Chapter 67: Troy Walks A Road Paved With Pedestrians

Tues, December 1, 2074 4:02 am- Caliente Manor; Middlebourne, Pleasantview

When Troy was in his late teens, his mother signed him up for figure drawing courses in a somewhat misguided attempt to foster his development as a well-rounded individual. Although he had initially been resistant to the idea, he soon found an appreciation for the organized system that was the human anatomy. The average person is seven heads tall. In one point perspective, the eyes are located half way down the head. The tip of the nose is half way between the eyes and the chin. The opening of the mouth, half way between the nose and the chin. The eyes are separated by the space of one eye. The corners of the mouth line up directly with the centers of the pupils. Troy could drop a line, bisect a torso and plot its symmetry.

One evening as he was packing his toolbox, his instructor pulled him aside. You've an excellent grasp of the mechanics of drawing, Mr. Tellerman she said. Your compositions are dynamic. Your line quality is superb. Your sense of scale and proportion, meticulous. But I am afraid that your work is almost clinical in its objectivity. You see an arm and indeed, you draw an arm.



Thirty years later, Troy still scrutinized everything from a standpoint that was "clinical in its objectivity" but was only just now starting to understand the formulaic sterility that it produced. Was he really so tedious as to arrange his ties by color and stick to a skin care regimen and monitor his calorie intake and filter the water that he bathed in? Was he really so hardwired to evaluate himself by what he owned that when considering the blandness of his lifestyle, his consumer habits were first to come to mind? Or is asking that question too self-aware? Is it a bad thing to be self-aware? Is that how he got to this point? Is self-awareness a road paved with pedestrians?

Siren curled her knees up to her chest and exhaled audibly. Troy rubbed her back with the flat of his hand the way he had when she was a little girl, so terrified of the dark that she would hiccup herself to sleep. Nowadays, it was Troy who lay awake.



When he could sleep, he no longer dreamed. It was what he imagined death to be like-- Just a perfect and empty state of not being. What was cleaner, more organized, more symmetrical and unified than that? And yet, for a man with absolutely no imagination or intuition, he desperately missed dreaming. In his dreams, nothing had a predictable statistical outcome. His dreams were absurd and contradictory and farcical and ugly. And yet, they were all the more concrete for it.

Reality was artifice. Reality was a finite thing that could be measured by the depth of his wallet and the length of cock. That was reality. His dreams had no respect for size or dimension.



No, that wasn’t entirely true. He did have his wife. He did have the kids. He collapsed down onto his back and Siren nuzzled up to his neck. She kissed him lightly where his jaw line and his throat met. Unlike everything else in Troy’s life, there wasn't an ornamental or frivolous thing about her. And he yet he still treated her with less care than he did his fucking suits.