Probably Just Indigestion

The only apple left was a sad, slightly squishy thing. The pears wouldn’t be ripe enough for at least another three days. George reminded himself that even the most perfect-looking apples aren’t always edible. He remembered vividly slicing into an apparently flawless Pink Lady a few months ago and starting back at sight of its rotten core, already fuzzy with mold. By the same logic, an apple spotted with various imperfections did not automatically classify it inedible. So George resigned himself to the wrinkled Granny Smith, sinking his teeth into the pink blush (or was it a bruise?) and watched the rain leave legs on the window.

The sun was just about to reach his boomerang point, but gray clouds and heavy moisture scattered his light so thoroughly that George couldn’t say exactly were he was. When New York got this way, especially being so close to the park, it was all but indistinguishable from Paris in its grayest, winter moments. Harsher lights from television sets cut through the haze intermmitently as apartments in the complex across took refuge from the spring’s storm with Barefoot Contessa.

In a reoccurring dream of his, he was standing in front such a window, in such a rain. The clouds were the only landscape, and would crowd the window like schools of curious fish against the tank in an aquarium. He was always alone in this dream, dressed as a true professional with silver cuff links and impeccably pressed trousers. He loathed smoking when he was awake, thanks to Emily, whose Marlboro Lights would invade all space (and the world is mostly space) with its death-like musk. Yet here, in this dream, staring at the window and the rain, he’d be smoking.

He smoked, but mostly counted. Aloud he would recite, “Eight, seventeen, one hundred thirty seven, two, sixty six, twenty four…” as if announcing the tape from a stock marque. The numbers never stayed the same. He was unable to distinguish a pattern. He would stand and recite, with more confidence and clarity than his waking voice embodied until the clouds moved from gray to black. It was at this point in the dream when George would feel fear. There was a power pervading the space that didn’t permit him to move from his position at the window, reciting the numbers. Still the numbers would come, forcing their way out of his mouth with increased urgency, as beads of sweat ran down his neck, his chest, down his right thigh.

The dream had, undoubtedly, connection with his line of work, but there was something with a more serious flavor embedded. Having analyzing the dream several times over, often at 5:30 a.m. in a little diner on 67th with a small pastry and coffee so strong it came with grind dregs at the bottom, George thought it unfortunate that he should find his voice (so eloquent he sounded! A reincarnation of Don LaFontaine surely, if LaFontaine was resurrected an accountant!) only to be bound by the invisible power, the dream concluding in fear.

George would wake in a sweat. He’d dry his face with the cool side of the pillow before standing, dressing quickly, setting his glasses carefully in place and patting pockets to be sure of his wallet. They knew him at the diner now. They knew him to be eccentrically quiet and owl-eyed, who might or might not remember to bring reading material. The sensations of helplessness and fragility that the dream left him with would take him at least an hour to shake off, stirring his coffee obsessively dissolving every last of the five sugar cubes.

He wasn’t dreaming now. He was eating an apple. Numbers were nevertheless running through his mind. A new client had recently entrusted him with $200,000. The client had expressed interest in a mutual fund that George had composed for a few fellow consultants, but no, now, George thought, the world of silver and gold was about to receive a little shaking. George must tell him, as soon as this entire apple had made its way to his stomach, that his money would make him infinitely more if he entrusted it to the wave that was about to come.

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