Portrait of a Hollow Man

By Orlando Chavez

"Slowly his eyes open. He struggles to separate his eyelids which have been sealed shut by the crust that has formed overnight."

With these words begins our journey thr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ennui Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989714629

Book preview

PortraitOfAHollowMan-FrontCover.jpgTitlePage

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

4:13 am

5:23 am

6:17 am

A Portrait of the Spider

6:42 am

8:17 am

A Portrait of a Stranded Driver

9:12 am

11:19 am

12:31 pm

1:00 pm

1:14 pm

1:47 pm

2:26 pm

Dialogues with a Therapist

3:00 pm

4:37 pm

A Portrait of a Driver at a Stoplight

5:15 pm

A Portrait of a Supermarket Cashier

5:48 pm

6:30 pm

8:03 pm

A Memoir

11:49 pm

A Portrait of the Dog

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

To Nixon and to all my other pets past, present and future.

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion

—T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

4:13 a.m.

Slowly his eyes open. He struggles to separate his eyelids which have been sealed shut by the crust that has formed overnight. He transitions from the darkness of his sleep to the darkness of the room, only able to make out the slight outlines of the nightstand and the lamp next to him. Slowly he turns over, patting around, looking for his phone to confirm the time. He assumes it is around four in the morning. As he rolls over, he feels a jab into his spine. It is the book he went to bed with the night before. He tosses it to the side. As he rolls back over, he feels another jab in his ribs. It must be his cellphone. Despite the fact that he has read numerous articles about the negative implications of having your phone in bed, and how it should be in another room, and how bad it is for sleep health, he still takes it with him each night, and falls asleep with it beside him. It’s a slight miracle that the phone hasn’t broken after having a man roll on top of it countless times. Fumbling with the buttons, he finally manages to turn on the screen. It takes a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the light. He sees that it is 4:13 am; his guess was close enough. He has never needed an alarm, and will only set one if he has an important event such as a flight, though even then he finds himself waking up a few minutes before the alarm. His internal clock has been accurate most of his life, yet he still finds himself constantly checking the time. He’s now awake three hours earlier than he needs to be, but he can’t force himself back to sleep. He was born to be both a night owl and an early bird, which he is glad about; he finds sleep a waste of his time. Though, after reading articles and listening to doctors, he knows this is not the best mindset for his health.

He lies in bed, aware of the weight of his duvet and pillows beneath his head, looking up at the darkness of the ceiling. The room appears empty, mirroring his mind – both are usually filled with more than they can handle. While he wishes that he could use the extra time that being an early bird affords him to be more productive, and do something like exercise or read or finish some chores around the house, he cannot find the motivation to do any of it. Instead, he reaches for the phone again and again. He realizes why he should leave the phone in another room before he goes to bed as he checks to see what day it is. When he was a child, his mother would scold him, calling him dumb for not knowing what day he lived in – since then, he has not let a day pass without acknowledging the date. It is January 20th, the third Monday of the month.

He remembers reading an article claiming that the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year. The holidays have ended and people now have to pay the debts they incurred to pay for all the lavish presents, many of which have already ended up in the trash. The days are dark with little sunlight, and the weather is cold and miserable. He hasn’t taken on any debt and he prefers the lack of sunlight, which helps ease his headaches. The cold temperature outside is the only thing that bothers him this time of year. He opens up the internet browser on his phone and is reminded of the things he was looking at before falling asleep. First, a reminder of last night’s basketball scores and the disappointment of having lost a few dollars because, despite being up by twenty at the half, the Lakers decided to take their foot off the gas and not only did they not manage to cover, but actually managed to lose the game. The only thing that made that pill a little easier to swallow was the fact that LeBron James had lost, although he also felt like an idiot for having faith in LeBron James to begin with. James would never be Michael Jordan, and for him this was further proof of that. He pulls up a video of the infamous flu game: an absolute classic. Jordan goes from sitting on a bench trying to hydrate with a towel over his head to absolute greatness on the court. He admires the sheer force of will, but he knows he will never make any effort to try to reach a level like that.

Next, he checks the weather. He checked it twenty times online the day before and watched the report on the news. For as long as he can remember he’s been obsessed with the weather because it’s one of the few things that occasionally manages to surprise him in life, but today is not one of the days that it will surprise him. Partly cloudy skies in the low twenties, with snow likely in the evening. That was the weather prediction a week ago, it had been the weather prediction last night, and it is still that this morning. He looks at the radar map on his phone and sees a giant blue blob signifying snow, rolling slowly towards the direction of his town, further confirming the predictions.

