Friday

I gasped and sat up violently, my body clammy and cold. My fingers and toes buzzed as though they'd been asleep. I felt like I couldn't breath, that there was something squeezing my chest, where my heart was flopping around like a fish out of water. Then the cold air hit me. Why had I left the terrace door open last night? That, I didn't know. The weather had been so finicky in the last month. Monday morning, I woke up stifled and sweating in the middle of the night and had to get up and open the door. I didn't remember leaving the door open last night, but if I did--I must have--then it was so I wouldn't again wake up in a sweat. But there I was, still sweating, only this time I was freezing as well.

I got out of bed and walked to the door to the balcony. I slid shut the large glass door and stared out over the skyline. For some reason, it didn't seem to shine the same this morning. The green outline of the Bank of America building was a little more hunter then emerald. As for Reunion Tower--as a kid I called it the Giant Tee-Off, since it looks like a golf ball on a tee--there were noticeably more lights missing than usual. Any other morning, the view of Downtown cheered me up--reminded me that I live in the big city--but this morning it seemed dreary, like a rusty fog had covered everything in sight, leaving me with an awful taste in my mouth, like an old penny.

My mind felt foggy, like there was some idea floating around in there just beyond my reach, like a voice in the distance or an image buried underwater that would rise up to the surface just enough that I could begin to make it out before diving back down again. Was I still dreaming? I've never remembered my dreams, not even as a child, so if I were indeed still dreaming, would I know?

At three o'clock, my alarm sounded. I thew on Hanro, Egyptian cotton bath robe, grabbed my gym bag and went out the door, down the hallway to the elevator and rode it up. At the twenty-ninth floor, the elevator stopped, the doors opened to reveal a young woman standing in the hallway. I'd seen this girl before, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, like clockwork. She couldn't have been older then thirty. Light brown hair with subtle blond highlights, very tasteful, pulled back into a ponytail. She wore a pair of boxer shorts and a Southern Methodist Law tee-shirt. She glanced at me as she stepped onto the elevator. I nodded at her. "Good morning," I said. "Morning," she replied. She turned her back to me a the elevator doors slid silently shut.

Good Morning. It struck me as odd that after months of meeting each other like this--three times a week, the only two souls awake in the building--we had never once shared more than those two words. God knows, I tried. A good looking young woman like her. But my earliest attempts to break her ice were derailed when I saw that she wasn't my type. That is to say, she was a little too "headstrong." There was also something in her eyes that was at the same time difficult to describe and entirely deliberate. It had been like her eyes were lasers or even x-ray beams that cut through the facade of my being. I felt naked when she looked at me, like she saw, not only through my clothes, but the whole outer image of me. Like she could see inside me, count my rings and know my true age. She could see the tiny nick of a scar from my eye lift that the doctor assured me nobody would notice. Honestly, I was glad that we only shared those two simple words. On days when we missed each other, I liked it even more.

By three fifteen I had begun my hour of cardio. One hour every morning and my no-carb diet have kept me under ten percent body fat well into my later thirties. Tuesdays and Thursdays I hit the treadmill. Monday, Wednesday and Friday it's the stairmill. It was Friday, so I got on the stairmill. Sure, it looks a little gay, but the truth is it's a real ball buster. "It'll wup the shit out'a ya. You can't argue with the results" my trainer told me. On any other day I would have agreed with him, but today...

Fifteen minutes in and my heart is pumping along at its target pace. My breathing deepens, and the sweat begins to dampen the collar of my tee-shirt. I was tired, and I knew it. Not any more worn-out than I should have been, but that morning I just seemed to feel it more. I looked at my reflection in the wall-length mirror in the front of the empty cardio room. My god, I thought, I do look ridiculous. It wasn't just me, a grown, arguably middle-aged man on a stair machine, but the situation as a whole. The fact that I payed seventy-five bucks a month to use this gym, then rode an elevator up ten flights of stairs to climb fake stairs, just so I can watch CNN on the High-def plasma widescreen they got bolted to the wall or stop by the Jamba Juice that they had built here for my convenience.

I stared into my reflection, observing my body as it humped its way along the truncated escalator to nowhere, until I stopped climbing, and the machine dropped me to the floor. My heart just wasn't in it.

I tried to lift some weights, which went better. Then I bought a protein smoothie and went back downstairs to me apartment.

Plastic Dreams

Before last night, I dreamt in plastic. And it all seemed so real to me at the time. My loft apartment. My Mercedes. The desk in my office at the ad agency. They all seemed so concrete, so unquestionably necessary. Like oxygen or a spine, as if, were they to disappear suddenly, I'd be left bowled-over and wriggling on the floor like an earthworm washed onto the sidewalk.

I dreamt of a world that was disposable, where everything was shiny, spotless and new. State of the art. A world where something as simple as a television or a coffee maker became worthless the moment the newest model hit the shelves, or more likely, the VIP market. After all, why wait for it to become available to the "GP"--that's General Public in ad-speak--when you can buy it on the grey market for twice the price and get it months before anyone else.

I dreamt I was in a world where everything was replaceable at the touch of a button, and the solutions to all of life's problems was no further that a phone call and a credit card away. Where what they say is true, that money can't buy happiness, but the promise of perfection is for sale on every corner, in every window display and magazine rack. Every billboard and bus stop affiche proclaiming in one unanimous voice "We are young. We are beautiful. We are immortal. Join us."

Before last night, I dreamt in plastic. My loft apartment, plastic. My Mercedes, plastic. The desk in my office at the ad agency, where I've spent the last fifteen years designing plastic labels to slap onto plastic products and pack into plastic boxes. Everything plastic. All of it, plastic. Plastic. Plastic. Plas--

You get the picture.

Even my face, my once handsome face, rich in youth and vigour, now spackeled and pumped full of botox and filler--an eye lift here, a chemical peel there--all in an attempt to delay the inevitable. A new coat of paint on a house infested with termites. Brass polish on the Titanic. A chocolate coating on a turd.

Before last night, I dreamt in plastic.
This morning, I woke up.