spontaneous

I met a girl on the train this morning. I say ‘met’ when I mean ‘saw’. I rarely meet girls. They aren’t easy to talk to and never say hello to me. So I met (saw) this girl and she was beautiful. Which is another reason I did not talk to her. Or, perhaps, the reason she did not talk to me.

I knew very little about her, but told my friend Jim anyway. He said I should describe her to him. Jim always describes the women he meets. He does actually meet them. Jim sleeps with them. Jim is spontaneous. I am not. So I told him she had long brown hair, big blue eyes and a very big nose. I told him I didn’t care about her nose, because lots of people have faults and love doesn’t see big noses. He said that love might not see big noses, but that if she was a Jew then she’d never love me. Jim doesn’t think that the Hebrew people can love. Except Jim has never met one. He calls it a ‘fact’ when really he means it is an ‘idea’ he has.

I think tomorrow, when I meet her, I’ll take a Torah with me. Women like nice jewish boys. Even if they are not jewish themselves. This I have noticed.

My manager took me aside today and asked me to be a ‘greeter’ at the door, which means he wants me to stand at the entrance to the shop and welcome people. I don’t work in a supermarket, I thought, I work in a bookstore.

Jim says later, that when my manager puts people in job positions that aren’t right for them it is called ‘Muppet Shuffling’. I’m shuffled quite often, I feel like I’m the 3 of clubs. I am not an ace.

Half way through the day I take my bright red lunch-box out to a little courtyard near to work. I light a cigarette and pretend I’m a detective. I have my own office. There is no courtyard. There is only a little office with a filing cabinet, a desk, a swivel chair and my name on the door. Everything is black and white.

I pretend I’m Sam Spade. I pretend this because the cigarette ash does what it does in the book. “The ashes on the desk twitched and crawled in the current.” I think about spontaneous combustion. I check my temperature. I think that if someone wrote about my life, then they would write ‘he “twitched and crawled”’.

Sometimes I’ll imagine I’m going to explode. That every bit of me will be lit up like the embers from the end of a cigarette. I will be walking along and a strong gust will cause me to dissolve into the wind.

At the end of the day I haven’t had a chance to buy a Torah, but she is on the train all the same. She gets onto the carraige and sits down across from me. I can smell her perfume. She smells like flowers, but I don’t know flowers well enough to know which ones she smells like.

I’m half-way home and the train jerks forward sending my book flying to the floor. We both bend down to retrieve it. It is like a film. When the two characters reach down to pick something up, usually a dropped book like this one. (Probably not ‘Penthouse XXX’ though.) Their eyes meet and somewhere in the space between their noses, they fall in love. If we were to fall in love now, there wouldn’t be much room between our noses. Her nose is very, very big.

Except, what happens, is more like a nightmare than a movie. We bump heads.

We both sit up and look at each other in the confusion that is caused by two heads hitting each other by mistake. We both sit up and look at each other and I’m bright red. My cheeks are the colour of my lunch-box.

This isn’t my stop but, when the train stops, I get up. I try to say ‘I love you, you are beautiful and I don’t care about your big nose.’ Except that a woman screams and fate decides that she only hears the last two words. And the woman screamed because at that moment, just as the door opened, I stopped being solid. I turned into a swarm of embers.