Steady State
Michael K. Gause

It was a day so forgettable it fooled the senses, broken by conversations clipped like Dolby applied to the atmosphere. Even those of the early morning were now hard to recall, their topics and tones indistinct from the last six years. As he sat smoking away a stolen hour of peace, they could have happened last spring or October 1998.

Judging time is a sense, too. 

The scene outside looked like a Super 8 home movie, the way they are depicted in movies to show a character’s memories of childhood. Wild-suited characters pedaling three-wheelers looked more like gaudy rickshaws hauling groceries and crushed cans instead of people. The next second it’s a spotless, black jaguar creeping up to the curb, just feet outside the window. From it emerges, without fail, an aging white man wearing a pastel polo, khakis, and his bored, complacent wife. Both would check out the buildings around them like tourists from planet Trump. Their eyes scanned the storefronts for some destination point suitable to their tax bracket and related tolerance of discomfort, before crossing the street to the chain bar on the corner.  

Judging fear is a sense, too. 

The street out front was a main conduit to downtown, the large windows providing patrons a never-ending show of blurred cars and faces, gallery upon gallery of the current state of the union in snatched profiles to be saved in the subconscious for later misuse. A thousand thousand worlds behind each eye and nose never to be known. A dizzying flow chart of conversations and branching decision trees to help your crazy. 

Once in a while in broad daylight, a stumbler. Almost always from left to right due to the number of early happy hours in the east end. An old man too tired to worry about appearances. If younger, then in wolfpacks and laughing. The old ones never laugh. Having had their fill they make their way, the sidewalk now a moving foreign foreground, toward the notsurewhat of 27^th. Skarda Bar. The sun’ll dry up some of him by then. Breakfast all day to rebuild the crumbling base of bacon, eggs, and toast laid poorly at 10. Something just ahead, anything that a shoegazing poet might just nod to and call what comes next.  

Judging need is a sense, too. 

This whole collage was glued to a well lit backdrop and marched steadily before the windows of the shop. He sat there watching, trying not to hate how little it gave. See enough of anything and you exhaust the possibilities, some hope for a consolation from the routine, enlightenment from the incessant tribal drums. All permutations are finite, combinations, too. If something was to be gained here, he wouldn’t see it. He knew what he was supposed to take from it—something about himself, a thread that might connect past and future for some practical use in the present. But damned if he could nail down what part was which. It was all the same, and the same was all he could think of when he thought of himself. 

Judging sanity is a sense, too. 

He sat, watching from the cheap seats, observing the silent talkie that never crescendos. A foreign film, he thought. Wenders or maybe Fassbinder. Experimental Warhol or raw footage sculpted away from real living. Some people’s place is in the story and other’s is to buy the book. A tale that forgot to begin and end outside of waking and sleeping. An infinite loop that draws itself downwards, the circle becoming a funnel. Life seemed a single blurry progression around and around without plot point one. 

He left the butt in the ashtray and said his goodbyes at the door. Crossing the street he looked up at the perfect circle behind the only cloud in the sky. A perfect circle that wasn’t being pulled inwards. An example that the steady state can be beautiful. On earth so as in heaven. My ass. 

A horn, and he looked at what earlier would have been just another forgettable blur. The driver’s lips revealed a mix of fear and anguish that mimicked the chrome now upon him. He felt the steady state universe come to an end with the Big Bang and a place in the story open up. It was a bit part but one that carried the theme all the way home. 

Judging change is a sense, too.

All Rights Reserved to Michael K. Gause