Marcus R— All Over

Marcus was one afternoon lying on his couch with not much to do. He might have been working at the dry cleaners that day but he’d begged off sick. In fact, there was a touch of nausea in his stomach, but this was more spiritual infection than anything of the figure. He wouldn’t have said so to his boss.

In any case, Marcus was supine. He was, in other words, indolent. He was, as one would say, goldbricking, a rounder. This is important.

From his place on the couch—crimson with a yellow afghan thrown over its back—he faced the one window in the room. The window had no curtain but it did have a shade, one of those rollers the color of parchment.

Marcus was not reading, since then in his life he had no interest in books. His friends talked about Camus and Camus and Camus, and Weil, but he hadn’t a clue what they wrote. Cumbersome things that might have been beautiful, had he’d checked, he thought. If he had any interest, he thought, he might have been struck.

The rainy afternoon light came through the shade: two rectangles of almost equal dimension, one stacked above the other, transected at the center, the light parchment-colored and soft, dim but brightest at the middle, spectral to the edges, diffusely aglow, phantomic, psychic, transected at the center.

Marcus never wanted to go back to the cleaners. It gave him incorporeal turns in his gut. What would he do? So holy, so precious, so lazy. What could he do?

The world was faintly and perfectly dizzy. He closed his eyes and there in the dark he hunted—he laid out—for form.