idiotic investigation the 2nd

Their craziness was palpable, easily observed.
Yet our man hardly batted an eye while he calmly read a magazine; he sat in the manner of a gentleman, with one leg tossed over another, casually tapping the air with his shoe.

He was reading a short story, the author of which he did not personally know; his ignorance, however, did not disturb him and his toe kept apace.

All around him the moonstruck circus grinded in a demented spiral as all its crazies began to trample one another, in some cases deliberately and in others unintentionally. Our man stared at his magazine, failing to notice the unhinged fray.
From his crooked form exuded a calmness that deflected the deranged festival.

That is, until a certain knee, attached to a leg belonging to a man that was in a hurry, collided with his tapping-toe and sent it flying in a frantic arc.

Our man, now thoroughly distracted, looked up from his magazine and watched the receding figure of the man that had jolted him; taped to his back was a battery-operated flashing sign that read:

“Out to lunch”.

Before he disappeared behind a wall, the man turned back to our man and, with a quick wave of his hand, yelled:

“Sorry I kneed you.”

The silence of this ‘k’ was consequential.
Our man systematically failed to hear silent letters; thus when the phrase – “Sorry I kneed you” – was heard, it seemed to our man that the rushing man was in urgent need.

Not being one to hold a grudge, a great passion to rise to the urgency of this occasion filled our man’s heart.
But at that exact moment, he also noticed all the other psychotics running about, trampling one another, screaming and honking car horns. This he assumed was a related case of urgency and so his heart expanded its worries to universal proportions.

Naturally, he began to wave at some of them in order to get their attention, and before he knew it they all stopped their foolery and stared at our man.
Not being one to lose an opportunity, our man pressed into a thorough disquisition on the topic of need; this thoughtful tract proceeded for some minutes and the crazies were strangely transfixed.
He was launching bullet proof arguments and chains of insightful dialectics; he was spouting rhetorical questions that he deftly flipped back to whenever the crowd lost track of his main points; he managed to hold up an imperceptible rhyme scheme; he sang a song midway in order to rouse the passions of the elders in the back; he whipped them all into a single body with a trillion eyes.
At certain points in his tirade the crowd of lunatics cried, nails pulling at their faces and fingers at their hair, at others points they laughed, palms slapping and knees flying; they were a massive instrument played by our man’s verbal flight, his keen intelligence was the motor of their actions.

He resolutely folded the magazine into his coat pocket, checked the time on his wristwatch and stood up from the bench. The crazy circus persisted and he walked to where the man had disappeared behind the wall, all the while thinking of the statement:

“Sorry I kneed you.”

The man was urinating at the wall; this, however, did not disturb our man who walked up to him and asked:

“Do you require assistance?”

The man was startled by our man’s sudden appearance and proximity as well, it seemed, as by his crooked form; assuming that he was there to harm him while in his vulnerable position, he extracted a knife from his pocket.
He held it up in order for its impressive glint to be observed and smartly pressed it into our man’s heart.
This produced a little dahlia of blood around the handle which grew downwards.

The man zipped up his trousers and assured our man, who was now dying, that he was not in need.
He was obviously clever for he immediately saw the mistake that our man had made: failing to hear the silent ‘k’ led him to a wrong interpretation of the statement “Sorry I kneed you”––hearing it as a request and not a mere apology.

“Sorry I misled you” he said, “it must have killed you when you realized.”
It seemed that the man experienced a glimmer of regret.
He extracted the knife from the dahlia’s centre and walked toward the psychotics.

The last thing that sprang across the screen of our man’s mind were the words

A knife with a silent ‘k’ is still a knife.

The lunatic show danced and danced and danced and danced and danced.

–––––––––––––––––––––– THE END

[For a brief essay revolving around the themes presented in this investigation refer to the “Old Thought” On Being Silent.]

idiotic investigation the 1st

One time, I was in a cab. When I arrived at my destination, I paid the driver and shut the door before heading toward a building across the street. Just as he began to drive off, I decided not to let him pass first, that I would cross in front of his car and not behind. As a result, he stopped his car abruptly so that I would not be harmed. This decision – to cross in front – troubled me, and while I hurried across the road I felt that I was leaving a trail of something ugly behind me; thinking about this trail brought me down while in the elevator.

Suddenly, while thinking about the cab and the way he had to stop so abruptly, the electricity went out and I was no longer in an elevator but a dark box that was suspended between the second and third floors; as a result, my thoughts about the cab and my decision to cross in front of it subsided because I deftly coined the word suspendevator.

I thought about writing it down, but the action of writing it down proved to be too much to think about all at once, so I thought about the thought of writing it down and that too proved to be difficult, but in a different way, so I settled for just saying it out loud:

“Suspendevator.” My voice echoed down the shaft.

Anyway, while suspended, I got to thinking about some of the decisions I’d taken that day––aside from the one concerning the cab (only the most recent); it was by now almost 10 am, but I had made a number of weighty ones already.

Long ago, this hectic lifestyle prompted me to keep lists. Here’s today’s list (so far),
1. Decision to get out of bed at my customary time.
2. Decision to have the breakfast I am accustomed to having.
3. Decision to wear my own clothes.
4. Decision to leave the house without my keys.
5. Decision to tell my mother I would visit her in order to borrow her keys so that I could          go home after all the other things I would have decided to do were done.
At this point I pencil in
6. Decision to cross in front of a cab.
7. Decision to name my mother’s elevator a suspendevator.
Reading over it again has made me realise that decision 5 was pure improvisation, and now that I think about it, this unusual exertion might have been what led to (the rash) decision 6––but I dare not decide on that now.
I fold the paper back into my pocket.

As you might expect, my intellect was taxed at this point in the day and the suspendevator’s darkness was thus soothing; I thought about the important similarity between the words soothing and something, but also about their even more important differences: saying “something soothing” is not like saying “soothing something”; in fact, something soothing is not necessarily soothing something.
These considerations led to agitation and so I put a stop to them right there.

When the electricity returned  the elevator did as well and this made me sad because now I had to carry on: it deposited me at my mother’s floor, where I stood at her door to take a
8. Decision to use my index finger to ring the bell.

Of course, I was aware that my index finger would probably resent this decision since it was already used in the elevator to press the button for my mother’s floor (an event I don’t remember very well and which thus does not qualify to be a decision), but I went through with it anyway and hoped that it wouldn’t turn on me.
(If you ignore problems they go away; if not, then pretending is just as good as being.)
At any rate, I was deftly considering the notion of mini-decisions, one that you can’t be aware of, but I quickly lost track of these miniatures which dispersed like marbles. So I said it out loud just so that I could remember it later.

“Mini-decisions.” My voice was absorbed by the door.

When the bell sounded, I instinctively retracted my hand, but my finger remained postured (the decision to curl into my palm was yet to be taken), so when my mother opened the front door she saw that I was pointing at her. She told me it was rude to point and I resented her for this chastisement––thinking that perhaps my finger was getting back at me for the labor I appointed it to; but I also thought that I only resented it because of the denial I was in about having abused it twice in a row.
I felt bad about this and I look apologetically at my finger while I crossed the threshold.

When I left with the keys, I took the
9. Decision to walk down the stairs.