It had been a long day, a hard day, a hot day, a day that grabbed you by the shoulders and shook you until your teeth rattled off your brain and fell onto the carpet. It had seized Pat, used him cruelly, and discarded him with the thoughtful care of a six-year-old with a handful of used tissue paper.
He was hungry. No food since the morning. But there were more important things to do. He had to relax before the morning came again. He had to sit down. He had to stop moving.
So Pat sat. Pulled up a chair (tugged at it, at least), shuffled into place, sat at his desk and stared at the wall.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. His inbox pinged cheerily at him. On the wall, the alarm clock coughed up objectionable noises – he needed to put dinner in the oven and he needed to have started preheating it ten minutes ago.
Pat knew all that. He knew, he knew, he knew. God he knew. But that didn’t mean he needed to hear all about it.
So he turned off the alarm. He turned off the phone. He closed the mailbox, then closed the private mailbox, then shut down the browser (containing his secondary mailbox).
Then he turned off the computer so that the clock wouldn’t stare at him from the corner of the screen, dates and deadlines predetermined and highlighted and ticking away like little time bombs. That was for tomorrow, another country. Today –
Well, tonight
– he was going to get some rest.
Pat leaned back in his chair again. Quiet. Peaceful. A dog barked. Traffic groused. His neighbours spat and shrieked and hissed. The raccoons in his garbage took their example to heart.
This would not do. It would not do and so Pat stood up and put on his coat and got ready to would not don’t.
The dog was simple. Pat had a spare bone left in his compost, barely a day old and still flush with scraps of half-chewed pork. He smacked the animal with it until it produced no noise above a whimper and let it be.
The traffic was harder. Pat settled for driving his truck into the center of the road, locking the keys inside, and setting it on fire with his lighter.
The neighbors had a brick thrown through their window with a couple’s councillor’s address scribbled on it.
And the racoons were shooed away with an old and angrily-dented pot and a firm ladle that had been passed down to Pat by his great-grandmother’s aunt, made of some mysterious blackened metal that was probably toxic but in a way that made you wrinkled and tiny rather than cancer-riddled, if his family history was any hint.
So Pat sat down in his chair again. It was very nice, except for all the things he could hear. Little things, like the hum of the refrigerator, the squeak and rustle of tiny furry things in the walls, the woosh of the wind, the crunching of broken glass next door as the neighbors had sex on their living room floor.
Pat sighed, got up, found a toothpick, and carefully punctured both his eardrums. There, noise fixed.
He sat down again. Then he changed his mind and walked around the house, turning off appliances, turning off electronics, removing the fusebox and chucking it out the back door to stop that constant ticking and humming in the walls, taking a sledgehammer to the furnace to shut off the noise and air that blasted at him from the flooring vents.
He sat down again, again. He got up. He took his old bb gun out from the box under every other item in his closet and destroyed the street lights that he could see from his window, which numbered seven, and he sat down.
There. All done, all quiet, all smooth, all fine. Except for that one light that shone on his ceiling, the light of the carbon monoxide detector. But that was fine, fine. Besides, he couldn’t turn that off or the alarm wouldn’t stop screaming.
It was fine.
Absolutely fine.
Completely, utterly fine.
But that little light wouldn’t go off.
He had to do something about that. How else would he get any rest?
Pat sighed again. As he got up to search for his hammer and chisel, he cursed his grumbling belly. But he didn’t have the time to fix that anyways. He had to relax.