The Man Who Fell Out of His Head
By Evander Arnage
The night he was struck by a bolt of lightening Lewis Lippit was retrieving a string of freshly washed socks he’d left hanging outside the kitchen window that looked down onto the trash strewn courtyard of his four story tenement house.
He had heard the thunder rolling in and felt the blue flickers of the distant lightening on his cheek while he was stooped over the bathroom sink trimming his perpetually uneven mustache and had ran to get the socks before the big drops fell.
They were thick white socks, the sort you could wear with anything, even a jet black tuxedo suit which Lewis happened to possess from the wedding of his sister to an irritable Italian mobster and failed Broadway actor who insisted that all the men in the ceremony wear the same outfit or risk being shot in the left foot with a small caliber pocket pistol which he carried with him at all times. Now, many years later Lewis still enjoyed wearing the suit on quiet Monday evenings after the laundry was dry and his socks contained their optimum quotient of trapped ionic air between their cotton fibers. He liked to put them on and take long gliding strides down the hardwood hallway pretending he was a retired Paul Anka crooning mournful ballads in some failed edition of the Ice Capades. It was like riding two little cushions of air.
Just before the lightening hit he was thinking ‘what drama it will be to glide around the apartment in this broiling tempest!’
He was leaning over the windowsill, his gut spilling out of his frayed and moth eaten cummerbund, pulling a sock from a weathered clothespin when it happened. There was no sound. He felt only a rush of air somewhere between his ears like the fleeting gulp of a vacuum sucking through a heavy blockage. It was sudden and inexplicable and all at once he felt as though he had become unglued from every sense of his body and was now somewhere outside of himself, near but far, everywhere and exactly there but mostly somewhere about the floor and very very small. He realized all at once that his perspective was now emanating directly out of the sock he had just been holding and surrounding him was a great ocean of inert limbo-ness that washed up on all sides.
He was struck by a shrill and dread-filled truth: this was his reality. He was, and always been, this sock and what he had known up until now, his life as a man, his apartment his entire past- childhood, teenage years, college, jobs, travel, relationships, struggles and desires- had all been a long and vivid dream, lasting perhaps only a few moments in sock time and he was now awakened, back to his one true presence, this particulate clump of white cotton fiber that had spontaneously developed sentience and then projected itself into the unconscious realm to imagine ‘Lewis the human being’ but was now back from its reverie, to reclaim its normal state of inconsequential molecules without free will or physical mobility or intelligent intent.
Lewis was clenched by the panic of a foregone certainty. It was so clear and true and immediate that he felt a powerful anguish for the loss of the dream life he once lived as Lewis Lippit the struggling trombonist and failed lover, who measured his worth by all the things he said he’d do but never did. Lewis Lippit who stayed up late at night doing nothing and anything to avoid the interminable hunger of his regrets.
Then with nothing else to do for it he accepted the futility of lamenting what had never really been and made peace with his new state, his one true reality, realizing as he did how simple and serene a reality it was. To not have the worries of the human body as it aged and the human experiences as they multiplied and became more convoluted, the ceaseless labors for money, relationships, status, possessions, the fear of pain, mortality, loneliness. He would need none of those now, he was simply an inanimate piece of the physical landscape with no responsibility and no power to become anything more or anything less. He could satisfy himself with the essential imperative to be- and that was all.
A great, euphoric tide washed over him like he had never known, a warm satisfaction of the sort he had been searching for his entire life. So fulfilling was it that he no longer even felt the need to identify himself as himself, or as an individual at all. He was simply matter-awareness. There was no more need for an ego, the burden of purpose had been lifted from him and he now floated in a serenity of blissful mundaneness. He was sock.
Lewis was allowed to enjoy this profound experience for only a brief moment though, before he was violently regurgitated out of the sock perspective and came to in a coughing, sputtering fit, back inside his body which felt stiff and smelled of burnt hair. He could hear light jazz music playing on the radio in the living room and the sound of the rain pattering against the window above his head. The sock was still clutched tightly in his fist and smoke emanated from a black scorch mark in the sole.
Later he would wrap the sock in a silk handkerchief and save it in the bottom of his dresser where he would take it out sometimes on anxious nights and yearn achingly for its uncomplicated existence before satisfying himself with the thought that in the end there would only be transition.
- - -
I am a freelance copy/creative writer from Canada currently working on my first book, an illustrated anthology of strange and quirky short stories entitled The Human Fable. Currently I am traveling and have no permanent address so my email is my only means of reliable contact. My preferred pen name is Evander Arnage, which I use to avoid paying alimony and bad loan shark debts.
