Meeting of a Man and a Chair

Fiction

The man strides into the lobby of his employer’s law firm while staring raptly down at his new Burberry loafers. He really does love them. The receptionist a few feet away doesn’t acknowledge him, as usual. She wouldn’t look up from her computer for anyone, really. She’s too busy tapping keys. At this moment, she’s inserting the letter e into the crossword puzzle on her screen, completing the word “pinhole.”

This is not a coincidence.

With the man’s next step, the strap of his shoulder bag brushes against the chair beside the receptionist’s desk. The strap catches on one of the back posts. To the casual observer, this would appear to be inconsequential.

With the man’s next step, the strap pulls taught, lifting the chair slightly up off the floor.

The man hesitates briefly— exactly as long as it takes for the second hand of his Rolex to lean into its next tick; precisely the fraction of a second that will allow a fruit fly buzzing at the man’s ear to elicit the thought of a flick of the man’s hand. Yet there is no thought, nor flick (not surprisingly).

With the man’s next step, the strap lifts up off the back post, releasing the chair, which bounces down onto the floor with a soft knock that the man does not (bother to) hear.

The fruit fly starts for the back post. We will never know why.

The man proceeds down the hall, arriving at his office, his thoughts squarely on the workday ahead.

At his desk, he takes his laptop computer out of the shoulder bag and sets it down. He does not think about what just happened with the strap and the chair, though he had certainly felt the pull, the momentary tension and the release.

If you mentioned any of this to the man he probably would laugh in your face. He would stare at you in his haughty manner, as though you were some sort of imbecile. He is far too busy to note such meaningless minutiae. And yet, his mind has done just that. It has absorbed every last detail about what happened, for as a recorder it is very much like a digital device, one lacking an off button. The marriage and divorce of strap and chair post have taken up permanent residence within it.

When the man is sleeping (fitfully), or drinking vodka (tenderly), or daydreaming (venomously), or when, many years from now, he is lying in his deathbed in his last throes, the memory of the chair post, the laptop bag, the strap, and all the “meaningless” minutiae — perhaps even the fruit fly (yes, absolutely, the fruit fly) will percolate up from within him as though from a loudly boiling kettle.

They will intrude on his awareness. They will announce themselves with the same urgency as any one of the man’s many achievements, which had seemed so vitally important, even momentous. And yet … that moment. That little one. That meaningless one. That was the one. It was the one that could have stirred him from sleep, the one, like so many others, that he missed and kept on missing.

Stories by Lev Metropol

Lev Metropol is a writer and advocate for alternative treatments of depression. My goal is to write transcendent, quality fiction and non-fiction.

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