Blanden, I

“Do you believe this?” I said to my wife as images of bombings crisscrossed the television screen.

“Believe what,” she said. It wasn’t a question to which she expected or wanted an answer. Her nose was buried in her iPad, and nothing short of nuclear weaponry was going to dislodge it.

“This war,” I said. “This stupid illegal war.”

“Hmm.”

This was the war I would have protested in my youth by shouting in the streets. But, alas, I was no longer capable of burning flags, marching on Washington, tuning in, turning on, or dropping out. I was in the latter half of my life. I had passed over the event horizon of passion for such things.

My wife didn’t care about the war. Her concerns were elsewhere, although I was never exactly sure what they were. I knew enough to know her concerns didn’t involve me.

“Where was this war when I needed it?” I asked out loud. That earned me a funny look from my wife. From myself, too.

My life has been a series of missed opportunities. It isn't my fault. I was born too late to be part of the generation that was shaped by the Beatles and too early for the nihilistic angst of Generation X. I always felt I need to create something, do something. I went the safe route instead -- wife, family, a job with prospects (largely unfulfilled), precisely because I was unable to harness the creative tension of either generation. Now those demands take everything from me. I have no time or energy for anything more.

Mrs. Blanden was stifling, but she hadn't always been that way. I can remember two or three occasions when we were younger where she was beautifully carefree. It had taken her years to become so constantly unaware of me.

The children were her idea, and I did my duty, conceiving them not just to placate her, but also in the hope that they would provide a bridge between us. Kids are so needy. I didn’t realize that children kept married people together because they made their parents too tired to consider anything else.

I didn’t know if my life was a tragedy or a farce. I was just a victim of circumstance. It wasn’t my fault. My life might have been inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but I took a certain amount of pride in the fact that I kept plodding along in spite of knowing that there was no reason to expect things to get any better.

I have dreams, though, both at night and in the day. I dream that things will suddenly get better, that my life will burst tangentially from its current orbit by virtue of a piece of mail or a telephone call or because of what I see across a crowded room. I dream my life will change in some eruption of good fortune like spontaneous kisses on V-J Day.

I didn’t expect anything to improve. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, I spent a lot of time listening for the first sweet note of total worldwide disaster. Disaster equals freedom. Disaster is the stripping away of all pretense and doubt. Disaster is the reduction of meaning to a raw, brute struggle for survival. My fantasies might be vague, but each day I rose thinking this can be the day, and each night I fell asleep thinking that tomorrow could be it. In the end, all the aspects of my life were sane and regulated and predictable like the cycles of the moon. Citizen Blanden is reliable if nothing else.

“I can’t get Excel to work,” one of my co-workers said as he entered my cubicle.

“No problem,” I told him. Even though it’s not my job, I go to his cubicle and fix it for him.

“Where’s the Johnson file?” another co-worker asked me on my way back to my cubicle. Once again, it’s not my job, but I find it for her. No problem. I was confident and in control in my job. I knew how the computers work. I knew where to find the files we needed and where to return them when we were done. People asked me questions about how to do things, and I was never at a loss for an answer, (provided that they asked me about the computer system and the filing system). At my work I was safe; even valued. There were no surprises, no pitfalls that I didn't see coming from a mile away. I walked the floor with confidence. My co-workers were pleasant to me, and I was pleasant with them. Sometimes, though, they got quiet just as I entered a room, but that didn't happen very often. I knew I was too well-liked to believe that they would make fun of me behind my back.

There was a time in my life when I wholeheartedly believed that I had felt the whole gamut of human emotion from hate to love to indifference. I did not realize that I had never been in love until the moment it happened. In my defense, I loved my wife when I married her. I thought I did, anyway. I genuinely believed that I did. I love my children when they are good, although they can get quite annoying. Starling, however, I loved from the instant I saw her. She alighted on the forefront of my thoughts out of an unremarkable gray sky on an unremarkable day with no more thought than a bird gives to the branch upon which it chooses to rest, indifferent to the indelible imprint her claws make upon the bark.

