Joel sat at the head of the thrifted, tile topped wooden table that he had purchased for $23 when he moved into his overpriced, undersized apartment. It was 3:30 in the afternoon and the radiant warmth that poured in from the window next to the table contrasted nicely with the cold tile that rested just below his palms. He stared as far into the abyss that his apartment would let him – about seven feet – as his mind battled with a question he was unsure he even knew how to answer.
Joel Portnoy started that day in the same way that he did every other that week – by gasping for air. Although he had been afflicted with an uneasiness that even two decades of overzealous therapists and an equally invasive mother could not explain, Joel’s naturally anxious state was not the cause of his most recent internal struggle.
“Do I need to be committed?”
He let that question sit in the back of his mind for a moment while the sun warmed the right side of his face. The large windows that were draped from wall-to-wall were initially what had drawn him to the apartment six months prior. Things were simpler back then. Still difficult. But simpler.
Joel moved to Cycil, a small New England town, right after graduating from college. It was prohibitively expensive, lacked many of the basic furnishings of civilization, and Joel didn’t know a living soul there. It was a fresh start. He had gotten a job writing copy remotely for a boutique ad agency based out of Raleigh – mostly coupons, online pop-up ads, YouTube ad reads, things of that nature. Advertising was emphatically not Joel’s dream and it baffled him that it was anybody’s. Sure, he was thankful to have a job that allowed him to have his own apartment and to live in whatever little town he wanted but he found the world of advertising itself to be wholly unremarkable. But what else was he going to do with an elite liberal arts degree?
Overall, things were good for Joel during that first month in Cycil. Although the first week was lonelier than he was expecting and he hated how cheap all his furniture was, once he found his footing, he was surprised how peaceful monotony could be. It would be in meeting people, however, that he would find no clear resolution. Joel had the makings of what most would consider to be an easily approachable man. He was not unattractive in the conventional sense and he was good natured enough that whenever he was talking to a person, he’d ask how they were doing and mean it.
Unfortunately for Joel, it would be his own personal doubt that would cause him to spend most of his time alone. Doubt that he never had anything interesting to say or that his face wasn’t good enough to look at. But more than anything else, he doubted that anyone else felt the way that he did. Lonely. Every so often, when he would be sitting in the coffee shop or at a restaurant, he would see another person who seemed to be about his age and his eyes would burn with rage for a hot passing second. For just a moment, he felt a deep hatred for them, more than anything else in the world. He resented them for their confidence in sitting alone. He despised them for not having the courage to walk over and ask to join him. But then, just as quickly as they would appear, those ugly, fiery feelings would vanish, leaving behind only more doubt.
There was a part of Joel that always suspected that whatever solitary patron sitting across from him also felt those same, vile feelings and that they too felt disgusted with themselves for it. But he found very little comfort in that. He wondered if it would be better if he were just the problem.
Joel opened his eyes and looked down at his hands. They glowed in the sunlight. He looked around his apartment and appreciated how the light managed to effortlessly touch nearly every square inch of it. For almost twenty minutes a day, his beige walls would be painted gold and his cramped living room that could barely house a love seat and a table were cloaked in an effervescent cloth. Joel appreciated his apartment and he was growing to love the life that he was building for himself. But on that day he was tired, as he had been every day that week. Joel knew that he wasn’t sleeping well, that wasn’t really new. However, there was something novel about this type of exhaustion. It was a type of mental fatigue – the kind that a person gets from being incredibly stressed or from being on high alert for long periods of time.
It had all started around a week and a half before when Joel was sitting at his favorite coffee shop – the one of two in town that wasn’t a Dunkin – when out of the corner of his eye and for the briefest of seconds, he was a dark figure moving abnormally fast. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it but it moved at a speed that was so quick it didn’t feel human. It didn’t even seem natural. He felt that all too familiar pit of anxiety grow in the pit of his stomach as he looked around the cafe in search of some type of validation. He tried to make eye-contact with the cashier but she just gave him a polite, tight-lipped smile and looked back down at her phone. Everyone else there seemed equally distracted and enjoying the happenings of their own self-contained stories. Joel took a deep breath, as he had done thousands of times whenever he felt overwhelmed by what the world was sending his way. He decided that it was just going to be one of those inconsequential things that he’d have to pretend didn’t happen.
