Now is the Time

The stars were tugging at him. They had lined themselves up just so while he slept and today was the day. For once, life was going to work properly for him today. Things were going to happen today. Big things. Auspicious things. Things he'd remember forever. His spine lay straighter. His blood flowed with purpose. All he felt was exhausted. He still had no idea what the universe had paved the way for.

He dragged himself into the bathroom as though this was any other morning. Any other morning! Vast scattered galaxies had made provisions for him, for this day. Sun spots, volcanoes on Jupiter, and the rings around Saturn had all adjusted accordingly. This was the most unordinary Monday in the history of time. He found his teeth with his toothbrush and scraped and ground the long hot night from his mouth. His head was in the clouds. His body was...

He looked at himself in the mirror. He didn't think he looked too good. A crease ran from one eye to the corner of his mouth. His left eye. No, his right eye. On his right as he looked in the mirror. So that would make it his... He almost fell asleep standing in front of the mirror. He remembered to spit out the toothpaste. The universe couldn't hold this position for long. Couldn't hold open this window of opportunity for more than a few minutes. Wonderful things were ready to happen, but he'd have to wake up first.

He orbited from the bathroom and on into the kitchen. A star faded and fell, a million million miles away. The heavens rotated and clicked back into their normal position. The moment was gone. He realized he'd been staring at the coffee machine for a solid minute.

The Last Days of GumCo

It took him about a week to figure out that, if he stuck his arm all the way through the space where the tall, skinny window used to be, and flicked his wrist just right, he could make an orange on the end of a string land on what used to be Miss Tinley's buzzer, and let himself in the building.

That whole week while he tried to buzz himself in—Ms. Tinley having vanished along with everyone else—he drew no salary. It wouldn't have been right, getting paid for loafing all day, one arm jammed into the place where those tall, skinny windows used to be outside the entrance to GumCo. When he finally coaxed the orange onto the buzzer—he had really gotten quite good at it, rather like throwing a football or pitching a baseball, only it was an orange far past eating—the latch on the main door clicked open, and he laughed.

He hadn't felt that much relief since closing the Sweet Mart account. (No one—not even he—believed a retail chain stocking nothing but candies and gums would succeed, but until it folded, it would be stocking GumCo gums exclusively! He had whooped with joy, right there on the fourth floor!) And this, this modest little click, was just as powerful.

He didn't dare rig the buzzer (what if trespassers discovered they had free access, night or day to the GumCo building?), but he had acquired a real knack for the somewhat athletic technique of long-distance buzzer buzzing. He tried to carry on, amid the quiet and the emptiness. Day after day, he was the only person there. And that's no exaggeration. A few years ago, when an outbreak of flu and a four-day holiday weekend conspired to thin out the ranks of GumCo employees on the premises, he had called Muriel and told her—morbidly, she said when he got home that night—that it had been a graveyard in there. That was nothing. Now, from 8:50 until 5:00, he was the only person at GumCo. Phones rang and appointments came and went, unacknowledged. He tried to carry on.