I first saw Starling across a conference table. She did not see me the same way I saw her. Her eyes slid off me like a shimmer off of hot pavement. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She is the most beautiful woman I will ever see. Throughout the long boring presentation that was the reason we were in the room together, I watched her as closely as I dared, cataloging everything she saw, every expression on her face, every movement, every posture. At some point, our eyes met and stuck together for an instant, and it seemed like everything I was poured out of me to her, that my entire self was decoded, compiled, and printed out, and laid at her feet. When she looked away, I knew that she had found me unthreatening, inconsequential, and worst of all, irrelevant.

It was not supposed to be that way. It was supposed to happen like this:

"I love you," I would say.

"I love you," she would reply, simply, casually, as if stating the immutable tautology that water is wet.

After an amorous pause, one of us would say (and it did not matter which), "I never believed this could happen. What do we do now?" Then we would go back out into the world long enough to untangle ourselves from our separate lives so we could mingle them together forever. It would be difficult, and no doubt there would be many trials, but we would endure. We would have each other to look forward to. We would have each other as a reward.

All that, though, was the leading man's role. I was an extra, a walk-on in an epic film whose cast of thousands revolve around her. She was Cleopatra and the Virgin Mary, Nefertiri and Salome combined and set in a world apart from me, a mere billionth of a man, an indiscriminate fragment of the teeming masses, a Prufrock without a name of his own. My only purpose was to provide a foil of unrelenting mediocrity as a yardstick with which to fathom her otherwise immeasurable excellence.

She would never be mine, never ever. The epiphany hit me so hard I gasped, drawing her eyes for an unwanted second time. I did not dare to look into those eyes. I feared to see what I knew they contained. I knew I would regret not looking into her eyes again, not speaking to her (I knew I wouldn't dare), and most of all I would regret the unconscionable crime of being what I am.

For a year, I watched Starling from afar. For a year, I contrived plausible reasons for walking past her cubicle. Each time I caught her eye I would attempt to find the smallest mote of love for me in them, but her eyes only brushed me casually, like when a cashier accidentally touches a customer's hand while making change. If I were pushed out the window on the thirty-seventh floor, my face and the face of my murderer would fade in her mind into an amorphous blob of contemptible goo. I knew I was on the extreme margin in her life, unable to leave an impression even if I was crucified with pushpins on the OCEA bulletin board in the employee lounge.

Sometimes when I was alone in my windowless, airless, tight-fitting office which I had finally earned with a modicum of realized potential somewhere along the line, in the moments between completing one task and starting another, I would stare at my notepad and wish that I could draw her face. That would be something, a tribute and memento to her made by my own hand, the blue lines serving to accentuate my art in situ. Unfortunately, I cannot draw, so I never touched pen to paper for that purpose.

Sometimes I wished that I could write a poem to her beauty or a song that declared my love for her. I wished I could serenade her like King David or David Cassidy. Music is yet another talent that I lack, and the one time I tried to write a poem about her it came out like a memorandum, so I tore it into quarters and stuffed it into the shredder. When I daydreamed about her, all I could do on that notepad was doodle concentric circles, each one giving some kind of motion to my otherwise idle fantasies.

Twelve months passed. Another seventieth of my allotted threescore years and ten dripped away into a puddle that quickly seeped into the dry and thirsty earth. My hair thinned, and my paunch grew. Fifty-two weeks. Over that time, I slowly transitioned from vaguely unfulfilled to actively dissatisfied. The only thing I could really connect with besides the impossible fact of my unrequited love was the war that dragged on and on and on, the war that did not affect me in the slightest. At least once a week I could not help but launch an anti-war sermon at my wife. I gradually became aware that while she listened to my tirades, she most likely wished that I would go and fight and never come home.