Joel would see the creature in the corner of his eye twice two days later while he was shopping at the grocery store. The first time was while he was meticulously inspecting the packages of strawberries. With his focus narrow on a particularly ripe looking bunch, the figure flashed by once again. Startled, Joel shot his head straight up and began frantically looking in all directions, dramatically dropping the container on the floor. The grocery store clerk standing next to him rolled his eyes with the presence of his new task.
As if going through the motions once again, Joel sought some type of confirmation from the bystanders in the area. Each person that passed him carried on, enjoying the monotony in the tasks that Joel himself not long ago had grown to find sacred. Joel rubbed his eyes until stars appeared, hoping he could summon the creature on his own terms. When this failed, he joined the ranks of the casual shoppers.
Fifteen minutes later, almost as if some type of cruel joke, just as Joel had put the sighting behind him, the creature appeared again. That time, however, it behaved differently. Although still remaining in his periphery, the creature no longer moved at breakneck speed but now crept, like a frozen malevolent shadow. Despite crawling like a fog on the fringe of his gaze, Joel could not place his eyes on it directly. For a reason that he couldn’t even begin to explain, this change in the creature enraged him. Whatever the cause or source of this apparition, it had begun to taunt him. It no longer felt the need to sprint around and run away but yet it was so cowardly that it would not face him head on? It took every ounce of Joel’s strength to not curse the creature right there in the cereal aisle. Realizing the ridiculousness of the situation he was in, Joel once again took a deep breath and kept inhaling and inhaling. He did not want to stop until the panic and rage and confusion went away with the creature. So he did not stop.
When Joel opened his eyes, the store was on top of him and a small crowd had gathered. Creatures from all over town, with their monotonous rituals interrupted, gathered around to see the man laying on the vinyl floor.
“Is he dead?”
“Should we call someone?”
“He looks too young to pass out like that”
Joel got up and emerged from the ring of onlookers with an embarrassed smile. Half looking down, he apologized to all of them and quickly left the store without buying anything. The creature taunted Joel the whole drive home, oscillating between slothing and hurling itself around the perimeter of his vision.
However, as luck would have it, the next few days were relatively uneventful for Joel. Call it the endurance of the human spirit but despite its best efforts and no matter its speed, the creature was unable to sever Joel’s participation in the regularness of life. He still needed to write 250 taglines by the end of the week and his rent was still due on Thursday. He figured he would treat the creature for what it was – an interloper in his affairs, a freeloader in his life.
Empowered by his newfound attitude, even tried learning how to ignore the creature. All signs pointed to this just being one of those weird things that Joel would learn to live with that nobody needed to know about. That was until it happened.
As Joel drifted off to sleep, he recounted the uneventful details of the day and cataloged the list of tasks that needed to be done during the next. With his eyes closed, darkness swirled around him in a pool of deep nothing. But it was from this nothing that something began to form. No longer from the fringes but head on, the creature began to form. Joel could feel the panic growing at the base of his neck and quickly opened his eyes. His room was enshrouded in a darkness not dissimilar from the one inside his mind. A faint light crept in through the curtain. Joel looked down at his phone. The bright light tore through the darkness and declared the time to be 3:30am. “I must have just fallen asleep”, he nervously thought to himself.
Joel tossed and turned for another half hour before finally nodding off once again. He slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep and was awoken by the sound of his alarm. As quickly as he was asleep, he was awake.
Joel slowly opened his eyes, combating the morning light. Squinting through the brightness, something felt different. Joel got up and washed his face. As he looked in the mirror, he once again had the ominous feeling of absence. He felt a lagging sorrow that he could not explain. Joel continued throughout his day with the lingering feeling of loss.
By mid-afternoon, it hit Joel like a ton of bricks. The creature was gone. Neither fast nor slow, it no longer taunted him from the outskirts of his vision. Sitting on his couch, Joel flung his head into his lap and began laughing uncontrollably. He was free. He was finally free! Whatever that thing was had left him. It finally left him alone.
He stopped laughing. He took out his phone and stared at it for a moment. This was the best thing to happen to him in months and there wasn’t a single soul he could tell. This had been the worst thing in months and there hadn’t been a single soul he could tell.
Joel got up from the couch and sat at the head of his thrifted, tile topped kitchen table. He felt the warmth of the sun rest gently on the side of his face.