Arnold Gilroy

Arnold Gilroy awoke one morning after a restless night of intense dreaming to find that he was, disappointingly, himself. He blinked his two hazel eyes one after another in the “where-am-I-who-am-I-daze” of six AM. He was, of course, Arnold Gilroy, and he was in bed. Less specifically, he was in a small and, for the purposes of our observation, nameless town with a single big street of buildings that most everyone worked on or around (you know the type).

Arnold struggled obstinately against his sheets and rolled onto his side. He found his roll impeded by something long and fleshy with nearly a half dozen protrusions jutting out unevenly from the end. Confused for a moment, he sat up and found that the strange fleshy protrusion was his right arm, which was completely and untouchably asleep; it was apparently unsatisfied with the meager four hours it had been allotted.

“Go back to bed,” it prickled.

“No,” Arnold said quite forcefully, “I’ll not be late for work again.”

“Bugger off you inconsiderate sod, I’m having another ten minutes at least, or I’ll drop your coffee later,” it retorted.

Arnold was not in the habit of negotiating with terrorists, but in this case he relented. He would allow his right arm a break and would use his left arm for a while until his right woke up.

Reaching the sink in his bathroom, he peered, bleary eyed, up at the mirror and scowled that it was still he who stared back at him. Arnold figured he wouldn’t mind waking up as nearly anything other than himself.

“A flea even,” he thought, “my room must seem like a whole new Earth to a flea, I would never get bored.”

It’s not that he didn’t enjoy his life; it’s just that he would rather poke his eyes out with lemon juice covered toothpicks than step one foot out his bedroom door. Don’t you dare call him depressed, he didn’t suffer from depression or anti-social disorder or anything so inconsiderately diagnosable. He was a victim of that untreatable and often unrecognized disease, “Unadulterated Boredom”.

The shades of grey that made up everything he owned, from his pale carpeting to his moldy breakfast cereal, certainly exceeded the fifty or so that made up his favorite/least favorite books. I say favorite/least favorite because they really were the only books Arnold had read in almost a year. There was a certain pale and pretty receptionist named Dawwn at the office who loved those books and had leant Arnold her copies on the promise that he would read them. This

led him quickly to the decision that he would no longer flirt since it soon became promises, interrogation, judgment and then rejection… but a promise is a promise so he leafed through the sultry volumes of text while choking down some stale wheat product soaked in a bowl of milk. He used his left hand to pry a grain out of his teeth, which hurt quite badly.

“Good morning, Arnold!” his right arm finally greeted with a slight tremble. “Oh about time you got up,” he chided.

“Do we have any coffee?”

“You said you’d drop it,” he responded, forcing his arm to grab his brief case which it quickly dropped.

“Nope, sorry old chap; I can’t carry a thing until you toss at least two cups of coffee down your gullet.”

“Fine, I’ll grab something on the way to work, but you have to carry the brief case.”

“… only briefly,” it finally agreed.

Arnold raced to the car, but was too slow; his briefcase hit the ground at exactly twelve and a half miles per hour. It was in fact so perfectly twelve and a half miles per hour that if geologists had used the velocity of his briefcase as the baseline for measuring the effect of gravity on briefcases they would find that they had miscalculated the earth’s mass by nearly four whole ounces the heavier. If the earth were four ounces heavier at the time of humanity’s slow trudge from the viscous goo of its origins, then the effect of gravity on our single celled bodies would have been too great and our close cousins, the Suricata suricatta, (commonly known as the meerkat) would actually have become the dominant species.

As the velocity of his briefcase was, however, not measured by the larger scientific community, there are in fact a number of scientists who have incorrectly made this measurement and come to the conclusion that we are merely large hairless meerkats; the fact that we are not is, I am sure, a disappointment to many.

Unaware of any tangential anecdotes made at his expense, Arnold opened the door to his grey Oldsmobile (not the pretty one, the square one that is often mistaken for a large toaster) kicked his briefcase into the car, climbed into the back seat, realized his mistake, got out, and sat in the driver’s seat. After a moment of sputtering and gagging the car finally started and Arnold managed to get another annoying bit of cereal out of his teeth. Arnold pulled out of his driveway and puttered down the road at twenty-seven and a quarter miles per hour, which is the correct speed limit in most residential areas when accounting for inflation.

His arms guided him to a small coffee shop named Kathy’s Koffee and Bagels with a sign hanging crookedly over the door that said “Clothes”. Arnold thought this was incredibly strange until he got closer and managed to correctly read the sign that read “Closed”. Frustrated, his arm pounded on the glass door and pleaded for mercy, taking the store’s closure as a direct assault on its sensibilities.

“Open up! Foul ingrates!” his arm cried as it had apparently skipped Denial, and had made his way on to Anger, the second stage of grief. This lasted only a moment before it went through Bargaining, Depression, skipped Acceptance entirely and went back to Anger.

“Shut up,” Arnold finally ordered his arm, “It’s just boiled bean water. You’ll get over it.”

He was going to say something else when a sudden pang in his back left molar suddenly reminded him he had a dentist appointment. Hurriedly, he hopped back in the car and pulled out of the parking lot at precisely eleven and five sevenths miles per hour. There is almost nothing at all remarkable or notable about that particular velocity, which is actually quite astonishing in itself.

After driving for a couple minutes, long enough that he definitely couldn’t turn around and be at work in time, he called the office to let them know he’d be late again regardless of his arm’s eventual cooperation, scratch that- he decided he better leave out the bit about the arm.

“Hello! These are the offices of Kaitlyn, Caitlin and Kaytlinn, how may we help you?” Dawwn, the pale and pretty receptionist, answered. She was apparently unaware her phone had caller ID. Indeed, she was unaware of a lot of things, war in the middle east, most forms of poverty, the sensation of peeing in a hot tub, and the precise location of Milwaukee to name a few.

“It’s me, Arnold; I’m going to be late again. I have a dentist appointment.”

“Oh, Arnold! Of course, I’ll just mark you down for the uhm… seventh time this month. By the way how do you like those books?” Dawwn asked about as casually as one waltzes with a polar bear.

Arnold thought about his answer for a long time. He really neither hated nor loved those books. He didn’t think they were bad or good, he had no frame of reference, no reason to have any sort of feeling toward them whatsoever. To him, they simply represented even more shades of grey than he cared to add to his boring, insignificant, unremarkable, dispassionate life. He thought about his arm, how it nearly bested him today. He thought about his briefcase, which at times seemed as much an enemy as his moldy cereal. He thought about Kathy’s Koffee and Bagels and the “Clothes” sign. He thought about a lot of things (the precise location of Milwaukee was not among them and is counted as one of the rarer thoughts known to man). He thought for so long that Dawwn assumed the line had gone dead.

“Arnold, are you there?” she asked expectantly.

“Dawwn. I quit. I’m keeping your books and I quit,” triumphantly he snapped his phone shut because his phone still does that and tossed it over his shoulder into the back seat.

His tooth groaned, “How are you going to pay to get me pulled now?”

“Oh don’t you worry,” said Arnold’s arm as it expertly switched off the AC, turned the radio up to the setting that in a parallel dimension is labeled Annoy Your Neighbors, and rolled down the windows, “Old Arnie’s going to figure it out. I can feel it.”