Canady Park

by Jeff Miller



  Canady Park

  by

  Jeff Miller

  *****

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Canady Park

  Copyright 2010 by Jeffery C. Miller

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  *****

  Canady Park

  Kevin Landstreet, ex-computer programmer, climbed the stairs to his apartment with his head down and his hands in his pockets. At the top of the stairs he saw a piece of paper taped to his apartment door that screamed “Notice of Eviction” in bold black letters, facing outward so that everyone who passed by could read this declaration of irresponsibility. Kevin snatched the notice from the door, shoved it into the pocket of his jeans then rushed inside his apartment, locking the door behind him. He exhaled, groaned, then wondered how long it had been there. He was gone most of the day so it was conceivable that he was the pariah of the apartment building by now.

  He ran a mental inventory of the residents on his floor. There was the older lady in apartment two-twenty-three, and a young couple in two-twenty-seven. These, at least, were certain to know of his shame by now. And the pretty young lady in two twenty nine probably saw the notice too. He didn’t know any of these people. He only saw them when they passed in the hallway, coming or going.

  Technically, homelessness posed a greater threat to Kevin’s well-being than the threat of derision from his nebulous neighbors. Strangely though, Kevin was not concerned with technicalities at the moment. He just wanted to be liked. He could have let it go at that. It was a well-defined conclusion. However, Kevin's brain thrived on crafting paradoxes from incomplete data and creating enigmas out of the obvious. His mind acted like a supercomputer generating bad data due to faulty programming. With his backside planted firmly against the inside of his apartment door, he stared blankly into his living room and pondered.

  Before long a new paradox thrust itself under the electron microscope of his analytically conscious mind to be reverse engineered until it was dis-assembled into its constituent parts. This paradox took the shape of the following circular statement: “The harder I work to make people like me, the less they do.” Thus, his thoughts devolved into even more convoluted circularities, each one based upon the one preceding it with only occasional permutations or new data sets introduced into the flow. If it were physically possible for one’s head to explode from too much thought, Kevin would have been a very dangerous person to be around.

  ~~~~~

  Four months earlier Kevin had lost his job as a computer programmer. It wasn’t a very good job, but it paid the bills. Even when they cut his hours he was able to scrimp by. But the day finally came, as he feared it might - and it always did - that he was called into the boss's office and let go. “Just not enough work to keep a full staff right now Kev,” explained his boss.

  With all of the time and effort that Kevin devoted to thought, it could be assumed that he was brilliant, perhaps even a genius. The truth is, Kevin did not know very much. The overwhelming amount of cyclical processing kept his mind tied up most of the time. His thought processes formed something of a closed system. Very little went in. Very little came out.

  Over the next three months he slipped further and further behind. During this period he managed to cobble together one job interview with a building maintenance company. He found the listing in the classified jobs section of the newspaper and wasn’t sure what it entailed. The ad had no description, just a phone number under the heading Affiliated Office Ablutions. Kevin assumed, correctly, that this was the company’s name. He called the number and was told when to show up for an interview.

  The day of the interview Kevin paced back and forth in front of a single story office in a strip mall until finally working up the courage to go inside. He approached a purple-haired receptionist whose face was studded like a practice pad in a rivet gun factory with frightening metallic objects. Her black lips bulged like a Yin/Yang symbol on her deathly-pale face. Kevin cleared his throat. “Hi, I'm Kevin Landstreet,” his voice cracked. “I'm here for a job interview.”

  The receptionist looked up at Kevin, opened her mouth and clicked a bolt imbedded in her tongue against a tooth. The sound made Kevin shiver. The girl sighed, then picked up a form and handed it to Kevin. He took it, thanked her, then found a seat in the reception area. He didn’t have a clipboard and was afraid to ask for one, so he began filling out the application on his lap. This wasn't working out very well because at the same moment Kevin's feet decided, quite on their own, that they were more interested in ballistic bouncing. Kevin, in turn, was obliged to institute Directive Seventeen.

