Novel Treatments / Aleister's Window (Edit 2, Chapter 1)

        There is not a Friday that passes when Gloria Agatha Gillis doesn’t ride her bicycle to the Bun of Your Business Bakery at the corner of North Park and Ninth in the Village of Column Square, and there isn’t a Friday when Aleister Motts doesn’t watch her—secretly, though quite visibly—from the vantage of a tall second story window opposite the narrow street.    She leans her red bicycle tenderly against the stalk of a naked oak tree, making delicate adjustments to the handlebars as it starts to tip and turn; it hasn’t a kickstand.  
Gloria was not a word that Aleister had ever been able to produce in his mind—as intensely he would have wished to; she was a stranger by no known degree of separation.  He would simply assign names to the woman on the red bicycle by some loosely selective process—really, not a process at all.  Rather, a criteria; her names could be only those he did not find particularly becoming of her.  Last week she was Tara; the week before that, Fran.  Today her name would be Tiffany.  Aleister had allowed himself to be consumed to such an extent by the gravity-like lure of his fantasy that he began (in conscious jest) to make vain gambles at an equally unbecoming last name.  
“Jones”, he utters under his breath, which fogs the cool window.  His eyes follow Tiffany Jones into the bakery, her bicycle leaning faithfully unsecured upon the great oak projecting from the small dirt island amidst the sidewalk bricks in such a manner to suggest that the tree had been created for the sole purpose of building a city around.  It was during these periods of quiet intermission each week that Aleister was able to assess the subtle variations in her dress, demeanor and timing (though these were few and sorted) from the spectacle of his grand suicide window, a title by which the sardonic landlord had jokingly referred to it during the walkthrough.  Hypnotized by something in the glare and the beauty of the brightened autumn village—and perhaps also his morning beverage—he gazed down at the cumbersome, red, ridiculous bicycle.  It was as an accessory for her; she would always wear at least two red accessories in addition to the bicycle, each of which generally suited her about as well as her names.  
        Intermission would end several minutes later with the resurfacing of her figure from the bakery doorway.  She then carefully encouraged a brown paper sack to fit nicely in the wire basket mounted precariously upon her great chrome handlebars.  Just as she finished, the handlebars twisted unexpectedly.  As to keep the beastly bike from crashing to the sidewalk, she dropped to her knees and seized the frame in a valiant effort to its honor, but managed on the way down to entangle her (red) shoulder pack between the front fender and frame, hence, pickling herself in a quite unfortunate conundrum of weight and balance.  Had it been any other woman (or even a man, for that matter) Aleister might have perhaps gone so far as to rush down the two flights of stairs and across the busy street to help.  Only now by this woman he was too captivated, as though her clumsy misfortune had only served to deepen his enchantment.  But her spell was in the next instant broken—quite jarringly—by the appearance of an unexpected—really, quite uninvited extra.  It was in this instant that a young man would dash in from the periphery to free her quickly and surgically from her entanglement and then help her—gracefully, along with the bicycle, unscathed—to her feet.  
Aleister watched carefully as the two exchanged kind words—Tiffany blushing and bubbling with dramatic appreciation.  It occurred in this moment to Aleister that he had never witnessed her speaking or so much as interacting with any person beyond a mere gesture; several weeks ago she waved an affectionate hand gesture to an unyielding motorist who nearly clipped her as she pedaled into traffic, which could be sympathized with as the city offered very little in the way of designated bicycle lanes, Ninth Street being no exception.
        And so, Aleister stood like a statue at the window while his beloved squirmed giddily and girlishly under the (now) unstoppable charm of her hero, whom Aleister noticed—with a twinge of grave disappointment—was actually quite handsome, and at a guess, several years younger than he.  The sidewalk romance continued until it progressed quite predictably into what could only be perceived as an exchange of information: She took a card from him and carefully filed it—so as not to be misplaced—into a large wallet that lived in the side pouch of her red shoulder bag.  He in turn entered her information to a sleek mobile phone that appeared as smoothly as it would disappear his snug-fitting pants pocket.
        This would be the end of his weekly feature, and not the end that Aleister had grown so fondly accustomed to.  Not the familiar ending where she would ride away just as prettily focused and aloof as she had appeared.  Instead she now rode dreamily, enchanted by her new prospect: he who came to her so serendipitously in her time of comical vulnerability, only that her defenses would be crushed by the bashful embarrassment leading to the red-faced laughter and of course then to the overwhelming happiness—the happiness that he now owns.  Aleister follows the hero with his eyes until he disappears around the corner, swaggering cockily, or so Aleister coul only imagine.  He moved slowly from his statue post at the window and then to the couch where a bottle of vodka and a guitar awaited him invitingly.  The vodka was of a brand just choice enough to drink straight from the bottle without grimacing—not to say that decent vodka isn’t worth an occasional grimace—particularly at the first sip.  