Work Fog

Another dull click, Curtis thought, as he was accidentally hung up on for the third time today. He took it in stride. It happens. Not a conspiracy against him by any means. No use connecting dots that weren't really there.
Christine came by, pleasantries and paper were exchanged. Curtis kept his gaze proper. Easy to do, although she was certainly soft on the eyes. Leafing through these new documents, he found the problem in seconds that was nagging her for days.

Curtis had a moderately profitable curse. He could see things going wrong in real time. The figures appeared to him like a car accident in slow motion. A couple cents wrongly attributed here, tens of thousands of dollars of lost capital somewhere else months down the road.

But he would sit on it. Make it look like days of work. A decent bean counter was all he wanted to be labeled as, not some sort of idiot savant.

Standing up with his mug of decaf coffee, he ambled to the closest ceiling to floor window. Outside was a vast wasteland of monotony. An industrial park for the record books. Three story warehouses and four story office buildings as far as the eye could see. Some bizarre zoning requirement demanded that a four acre patch of actual parkland be nurtured to dampen the steel and glass sterility of the neighbourhood, so a cluster of trees stood out like a sore thumb to the northwest. If he squinted, Curtis could see the expressway interchange, and beside that a massive plaza that held five big box stores.

He wondered if he stood on the roof of the shopping centre with a pair of high powered binoculars he could see the whites of his own eyes as he stood drinking coffee at this very moment.

Two of him. The world would be so lucky. He saw a show on the Discovery Channel about parallel universes weeks ago and wondered how much better his other selves were doing right about now. Perhaps some were doing worse, but unless it was cancer or a spiraling drug addiction, Curtis couldn't really picture it.

It wasn't always like this, Curtis thought.

Like what, he heard that annoying anti-voice in the back of his head – in the back of everyone's head – viciously retort, what was it like, pray tell?

He remembered his fantasies of yesteryear, which propped him up mindlessly and without consequence. Curtis had good things going for him, and more importantly, the right things going for him. Dare we use the word dashing to describe him in both high school and most of university?

He was one of the few teenagers that were popular, smart, and athletic, dividing his time between those three spheres with the deftness of a veteran tightrope walker. From there he made an effortless transition to college, metabolized the various chemicals and alcohols while analyzing the finer points of business management. Time flowed like a lazy river.

As graduation loomed, the threads began to slowly unravel. Very slowly. No place to put your finger on where it all went south, but the world changed and Curtis didn't. Or just didn't change fast enough with it. Unspoken agreements with society at large began to vanish.

Sunk. Like a stone.

A lull for the ages nestled itself comfortably into Curtis Ludwig. A tidal wave of indifference.

'What do you want to do?' someone once asked him. The face was ageless. He can't remember if it was a roommate or an academic advisor or an uncle.

'Nothing, really', he replied.

Who says honesty is the best policy?

But then he got handed the sheepskin and suddenly getting up at eleven in the morning wasn't paying rent and suddenly everyone Curtis knew had their hands full from nine to five or something with several hours of something resembling a career.