Remembering that he had made a post on Instagram, which is a rarity, he scrolls to see what the response, if any, may have been. It was a picture of his dog sleeping. He remembers feeling a bit depressed when taking the picture. The head full of white hairs on his dog’s head, along with his saggy jowls and the tear stains running down his eyes, which made the dog look like a raccoon, reminded him that his dog’s time in this world was short and that the company of his dog would be gone sooner than he would like. He had captioned the picture with a generic sentimental quote about the woes of getting old. He felt that between the picture and the caption the melancholic mood he had experienced had been adequately captured, which now made him think about what people meant when they liked the picture. Did they just like the picture, or the fact that he had posted? Or did they like the sad sentiment that he felt, the fact that he was sad, or was it just an instinctive reaction to like a post from somebody you know? He feels that to like something online is a gesture that is so empty and automatic that it does not even serve to acknowledge the existence of what was posted. Most people, including himself, probably can’t remember one thing that they liked in the past week. He reads the random comments from scammers offering free pet goods and offering to promote his page. Now he’s not only depressed by the feelings from remembering what had gone through his head when he took the picture, but he is also dejected by the emptiness of these interactions on social media, heralded as a way to bring people together but having the opposite effect.

As he scrolls through his feed, he looks at his post and begins to wonder what it was that compelled him to make a post to begin with. Was it the small hit of dopamine from seeing strangers like what he was sharing? Was it some narcissistic need to show off? He concluded it was simply an attempt to communicate something, although based on what he’s now seeing, his intended message seems to have missed the mark.

Slowly, his thoughts on the matter fade out and he begins to mindlessly scroll through various posts of the latest memes. He can’t help but occasionally chuckle at some of the more creative captions for the overused pictures, followed by a sense of disappointment in himself for falling for what feels like such lowbrow humor. It is a brutal cycle in which the momentary boost of levity from the meme is followed by a dive into depression, which he then attempts to make up for by looking at more memes, leading to further feelings of depression.

He starts to think about that word: depression. It is a word that he knows he overuses to describe how he feels, to a point that it has lost all meaning. What an odd word. When one depresses something – for example, the brake pedal on a car – a weight is taken off it, but when he feels what he describes as depressed, he feels a tremendous weight on him.

Growing bored of social media, he switches back to his web browser and reads up on the news. There is no breaking news, so most of the things he sees are the exact same things he had seen on the news the night before: shootings at home, war abroad, markets are up, people are poor. He starts scrolling to the entertainment section, and an article about an actress he is vaguely aware of catches his eye. Again, he knows celebrity gossip is something he ought not to entertain, but the website has fulfilled its purpose of getting him to click, and there he is reading about the latest divorce between two actors who had been married only a year, and have a child together, and the accusations of abuse surrounding the husband, which he denies.

He’s halfway through the article before he switches to Wikipedia, where he went down a strange rabbit hole of topics the day before. He had looked up the battle of Verdun, which led to World War I, which led to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which led to the Habsburg Dynasty, to Otto von Habsburg, who was the last surviving crown prince of the empire, to Ian Paisley, who was an Irish Protestant politician, to ecumenism, which is where his path had ended before falling asleep. He enjoys these journeys with no destination, and considers them one of the better ways to spend time on the internet. He often likes to think of two random things and try to get from one entry to the other by only clicking on links in the articles. It is an utter waste of time, but it is one of the more satisfying itches to scratch.

5:23 a.m.

Just as he is about to get into the article on ecumenism, the click-clack of his dog’s nails can be heard across the hardwood floor. Although he has been awake for an hour, he has not yet collected the energy to get up, but he knows if he doesn’t collect the energy now, it will mean more work later having to clean up the dog’s pee. The sound grows more distant until it stops, meaning his dog is at the front door and he has less than a minute before his dog will simply let it go where it stands. He jolts up, grabbing his sweater and putting on his moccasins. He looks for his phone in the darkness, tossing the covers off and patting his hands across the bed. He looks at the screen and checks the time: 5:23 am. He hurries to the door, careful not to accidentally run into a wall or step on the dog. He attempts to yell at his virtual assistant to turn on the living room lights. The combination of the dry winter air and early morning grogginess makes his voice croak, and he coughs as the words come out in a jumbled mess. To his surprise, the virtual assistant lights up in acknowledgment of his request and a second later the living room is bathed in a fluorescent light. He squints and jerks slightly as his eyes adjust to the sudden brightness. He checks to make sure that the dog has not already peed on the small carpet, there to wipe your shoes off on as you come in. The dog stares at him with its tail wagging, probably going crazy holding in the urine that bloats its tiny bladder. After he opens the door, the dog cautiously but quickly steps outside. He has never needed to put a leash on the dog. The dog is small, fat, old, and has never made any attempt to run away. As a matter of fact, it has been a while since the dog has attempted to run at all.

Despite having been in a hurry to go outside, the dog takes its sweet time looking for a place to urinate. The snow on the ground makes the dog walk with trepidation. Too often, the dog has made the mistake of