“Gillian?” Arlo asked as he approached her.
She turned her head so fast that he feared she might get whiplash, the rest of her perfectly still form frozen in place.
Staring at him wildly from the corner of her eye, she whispered, “When is a door not a door?”
“Ummm,” Arlo mumbled, “I’m not too good at riddles.”
“I think that I might be going crazy…”
Arlo smiled, a gleeful giggle slipping out of his gullet. “Knowing is half the battle.”
Her brow furrowed as she pondered that.
“Of course, if it’s really a battle they’re talking about, then I suppose the other half is killing people,” he said with a shrug, his nervous chuckle filling the uncomfortable silence.
“What?” Gillian asked.
“Nothing,” Arlo said. “Do you need to use the bathroom?”
She clucked her tongue. “That’s a pretty personal question. I don’t even know you.”
“True,” Arlo agreed. “But you do know that a lot of interesting people have died on the toilet. You know… I find you interesting, Gillian.”
The full coffee cup suddenly dropped from her clawed hand to splash in a fountain of burning hot, brown java all over her legs and shoes, luckily not reaching high enough to drench her immaculate skirt suit.
A wordless cry of shock and pain escaped Gillian’s throat as the bare skin of her calves sizzled under the onslaught of 2,000 degree coffee.
“Woah, bummer,” Arlo said. “Looks like you’re going to need to use that bathroom after all.” He laughed.
Gillian’s shoes squeaked across the linoleum through the bathroom door, brown fluid squishing out from between her toes, cooled coffee drying slowly on her skin. Arlo waited in the foyer. He had just enough time to toss the cup in the trash can and plop a nearby Caution Wet Floor/ Piso Mojado sign over the puddle before she re-emerged. Barreling toward him, she stopped just out of arm’s reach.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“I told you, I’m Arlo Black.”
“Yes, but… Who. Are. You?!” she practically screamed.
“I’m your new trainee,” he said.
Her eyes opened so wide they seemed to fill her face.
“My trainee…” she mumbled, the fear evident in the faint warble to her voice.
“Normally, we’d do this up in your office,” he said. “Supervisor Goodspeed Call Me Roger would introduce me. But today, I’m trying something different. What do you say, dreamland roomie? Wanna see how high we can blow up this popsicle stand? Because I’m definitely ready for some new dialogue.”
Now What?
Arlo sighed as Time reset and he found himself once again on a crowded stretch of concrete, surrounded by commuters headed to… wherever it was they all disappeared to every day.
A man in a yellow hat tapped him on the shoulder.
“Do you have the time?”
“It’s all relative, my man,” Arlo answered.
At the confused look on the man’s face, Arlo slapped his cell phone into the guy’s palm. “Here, use this,” Arlo said. “It’s not doing me any good.”
As Arlo approached the coffee shop, he took a deep, cleansing breath. He wasn’t sure how many times he’d entered Java Joe’s Coffee Haus, but his gut feeling was “a lot.”
Every day of Arlo’s life felt exactly the same as the one before… no matter how hard he tried to change things. His eyes roamed over the bulletin board on the door: ‘It’s okay to quit. Nobody really expected you to succeed anyway.’ Ouch. That one stung a little.
The old couple in the hula print shirts passed into the Coffee Shop at the End of the Universe and Arlo followed in their wake. Gillian was already seated at one of the tiny tables, waiting on her usual order. Arlo had tried to jilt her out of her stupor on a variety of “days” with a variety of antics, from surprising her in the java house doorway to crowding close beside her everywhere she went. Everywhere being here and the office since those were the only places she existed that Arlo was allowed to interact with her.
“Order up,” Jr called out.
As Gillian rose from the stool to snatch her paper cup of disaster off the pick-up counter, Arlo realized that there was one thing he hadn’t tried yet…
He reached out and squeezed the coffee cup in her hand so hard that it exploded. Burning hot coffee rained down on the both of them in a shared shower of agonizing pain.
Arlo’s incoherent cry of torment blended beautifully with Gillian’s caterwaul of curses in a carefully orchestrated symphony of damned souls. As the dark brew dripped from both of their noses and pooled in their shoes, Gillian gritted her teeth and glared at the man orbiting her sphere of influence.
“What the hell, Arlo?!”
He blinked, coffee droplets flicking off his eyelashes to land on his cheeks.
“You know me?”
“Of course, I know you! Are you crazy?!”
“Not anymore,” he said with a wide grin.
To be fair, Arlo was still a little bit crazy. He had been previously diagnosed with a Personality Disorder that ran so far past the Borderline that it was verging on immigrant status. He also loved himself in a way that his discount psychiatrist said exemplified the textbook definition of Narcissism. But, then again, Gillian wasn’t winning any medals for healthy coping mechanisms, herself. Possessing what Arlo would define as Acute Stick Up the Ass Syndrome, and People Are Gross Disorder, she didn’t like to be dirty. Or confined. Or touched. Or talked to. Or… everything that Arlo personified.
She was staring at him, apparently waiting for another or different response to the crazy question.
“Sorry,” he said. A strained laugh escaped his lips but he bit it back almost instantly. “I’m sort of on unfamiliar ground here…”
She watched him for a moment longer before sighing heavily and dropping her now empty coffee cup from chest height. The cup plummeted through space to land squarely on the counter where it wobbled for a
