Comfortable Man

The Comfortable Man walked through the doorway then stopped at the edge of the darkness. As his eyes adjusted, he noticed how it was like watching a film, when a scene gradually grows out of a dark screen. He remembered reading – he had forgotten the author – that life had become a metaphor for film and he silently laughed at the absurdity but all too frequent truth of it.

When the interior of the room became discernible, he saw a styleless dance club, as most were: too many small tables with formica tops; on each an empty ashtray surrounded by four upside down chairs. The absence of candles told him the place was frequented by an affluent, younger crowd, but he didn’t know why. The walls were dotted with garish beer advertisements and high in the far right corner hung a not so big television. To his left was a DJ's stage (or was it called a booth?) six feet above a medium-sized, fake parquet dance floor that cut a semi-circle into a dark and worn carpet. About thirty feet in front of him was the bar. The air was still and cold and in it was the faint odor of industrial insecticide mixed with mildew. It was too dark to see any of the fine details but right now he didn't care about details; he just wanted a drink. He rarely drank and didn't really have a reason for drinking now, but he didn't care about that either. He had simply decided to have a drink.

He saw the back of the Crooked Man sitting at the bar and the front of the Silent Man, who was reading a magazine, sitting on a stool behind the bar. As he walked toward them, the Comfortable Man made up a graduated list of choosing a seat at a bar: sitting next to someone meant you were intrusively intimate, one-stool-between meant you were friendly, two-stools-between was unobtrusive but not snobbish, three-stools-between was a snub, four-stools-between meant you held sinister designs, five-stools-between meant you were temporarily depressed, six-stools-between meant you were miserable and couldn't be helped, seven-stools-between meant you weren't really there, eight-stools-between meant nobody was there, and on and on. He reached the bar and sat two-stools-between from the Crooked Man. The Silent Man looked up from his magazine and the Comfortable Man said, "Southern Comfort, neat." He got two ice cubes, but never mind.
...

for KHALIN, LACEE, JASMINE
THE COMFORTABLE MAN
( excerpts )

by DWIGHT BERNARD MIKKELSEN

copyright © 2001 NotesLinger Arts

That was pretty good, the Comfortable Man thought, and not entirely untrue. He was a painter–yes, an arteest! He smiled at the affected accent and, apparently, it was a good moment to do so because the Crooked Man seemed pleased to have made the Comfortable Man smile. The Comfortable Man, as he always did, had left the city just after a showing–"another-successful-showing-I'm-so-excited!" according to his agent–saying he needed to 'refurnish his creative blood'. Actually, he had just said he was leaving; the 'refurnish his creative blood' phrase was his agent’s, which, of course, was nonsense: creativity had nothing to do with body fluids and, besides, 'refurnishing creativity' was a bad metaphor. No, he didn't NEED this trip; he hadn't needed any of them. He simply decided to go – no reason at all.

Early the next morning after the showing, as he drove out of the city, listening to Vaughan-Williams' Fourth Symphony (later, he'd listen to the Fifth), he peripherally noticed the tall, sparkling buildings – vain monuments to the shallow dreams of men – dissolve into the not-so-tall, soot covered buildings – vain monuments to dead men's shallow dreams. This gradual transformation of concrete, steel, and glass was a visual statement that shallow dreams die with the men who make them and are ignored by men with new shallow dreams and that someday all such monuments become embarrassments covered in soot; that all things of earth, including the life that lived on it, were temporal: wealth and poverty, suffering and comfort, fame and obscurity, and all the other dichotomies that resulted from the shallow dreams of men. Such were his thoughts as he mechanically played cat and mouse with the other drivers and, by habit, timed the traffic lights.

The powerful opening of the fourth movement coincided with his passing the city limits and his thoughts turned to Art, the one thing that comforted him. Art, true Art, does not suffer the transformations and quick decay that life on earth experiences, but then Art is not of this world. Art is the singular disagreement. In Art are the great dreams of Man, not the shallow dreams of men – a small grammatical difference but a vast conceptual one. Vaughan-Williams had understood this: his Fourth Symphony, with its impeccable structure supporting rich and violent dissonances, was an assertion that beauty and perfection were the superior goals; the Fifth Symphony a confirmation that he was right. Beauty and Perfection – they had flowed through his veins. The Comfortable Man smiled again, this time at himself, for the similarity to his agent's bad metaphor.

As the city shrank behind him, a familiar melancholy began to color his thoughts. Too often, the shallow dreams – nothing, really, but loathsome, boring arrogance hiding behind expensive PR – suffocate the Great Dreams, with the resulting tragedy that the world, while yearning for Art, is forced to endure the sham known as entertainment. Cut glass set in a ring of gold. Then, about two and a half minutes later, he considered the quiet two-note motif at the beginning of the second section – the battle cry of a small, insistent army. It seemed to him an admonishment, a reminder, that while monuments are eventually covered with soot, Art never grows dull.

His attention gradually shifted back to the dimly lit bar. He looked at the two almost melted ice cubes in his Southern Comfort and wondered if the Crooked Man and the Silent Man could remember their great dreams. Or did they, along with nearly everyone else, merely struggle with a temporal life?

He remembered Anika.

...