  ~~~~~

  Directive Seventeen was a situational stop-gap that Kevin had developed over time to compensate for his unruly mental processes. It was designed to devise and implement corrective alternatives when his, sometimes unresponsive, body became detached from the diluted commands of his overtaxed brain. This particular implementation of Directive Seventeen required that Kevin stand up and fill out his application against the wall.

  Upon completion of this task he returned the filled out application to the receptionist, then sat down in his seat to await his interview. As he sat in the waiting room Kevin noticed several other men filling out applications. He compared their manner of dress to his own apparel choices for the day. This, of course, presented a conundrum for Kevin’s besieged mind to mull. Unfortunately his capacity to mull seemed to be offline. This had happened before. Kevin knew it to be a precursor sign, not a good one, especially when coupled with the fact that he had just instituted Directive Seventeen.

  Taken together these were undeniable indicators that Kevin was about to experience something that his doctor referred to as a “Panic Attack”. As fate would have it, Kevin’s mind chose a bad time to initiate the “Panic Attack” subroutine. For, at that moment, he perceived an audible and very familiar string of consonants and vowels. “Kevin Landstreet!” the receptionist called. It was his turn to be interviewed.

  The interview started out pretty well. There were smiles, and handshakes. Kevin sat erect in his chair. He listened to the Interview Lady’s summary of Affiliated Office Ablutions’ corporate mission. She expounded upon its goals, and its commitment to “unabashed quality and customer service”. So far as Kevin could tell, the momentum was flowing in his favor. Then, a change occurred in the dynamics of the interview. A sudden silence indicated to Kevin that he had arrived at a nexus. He deduced that this was the point where he was required to provide input into the conversation.

  Most people know that a frozen computer cannot process anything. It becomes oblivious to any command that its user may attempt to give it. The image on the screen could look perfectly normal, but it is nothing more than a ghost of the last successfully executed command that occurred before the processor froze. This was essentially Kevin’s state of mind at that moment. If he had been capable of describing the situation he might have said, “this is the point in the interview when the momentum changed.”

  Kevin would have paid good money, if he had had any, for a Directive Seventeen to throw at this problem. But Directive Seventeens required a functional brain in which to execute their instruction set. At the moment, Kevin’s supply of functional brains had fallen below the minimum system requirements needed to run one.

  It became painfully apparent to Kevin that the disturbing smile affixed to his face, like an “under construction” page on a web site, could not hold out much longer as a substitute for communication. An intern
al battle to restore his functionality raged as each excruciating moment of silence blipped out of existence and was replaced by an even more excruciating moment of silence, and so on, until the truth revealed itself that his brain was thousands of miles away on a slow bus to nowhere, and he was out of time.

  After a minute or two of leaden silence the interview lady smiled. Kevin couldn’t see this. What he saw was a radiantly white sheet of paper floating in front of his face, the words “Notice of Eviction” blinking on and off just above its surface.

  “Well then,” said the interview lady. “If there’s nothing more...” She rose from her chair and offered her hand. Kevin grasped it like an automaton, but was at a loss for what to do next. The interview lady escorted him, as one would an invalid, to the door. All of this happened quickly, or so it seemed to Kevin, as if in one fluid motion. He found himself standing outside the interview lady’s office door, but couldn't gauge how long he had been there. She was saying something. The words fluttered around his head. With some difficulty he caught them and deciphered their meaning. “We will contact you if we decide to hire you.”

  For one magnificent nanosecond these words filled Kevin with hope. Then he realized that this was merely an aberration of vestigial optimism ricocheting around his brain like a wily virus. This he quarantined, and purged from the system.

