Abner

Now that was a feeling he hadn’t had before. Abner blinked hard and reached for his Styrofoam coffee cup. The dishwasher was broken again, and he didn’t feel like washing endless mounds of dishes. He’d determined a week earlier, when the misfortunate piece of junk suddenly quit, that he would use disposable dinnerware as much as possible. Disposable. “That pretty much describes what my home looks like right now,” Abner thought out loud. Heck, thinking out loud had become a regularity these days. Life was so stupefyingly boring…and lonely. The coffee burnt not only his tongue, but the back of his throat going down, it was so hot. But that’s how Abner liked his coffee. Why he was drinking coffee at this moment, not even he could figure out. After a hard day of work, it was now almost midnight, and he knew he needed some rest. He also knew that if this was going to be another normal night, he wasn’t going to give himself any rest. No, he’d stay up. Till 4 a.m., perhaps. When he was out of coffee, he’d reach for the cherry-flavored off-brand cola in his fridge. It didn’t matter to Abner that he was going straight from a hot beverage to an ice-cold one; he didn’t give a rip. What mattered was the caffeine. “If I had the money,” he thought, “I’d buy myself a supply of caffeine to administer intravenously.” Money, God knows, one thing Abner didn’t ever have much of. Mr. Grimes made sure of that. That idiot boss of his at the supermarket. The one whose glasses were half of his face, and wheezed a lot, especially when he got unhappy with Abner’s stocking of grocery-store shelves. Nope, Abner didn’t get much money, and what little he did receive paycheck-to-paycheck, he wasted. His philosophy had always been, “You only live once,” so his slightly malodorous two-room apartment housed a brand-new desktop computer, DVD player with surround sound, and a Yamaha keyboard with a zillion different special effects sounds on it. It still bothered Abner that he didn’t know how to play the keyboard. Why had he bought it? Sometimes he wished he hadn’t bought the thing. He could have lavished his precious few dollars on more cherry Coke and coffee, enough for a year, maybe! He always had idolized famous piano-players, to the point he’d convinced himself he one day would be able to pour forth beautiful melodies at the instrument’s inviting spread of gleaming keys. For the moment, he would only be able to savor Franz Schubert’s Erlking and Frederic Chopin’s dark, moody Nocturne in C# minor, Opus 27, No. 1, pieces from a 2-disc classical music set he’d had to purchase for a music appreciation class he had in college. But he didn’t want to think about that. That reminded him. The college he’d dropped out of. The history he used to love studying, now gone. Was he now reduced to this, chugging soda out of the 2-liter plastic bottle, listening to internet radio, only to go back to work under Mr. Grimes tomorrow?! “But wait a minute, that’s really later today he thought.” It was 12:30 a.m. Strangely enough, he realized, shaking himself of his brief depressing reverie, he enjoyed piano from classical artists but couldn’t stand modern rock acts who incorporated poppy piano lines in their music. No, Abner was a man of contrasts. He was done listening to Chopin for the evening. As he went to go check his e-mail for the fifth time that evening, he grinned as his internet radio page refreshed and he began to hear the opening guitar chords to “Back in Black.”

Abner shivered. There wasn’t any reason for that, he knew, except for the vocalist’s wailing vocals. It was summertime and the AC wasn’t working very well. And much to his dismay, there it was again. There was that feeling again. It was both aggravating and exciting. Abner knew he was going to go insane this time. He mastered his computer off, threw the plastic bottle in anger, and walked into his bedroom. There was that keyboard on the floor again! He lay down on his bed and stared at the ceiling. He stared so hard, his eyes hurt, and he briefly shut them and tried to relax. His heart was pounding out of his chest, it seemed, and the sweat on his forehead was ice cold. This time, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to vomit it away. He swallowed hard, and walked back into the living room. He felt his heart rate returning to normal, as he looked around the room. Junk, litter, rubbish. As far as the eye could see. Part of him wanted to clean the room and wash the month-old dishes and make the place all spic and span, but he knew that wouldn’t do any good. He’d be back to this same feeling again. He no longer felt nervous. It was pure excitement now.

For the past 2 weeks, Abner had slowly felt it coming on, but he didn’t know quite what it was. He just knew he was getting fed up with life really quickly and that something was going to come liberate him. And it was finally here. That feeling was finally here. He still couldn’t define it, but he’d known this feeling would arrive. And after many nights up late, wondering what it would feel like, he finally felt it. “Great, what do I do now?” he wondered. What Abner felt in that instant was the desire to create something. All his life, he’d marveled at what others could do. His favorite musicians, his favorite actors, his friends’ abilities. He had to leave all that junk behind, he had to get up and do something to call his own. He ran into the bedroom and plugged in the Yamaha. Pounding the keys, he imagined he was tapping out some illustrious song that would become the banner melody for his generation, or something…momentous. But ten minutes later, he stopped playing and pressed the playback button of the sonata he’d just recorded. His sonata was a jumbled mix of dissonant keys, a bang-up a 2-year-old could have composed. He cursed and ripped the keyboard’s electric cord out of the wall. “It’s okay.” Since this strange new feeling had come over him earlier, he’d known it wasn’t the keyboard. It was something else. Destiny was all around him, the air of the apartment was thick with it. He restarted his computer and began to pace back and forth in the front room. Where had this feeling come from? What did he want to do? What was he going to do? None of this made any sense. Maybe he’d been working too hard, or thinking too hard, anyway. He thought about calling his best friend up on the phone, but he knew that wouldn’t help him. This was the moment he’d been waiting for. He opened the door and walked outside. There was the freeway, the cars rushing by on the interstate. Hmm, a nice wreck with flashing lights nearby. He thought about going for a walk, but no, that wasn’t it either! What was it?! He had to go somewhere, now! There was the interstate, and he’d always considered hitchhiking to get out of the monotonous life he lived. But no, there was something he had to do back inside that dingy apartment. He began to pull on his hair, twisting it in his fingers. He felt his hand trembling again. Walking back inside the apartment, he noticed the computer had restarted. Plopping down in the typing chair, he looked for his 2-liter. He picked up the Coke and took a swig, opening his email client with his other hand. His heart skipped a beat. He knew he’d emptied his email box earlier, but there was an email with the subject line, “Forget the piano – instructions follow..” His heart rate sped up as he clicked the link.

This is how every fantasy begins. A reality we all want to escape from. And the rest of the story is the main character’s journey into surreality, something we know we can never do. So we have to read about it. We all want to wake up and realize that things are better and more exciting than in the life we feel doomed to live. And thus, the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, etc., is born. This little story I began came out of some boredom just before bed, and notice it points toward this same desire to escape. We’re never happy with our lives, are we? Fated to desire something else…may we find the ultimate plan of the Master for our lives…

And I dunno if Abner’s story has an ending…