This first sip in Aleister’s case was not the first of the day, nor was it the first of this hour.  Once his thirst was satiated and the bottle surrendered to the clutter of the coffee table, his hands would find their way to the big, hollow guitar, which leaned aside the couch.  With an awkward twisting of the torso, and some swearing the guitar finally found its way into his lap, at which point he began to softly strum an unoriginal and melancholy folk tune.  Improvising the lyrics as he went, it mattered little that three of the strings were offensively out of tune.  Beyond the tapestry of loosely woven mumblings there was only the hopelessness of his ill mind and the obstinate impossibility of obsession, both of which he had been content to forget for the moment.  However, through each subsequent moment his jam progressed and moved jaggedly through several distinct structures, each more intense and technical than its predecessor.  All the while, his voice rose in pitch and volume from what had started as a low mumble had now grown to a shrill holler.  It seemed that the music and the vodka had done little to the service of escapism.  Rather, it suggested empirically that his drunken improvisation had actually been antithetical in any such matter.  Only when he had noticed a flow of blood from the cuticle of his right index finger did he finally stop.  He knew well what would happen if he was to permit the maturation of a blind rage.  
“You’re a child.”  He mutters and then tilts his head to face the ceiling.  
        After several minutes of staring blankly, bleeding obliviously on the couch, Aleister was gripped with a sensation of nude self-consciousness.  The random lyrics, it seemed to him (their shrieking horror at the pinnacle) had been some crude and exhibitionistic act of lust for which he now felt deeply ashamed; not in the sense that the neighbors may have heard him, but rather under the supposition that the proprietors of the afterlife—Gods, if you will—might keep unabridged recordings of each person’s life, archived in a massive public library to be borrowed freely and viewed—in all of their hideousness—to the certain ridicule of all the other dead people.
In the next moment he would find himself surrounded, suddenly, with a most magnificent awareness of all humiliation to which he had ever fallen, as though he were reliving its quantified mass in a single breath—and in the next moment, the shame of so many failures rose to circle him as vultures do—and at last, the all-too-human specter of hopelessness came and put its hand upon his shoulder.  He felt at this moment to weep, but then turned to his masculine rationality—his toughness—and said softly: “You’re fine.”
Aleister set the guitar back in its spot beside the couch and took another drink of vodka.    The girl on the red bicycle—whatever her name was—she was merely a diversion, an affectation; a special treat for each passing week.  Though today this treat had been spoiled by another man’s good intentions.  What then would Aleister have preferred?  To stand by and account the woman’s suffering so callously?  Was it her sudden vulnerable humanness that had been so pleasurable for him?  He pondered these questions for a moment and then supposed that it was simply the shattering of a woman’s aloofness that he found so pleasurable.  Comparatively, he likened her smile to her suffering quite evenly.  His only reservation was that it had not been himself, but the hero who was able to summon the blushing smile, and before he intervened Aleister had not even conceived that such a thing was possible.  Not that the woman’s affect was somehow unattainable, but rather that it could be summoned so spontaneously.  The hyperbole of her presence—pervasive and constant—in his life was laughable, though it perplexed him in the deepest seriousness.  Only in meeting her could he break this seemingly supernatural power she (unwittingly) possessed.  But how would he ever meet her?  Certainly not in a flamboyant act of heroism; and really, how heroic was the deed he had witnessed?  After all, she was only really saved from having to concede in allowing her cumbersome—and entirely too heavy for a person her size—bicycle to fall edgeways on the sidewalk.  Once able to untangle her baggage, she probably would have only suffered—along with a great degree of perturbation—some chipped paint, a bent crank, or at the very worst, a skinned knee.  Perhaps this heroism had only been Aleister’s irrational imagination framing the event not as it was, but as he feared it to be.  And perhaps this same imagination was at the heart of his diseased fixation, not just on her as a woman, but upon the great structure of fabricated symbolism in which he insisted upon framing her.  Furthermore, what could make certain that their eventual meeting would even result in reciprocal feelings?  For this matter, he had never even seen the woman up close, nor did he have an inkling of an indication as to what sort of company she kept—or even if she was remotely intelligent.  It seemed then to Aleister that his infatuation had been all the while based on only the most aesthetic fineries: the pleasant irony of her gaudy red motifs, the silly bicycle and her nanometric punctuality at the bakery each Friday.  This routine, so reassuring as it seemed—in the past few months since his discovery of her—that she had become (sadly) the only person that he was able to consistently rely on (even if it was only for an oblivious engagement in his voyeuristic excitation).
Aleister sank into the filthy couch, bottle in hand, and carefully recounted once again her every movement.  And in this moment he paused to wonder: why—in the curiosity of all that he has witnessed—during the hapless ordeal, her sack of bakery items had not fallen from the basket?  