But not really...
By Evander Arnage
The night he was struck by a bolt of lightening Lewis Lippit was retrieving a string of freshly washed socks he’d left hanging outside the kitchen window that looked down onto the trash strewn courtyard of his four story tenement house.
He had heard the thunder rolling in and felt the blue flickers of the distant lightening on his cheek while he was stooped over the bathroom sink trimming his perpetually uneven mustache and had ran to get the socks before the big drops fell.
They were thick white socks, the sort you could wear with anything, even a jet black tuxedo suit which Lewis happened to possess from the wedding of his sister to an irritable Italian mobster and failed Broadway actor who insisted that all the men in the ceremony wear the same outfit or risk being shot in the left foot with a small caliber pocket pistol which he carried with him at all times. Now, many years later Lewis still enjoyed wearing the suit on quiet Monday evenings after the laundry was dry and his socks contained their optimum quotient of trapped ionic air between their cotton fibers. He liked to put them on and take long gliding strides down the hardwood hallway pretending he was a retired Paul Anka crooning mournful ballads in some failed edition of the Ice Capades. It was like riding two little cushions of air.
Just before the lightening hit he was thinking ‘what drama it will be to glide around the apartment in this broiling tempest!’
He was leaning over the windowsill, his gut spilling out of his frayed and moth eaten cummerbund, pulling a sock from a weathered clothespin when it happened. There was no sound. He felt only a rush of air somewhere between his ears like the fleeting gulp of a vacuum sucking through a heavy blockage. It was sudden and inexplicable and all at once he felt as though he had become unglued from every sense of his body and was now somewhere outside of himself, near but far, everywhere and exactly there but mostly somewhere about the floor and very very small. He realized all at once that his perspective was now emanating directly out of the sock he had just been holding and surrounding him was a great ocean of inert limbo-ness that washed up on all sides.
He was struck by a shrill and dread-filled truth: this was his reality. He was, and always been, this sock and what he had known up until now, his life as a man, his apartment his entire past- childhood, teenage years, college, jobs, travel, relationships, struggles and desires- had all been a long and vivid dream, lasting perhaps only a few moments in sock time and he was now awakened, back to his one true presence, this particulate clump of white cotton fiber that had spontaneously developed sentience and then projected itself into the unconscious realm to imagine ‘Lewis the human being’ but was now back from its reverie, to reclaim its normal state of inconsequential molecules without free will or physical mobility or intelligent intent.
Lewis was clenched by the panic of a foregone certainty. It was so clear and true and immediate that he felt a powerful anguish for the loss of the dream life he once lived as Lewis Lippit the struggling trombonist and failed lover, who measured his worth by all the things he said he’d do but never did. Lewis Lippit who stayed up late at night doing nothing and anything to avoid the interminable hunger of his regrets.
Then with nothing else to do for it he accepted the futility of lamenting what had never really been and made peace with his new state, his one true reality, realizing as he did how simple and serene a reality it was. To not have the worries of the human body as it aged and the human experiences as they multiplied and became more convoluted, the ceaseless labors for money, relationships, status, possessions, the fear of pain, mortality, loneliness. He would need none of those now, he was simply an inanimate piece of the physical landscape with no responsibility and no power to become anything more or anything less. He could satisfy himself with the essential imperative to be- and that was all.
A great, euphoric tide washed over him like he had never known, a warm satisfaction of the sort he had been searching for his entire life. So fulfilling was it that he no longer even felt the need to identify himself as himself, or as an individual at all. He was simply matter-awareness. There was no more need for an ego, the burden of purpose had been lifted from him and he now floated in a serenity of blissful mundaneness. He was sock.
Lewis was allowed to enjoy this profound experience for only a brief moment though, before he was violently regurgitated out of the sock perspective and came to in a coughing, sputtering fit, back inside his body which felt stiff and smelled of burnt hair. He could hear light jazz music playing on the radio in the living room and the sound of the rain pattering against the window above his head. The sock was still clutched tightly in his fist and smoke emanated from a black scorch mark in the sole.
Later he would wrap the sock in a silk handkerchief and save it in the bottom of his dresser where he would take it out sometimes on anxious nights and yearn achingly for its uncomplicated existence before satisfying himself with the thought that in the end there would only be transition.
- - -
I am a freelance copy/creative writer from Canada currently working on my first book, an illustrated anthology of strange and quirky short stories entitled The Human Fable. Currently I am traveling and have no permanent address so my email is my only means of reliable contact. My preferred pen name is Evander Arnage, which I use to avoid paying alimony and bad loan shark debts.
But not really...
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