Danny was up in the wee small hours of the morning-2:11.He had awoken a half hour before, tossed, turned, spun around, and tossed some more before giving up. He turned his music on quietly; there was no one else in the apartment, but he felt he should keep it down anyway. Maybe it was a reverence for the deceased. He started with “Under The Bridge” by The Red hot Chili Peppers.
Danny was no stranger to long nights, and I was no stranger to him. I had seen Danny at some of his lowest moment. Disheveled, frazzled mind, anxious over one thing or another- Himself, his love, a sense of the passage of time, the future. All trivial to myself. The song suddenly got louder at the final chorus- better turn it down, wouldn’t want to wake the dead.
What to listen to now? Might as well let the whole album run- no, he changed his mind, Pat Metheny’s “Bright Size Life”, that would do perfect. The first thing Danny thought of when his mind finally slipped from the rapturing guitar and bass of Pat and Jaco, was the question of who else was up at this hour?
He thought about the people in the apartment just beside his, he knew it was an older couple, but never got to know them. Odd how you can live so close to someone for so long and hardly ever speak. He thought, I bet some people are at work now. What an unfortunate fate. Imagine the minimum wage box worker who has to pick things up and put them down until the sun goes down just to be able to live. Down where they are, my fate doesn’t seem bad at all, he thought. Up to nothing much, down on my luck sure, but tomorrow I’ll be up and at em’.
It would not be the last time Danny thought of tomorrow.
The box worker, he imagined, would be sweating in the stark fluorescent lit truck, arranging boxes. Docked like still life in the warehouse bay, Anton, the box worker, would come out after finishing the truck and be struck by the cool wind over his skin. He wouldn’t even notice the sun rising until he finished of his bottle of water, clocked out, and turned to the open sky.
The song changed again, he checked the album, then pulled his blinds open to reveal the city below. Danny did not live in one of the great American cities you might have heard about, but in the many cities near the greater cities. But he was lucky to be where he was, he knew, it just never truly felt like it.
In a far off window he saw a warm light. Still hours before the sun, it must be another person. He imagined it was a woman, living alone, strong, and independent. Of course someone, simply by virtue of being up at- what was it now, 2:25 almost- does not make them these things, after all, Danny was up. Danny was not strong or independent. Though he thought of himself as someone who treated his solitudes with some preference over multitudes, he felt he needed someone else to open his tightly sealed jam jars of trauma and contemplation, what others called “baggage”.
But this woman- who was a product of his imagination- she would be up doing something important. Perhaps making some difficult decision, one that had no real right or wrong answer. Should she keep her eyes set on her career with the city council and the budgetary offices she served in? She did have those aspirations of mayorship, the kind which would never be said or admitted, not for being wrong, but for being seemingly childish in the face of all the political whirligig going on. Or should she more or less give up those ambitions and confess her un-qualifying love to the country man of her dreams, met by chance, but bound by fate?
No right answer. She did care about the work, more than just for her sake, but she did love him. Did she truly love him? She knew if she agreed to love him it would mean leaving the city at least, maybe the state. They had talked it over like such adults- she was a strong independent woman remember- and yet she avoided the words, never committing. But all the issues the city faced she was in the middle of solving or at least helping. And people had come to rely on her, not her fault, or was it? Things were so muddled!
“Adults” She would sigh under breath. “I wish he never loved me, or the city didn’t need me, or both. Life must be so simple for the little people. And where are my vices when I need them?” She never let herself have vices, they would have gotten in the way of work.
Danny figured her to be self important, yet to him deeply admirable. Such is the way with strong independent people, he thought.
And no wonder he conjured her life with love, Danny couldn’t go minutes without thinking of his. She was not everything to him. Most everything, but not everything (he was sure to make the distinction) and she happened to be in another city in another hemisphere at the moment- actually for the past four days- three days and four nights. Maybe that was why he couldn’t sleep.
He thought of where she might be, but found he kept slipping between that and a fantasy where he could have went with her. One scene of her at the podium giving the good speech, the next them in the hotel room. Then her mingling with giants of her field on the conference floor, then back together on the streets of Melbourne, like he was her imaginary friend. He didn’t love the comparison. Perhaps he was just an anxious person.
The album stopped. Clock check: 2:52. Why was his mind racing? Maybe something calmer than jazz fusion would help. Ah, of course, Sinatra’s “In The Wee Small Hours”…
For the next while Danny would be absorbed in thinking of his love, guided by Sinatra through the dim blue curtain of memory and longing. So while he’s occupied with his indigo dreamscape, falling into a sleep lighter than air, let’s take a trip of our own.
Down on highway 75,
Farther than a day’s long drive,
And where no street lamp halos fall,
And where no dead end angels crawl,
In the wide and open sticks,
A home laid low down to it’s bricks,
Castaway and overgrown,
For longer than most folk had know,
Sits with one brick out of place,
Amiss in mortar and disgrace,
Wondering how, and oh, and why,
Why they must watch the world go by?
Jake the brick had watched the sunset a thousand times. He once took satisfaction knowing his body was useful as a home. But on the dingy moss floor, he felt he had no use at all. One breezy sunny morning a snail crawled on him, but it only stayed to feed on his crumbling corner, and then left. They never stick around long, Jake thought, everything comes and goes. Yes everything that comes goes, and now that here no house is standing, even in this sun resplendent, I am hardly much of a brick.