  “Thank you very much for your time,” said Kevin automatically, The sound of his own voice stunned him. He turned and walked out the front door of the building knowing that they would not be contacting him.

  ~~~~~

  Now, standing in his apartment with his back against the door, Kevin pulled the eviction notice from his pocket. He tried to read the legalese printed in tiny letters on the back of it. There were a lot of words that he did not understand. He was hoping that there might be a clause that said something to the effect that he could stay in his apartment a little bit longer if he promised to keep trying, but it was hopeless.

  Kevin put the eviction notice on top of his television set. He walked over to the sofa and lay down. He was nauseous and exhausted when he closed his eyes and crossed his forearms over them. Within a few minutes his system had achieved complete and heavenly shutdown.

  ~~~~~

  When he awoke he felt light. He rose from the couch, walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. He couldn’t shake this feeling of lightness, like he had lost thirty-five pounds in an hour. He closed the refrigerator door. He thought he might be able to float up off the ground if he concentrated really hard, but his mind was still fairly silent at the moment. He didn’t want to disturb it. Instead, he launched himself into the air. He rose no higher than what seemed normal, and landed on his feet at what seemed to be a normal impact, considering weight and velocity. Still, he decided he liked this 'light' feeling, whatever it was. He certainly felt better now than he had before his nap.

