Archivist Does Writing! (Surprise!)

[Wittles]

On 11/4/2023 at 5:22 PM, The Aspiring Archivist said:

Well, I have not added to the story I have in theory been working on, but I did do a little scene based on a prompt @Edema Rue gave me. Here it is, for anyone who's interested. Thoughts and feedback are appreciated.

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Paul sat alone in his apartment, reading a book. It was some time he liked to set aside for himself each day, to get away from things. Not to think. He could do that whenever he wanted, and it didn’t tend to end well. “Directed relaxation,” he called it. If he allowed it to become indirected, it would quite possibly end in chaos. He let the featureless gray walls become a neat little environment for perfect inaction. He set down the book for a moment on the small square wooden table in the middle of the empty room, and leaned back in his singular, uninteresting wooden chair to take a sip of tea. He gently lifted the white ceramic coffee mug to his lips, tilting it in order to let the caramel-colored liquid flow…

The simple white door into the apartment burst open without so much as a knock. Paul found himself startled, and his mug-holding hand jolted with his surprise, sending a few newly airborne tea droplets flying onto his good gray coat. It didn’t hurt, for the tea wasn’t hot so much as just above lukewarm, but it would certainly leave a stain. He set down his mug on the coaster, and looked up with mild annoyance to see whoever it was that had so rudely and abruptly disrupted his directed relaxation.

It was Jacob Salwick from work, he thought, and that much was true, though it also happened to be all Paul knew about the man. They must have seen each other every day, but Paul had never given Jacob so much as a passing glance and a few short words. “Could you spare a pencil?” sprang to mind; it was a common phrase for Paul to use, as he had a frustrating tendency to lose his own. He almost said it right then, as it would have felt natural in the face of such an unnatural occurrence. He didn’t, however, as he found it would be a strange thing to say considering his lack of need for a pencil.

Some other questions sprang to mind, not ones that he had asked of Jacob but rather ones brought up by the unexpected scenario. Why was Jacob here? How had he gotten Paul’s address? What made him so desperate as to eschew such common practices of politeness and decency as door-knocking? Paul almost spoke those questions too, but in the time it took for his mind to form all of these thoughts, Jacob had apparently become primed to speak.

“Do you ever think about life, Paul? And how it ends?” Jacob’s voice was a hoarse rasp, far removed from its normal monotone smoothness. He staggered forward towards the table, and leaned onto it across from Paul, holding himself up with both hands. This caused the relatively small and light table to inch forward into Paul with a small squeak of wood on wood. It also, to Paul’s dismay, sent more droplets of tea flying, some of which landed on the pages of his open novel. He scooted back in his chair, relieving himself from the discomfort of the sharp edge pressing into his chest. There was another source of discomfort that was less difficult to remove, that being Jacob’s stance and expression. The man wore his dressy work clothes, and they looked rather disheveled. He loomed over Paul, who met his gaze, which might have been called crazed or unhinged. This seemed odd to Paul, as the man had never been anything more than calm, quiet, and controlled at work.

He considered how to answer the question. It seemed like an intense one to ask of someone you had rarely spoken to, not to mention the fact that Jacob had just more or less broken into Paul’s apartment. He could ask one of his own questions, but he found within himself a strange urge to answer Jacob’s. Here was some direction for him, if not an unexpected one for the evening to take. It didn’t strike him, as one might expect, that this sort of interaction was liable to become dangerous.

“I suppose I do. Don’t most people?”

“Constantly Paul, I think about it constantly. It consumes my day, my every waking hour. All of these questions, these vast, existential questions that no one ever properly looks to answer until it’s too late! You could die today, Paul, do you know that?”

Paul pondered this, meanwhile carefully closing the cover of his book to protect it from further damage. Not a moment too soon, as the table rattled, tremors momentarily coursing through Jacob’s body and into the surface he grasped. Paul began to consider moving the mug. “That’s true, certainly. It’s true of everyone. An unfortunate fact that we all have to live with. I imagine if we were all too acutely aware of it, it might drive us… insane.” Paul continued to meet the man’s wild gaze. Jacob’s eyes were bloodshot.

“What if it wasn’t, Paul?”

“Excuse me?”

“What if it wasn’t true? What if I could answer that question, Paul?”

Paul raised his eyebrows. This was surely one of the more interesting conversations he’d had lately.  “I imagine that would cause quite a shift in things. In how people think about mortality. What kind of answer do you mean?”

As though in response, Jacob took one hand off of the table, reaching into his back pocket and pulling something out. Paul caught a glint of metal. A… key. Jacob held it out for Paul to see, then set it down in front of where he sat. “Under my desk. Don’t let anyone see you. The answer, Paul.” Jacob was consumed by tremors again, more intense than the last. Paul regretted his earlier inaction as the coffee mug tipped over and plummeted from the table, spilling the tea across the hardwood floor. He was thankful that it didn’t shatter, though he would later discover that the lip had been chipped.

Paul noticed something on Jacob’s face again as he again pondered how to respond. A small streak of dark liquid had exited from between his coworker’s lips and ran down to his chin, then under it and onto his neck. It left a red streak behind it, and Paul recognized it as blood. How odd, he thought. Blood did not typically come out of one’s mouth, after all. At least not in his experience. “Are you alright?”

Jacob broke their eye contact, stumbling away from the table and crashing sideways into one of the walls with a loud thump. A droplet of blood dislodged itself from his mouth, not unlike the tea from the mug, and made a crimson mark on the gray wall. It was left there like an adornment, a meager population of the featureless plane, and a convenient answer to Paul’s question as Jacob slid to the ground in a full collapse. Paul quickly rose from his chair, instinctively pocketing the key as he approached the fallen man. It took no more than a minute to discern that Jacob was not breathing, and had no pulse.

With urgency, though not frantic haste—it was, after all, his time for directed relaxation—Paul removed his phone from his pocket and dialed 9-1-1. He put the dispatcher on speaker and explained the situation as he initiated CPR. Paul knew that those who received CPR were more likely to survive once paramedics arrived, though he guessed that the blood which was now making a small pool on his floor didn’t aid those odds. Almost without thinking, he discretely left out the details of their conversation, and the key. Discretion, he noted, had practically been the dead man’s final request.

This is really interesting. Something about the almost drab tone was kind of spooky for some reason, it made for a very intriguing tone and just a cool aesthetic in my head.

Edited November 6, 2023 by Wittles of Shinovar