The Handlebar of Circumstances

I am seated behind an oak wood desk.

In a high backed leather chair, a phone against my ear, speaking to no one. I'm in an office with high floor to ceiling windows. Outside is a cloudy New York day, the tops of the buildings around far below. The city looks like a miniature child's toy. Grey and silver buildings, cars on the street that resemble tiny black dots. I rise and walk out of my lavish office and into the bull-pin. An expansive space filled with end after end of cubicles. Wrapped around it are the building walls, floor to ceiling windows displaying the clouds like a thin haze just outside, the curve of the Earth beyond.

The office is packed with young executives, secretaries and assistants moving about. I walk around the bull-pin, keeping the windows on my right side. People walk past me, in slow motion, waving and smiling. I wave and smile back, I am disturbed. Before I could make it to the far wall ahead, lined with windows, I feel it. A sudden, deep, dark dread. A foreboding. As if something cold rested on my right shoulder. The lifeless hand of a corpse.

I turn to it, my gaze straying to the window, and then outside in the very near distance.

Towering up next to our building, like a massive, rectangular, silver spire, lined with numerous columns and wrapped by a wide, silver parapet, was Tower One. It stood stark, its windows between the columns reflecting the yellowish glow of the sun, it's top bristling with an antenna tower rising like a spike further into the sky. My heart dropped.

My eyes swell. I knew where I was...In Tower Two, and I know what was approaching ...certain and imminent death. My heart shifted from fast to heart attack. I could not take my eyes off Tower One, could not move, could not warn anyone. Until I saw it...frightening low, moving fast, a long arrowhead soaring over the building tops below, heading for Tower One. I turn around in a world gone slow, my mouth wide. The people, the people were all going to die...die.

I scream, sitting up, clawing at the sheet over me, shouting RUN. But there would be no one to hear my tonight save the Skeksies. I relaxed by degrees, realizing that I was in my room, in the safety of my bed. I begin trembling from head to toe. I cry, sobbing like a baby.

Oh, the joys of Lithium. Tremors, vivid dreams...I wonder if that explains the child-like crying after a nightmare. I never cry after a nightmare. But the human toll kept rushing back upon me. The number of corpses, one after another like a marching parade. You want it to fucking stop, but no, it just goes on and on until you can't stand it anymore. Make it stop, please, please, please make the music stop.

Lithium. Dr. A and I agreed that it would be better to be on Lithium than Abilify. I agree whole- heartedly, especially since one of the many mild side effects of Ability is: Sudden, unexplainable, instantaneous death. Just a mild one. I mean I can deal with that, right? There's nothing wrong with instantaneous death. I mean, thousands of people in lower Manhattan, just across the street where I worked did it. I just missed being around that day, you know.

Lithium was made for us people with Bi-polar Disorder. I shaves off the peaks of the manic periods. Those are the periods where I clean house, move everything around an eighth of an inch to line them all in left angles to anything around it, dice vegetables. It manages when I write straight through the day or night, watch television until the sun rises, annoy what few friends I have left through email or over Instant Messenger. Oh, and the constant talking to myself. What do I need friends for? I have hundreds of people in my head, and I talk to them all...thank God they don't answer me back. Or do they?

There is a knock on my door. Isn't the Lithium supposed to stop that shit too? It comes again. It can't be real because I have a doorbell. If there was anyone on the other side, why didn't they use it. The doorbell rings. I rise to the door, dressed in my nightshirt alone. I crack the door open and on the other side is my neighbor from across the hall. Stocky, but a muscular type of stocky, crew cut haircut, lantern jawed, his eyes two dark rivets in his head. I've seen him before, sometimes in the elevator, sometimes going to the bathroom for a shower. A jovial character, always saying hello. I reply with a smile, but then make myself scarce in a fucking hurry. I'm outside of my room. I don't really like that.

So, here he is, now a fast friend, as if we now have known each other for years and years. He was there at my birth, smiling like he is now, watching over me. Now it was time to call in his favor. "Hey guy, I wanted to ask you a favor," he says cautiously. A favor? Surely Hobobob, you are not beyond the reach of humankind that you can no longer offer assistance to your fellow man. What? "I just need to get on the Internet to check my email," he unfurls a crushed dollar bill in both hands before him. "I have a dollar for you if you would be so nice." There are two Hobobob's in my head now, falling backwards, passing though the bone, skin and muscles of my back and staggering into the center of my room.

The Hobobob on the left is cackling so hard that his sides are hurting, causing him to wrap his arms around his chest and rock with laughter. The Hobobob on the right is recoiling in fear, forearms up, shielding his face from a blow that doesn't come. I look at my neighbor, and in a split second my mind weighs the pluses and minuses of the decision. 1) How the FUCK did he know that I have a computer that is attached to the Internet? No one has been in my room. How do they know? The answer is easy, Paula. Nosy motherfucker is no doubt reporting everything about me that she knows, like a gramophone speaker is protruding out of her fat ass. Remember, that bitch was with me in the homeless shelter, and in the shelter I was all the rave. Everyone wanting to 'get on the Internet' for some fucked up reason on my laptop. Go breathe water you fucks.

2) The most upsetting thing of all is that if I let this useless mother- fucker in he'll imme- diately begin cataloging everything in my room for later reporting. I know, I know, I don't have shit, but I rather people not know and wonder than know and plan. I don't know if that makes sense to you, but it does to me, and finally 3) as the old fable goes, 'give them an inch and they'll take a mile'. With fucking Skeksies this is so very true. These assholes take it one step further on every occasion. Let my neighbor use my computer today, and he'll be here with a fucking dollar every day. Soon, he'll just be here, promising the bring the dollar the next time. You see how they plan? A NEXT time already.

Uhhh, I begin, sorry, no can do. You see, I suffer from Social Anxiety and to let you into my room would freak me out and I just bought a new knife set and well... I don't know why I told him that, so don't ask me. Sorry about that my friend. He nods mournfully, "Okay, I get it," crumpling up his dollar again. Who carries money crumpled up like that? Who? "Well, maybe next time." I smirk, oh the NEXT time, like when un-frozen cavemen come stalking out of Antarctica to New York to fuck Ford models? Okay, then.

I slowly close the door, lock it and stare at the window. It's a gray day. One following the other, the march of darkness. I wonder when the sun would come out again, blazing. But then again, it has been hotter than a cookout in Hell. Hmmm, with so many bad girls and prostitutes going to Hell, how can it be all that bad?

Oh, I don't know, but I have no intention of going there anytime soon, even if I do have a new cutlery set.

Hobobob