I Am Nowhere, I Am Nobody
Chris Janak
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(...) Every window I passed was a look at something I lacked. Across the street, up above, an open shade afforded a glimpse of someone’s life. A framed print, a table set with plates and forks and bowls of warm food, a TV nearby flickering its strange blue incandescence over the room and its invisible inhabitants. Beyond each window were souls who loved and were loved, who spoke and sang and laughed and cried, and still I was nowhere, still I was nobody. (...) I cursed my shoes. Once they had been good shoes, solidly handmade with good leather and sweat. I had money in my pocket when I bought them, enough to buy them and still have some money left. But that was the past, and the past was a fantasy to me, a better place than any future I could imagine. Those shoes had been on my feet too long and the world was creeping in through the holes in the soles. As the heels had worn down, tiny nails pushed upward through the soles. With every step they jabbed me, mocking my state of mind, my state of being, my inability to simply buy a new pair of shoes. (...) In a lonely office high above Times Square, CHRIS JANAK toils in the service of an evil corporate conglomerate that lines the pockets of a few wealthy shareholders with the unlucky souls of those it consumes. He has abandoned his dreams of a better life and has resigned himself to an endless routine of bitter drudgery followed by a slow loss of physical faculties then, finally, death. Apart from that, he says, things are going pretty well for him. |