  Kevin walked back to the living room to finish reading a book about locomotives that he had started the previous evening. He stopped cold as he passed through the doorway. A bolt of fear shocked his spine. He stared at the couch where somebody lay sprawled out, apparently sleeping. The same couch that Kevin had vacated just minutes before. He crept backward a few steps, all the while trying to decide how to handle the situation. From his current vantage point all he could see was the top of the person’s head, but the longer he looked, the more he sensed that this was not just a random sleepy person who had commandeered his couch. He finally worked up the courage to creep forward so he could get a better view. To his shock, he recognized the person. It was Kevin Landstreet.

  ~~~~~

  Kevin sat down in a reclining chair next to the couch and watched himself sleep. He wondered if he might be dead. He didn’t think so. He could see the sleeping Kevin’s chest lightly rise and fall. He was afraid to touch him. “What if he wakes up?" he wondered. "What will I say to...myself?" The situation reminded Kevin vaguely of a magazine story he had read as a kid. It was about a guy who claimed to live on earth while he was awake, then when he fell asleep he would leave his body and awaken on a planet he called Rubberworld because, in that world, things bounced with an equal and opposite force off of anything else that made contact with them. This actually made Kevin feel slightly better about the whole situation. At least he didn't wake up on Rubberworld.

  After a while he decided he should call somebody, an ambulance, or the cops, but he had no phone service. The phone company had disconnected it a month before. He remembered the pay phone at the convenience store on the corner and decided that this was his only option. As he rose from his recliner there was a knock at the door. Kevin had no friends to speak of. There was only one person who would be knocking on his door, and Kevin was expecting him.

  As he walked toward the door he rehearsed what he would say. He turned the knob and pulled the door inward. His landlord, Mr. Riskotti, five feet two inches of Italian American stood glaring.

  “Hi Mr. Riskotti.” said Kevin. “Listen, I understand about the rent and all, but something weird is going on here. Can I possibly use your telephone?”

  Mr. Riskotti took a step backward. The scowl dropped from his face. He appeared to be staring directly at Kevin’s chest.

  “Mr. Riskotti,” Kevin repeated. “Can I use your phone?”

  Mr. Riskotti ignored him. After a short time the old fellow tiptoed stealthily forward, as if Kevin wasn’t standing right there watching him. It reminded Kevin of Agent White sneaking up on Agent Black in the Mad magazine comics. Mr. Riskotti moved tentatively across the threshold, then into the apartment. “Who’s there?” he asked. His voice shaking.

  “It’s me, Kevin.”

  There was no response. Mr. Riskotti acted as if he had not heard, but that was impossible. He was standing right in front of Kevin.

  “Don’t be tricky with me Landstreet,” said Mr. Riskotti. “I know you’re in here!” he said, squinting down the hallway through his thick glasses.

  “I’m right here sir,” said Kevin. He stepped back to give Mr. Riskotti room to enter the apartment. Mr. Riskotti took two more cautious steps then peered warily behind the door. He looked down the hallway again. This time he saw Kevin sleeping on the couch.

  “There you are, you no goodkin!” said Mr. Riskotti. “Wake up!” He turned and hobbled at his normal pace down the hallway toward the living room where Kevin lay. Kevin touched Mr. Riskotti on the shoulder causing Mr. Riskotti to simultaneously yelp like a dog that had gotten its tail stepped, on and to launched himself into the wall. He slapped at the shoulder that Kevin had just touched as if trying to swat a horsefly. His glasses fell to the carpet, knocked off by his impact with the wall. Mr. Riskotti looked directly at Kevin, but his gaze had a distant quality, as if he were looking through him. Then, he turned and ran from the apartment faster than Kevin ever imagined the old man could move. His glasses remained on the hallway floor. Kevin picked them up then ran out the door. “Mr. Riskotti! Your glasses!” Mr. Riskotti was nowhere to be seen.

  Kevin returned to the apartment and put Mr. Riskotti’s glasses on top of the eviction notice that he had laid on the TV, then he stepped back out of the apartment and closed the door behind him. He had no destination in mind so he wandered around the park. For some reason he felt calm. This was a feeling that Kevin rarely experienced for any length of time. Under the circumstances he decided that this feeling seemed out of place, so he started to analyze why, then decided he didn't care. He would just enjoy it while it lasted.

  An hour later he walked down Cape Hope street toward his apartment building. An ambulance and two police cars were parked in front of the building. As he walked, he watched two paramedics work a gurney down the last few steps and onto the sidewalk. Kevin was still half a block away when he realized who was on the gurney.

  “Wait!” he yelled. He ran, flailing his arms in the air, trying to get the paramedics’ attention.

  “Wait, don’t take him yet!” Kevin yelled so hard his ribs cramped up
forcing him to stop running, and giving the paramedics time to get the gurney into the back of the ambulance and close the doors. By the time Kevin reached the front of his apartment building the ambulance was pulling out into traffic, escorted by the police cruisers.

  Kevin looked to the entrance of the building. At the top of the steps he saw Mr. and Mrs. Riskotti clutching each other, both transfixed on the morbid motorcade that made its way up Cape Hope Street and out of sight.

  “Mr. Riskotti! Mrs. Riskotti!” Kevin yelled. He waved his arms in the air. Neither of them paid any attention to him. Together, they turned. Mr. Riskotti put an arm around his wife, who seemed to be crying. They shuffled back into the apartment building closing the door behind them.

  Kevin tried to get into his apartment. The door was locked. He had left his key inside. He considered knocking on the Riskottis’ door, but decided that wouldn’t be a good idea. So he walked aimlessly around the city nestled in a comfortable, albeit dark, haze of jumbled thoughts. When he finally re-gathered his wits he found himself sitting on a bench in Canady Park.

  “Funny thing about parks,” he thought, “seems like people only visit when there's no place else to go.” Kevin surveyed his surroundings. Scraps of paper and empty soda cans lined the sides of the walking trail. A lonely bicycle leaned against an old tree. It had been there so long that rust stains ran from its decrepit frame and down the bark of the tree. It seemed as though the sun should be blazing judging from the quality of the light that reflected off of the pavement and the glittering halo of gold flecks that glinted off of the tree's leaves, but Kevin didn't feel warm, or cold. Temperature didn't seem to be a factor at all as far as he could tell. He noticed there weren’t many people in the park. Near the small lake in the center of the park was a playground, but no children. In their place was garbage. It was all over the place. Kevin wondered who was supposed to keep this place up. Whoever it was, they weren't doing their job. He doubted that this type of neglect would be tolerated on Rubberworld. Maybe he would have been better off there. He reviewed his options for living quarters and decided that this park bench was as good a place as any to call home, at least for now.