.        .        .

        The wandering eyes of Nathan find the tiny form of bicycling Gloria growing in the distance.  “My darling!”  He exclaims across the shaded lawn while sliding the mostly empty bottle of merlot discretely behind their stylishly weathered futon.  Gloria commandeers the bicycle peacefully into the empty driveway, dismounting into a graceful gate (in determined resistance to her natural inclination for clumsiness) and then to a halt at the foot of the stairs, at which point Nathan rises stiffly to meet her with a kiss.  He then takes the bicycle in his hands and carries it up the stairs.  “Did you get the wine?”  He asks, leaning the cycle carefully against the railing.  “I wish this thing had a kickstand.”  He adds.  “I got the wine.”  Gloria affirms, and pauses—“Smells like someone started early.”  “I had a glass.”  He shrugs, and then notices the basket.  “Oh, honey.  You crushed the bread again.”  He whines while pulling the Bun of Your Business Bakery bag—now a perfectly formed cube—from the grip of the basket.  “It was the only way it would fit in there, Nathan.  Besides if you want me to get a ration’s worth of food, then perhaps you ought to come shopping with me.”   Nathan takes a thoughtful pause and says, “It’s nothing, dear—and next time, I will.”  He kisses her again.  She smiles at the slowly expanding bag of bread in his hand and says, “At least we know it’s fresh.”  “Fresh and soft.”  He smiles back at her.  “Your teeth are purple, you damn drunk,” she snickers.  “You’re going to have to catch up, young lady.”  He retorts.  “Are you going to get me drunk?”  She feigns naïve girlishness.  He leans to her ear, “And make you dinner.”  “What else?”  She flirts.   He takes her hand and leads her into the house.

.        .        .

        Gordy Peltzer doesn’t give change to beggars.  He says: “Change?  Why don’t you change your socks?  Bum!”  The little liquor store on the end of North Park Avenue where it T’s off at Column Street is a favorite point of nexus for even the least dignified loiterers.  They swear at Gordy as he passes and he does not hesitate in retaliation.  “Self-made, shit-heads!  That’s me.  I was once where you are.  Now I’m drinking that good stuff!”  He pulls a fine bottle of scotch from the paper sack under his arm.  “You like that?”  He gloats.  In a few motions and a swarm of obscenities from the rowdy vagrants Gordy fumbles with his car keys and drops them along with the bag of fancy scotch on the pavement.  The muffled shatter echoes through the parking lot and a roar of laughter rises from the worn faces of the vagrants.  Without pause, he drops to his knees in pursuit of the keys and in grabbing them stumbles upon on a crisp looking professionally printed business card, which in accidental haste also stumbles into his hand.  Gordy Rises and brushes off his knees.  He shouts: “Okay, your drink’s right here, assholes!”  The vagrants begin to clap at his spectacle, chuckling all the while.  The slim paper sack begins to bleed seasoned scotch.  “You think I can’t buy another?”  Gordy says pointing at one of the men.  “Why don’t you go drink the fuckin’ broken glass then!”  He turns his pointing finger to the soaking sack.  The vagrants quiet a bit.  One of them approaches the spill.  Gordy starts toward the entrance to purchase another bottle.          

.        .        .

        A telephone rings.  “Bun of Your Business, can I help you?”  There is a discernable click.  “Hello?”  Veda waits for a moment and hangs up the phone.  A moment later the line-cook yells from the kitchen: “Was that another pickup order?”  “No,” Veda replies, “just a wrong number.”  The phone rings again.  “Bun of your business, can I help you?”  There is a pause and then a man’s voice says, “Yes, I’m trying to get to get a hold of Gloria.  Does Gloria work there?”  “No, no one named Gloria works here.”  Veda replies crisply.  “Ok, then.”  The man says.  “Sorry to bother you.”  He hangs up?   “Ok.”  Veda utters softly and sets the phone down.  “Was that another carryout order?”  The line-cook yells from the kitchen.  “No!”  Veda replies.  “It was no one.”

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