…What am I doing in here… he wondered. …I came in the room
for a reason… He stood awkwardly equidistant from all the furniture, trying to
reconstruct the moments before. …What was I… he had moved from the office into
the living room. In his hand he held a pair of scissors. …I was doing
something, when I started thinking about… But at this point he couldn’t even
remember the thing he had been thinking about that had distracted him. There
was a space in his head that had been occupied by a day dream. …Something about
a movie… …The movie we watched two days ago… Maybe he had been engaging his
habit of reconfiguring films that had potential but weren’t quite good. Maybe
he had been involved in imagining his plans for tonight, dinner, a movie and
all the things he might say. Maybe something else. All of which may or may not
have anything to do with the scissors and the living room and the stack of
books on the coffee table. He deduced vaguely, assuming nothing. …I might have
been picking up the house… This was a number of tasks he performed mindlessly,
enjoying how their simple physical activity freed his mind for other pursuits. In
fact he spent the majority of his time either ruminating on the past,
projecting himself into the future, or a third space of alternate presents and
imagine landscapes. Apparently his autopilot failed. He resented being so
rudely being brought into an immediate and unforgiving present.
The most difficult thing to understand was what the scissors
had to do with the books. Both were out of the ordinary, but the obvious
solution, that he would be cutting pages out of the books, made no sense. He
did not remember putting the books there, nor even what books they were.
Likewise he did not remember picking up the scissors. He was completely unsure
how to proceed and stood in the middle of the room looking from the books to
the scissors and trying to push his brain back into the blank spot of his past,
like trying to find his car keys. When anything was lost he’d inevitably find
himself looking in the same logical spots over and over, as if looking in his
desk drawer more deliberately might yield different results. Simultaneously he
would try to think of the best illogical spots, an endeavor that proved just as
frustrating. The only thing to do in those situations was to convince himself
that he did not want the object he so desperately and then it seemed that the
object would manifest itself accidently. He once found his wallet in the
refrigerator. The only course of action seemed to be pretend he didn’t want to
remember what he was doing, which might be best accomplished by reading these
books.
Naturally he went to set the scissors down on the mantle and
noticed the broken picture frame. The image of his own face, albeit slightly
more tan, beset by a mountainous landscape was obscured by broken glass and
just touch of blood. Only at this moment did he notice that he was bleeding,
near his elbow where the nerve endings…