Thoughts beginning with the cruel utterance "if only" began to echo through my head like a catchy TV commercial jingle. If only I hadn't married, or if only we didn't have children, if only I had the money to make it on my own, then, I would think, it would be possible, it would be just within the realm of possibility that Starling could love me. If only I were younger, if only I could lose some weight, then she could love me. If only I could talk to her. If only I had anything to say. If only if only-only if.

One afternoon after lunch when I was staring dully at my blank notepad I thought perhaps she might notice me in the distant future. Perhaps our love must be the work of natural selection; perhaps it must take time for it to evolve naturally. She could be transferred to my department, I imagined. We could attend a conference at the same hotel. I could see her at the bar and say hello or, even better, she could say hello to me first.

This desperate grasp at plausibility enlivened me and enriched my days for many weeks. I would be patient. I would wait. I had been waiting all my life, I told myself, and I pretended it was easier because I finally knew what I was waiting for. Good things come to those who wait.

It was not long after my decision to settle down and wait for things to happen that I learned Starling would be leaving the company. Leaving for good. Leaving forever. I knew that I was unlucky, that the universe was not a Blanden-loving place, so I told myself that this was bound to happen sooner or later. Only the Xerox machine in the supply room was truly eternal.

The news got worse. She was going off to get married, and not just a regular marriage. The rumor was that her fiance was well-off, an up-and-coming peterpeterpumkineater, but with enough money to keep her on the outside of the eponymous squash. Everyone but me knew about it months before. Why hadn't I been told? Did they know how I secretly pined for her? Did they notice me staring? Did they see me buzzing around her cubicle like some errant gnat? Had someone told her? Did she think it was funny? Or did she think I was some kind of weirdo stalker?

All good things must come to an end. Those words popped into my head like buoyant wreckage from the Titanic of my life. I spent the next two weeks not walking by her cubicle, not looking for her when I entered the lounge or any other public area. I braced myself for the painful process of separation. I would see her no more. In fourteen days she would be gone; then ten, then nine, then eight, then two.

I could not help but notice that the war dragged on. I wished very much that it would end.

I tried to savor each moment she was there, even if I had to be aloof from her. I wanted to reflect upon these last days, capture their essence in mental amber so I could remember them later. I realized, though, that my memories were really intangibles; there was nothing real enough to sustain remembrance. Even though she was close by, there were times when I could not remember her face. Two days remained before she was gone forever, and all I would be left with was a faint fading wisp of a daydream.

Near the end of that next-to-last day, I made my way to the employee lounge, loose change clinking in my pocket, wondering if I should get a Diet Coke or the real thing. I was surprised to find Starling sitting at one of the cheap Formica tables with Allison and Teddy from Accounting. I took my time in front of the vending machine trying to look like I was unable to make up my mind so I could eavesdrop.

"He used weapons of mass destruction on his own people," Teddy argued.

"So?" replied Starling. "He didn't use them on us."

"He's a killer," said Allison. "He had to go."

"But why war?" Starling asked rhetorically. "Look at how many people have died. Look at the mess. How can you say that this situation is any better?"

"At least they have a chance," Allison said. "At least they're free now."

"You have to admit that things are better than they were," said Teddy.

"Better for who?" Starling demanded.

I turned to face the discussion. Did I dare to talk to them about the war? I tried to summon up the substance of my earlier tirades, but my memory was suddenly woefully deficient.

"She's right," I finally said. "It's a stupid war."

"See?" said Starling. "Even he gets it."

I turned back to the machine and dumped my coins into the slot, then pressed the button for Diet Coke. I popped the tab and turned back to Starling and Allison and Teddy, but they had stopped talking. I waved weakly and went back to my airless office.

I knew I would never see Starling again. If only there could be more time, I thought. More time. My love for Starling would go unrequited, perhaps one day forgotten but never forgiven. It wasn't fair, I told myself, but that was a lie. It was fair.

She will never come to me, not even in daydreams. I never had a chance.