The Blanks

When the doorbell buzzes it catches him imagining how a head, bloody and real, might arrive at his door, wondering if the package containing a human head would be delivered by a uniformed messenger or would the regular postman stow the boxed head in one of the eight mini-lockers reserved for pieces of mail too large to fit into tenant mailboxes lining two walls of the small alcove where the lockers are situated downstairs off the main hallway between the security desk and elevators, a key tagged with the locker's number awaiting his long fingers after he stoops to unlock his box and gropes inside the treacherously sharp-edged metal opening barely wide enough to wedge in his brown-backed, pink-faced hand. A coincidence he tells himself on his way from his desk to the apartment door, the buzzer buzzing in the midst of his daydreaming about the delivery of a head. Strictly a coincidence. Two separate events, one real, one imaginary bundled with a million billion others sharing the accident of birth during the same nano-second. The conjunction purely coincidental, he assures himself, repeating his conviction not in words this time but with a brow furrowing scowl and wag of his head he directs at the gullible part of himself staring through the apartment door. The dumb part believing it sees a delivery person in the hall holding a head-size box squeezed under one arm. An actual sound no doubt had interrupted his imagining, the buzz disconnecting the scene inside his head from what's about to happen next here in the actual world. No doubt the head business over and out so why does he hesitate, close enough to the door for the buzzing to vibrate inside his teeth and the bangs following the buzz to thump like blows against his chest. Just a coincidence, he reminds himself, like when a person thinks about someone not seen for a long while and then in the next instant the imagined someone appears. A coincidence, never mind the fact it feels like the opposite of coincidence. Like timing's off. Like two different worlds—fiction and fact—each supposed to occupy its own pocket of time and space—have gotten tangled up, squeezed together. Knowing better doesn't prevent him from feeling disoriented, diminished. A traffic jam. Or traffic accident. A weird destabilizing overlap or warping or reversal. As if he knows he's listening to a remix except he's never heard the original tracks before. Everything's coincidental, he proposes, if you could stand far enough away to see the bundle of time you claim as your time carrying you along within it, you riding the grand flow, fitting, a perfect fit you think wrapped safely by your bundle, but it's not your time really, it's always all time, the same time whether you're thinking of yourself inside or outside or imagining yourself on leave, positioned at a distance great enough to view what seems to be your personal portion. Everything coincidental. Everything happening at once. Once. No stops. No starts. No chance to escape like the unexpected grains of rice yesterday spilling, skittering helter-skelter across the kitchen floor when he lifted from the cupboard shelf a bag of Uncle Ben's with a hole he didn't see in the bottom.

No need to give time a second to correct itself. He's not doing a delivery guy a favor (definitely a brown uniformed male he sees in the hall through the door) allowing him a half minute or so to dissolve along with the daydream which had brought him hovering silently at the apartment's door till the buzzer buzzed, dissolving to clear the way for whomever's out there now, pounding, impatient as anybody—stalled delivery person or not—kept waiting for no good reason has a right to be. So he opens his door and before he can speak—while he's concluding faster than the speed of light that time's timing can't be off and that he doesn't...