in it to make you feel vigorous.  The big tree on the mound of dirt in the middle of the front yard had dropped the last of its leaves around itself in a little circle of orange, yellow and red in the slush. The scrawny tree wedged up against the corner of the building was an explosion. This guy picked his way across the yard briskly to avoid muddying his shoes or tripping over one of the smattering of squirrel holes, whose tops protruded here and there out of the melting slush like the peaks of little volcanoes.

So much to do, this guy thought. First, he would get a good breakfast at a diner somewhere—some real dive, where there probably wouldn’t be any other customers, so, after stuffing himself with eggs and hash browns and bacon and an English muffin—money was no object today; he would order an English muffin a la carte just like that--he could remain in the booth undisturbed for a couple of hours, sketching out the form and dimensions of his little project.  (That was what he was calling it now that he was out in public as if passers-bye would be able to read his thoughts). Then he would head out to a hardware store, buy all the necessary equipment and haul it back to his shitty little room where he would start work right away without any kind of delay or procrastination. With any luck, he could have the overall plan and the foundation of the physical side of the project done before lunchtime, so he would have the whole afternoon free to do what he liked.

(This last impulse indicates just how revolutionary this particular Sunday was turning out to be. On all previous Sundays (that is those spent in the shitty little room and the few (if any?) this guy could remember from the time before the shitty little room) the abundance of free time coupled with its utter superfluity—as in general, there was absolutely nothing this guy wanted to do—was precisely what made the day unendurable. But on this Sunday, hot in pursuit of his little project, this guy actually anticipated with pleasure a few hours of free time in the afternoon when he could in good conscience, having made satisfactory progress in the morning, set aside the responsibility he’d undertaken and just hang out, maybe, in this weather, in a park or at a sidewalk table at a local café.  Maybe he would buy a newspaper or a paperback book and sit at the table with one leg resting across his other knee as he sipped his coffee and read as he had seen other people do on more than one occasion. Maybe he would even engage in an idle chat with one of the other patrons of the café, or if he went to the park, say, a jogger resting a moment in front of the bench where this guy was reading. Maybe the chat would grow into a conversation, and the conversation would take a turn toward newly undertaken ambitions or projects and this guy could share a bit—not too much, nothing about rubber hoses and pulleys, for example—about the project he himself had just undertaken; and just maybe the passer bye—the fellow café patron or the jogger—would take an interest and offer to help. He felt perfectly certain that pretty much anybody he ran into would enthusiastically embrace the need to get even with Ned if they just heard a bit about him and the situation.

(Come to think of it, even to call the evil scheme an evil scheme isn’t quite right. Certainly from Ned’s point of view (if he had known about it, but he hadn’t a clue, the poor bastard) the evil scheme was an evil scheme, but from this guy’s point of view, given the situation and all he know about Ned, the evil scheme was much less like an evil scheme to get even with Ned and much more like a noble project to save the world from Ned. Certainly, that’s just the way he thought about it (this guy), and you can take it from me because I knew him as well as anyone else, if not better.)

But I don’t want to get ahead of myself, this guy thought as he strode along the frozen sidewalks toward a diner he had frequently passed in the neighborhood adjacent to the shitty old building where he lived. First thing, breakfast.

Unfortunately when he got to the diner, it was closed. Actually, not just closed but out of business. In fact, it must have been out of business for quite some time because all the tables in the dining room, normally visible through the big storefront window, had been removed as had the lunch counter; and the only indication that a diner had ever been there was a message scrawled in big uneven letters in wax pencil across the window that said: No eggs! Closed! Out of business! Just like that, complete with exclamation marks.

For a few moments, this guy just stood in front of the empty window, wondering what to do. This guy was a bit disappointed as on the way there, he had really gotten it into his head that this particular diner would be the perfect place to sketch out the physical side of his noble project. He felt it would have been perfect chiefly because a) he had never seen more than one or two customers in the place and b) the salt and pepper shakers he had frequently noticed on the tables as he passed by, squat utilitarian things with chrome tops, would serve perfectly as markers on the map he was going to draw of his plan. For example, he could put the saltshaker on one part of the map to represent himself, and put the peppershaker—identical to the saltshaker except that it had pepper in it—on a different part of the map to represent Ned.  Additionally, if he recalled correctly, these salt and peppershakers had perfectly round bases, so after he had figured out exactly where he and Ned ought to be at each critical phase of his plan—by manipulating the shakers through various configurations—he would have been able to use those very same salt and pepper shakers to trace perfect circles directly on the map.

No matter, this guy thought. If he recalled correctly, there was another diner not much different from the first—and maybe, in a way, better—just a couple of blocks up and around the corner. He’d never seen a lot of customers in this diner either and no doubt the salt and pepper shakers there would adequately serve his mapping needs as well. (Maybe not as perfectly as the salt and pepper shakers at the first diner; but that diner was out of business. What else could he do?).  He started off again.

The sun had pulled itself a bit above the horizon now and was throwing long morning shadows all over the snow. People were beginning to come out. The ice on the sidewalks had gotten slick where it had started to melt. This guy walked briskly but carefully. He didn’t want to fall on his face. (You might laugh, but this guy had to take things like that seriously. He didn’t have insurance and a little mishap