Two

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody

- J.D Salinger Catcher in the Rye

Finally, after what could have been 15 minutes or three hours, Low stood upright and continued on his way towards his bed on the fourth floor of what used to be a liquor storage facility. Odd how it became difficult to leave behind such a vile place as the underbelly of a viaduct, but some sort of change within him had occurred in the indeterminable time that he had spent there, and he realized that he would forever think of that pile of dirt, those buzzing yellow lights and the concrete sky that enveloped it all.

Then even more hours passed, and the synthetic yellowness of the night was replaced by the sunlight of another Saturday. Low despised the weekend days, and would often spend them sitting in the darkness of the cinema. He always sat in the front row, so that the small rips and scratches that covered the screen exposed themselves in the white canvas that stretched from corner to corner, acting as an imperfect barrier to that which he would never be able to achieve. To Low, the calendar was just and endless cycle repeating over and over again, the weather seemed to be the only thing that ever changed. Rising from his bed, his bare feet took him across the cold floor towards the oversized windows, and as he stood in his briefs that were stained from mishaps with bleach, he wondered if there was a matinee playing that he had not already seen. His usual routine had begun, and so the day started with overcast skies, the cafe across the street, and the morning paper.

Low poured over his regular columns of the national newspaper that he read every Saturday. He obsessed over the little pictures that accompanied the regular contributors' names that he had come to know so well. His favorites were women generally, he had fantasized about having relationships with each and everyone of them. There was the straight haired blonde in the ribbed turtleneck sweater that was irritatingly sexy even though she was entirely too conservative for him, so it annoyed him that with each Saturday edition he became increasingly smitten with her. Obviously he had no control over his attractions, because what he really wanted to do was fall in love with the dark haired poet. She was his favorite. The intense stare, the slight smirk of her smile, her borderline bad haircut, everything coming from the 2 inch square photograph that seemed to be in a different section every week wreaked of passion. Regardless of what section she was in, every Saturday she was there, usually in the morning. Low envisioned dining late at night with her, swapping gossip about the inhabitants of the packed dining room with seductive glances only the two of them could decipher. He thought of her nails scratching his back, and his belongings being thrown out of a window by her in a rage of drunken jealousy. It would be a fast and fleeting thing, he thought, as he sat in the cafe which was almost always empty. Their tumultuous affair would end finally when he was completely consumed by her need for experience, eventually winding up as the subject of numerous literary ventures. Low's existance in the real would effectively be over he thought. The paper however would still arrive daily, and on Saturday's, she'd be be in it.

Low took his eyes away from the object of his desire's photograph and set them upon the words that spawned from it. Today she was writing about the murder of John Lennon, and of course about Salinger's Catcher In the Rye. She described the book like no one else had been able to do for him. Pointing out its underlying theme that made an ideal manifesto for the longing of the past and a realization of ones own mortality. There Low sat, holding his "Grande Americano," in the franchised environment which he took measurable comfort in, with the memories of when he accused his grade 12 teacher of forcing them to read a meaningless, boring book. Oh, how he wished for that naivete again. Boozy, but not hung over, and having read everything that interested him, and seeing as he didn't have enough money to go to the movies, there was nothing left for Low to do but check his email and go back to bed.

To Be Continued...