Jake never saw the other bricks around him, tumbled though they were, as constants. The sun and moon were constants, the Earth beneath him constant, the trees, the presence of bees, the seasons and the mat of leaves. So everything that comes may not go. And as for his uselessness, I needn’t mention the termite larva under him to consider him worthy of existence. But that’s just how I feel.
A knot was forming in Danny stomach. He tied it himself, thinking about all the ways things had gone wrong and might go wrong. But he didn’t know how to undo it. 3:15- three more hours until he had to be up anyway. But maybe he should try for sleep again. Funny how his daydreams kept him up at night. Better stop the album here, put on something lighter.“ I Wasn’t Meant To Lose You”, Swervedriver.
At this point Danny was slipping into a sorry state. failing to sleep, he felt the paralyzing exhaustion of his disease, like he was a numb mind in a dead weight body. He managed to move his arm and close the curtains, cutting out any last light. He felt perpetually broken-hearted, for no good reason. But if he could think his way there, why couldn’t he think his way out? It was becoming all too much. He knew it would suffocate his life if he couldn’t turn his ship in another direction.
But it was a pale sea he sailed. Sometimes he wouldn’t see the crew for days. Did he lock himself away or did they? It was nothing but a restless cycle of restlessness and tiredness. In some waters the ship seemed motionless, and only lighthouses of an ethereal nature glanced from the shore. Maybe this vessel would be his coffin.
Why couldn’t he just be like normal happy people?
His phone buzzed. His heart leapt out of his chest and then back in again.
From: Rebecca [3:31] – Good morning Danny<3 It’s about 6:30 in the evening here. Everything’s going good so far but I won’t be able to talk to you again until I see you at the airport tomorrow. I hope you’re doing alright, I expect a full report when I get back : ). Anyways I’m getting on the plane now, I love you everso and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
He formed his reply, but stopped, he didn’t want her to worry about him being up late in her absence. He thought, she’s the most brilliant person I’ve even known. She’s everso smart and clever. Why did she love him, how could she? If ever she did, from where it came must have be running dry. How can I love her if I don’t love myself?
And so then as everyday seemed to go.
His mind went blank again, forced by his impatient brain into as much sleep it could manage.
When his consciousness came back to him more or less in full, he thought of his job. He was a button pusher at the button pushing corporation. That’s what he told people. Formally, he was an assistant secretary to the manager of a bank, which he continually attested amounted to little more than pushing buttons.
About a year ago, was it years now? He had become aware of the life choices which led him to that position, as if as a whole for the first time. A change, silent, imperceptible but for the walls of his canopy skull, must have happened. He found himself often wondering what he had been thinking when he pursued that career. He almost figured himself the artsy type, or maybe someone with a scientific bend, like his lover. But perhaps that was simply the naivety of perception that comes from looking at something from the outside. It was all so muddled now, as things get in those periods of life when the borders of our thoughts become lines so fuzzy it appears as though we are missing something.
He would not be button pushing tomorrow, but he would the next day. He imagined how that day’s meeting would go.
I’ll probably clock in the same as always. That old air conditioning buzzing. Even on hot days it was too much cold. I hate days where you can never find the right temperature to be. So we’ll all file in and the inanity will begin again. I’ll spend years or more at icy altitudes, and come crashing down at the round table. No miracles on any Hudson to speak of. Perhaps that was an exaggeration- the meeting would only be an hour. They’ll try to have such critical conversations. Most of us will be tacos too stuffed with so much ground beef, and not enough of our own feeling, marinated in consequences, condemnation and contemplation. Attitudes and agitation.
“Meeting dismissed”
Relief and grief for the moment, and a trickling sense of stupidity and superfluidity will pervade as we return our 747’s to their white plastic hangers. Wash, rinse, scrub harder, still missed a spot, well it’s fine, we can just put in the dishwasher, repeat.
Look. There was the sun coming up now. No need to check the time, the answer was now. It was always now, now came with him everywhere he went. Whether he was thinking about it or not, he was in it, now and forever.
The cat jumped onto the bed. Someone’s up early, he thought. He stroked the cat’s dense grey fur. He looked like a bear, the way he stalked, ambled and laid so languidly. The cat was like a bear too. You’re up early too? he thought.
Danny’s disease was in full motion now, grinding down each thought, each action, to a baseless vapidness. He was diagnosed with seasonal affectation in his freshman year of college, his younger brother with schizophrenia three years later, in what would have been his freshman year. For Danny it ate into all domains of life.
The cat licked it’s foot. Long minutes passed. All things pass.
But everyday does not have to be like the day before, he thought. Sometimes the sun sets hard, and rises again a different beast. So there was no knowing, only now and here, where when would only be could. Most worrying was worrying over nothing. Just like all the space between the atoms, and the space between that, there was mostly nothing worth the stress.
The sun crested the water tower then, a bird’s eye, in it’s orbital cage. It was a predictable wildfire. All the daring people below would go about like it wasn’t the most striking and enormous thing in the universe. Like they would all go about as if Danny’s problems weren’t the only ones that existed. Oh, hey, Bittersweet Symphony’s on. What a jam…
And I’m a million other people from one day to the next, oh yeah…
Those were his long nights. Danny would try hard to sleep, maybe sleep for a little, get back up, fall in and out of his mind, and finally watch the sunrise. I watch him every time. His lover has little idea. All the world has little idea, of Danny, or Danny’s little ideas of them. I play my part, be around, watch, lend a kindly ear.
In the wee small hours, of those dimly mornings,
In the wee small hours, caressed or ensnared by ourselves,
In the wee small hours, holding the earth in the cavity of our chests,
In the wee small hours, we are all alone together.
everything & nothing 