Charlie

Charlie had never laid eyes on anyone quite like her.

Ever.

He saw her full, shoulder-length golden-blond hair bobbing up and down with each sure step she took, a college student wearing an over-sized high-school Letterman’s jacket. The jacket had a crimson body and dull white sleeves. She wore a short green and blue plaid skirt, pearl-white knee-high socks, and fluorescent pink sneakers. He watched her walking on the wide concrete path toward the campus media center. Nothing could shake his sense of wonder about how George Lucas rather than Shakespeare or Kafka had first come up with Star Wars. Charlie did not know the woman. He loved her, though. He wanted to tell her so she would know that he loved her. By her knowing, he thought, he would expand himself into her consciousness and thus have access to her experience of living even if only through what he saw in her eyes while speaking to her.

He approached her and said, “Hello, I’m Charlie. I love you.” He watched her expression change from quizzical to shocked to confused in what he perceived as a sequence of twelve or perhaps fifteen distinctly different moments but believed was a never-changing eternal moment. On one level of consciousness he felt guilty about creating this experience for she-he/she but he realized on another level that the guilt was limited to the thinking of I(she-he/she). On the I(she-he/she)/I-me level of thinking there existed considerations of irony and contradiction. On a visceral level he felt desire, a desire for sex, to consume her and make her part of him. On a caring level he projected himself as her (I/Thou or I Art Thou) and felt a self-love in the form of abandonment of himself to himself as himself-as-her (self-self@self-as-other).

He became anxious when he realized he needed to urinate. He wanted to continue thinking about what was happening, to say something more. However, the urge to relieve himself overwhelmed him quickly so he turned and walked away very fast.

As he walked away he hoped he could make it to a bathroom in the media center before pissing down his leg. He found one and as he opened the door he unzipped his pants. A wave of elation overcame him as he relieved himself. After he finished he felt morose as he focused his attention more fully on the thoughts that emerged: How must that woman feel right now, how might she have felt when I turned and walked away? Did she think I was afraid, that I panicked? Did she think me deranged or unbalanced?

He felt shame and he hated his body, the same body that allowed his eyes to see her, his nose to smell her, and his ears to hear her. After he thought the latter thoughts he came to the conclusion that—

Why am I thinking about this stuff? he thought. He made a decision: I should pull up my pants and get the hell out of here. I'm supposed to meet Loretta at noon! He zipped his pants then washed, rinsed, and dried his hands. He left the bathroom and looked around. Computers were everywhere, row after row of desks with students tapping away. The space seemed as big as an airplane hangar. He turned to his left and walked to the door. Everyone is looking at me, he thought. They somehow know that I told that woman I loved her and then ran to the bathroom with what must have been an expression of horror on my face. What must they think of me?

But they didn’t hear what I'd said, he thought. They couldn’t have heard me say “I love you.” They know nothing of the exchange. What they saw, if they saw me, was me walking very fast into the building. Who saw me and who didn’t? Should I hop up on a table and ask them or perhaps tell the story of what I recall experiencing just to set the record straight? He chose not to do so.

Charlie spent his days this way, over-analyzing every decision he made, agonizing over the words he spoke and the actions he took. He did this obsessively day after day, week after week, month after month, for an entire year. On the anniversary of the first day of feverishly analyzing every moment, he suddenly stopped. He did not reflect for even a second about why he stopped. Instead, he just stopped and began thinking as a sociological analysis might suggest a middle-aged middle-class white man thinks if he lives in Tigard, Oregon, votes for Republicans, earns an income between x and y, is divorced and childless with such-and-such a credit history and a particular sequence of Web sites browsed since the inception of his Internet searching as well as further additions to his demographic and psychograhic profile.

These days, Charlie’s attention is focused on activities such as driving to suburban strip-mall sports bars to watch “The Big Game” with Joe, Stan, Lester, Smitty, and Tank. He drinks, whistles at women, gets slapped. He eats Buffalo wings and is occasionally gracious to his favorite amply-breasted waitress. He sometimes feels guilty for treating her well based on bust size, but not for long as he shifts the focus of his attention back to the game, cheering loudly and high-fiving his companions whenever his cherished team scores. He drives home drunk sometimes and he’s been charged with two DUIs. His lawyer convinced the judges to drop the charges in both cases due to technicalities related to procedural errors.

One of the arresting police officers became enraged that Charlie had weaseled his way out of a conviction. The officer believes that Charlie should be behind bars. Charlie, though, knows none of this. He goes on with his life as he’s been living it. There are other things he does besides going to sports bars. He brushes his teeth and works at a job, but those are just particulars.

Charlie’s life went on until his death. After he died, the narrator focused attention elsewhere.